Courtesy of Simon Griffiths
Sleepy Cape Town is quickly emerging as Africa's most happening place for technology start-ups, thanks to falling bandwidth prices, an increase in the availability of funding, and a new generation of risk-taking entrepreneurs. Dozens of new tech start-ups across sectors including information security, mobile payments and mobile social networking have launched themselves into the market.
Cape Town has given birth to a few significant tech start-ups over the years. Certificate authority Thawte - established by space tourist and Ubuntu Foundation founder Mark Shuttleworth in his parents' garage in 1995 - was bought by VeriSign for $575m in 1999. Last year, Visa acquired Cape Town-based mobile banking technology company Fundamo (founded in 2000) for $110m.
With the landing of new submarine telecom cables off South Africa's coastline starting with Seacom in 2009, bandwidth prices began to tumble, removing one of the most significant barriers to the global competitiveness of the country's IT industry. That was catalyst for the explosion of Cape Town's tech scene.
You'll be pleased to hear the tech scene is thriving in Cape Town.
We now have many more undersea cables installed and planned such as WACS, BRICS, SAex and WASACE.
The tech scene has been growing fast lately, so much so that I've decided to start a blog about it.
In terms of entrepreneurs, funding and developer support, Google has come in and started a project called Umbono, where they funded entrepreneurs in conjunction with 'Angel Investors'. A venture capital firm '88mph' has taken over and is providing great support and opportunities to new startups.
As if that wasn't already awesome, we've been getting many cool and informative conferences and workshops which I've very much enjoyed.
I've got lots more content to add to my blog already, I just need to make time to do it.
Posted by: tech scene in cape town, events and news for developers and entrepreneurs | May 15, 2013 at 05:01 AM