Tech start-ups show their stuff

26 August 2012 - 02:05 By TOBY SHAPSHAK
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South Africa's startup tech companies will get a chance to showcase their products at the prestigious DEMO Africa event later this year.

The local round of judging took place earlier this month in Johannesburg and Cape Town, where 30 companies showed off a range of startup ideas.

"DEMO Africa is an African edition of DEMO US, a renowned birthplace of technology," said Harry Hare, executive director of DEMO Africa. "DEMO is the launchpad for emerging technologies and trends. Each year over 2 500 people from around the globe attend DEMO in the USA, Europe and China to experience innovation at its birth."

At each DEMO event, a hand-selected class of new products are introduced to the world for the very first time, he said. The event attracts global media, investors, corporate acquirers, strategic partners and buyers. This is the first year it is being run in Africa.

"DEMO Africa 2012 will provide the most innovative emerging and established companies from African countries the opportunity to launch their products on the global stage and announce to Africa and the world they have arrived. The event will also act as a platform for companies outside the region looking to launch in the African market," Hare told Business Times.

Individual country events are being held and a shortlist of 40 companies from Africa will present at the final event in Nairobi, Kenya, in October.

"The quality of products from the startups that presented in South Africa was outstanding," said Hare. "There is a lot of maturity in the South Africa startup ecosystem which seems to be pushing the quality of products to very good levels. Any of the products we saw apart from just a few can have a good shot at the global market. I see the possibility of a good representation of South African startups in DEMO Africa."

Business Times is highlighting three of the firms who pitched their ideas in Cape Town.

Evly

While many businesses are using Facebook as the new medium to talk to customers, merely liking pages or commenting is not the same as engagement, says Evly.com's CEO Eric Edelstein.

"We want organisations to have better engagement with their communities," he said. "People use our software firstly for engagement and entertainment. The second thing is for virality, [to use] the sharing mechanism especially on social media.

"And the third aspect is to crowdsource some sort of business value. When we say that, it could be anything from idea generation through to market research all the way through to creative output, videos, posters, logos or any creative output."

Companies like Virgin, Puma, Nivea, Famous Grouse and Groupon, as well as the Democratic Alliance, have already used Evly, variously, to get ideas on new logos or posters, marketing campaigns, and how to improve their services.

Playboy magazine, for instance, had 20 000 fans on its Facebook page. "We increased their fan base to 72 000 fans in the space of six weeks," said Edelstein.

Said Hare: "Evly is an interesting product with a global appeal and very high success potential. The good thing is it was built from the ground up to be a global product, something that we must encourage our startups to do".

Evly originally started out as a software platform to crowdsource ideas for Springleap, a design-based website that asks its community to vote on designs. The winners are then paid by Springleap to produce them.

Springleap is run by Eran Eyal, who is a minority shareholder in Evly. Edelstein is a minority shareholder in Springleap. Stimorol and Nokia have recently used Springleap to design their packaging and Lumia phones, respectively. Springleap also presented at DEMO Africa's Cape Town rounds.

Edelstein went to San Francisco last January to see if the company was on the right track. "I went over thinking I'd spend a week or two meeting investors, but I learnt so much I ended up spending three months there."

Returning home, Edelstein changed tack and rebuilt Evly from scratch. "Within four months had our first paid customer and its just been going upwards since then," he said.

"Most of competitions being run in South Africa [on Facebook] are using Evly," said Edelsein, including Foschini's, Cape Union Mart and Media 24.

"If you were going to go build it yourself, it would take months. We've pre-built Evly with over a 1000 features. We've cut down the development time from thousands of hours to one hour."

Evly might be some of the best software to come out of South Africa since Mark Shuttleworth's Thawte internet certificate business.

Similar competitor companies in the same space include BuddyMedia (which was bought for $800-million bought by Salesforce); and Vitrue and Involver, which were bought by Oracle for around $300-million each, said Edelstein.

This month Google bought WildFire for $250-million, he added.

"We want people to perceive we’re a global company and then be presently surprised when they discover we're based in Cape Town in Woodstock," said Edelstein. "We're trying to stay proudly South African."

TaxTim

"I have a Masters degree in biotech and biochem so thought I had sufficient intelligence to be able to file my own tax return with confidence," said TaxTim co-founder Evan Robinson. But "I was a freelancer with various projects on the go, so was very confused last year when I tried to file."

"I enlisted the help of Marc, who is a chartered accountant specialising in local and international tax, and his knowledge was pretty handy," he adds of co-founder and tax specialist Marc Sevitz.

Then Robinson thought: "What if everyone could have access to their own Marc? What if I could digitise his brain and distribute him over the internet to the masses at an affordable price?"

And TaxTim.com was born. "TaxTim is an online virtual tax assistant who asks you simple, plain language questions one-by-one, then converts your answers into a correctly completed tax return. He helps you step-by-step to become tax compliant by helping you through the entire process, from registering for a tax number, setting up eFiling, completing your own return and submitting it to SARS," said Robinson.

Said DEMO Africa's Hare: "TaxTim is an excellent product, however it operates is a highly regulated sector. If they can weave around the regulatory issues, the product can make a huge impact".

Gigham

Gigham.com is designed to overcome that age-old problem of what to do for entertainment.

Built by Hilton Roth, known as Roach, who has been in the music industry for 20 years and owns the African Dope record label; and George Gally, formerly of Loerie-winning agency Radarboy and creative director of Ogilvy Japan.

"We both saw the inefficiencies around how events are promoted and discovered," said Roth. "There is a big hole in the industry. We decided to built something which brings events closer to promoters and promoters closer to events. That was the hole."

The way to do this was automation. Gigham aggregates events from Facebook, and lets promoters use "one-click to add their event".

"There is a lot of information, so you can drill down to what you want. We decided to built it using the city-by-city and region-by-region model and we think that's the real power of it. It makes it easier to scale as we add a city.

Said Hare: "This is a good one and can be dropped anywhere in the world".

  • Shapshak is a judge for DEMO Africa.
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