Business

Top posts of 2007 – South Africa’s wealthiest, SolarCity, SAP Business ByDesign and Elon Musk of SpaceX

Posted by beyond438 on Jan 4, 2008 in Business | 2 comments

Here are the list of the most read post on my blog in 2007:

1. South Africa’s wealthiest people in 2007 – Most read post by a factor of 5!
2. Lyndon Rive – Green energy CEO of SolarCity. Nice article in today’s San Francisco Business Times.
3. SAP’s on demand/SaaS ERP solution, codenamed A1S
4. Elon Musk of SpaceX
5. Mark Shuttleworth – Ubuntu founder and first African in space
6. What color is your personality? – interesting that this one made it so high up.
7. Laurie Olivier – Venture capitalist
8. Andy Stanley – The most powerful man in the room
9. New Google Maps Mobile – hold on to your GPS
10. Jack Welch / Lars Dalgaard Keynote video – I finished Jack’s book, “Winning” — easy read with LOTS of practical info. Highly recommended.

Thanks for reading my blog.

SoCon08 – Web 2008 in 1.5 days

Posted by beyond438 on Jan 3, 2008 in Blogging, Business, Technology | 0 comments

I attended SoCon07 last year and really enjoyed it. SoCon08 will be held at the University of Kennesaw, just North of Atlanta from February 8-9, 2008. You can register here. It’s not free like ’07 — this year it’s $43 for the full 1.5 days (including a Networking Dinner) or $15 for the Saturday. It’s still a great deal vs for example AlwaysOn’s $1875 OnMedia NYC 2008 event.Great place to meet all sorts of people that are part of the Atlanta (South East) tech scene.Are you going?

Free and Low cost cell phone calls – Jajah, Soonr, Jaxtr, Fring, Lypp, MaxRoam

Posted by beyond438 on Dec 24, 2007 in Business, Technology | 0 comments

Skype is not the only game in town anymore for free or cheap local and international calls. I use Skype a lot for making international calls when I’m connected to the Internet with my MacBook Pro. When I only have my Blackberry, I use VIP’s local and toll free access numbers to make international calls. Recently I started using Jajah’s local direct dial. On Christmas day Jajah is offering FREE calls.

Here are a few options for making cheap or free calls from your cell phone:
Jajah: Jajah has been around for about a year and I’ve used it on and off. Their new Jajah Direct service works great. They link an international number to a local US number. You dial a local US number and the phone rings in the foreign country you’re calling. This way you can make cheap international calls from your mobile phone. At the moment they have local numbers for most large US cities, e.g., Chicago, New York and San Francisco. I hope they add Atlanta soon. Jajah is very easy to set up and use. You can also use Jajah Mobile Web to make calls from your mobile phone. BBCalls integrates Jajah functionality directly into your Blackberry’s phone book app.

Soonr: I posted about Soonr before. Soonr brings your Mac or PC desktop to your cellphone. With Soonr Talk you can call your Skype friends from your cellphone. If they are online the call is free, else you pay the SkypeOut rate. I haven’t used this recently, however when I used it, it worked great. It does take some time to set up. If you have a lot of Skype friends and you have a browser enabled cellphone with a data plan then your calls are free, cool! This “SoonR Talk workaround enables VoIP on your iPhone” — post from Engadget.

Vinny Lingham – CEO of Synthasite

Posted by beyond438 on Dec 10, 2007 in Business, Entrepreneurship, South Africa, Technology | 0 comments

Recently Vinny Lingham stepped down from his post as chief strategy officer of IncuBeta, the online marketing company he co-founded, to concentrate on the interests of his venture capital company, Lingham Capital and more specifically on Synthasite. Lingham, along with his wife, Charlene, and a couple of friends started IncuBeta in 2003 and have grown the Cape Town company into a 50-employee operation with offices in the United Kingdom and United States. IncuBeta owns and manages several businesses, namely Clicks2Customers, a performance search marketing partner; SEM agency Quirk, ReveNews, and CostPerNews.

Another IncuBeta startup company, Synthasite, is now one of the primary investments of his venture capital enterprise, Lingham Capital, and one of the primary targets of Lingham’s attention. Synthasite recently received another round of financing worth $5mm.

Lingham is a mix of youthful energy and idealism, hard work, brains and national pride. He’s 28, works 60-70 hours a week, is a member of the Mensa organization, and loves South Africa.

Raised in East London, a city on the east coast of South Africa, Lingham received an information systems degree from the University of Cape Town and (Vinny corrected me: he dropped out because he didn’t have the finances to continue. I wouldn’t be surprised if he gets an honorary degree from UCT) an honors degree in electronic commerce from the University of South Africa. He is a fourth generation South African with ancestors from India. He loves to read, especially novels by Dan Brown and Tom Clancy, and is a movie fan. He considers Virgin founder Richard Bransen and U2 lead singer Bono personal role models. (He admires Bransen for his passion and fun, and Bono for his work for Africa.) In 2006 Lingham was the winner of the Top Young IT Entrepreneur in Africa Award. He is also listed in South Africa’s who’s who database.

South Africa’s wealthiest people in 2007

Posted by beyond438 on Dec 4, 2007 in Business, South Africa | 0 comments

The Sunday Times of South Africa recently announced South Africa’s billionaire’s club (In South African Rand, divide by ~7 to get to USD). You can find the article here (You may have to register to get to the list).Here is the top ten list:1. Lakshmi Mittal of Mittel Steel SA – ZAR27bn ($4bn),2. Nicky Oppenheimer of Anglo American – ZAR16bn ($2.3bn),3. Patrice Motsepe (African Rainbow Minerals and Sanlam) – ZAR13.5bn ($2bn)4. Rembrandt Trust – ZAR8.3bn ($1.2bn)5. Elephant Consortium (Telkom SA) – ZAR5bn ($700mm)6. Bill Venter of Allied Electronics – ZAR4.2bn ($615mm)7. Giovanni Ravazzotti (Ceramic and Italtile) – ZAR4bn ($586mm)8. Ackerman Family (Pick n Pay Holdings) – ZAR3.7bn ($542mm)9. Bruno Steinhoff (PSG Group and Steinhoff) – ZAR3.7bn ($540mm)10. Laurie Dippenaar (Discovery, FirstRand and RMB) – ZAR3.3bn ($483mm)Here is another list of South Africa’s wealthiest people. There’s some overlap.I wonder why Elon Musk (worth at least $300mm and should be in the top 20) and Mark Shuttleworth (sold to Verisign for $575mm) are not listed. Elon may not be deemed as a South African anymore. I think Mark still lives in South Africa.What to get on the list? Then you may find a few tips in this Secrets of a self-made billionaire Forbes article.Any one else that you think they missed?

Laurie Olivier – Venture capitalist learned to handle risk fighting off snakes

Posted by beyond438 on Nov 26, 2007 in Business, South Africa, Technology, Venture Capital | 0 comments

Laurence (Laurie) Olivier, an Atlanta VC and ex-South African, was recently profiled in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Laurie is a partner in Veritas Venture Partners. Veritas has investments in the following Atlanta based companies: Clickfox, CytoDome, and Asankya. Laurie serves on the board of these companies. He is the Chairman of the American-Israel Chamber of Commerce – Southeast Region and on the board of the Atlanta Venture Forum. Laurie is also instrumental in organizing the annual U.S.-Israel business exchange in Atlanta.In South Africa he currently serves as a technology commercialization advisor to the major government controlled research organization and the University of Pretoria. Laurie was born and raised in South Africa, and holds a B.Engineering (Electronics) from the University of Pretoria, and a B.Com (Hons) and Dip. Datametrics from the University of South Africa.Here is an extract from the Nov 23, 2007 article. Read the rest here.

Venture capitalists, particularly those who concentrate in early-stage investments, need diamond-hard nerves. Laurence “Laurie” Olivier, an Atlanta venture capitalist, got some good training early on. Growing up on a farm in northern South Africa with leopards, baboons and the ultradeadly black mamba, Olivier learned how to confront risk. “The biggest daily problems that we faced were snakes,” he said of his days on the farm in Groot-Marico, near the Botswana border and 150 miles north of Johannesburg. “There was seldom a week that had gone by where we did not kill at least a snake or two inside or very close to our house — some of the most poisonous snakes on earth, like the black mamba and the puff adder. “Olivier, who is distantly related to the famed British actor of the same name, is in somewhat less dangerous territory now, though still in a high-risk line of work: He runs the U.S. operations of Veritas Venture Partners, an Israeli venture capital firm with $100 million in assets under management that invests in early stage high-tech firms. An electrical engineer by training, Olivier, 47, was a former executive at Anglo-American Industrial Corp. in South Africa, where, in 1988 — at age 28 — he was tapped to run that company’s new business development unit. That work helped lay the foundation to what would eventually become his second career as a venture capitalist in 2000, the year he left Anglo-American to join Veritas.”My challenge was to find new businesses that we could start from scratch,” Olivier said. “One way to find new businesses was to scout for technologies, and one way of scouting for technologies was to actually invest in venture capital.”