By Wimpie van Rensburg, Systems Engineer, Riverbed Technology

Have you ever upgraded your bandwidth, even though you knew it wasn’t going to solve your latency problems?

If you said yes, it’s okay. Everybody has done it and it’s nothing to be ashamed of. Your intentions were good, and besides, it gave you a reprieve from all those user complaints. But then, after awhile, they started again, didn’t they?

And now you are right back where you started from, thinking about going back to bandwidth. Do you really think things will be different this time? Sure, there will be the honeymoon period, but eventually you will be right back where you started, broken promises and shattered dreams. I’m begging you, don’t do it, don’t go back to bandwidth!

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Applications are now open for the second Seed Engine Business Accelerator which is offering R100, 000 each for up to ten tech business ideas as well as a 13 week boot camp.

The programme offers coaching, mentoring, workspace and access to investors on demo day where more than R2 million per venture can be raised for second round funding.

Seed Engine has already selected six ventures (see table below) for its first 13 week accelerator boot camp which is currently underway in Sandton, Johannesburg with the first demo day taking place on 3 May. A number of these businesses have been selected for international start-up competitions and have started to raise additional capital.

Says Marc Elias, CEO of Seed Engine, “The search is on to find up to ten distinctive and disruptive business concepts. There’s been a dearth of tech start ups in South Africa, but we are turning this around by growing an integrated ecosystem which will contribute to job creation. We are looking for early stage entrepreneurs who have ideas which have international application. Seed Engine is South Africa’s first true business accelerator and we are looking to grow ideas into top commercial realities. We offer entrepreneurs extensive support and access to the right investor networks.”

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By Wimpie van Rensburg, Systems Engineer, Riverbed Technology

According to a report by The Economist entitled ‘If in doubt, innovate’, the Nordic region is becoming what it calls ‘a hothouse of entrepreneurship’.

With the mention of such a location, one would naturally think first of Helsinki-based Angry Birds’ creators Rovio who have gone on to develop and launch further popular iterations of the game including Angry Birds Space and Angry Birds Star Wars. 

What you may not know about this region is that this ‘hothouse of entrepreneurship’ came about by a group of students at  Aalto University in Finland, when in 2010 after a visit to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology organised  a “summer of start-ups”. These summer camps aimed to highlight the power and potential of the establishment of new companies in Finland in comparison to let’s say, Nokia, for example.

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The Integr8 Group is re-branding Integr8 Fax to Fax Unplugged as part of the company’s global expansion plans.

Integr8 Fax is a well established and renowned leader in innovative cloud-based technologies around paper to electronic based unified communications, with Fax to email as one of its core offerings.

The company is one of a handful of providers that own and manage their own platform, with a substantial base of resellers that offer fax to email services under their own white labelled brand.

Robert Sussman, joint CEO of Integr8, explains that Fax Unplugged offers precisely the same level of performance, reliability and ease-of-use that customers have come to expect from the company’s fax2email service – only that it is now being managed under a different brand.

Executive management believe the Fax Unplugged brand has global appeal and also the technical clout to be established more independently and aggressively in the market.

“This will further cement our fax-to-email offering as a corporate service which differentiates itself from casual, non-established email providers in that it is an enterprise grade service. Platforms globally are hosted in carrier grade data centres with full triangulation and redundancy,” Sussman continues.

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Research In Motion today announced that its new Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) solution, BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10, is now available for download. BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10 re-invents RIM’s EMM by bringing together device management, industry leading security, and mobile applications management for BlackBerry smartphones (including the new BB10 models) in a consolidated solution. It also provides a single console for managing BlackBerry, Android and Apple iOS devices.

“BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10 empowers employees to be more productive and better equipped to serve customers while it provides business and IT leaders with the confidence that corporate data is protected and manageable in the same way they have long enjoyed with BlackBerry,” said Peter Devenyi, Senior Vice President, Enterprise Software, Research In Motion. “BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10 makes mobility easy for businesses to help keep them moving.”

Flexible Enterprise Mobility Management (more…)

POPI (the Protection of Personal Information Bill) has been a difficult subject for most corporates living in the age of cloud computing. Corporates using offshore data centres to store customer or employee-related personal information need not fear that this will be totally prohibited once the POPI becomes law. Although POPI prohibits the offshore transfer of personal data, POPI will provide for a number of exemptions to this prohibition.

“POPI has been in the making for eight years and will hopefully be passed into law this year. Companies will then have a one-year transition period to get their houses in order to ensure they comply with POPI” says Tammy Bortz, director and IT law specialist at Werksmans Attorneys. “One of the benefits of POPI is that it sets out the requirements to enable the transfer of personal data offshore which will in turn enable South African companies to do business internationally,” says Bortz. (more…)

SAP has announced the latest version of Afaria, SAP’s mobile device management solution. Enhancements to the solution include deepening enterprise integration and distribution capabilities to effectively manage and secure the large number of users bringing their own devices into the workplace. To address the growing demand of enterprise mobile apps, SAP is including new app and self-service portal designs to provide a familiar, consumer-like app portal experience in the enterprise.

“The rise in smartphone and tablet adoption in Africa has meant that enterprises need to be able to effectively manage these devices. Many businesses are adopting the global trend of allowing employees to work on their tablets or smartphones,” comments Pfungwa Serima, CEO of SAP Africa.

“To address this trend, enterprises are developing ‘bring your own device’ (BYOD) programmes in the workplace that require a highly scalable, mature EMM solution – either on-premises or in the cloud – to effectively manage and secure all the various mobile devices and apps entering the workplace.”

As recognised by IDC, SAP Afaria effectively meets the EMM (enterprise mobility mangement) needs of enterprises. These needs include traditional mobile device management (MDM), as well as managing and securing the entire mobile device, app and data life cycle across the enterprise. The latest release of SAP Afaria aims to remove complexity and support the growing mobile workforce by helping ensure that all data stored and transmitted via mobile devices is protected and secure. It will allow customers to gain greater control and insight into a wide range of devices and apps, remotely backup and delete data if a device is lost or stolen, and easily deliver fixes, upgrades and refreshes to mobile users. (more…)