Nasper’s CEO Koos Bekker paid a visit the 2oceansvibe radio studio on Wednesday morning for an exclusive interview on the “Hard Willi” show with Richard Hardiman and Lindsay Williams.

Prompted by their own questions, as well as responding to tweets from listeners of the show, Koos covered a range of topics, from radio and print media, to the local and international online landscape.

Naspers is a leading multinational media group and over the past two decades the group has evolved from a traditional print media business in one country, to a broad-based e-media company in multiple markets. Naspers’ principal operations are in internet platforms (focussing on commerce, communities, content, communication and games), pay-television and the provision of related technologies and print media (including publishing, distribution and printing of magazines, newspapers and books).

Touchlab, A division of Media 24, recently launched the go! South Africa travel app.

Listen to the podcast of the live interview below:

Alan Knott-Craig is likely the most talked about local Internet entrepreneur at the moment. After his tenure as MD of wireless Internet provider, iBurst, Alan moved to Stellenbosch and started a mobile applications investment company. Enter World of Avatar, consisting of approximately 14 mobile related businesses, some of which were launched and incubated from within WOA while others were acquired.

Then Alan made his boldest move yet – he met with Herman Heunis, founder of South Africa’s most popular social network, MXit, and convinced him to sell. The acquisition was widely covered and the price was said to be a massive 9 digit number.

Some say Alan bought a technology past its prime with the likes of BlackBerry’s BBM and Whatsapp enjoying huge growth on smart phones. Alan saw it differently. With the next billion or two of the African population not even connected to the Internet yet, there is huge scope to provide communication tools to ‘feature’ and ‘dumb phone’ users. However, they aren’t overlooking MXit for smart phones and will aim to release a new version – said to be a game changer – in April 2012.

Alan Knott-Craig is a deal maker and with a huge community as bait, has set out to close several deals that will continue to drive MXit’s growth and revenue. Recently he setup an embed deal with Opera and has several similar deals in the pipeline. (more…)

While the full-length version of ‘The Lost Interview’ with former Apple CEO, Steve Jobs will be available on the 19th November, an exclusive teaser of the never before seen footage was revealed yesterday by What’s Trending.

The original hour long interview was conducted by author and journalist Bob Cringely during the making of his TV series ‘Triumph of the Nerds’ in 1995. In the end, only a part of the interview was used in the series and it was believed that the rest of it was lost. However, a copy of the VHS (remember those?) was recently found in the director’s own garage. With the help of modern technology, the tape was cleaned up, restored and put into context by Cringely himself. At the time of the interview Jobs was running NeXT, the computer company he had founded after leaving Apple.

In the interview Jobs talks about his pioneering days with Steve Wozniak when they built the Blue Box, the visits he made to Xerox Palo Alto Research Center and how it inspired the making of the Macintosh and his forced departure from Apple.

During the interview Jobs states: “We were on a mission from God to save Apple. I don’t care about being right. I just care about success.”

Steve Jobs died on the 5th October at the age of 56.

Watch the teaser below:

source: what’s trending

You might already know that today Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs goes on sale worldwide. It is already the top selling book on the Kindle store, so expect massive sales. There have been many biographies of Steve Jobs, but this is the first authorized one, and Isaacson interviewed Steve Jobs over 40 times in the last two years. The book description:

“Walter Isaacson has written a riveting story of the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing.

At a time when America is seeking ways to sustain its innovative edge, and when societies around the world are trying to build digital-age economies, Jobs stands as the ultimate icon of inventiveness and applied imagination. He knew that the best way to create value in the twenty-first century was to connect creativity with technology. He built a company where leaps of the imagination were combined with remarkable feats of engineering.  

Although Jobs cooperated with this book, he asked for no control over what was written nor even the right to read it before it was published. He put nothing off-limits. He encouraged the people he knew to speak honestly. And Jobs speaks candidly, sometimes brutally so, about the people he worked with and competed against. His friends, foes, and colleagues provide an unvarnished view of the passions, perfectionism, obsessions, artistry, devilry, and compulsion for control that shaped his approach to business and the innovative products that resulted.

Driven by demons, Jobs could drive those around him to fury and despair. But his personality and products were interrelated, just as Apple’s hardware and software tended to be, as if part of an integrated system. His tale is instructive and cautionary, filled with lessons about innovation, character, leadership, and values.”

Exclusive Books already has Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography, and it goes on sale today for R249 for the hardback.

As part of the book’s launch, 60 Minutes interviewed Isaacson. We have added the first and second half of the video below. Personally, I will be skipping the videos until I have read the book.

If you are all interested in how Jobs conducted his business or personal life, or how the book was written, get hold of a nice uncapped internet connection and watch the videos below:

(more…)

World of Avatar had an awesome week last week, having seen the launch of boom.fm and announcing their acquisition of Mxit. On Thursday afternoon I had a chat with Peter Matthaei the CEO of boom.fm and the CTO at World of Avatar to discuss how the investment company is doing and what his plans are in running boom.fm. Click play below.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Group buying has exploded in South Africa and shows no sign of slowing. Although some of the smaller ‘fly by night’ players have come and gone, there are plenty local group buying sites that are carving out a market for themselves. We are also seeing lots of international players entering our small local market with Google Deals, Facebook Deals, etc.

Jess is an entrepreneur who has profited from the global group buying craze. He started Ubuntu Deal late last year and within 6 months was acquired (100% acquisition) by local internet giant, Bid or Buy. International player Groupon also entered the market several months back with an acquisition of local player Twangoo. You can watch the Twangoo interview here.

I chat to Jess about his acquisition, subscriber and revenue growth post acquisition, which cities they have expanded to in South Africa and what his take is on the big international players entering the market (see below). I also asked if there is a market for group buying in Africa, his take on group buying on mobile, the Groupon IPO and the issue around group buying’s low barrier to entry. (more…)

Russell Perry, from his days as CEO of 123People, photo © 123People

Russell Perry was the CEO of the internet’s biggest real time people search engine, 123People. Bandwidth Blog takes you inside his tenure as CEO from when he joined as employee number three – taking the company into 13 countries, available in 11 languages, reaching 50 million unique visitors per month and fighting off competition from big US based rivals like Spock.

You started 123People, the biggest online people search engine. When did the idea come to you and how long did it take to get the first product up?

In fact, I was NOT one of the founders of 123people, I was “merely” the startup-ceo. The idea to create a people search engine was born by Markus Wagner and Martin Stemeseder who had sold their first company 3United (a Vienna based WASP) to Verisign (USA) and in 2007 started to look for new ideas. They were looking at the overall online search landscape and saw that there were some players such as spock.com in the USA and another German vertical search engine focusing on publicly available personal information.

However, it was more an aggregation of data (USA) and a link compilation (Germany) but no real-time search for this vertical.

So both set out to build the protoype and launched the website end of January 2008 out of their New York City apartment. I happened to be in NYC that week and I had been working with Markus and Martin for nearly 10 years – they used to build the stuff for online gaming and also the first mobile gambling platform while I was at bwin.com

I liked what I saw and I was asked if I wanted to build the website into a company. Over the next few months I followed their progress and joined them in the fundraising pitches for series A. In July 2008 we closed the first funding which was contingent on me coming on board as CEO.

The first few months were pretty rocky as we had a business plan but an unusable business model and the product was still in beta. There were no revenues, but there was growth. So I set out to get my A-team together and revamp the business model. Despite the opposition of the main shareholders and the VC guys to take a – what I call the 33-1/3 approach – and split revenue sources into display advertising, affiliate revenues and premium/charged services, we went ahead with it – thanks to one of the smaller strategic investors – and continued to grow the traffic and after six months – July 2009 – we actually broke even. By then we had a commercial product, were active in 8 countries and 6 languages, two of the three revenue streams where generating enough revenues to grow the business even further to about 50mln unique visitors per month by the end of 2009. This made us the most profitable and largest people search site globally.

Did you operate 123People from Austria? Do you believe you can truly build a global internet company from outside of Silicon Valley. Did you have a small presence in the valley?

Due to the fact that that there were several US players we decided to focus on Europe which also was supported by the fact that we had a Austrian VC and a German strategic partner. 123people was HQ’d in Vienna which was a benefit due to the proximity of our initial markets and also advertising partners.

Yes, I do believe that you can build a truly global internet company outside of SV – just look at Skype (Estonia/Luxembourg), and the Chinese online mega-players (though China is a whole market it is’s own, of course).

The only difficulty is that the VC money and a lot of the dumb money is in SV – in Europe there is less risk capital for startups, ample amount for expansion financing, but there is a clear focus on fundamentals of the business model – in SV a lot of dumb money goes to ideas, not fundamentals.. But, in SV the idea creation allows for mega companies to be build much more rapidly – look at FB with nearly USD 2bln in funding. THAT – would not happen in Europe.

No, we didn’t have any presence in SV or even in the US, only some PR support through an agency.

Was partnering with an incubator like i5invest, to gain access to their resources, critical to 123People’s success?

Yes and no, the incubator itself was not really instrumental in the success, it was actually due to the network the CTO (one of the founders) and I had and the people (A-team) we brought on board. What was beneficial, though, was all the back-office resources like accounting and finance that allowed us to manage our costs through being associated with i5invest.

While you where in charge of 123People what was the peak audience number?

Just above 50mln unique visitors per month. An “actual” and audited number since we were listed in the official audience tracking in all countries. Always have to laugh about this, because we didn’t inflate out numbers since we had to deliver to the advertising customers..

If we had been a company without revenues, my answer would we Silicon Valley-eque – 200mln visitors!

How did you beat rivals like Zoominfo and Spock to become the largest online people search?

Spock had really great technology, but they were focused solely on aggregating and creating new profiles of people and making them searchable – but they didn’t have a business model, no revenues and put 100% on product instead of taking a 33-1/3 split in market approach as we did. They burnt through something around the lines of USD 12mln in just a few years without revenues.. Clearly, not sustainable. They also had major issues going into new markets, especially Europe since they didn’t have the legal know-how – which we did.

Zoominfo – we actually partnered with them for a while until they change their focus to only sell their data instead of utilizing the vast database they had to generate traffic on their own.. I had long talks with them that I thought that was not the way to go and clearly 123people, being the startup, wasn’t in the position to pay upfront for data – and that wasn’t our overall business and traffic model. Also, their international efforts changed and they focused only on the US, if I remember correctly. (more…)

Recently I had the privilege of meeting with Donna Stephens, Head of Marketing & Customer Service at eRetailer TAKEALOT.com (previously knows as Take2). We met to discuss :

1) A name change,

2) The public disclosure of the ambitious goals at TAKEALOT.com

Based on this discussion I thought it a good idea to present a perspective related to how well TAKEALOT.com is positioned to achieve these goals.

Some context:

In October 2010 Cape Town based e-retailer Take2 was co-acquired by Kim Reid (former Naspers senior executive) together with New York based hedge fund, Tiger Global Management.  The tripartite partnership seems to have the internal equilibrium needed to change the landscape of e-retailing not just in SA but in Africa. The acquisitions fit neatly into the [assumed] strategy of Tiger Global Management who have more than US $ 9.5billion under their control and who have been steadily investing in emerging market internet-related businesses.  Kim Reid seems the ideal candidate to man-ship given his considerable depth of experience with the Naspers owned MIH Group, no stranger themselves to investing in emerging internet-related businesses.  Then there is Take2, a company started by seven investors in Cape Town in 2002. Take2 quickly moved to the position of SA’s second  biggest online retailer, selling books, DVD’s, games, CD’s electronics, toys and much more … with what I am told is a very loyal consumer base.

On announcement of, without doubt, very ambitious goals the media responded with what could be best describe as ‘stoking the fire,’ perhaps to determine just how much of a threat TAKEALOT.com represents to established and market leading e-retailer Kalahari.net.  After-all there is an old saying that goes: ” If you try to steal the giants lunch, the giant is likely to eat you for lunch.” In this case I assume that by announcing the following goals…. (more…)