Exciting companies in RSA?

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Eyenstyn

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Are there any progressive companies in RSA that are similar to Apple or Google?

I was just wondering because it seems that we often talk about companies over seas but what about local companies that are pushing boundaries and innovating in business arenas?
 
Are you kidding or what. I believe, any half reputable company doing 'cutting edge' r&d will leave SA quicker then Oom S.S. leaves the prison :D Imagine Google having to fire most of their employee and replace them with Africans in order to comply with AA criteria :D WTF Wish you all a nice and peaceful,long weekend.
 
BlackBox said:
Are you kidding or what. I believe, any half reputable company doing 'cutting edge' r&d will leave SA quicker then Oom S.S. leaves the prison :D Imagine Google having to fire most of their employee and replace them with Africans in order to comply with AA criteria :D WTF Wish you all a nice and peaceful,long weekend.
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Politics aside and racism - if your a South African following international trends - ask yourself why aren't there similar stuff being made locally?

I mean why can't we have an Apple company and a Google start up?

I know there are some but not on the culture changing scale like America.
 
Eyenstyn said:
Politics aside and racism - if your a South African following international trends - ask yourself why aren't there similar stuff being made locally?
I mean why can't we have an Apple company and a Google start up?
I know there are some but not on the culture changing scale like America.
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Why has Mark Shuttleworth set up Ubuntu in the UK and not SA?
 
Eyenstyn said:
Politics aside and racism - if your a South African following international trends - ask yourself why aren't there similar stuff being made locally?

I mean why can't we have an Apple company and a Google start up?

I know there are some but not on the culture changing scale like America.
Click to expand...

Plenty of reasons. There's a lack of skills and capital for these kinds of businesses to even start. Even before that, S.A. is comparatively a much poorer country so it makes no sense for a lot of capital to be diverted into high-tech R&D stuff. The competition is stiff, you wanna get into the tech game against Japan, Germany and the U.S.? Etc. etc.
 
Eyenstyn said:
Politics aside and racism - if your a South African following international trends - ask yourself why aren't there similar stuff being made locally?

I mean why can't we have an Apple company and a Google start up?

I know there are some but not on the culture changing scale like America.
Click to expand...

As much as both of us would like to do away with "politics and racism", the South African gov. does not. Keeping in mind the astronomic costs involved, it does not take 2 brain cells to figure out the issues at hand. Yes, DENEL used to be 'up there somewhere' but this days . . . Is a unfortunate state of affairs and a sober answer to your question - like it or not :(
 
Disappointing. Maybe we need an entrepreneurs thread because all I am hearing is excuses.

Denel wasn't for the people, they were for the government.
 
So firstly, what exactly do you classify as an "exciting" company? This is very relative, because what I find exciting, you may not. It seems you are mainly thinking about tech companies?

MXIt is a pretty cool company in that regard then.What about Kalahari.net? The African version of Amazon...or at least they seem to try to be. I think if you actually really look into this (instead of posting in a forum hoping to uncover a giant of innovation that you somehow missed) you will find that there are plenty of exciting companies in South Africa, but that they are relatively small. Webafrica might be considered as a cool/funky/exciting company, though it too is very small.

South Africa is a very small market. Most people here live in poverty. Of all the kids starting Grade 1 this year, maybe 30% will actually make it to matric. Less will pass. On top of this, we have all these stupid regulations on how many people of what color need to occupy what positions, and having worked abroad for multi-national firms, I can tell you that in more than one instance, this was the primary area of concern for them and reason not to invest. On top of all this, there seems to be less capital available in our country for startups, and not enough support for this from the government. These 'exciting' companies, like Google, Amazon etc. have offices here sure, but they are small offices, for the above reasons and/or for some of the other reasons mentioned so far. Further more, SA seems to have a much more conservative and traditional approach to business and change. We're much more formal - which is probably a contributing factor to finance being one of the dominating industries here. But that (finance) is probably not exicting to you!

These are not excuses. These are simple, basic, facts about South Africa. We're on the African continent. We have limited skills, a limited market, limited capital, and often a limited mentality to boot. For all of the above reasons, if you want to do something 'exciting'....or to stick with your examples...revolutionarily tech....you need to probably in the first instance make sure it has global appeal so you can hit a global market. Lets say you come up with Social Network 3.0 or whatever......why operate from SA? The venture capitalists for the most part probably wont get your idea, probably cant offer that much capital anyway, you wont find the right skills or be able to get them into the country very easily if you do.

This is not to say that innovation is dead. It's not. It's everywhere. But its a challenging environment. You can be very successful in SA though not always in the realms that you regard as exicting. Read about yola.com and Vinny Lingham for an interesting journey.
 
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Markd said:
So firstly, what exactly do you classify as an "exciting" company? This is very relative, because what I find exciting, you may not. It seems you are mainly thinking about tech companies?

MXIt is a pretty cool company in that regard then.What about Kalahari.net? The African version of Amazon...or at least they seem to try to be. I think if you actually really look into this (instead of posting in a forum hoping to uncover a giant of innovation that you somehow missed) you will find that there are plenty of exciting companies in South Africa, but that they are relatively small. Webafrica might be considered as a cool/funky/exciting company, though it too is very small.

South Africa is a very small market. Most people here live in poverty. Of all the kids starting Grade 1 this year, maybe 30% will actually make it to matric. Less will pass. On top of this, we have all these stupid regulations on how many people of what color need to occupy what positions, and having worked abroad for multi-national firms, I can tell you that in more than one instance, this was the primary area of concern for them and reason not to invest. On top of all this, there seems to be less capital available in our country for startups, and not enough support for this from the government. These 'exciting' companies, like Google, Amazon etc. have offices here sure, but they are small offices, for the above reasons and/or for some of the other reasons mentioned so far. Further more, SA seems to have a much more conservative and traditional approach to business and change. We're much more formal - which is probably a contributing factor to finance being one of the dominating industries here. But that (finance) is probably not exicting to you!

These are not excuses. These are simple, basic, facts about South Africa. We're on the African continent. We have limited skills, a limited market, limited capital, and often a limited mentality to boot. For all of the above reasons, if you want to do something 'exciting'....or to stick with your examples...revolutionarily tech....you need to probably in the first instance make sure it has global appeal so you can hit a global market. Lets say you come up with Social Network 3.0 or whatever......why operate from SA? The venture capitalists for the most part probably wont get your idea, probably cant offer that much capital anyway, you wont find the right skills or be able to get them into the country very easily if you do.

This is not to say that innovation is dead. It's not. It's everywhere. But its a challenging environment. You can be very successful in SA though not always in the realms that you regard as exicting. Read about yola.com and Vinny Lingham for an interesting journey.
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Dude your ranting. I said in the first post companies like Google and Apple.

Second post acknowledged we do have some - which you have mentioned.

Thirdly these companies are not culture changing like Google or Apple.
 
Just wanna throw my 2 cents in here... (or it's equivalent in whatever country you're in)
Anyone who's known about Mxit before 2005 can attest to the enormous impact it's had on teen culture in SA. And I think it's contributed greatly to SA's involvement in the chat/social app society we have in the world today. Unfortunately, because of it's unwillingness/inability (only they know which one is correct) to allow easy integration into other apps like Palringo, Nimbuzz, Fring, Skype, Google Talk, they kinda fell behind and now we don't really need mxit anymore with the likes of Watsapp and BBM consuming the masses at the moment. For majority of cellphone users, their next cellphone purchase would be a smartphone and they will most likely start using Watsapp. So my point is that even though Mxit may be fast dying in terms of popularity, it was undeniably an exciting company in terms of how it impacted our chat culture in SA. Mxit was connecting people before Facebook was born.
 
Thanks K9JT! The concept and initial drive was great from Mxit but they deviated into other ventures like Moola...they could have kept it simple and cheap.
 
I don't think the moola was a problem, in fact it helped them make more money so that they could upgrade servers, equipment, employ more people etc. The pricing will always be debatable depending on which side of the coin you're on but at the end of the day, a business needs to make money, and paying a few rands for content we could have gotten for free elsewhere isn't something worth complaining about when we get to send messages for free, saving us at least 30 cents a message. I didn't mind topping up my moola every month to support them. But as soon as I got my smartphone and discovered other chat applications, my gripe with them came when they didn't allow me to take my mxit service and contacts with me to those apps. Although I guess their argument would be that they allowed you to bring in other other chat services into mxit. I just think it should have worked both ways.

Regardless of what they should or shouldn't have done though, the iborg army is just too strong and now even non-iphone users (wannabe isheep) are being posioned by the seemingly tasty, frosting coated rotten apple. But please, let me not turn this into a fanboy ithread. So don't read this last paragraph ;-)
 
There are some top products coming out of South Africa. We might not generally hear about the things that change the way people do business or the face of signals intelligence and so on.

BlackBox said:
Are you kidding or what. I believe, any half reputable company doing 'cutting edge' r&d will leave SA quicker then Oom S.S. leaves the prison :D Imagine Google having to fire most of their employee and replace them with Africans in order to comply with AA criteria
Click to expand...
Not only do foreign companies come to South Africa to do R&D, but we have many local companies doing it too. And no-one is having to fire their employees.

Eyenstyn said:
I mean why can't we have an Apple company and a Google start up?
Click to expand...
We can, but it's early days for South Africa as a country that is not completely insular.

In some cases these things are merely being in the right place at the right time.
 
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