Guideline BizTech wins award in recognition of its outstanding work in risk management for its RUBiQ initiative Johannesburg, 20 November 2018 - The risk management industry celebrated leaders and innovation in the sector at a gala dinner earlier in November. Coming out tops for the outstanding work it has carried out in risk management, was Guideline BizTech (Pty) Limited for its innovative ‘RUBiQ GRC Knowledge Community’, winning the Industry Initiative Award for Risk Management System Provider for 2018. Conceptualised by Guideline’s executive director, Nicky Downing, the cloud-based smart technology platform is an affordable solution to small and mid-size businesses, as well as large Tier 1 corporations, in meeting the rigorous challenges related to Governance, Risk and Compliance. It brings together an expert subject-matter advisory community built into cutting-edge technology to service all manner of clients in dealing with the onerous task of ongoing business compliance. “RUBiQ is a true milestone in the future vision of Artificial Intelligence-enabled, on-demand GRC Platforms. We have created a live platform that is available to any company, in any industry, anywhere in the world – giving immediate, when-needed, access to critical GRC advisory, and good GRC practice, through intuitive smart tools that guide users through the critical activities of Governance, Risk and Compliance within any business. Importantly, these are also easily and affordably accessed,” explained Downing. “We are extremely grateful to have been acknowledged by our peers for the work that has gone into creating this platform and for the impact it can have.” Businesses the world over now operate in a data-intensive, technology-driven, always-on world. Taking cognisance of this, RUBiQ incorporates leading modern technology enablement through a live chat service with Help BOTs – with an underlying architecture that will enable a full Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence . . .
Compucart refreshes brand identity to align with strategic service deliverables
Compucart Anything Office, leading provider of boutique services and support to the SME market, has launched a fresh brand and identity aligned with vibrant and dynamic vision. With more than 17 years of experience, the company has been a trusted supplier of products and services that run from end to end office supplies and outsourced procurement through to superlative technology implementations and solutions. “The foundations of our business are made up of three core areas – Supply, Managed IT Services and Specialised solutions. As part of our rebrand, we have allocated colours to each of these pillars so they are easy to identify and engage with,” says Rowan Fine, Managing Director, Compucart Anything Office. “This ensures that our customers can instantly recognise our areas of expertise. It also allows us to showcase the comprehensive ecosystem of solutions we offer to the small to medium enterprise market.” Compucart has been working with small to medium enterprises (SMEs) in the South African market for more than 17 years. The company specialises in providing niche and tailor-made solutions to help SMEs overcome the most common challenges they face on a daily basis. Its goal is to alleviate client pain points as not all SMEs have the budget for a dedicated office manager, IT manager and procurement office. “We offer software and hardware as a Service, manage office fit outs, and provide hands-on support to our clients,” says Fine. “We work with customers to assess their specific needs and create solutions that match. This allows us to provide our clients with the help they actually want, where they want it, and at an excellent price point. Our relationships with strategic suppliers, vendors and manufacturers has meant that we can create packages that save our customers’ money.” The company has developed a procurement health check assessment tool to determine exactly where a company is spending more than it should and how systems or expenses can be . . .
IMImobile SA joins Google’s Early Access Program for RCS Business Messaging in Africa
Cape Town, South Africa, 20 November 2018 - IMImobile SA, part of IMImobile PLC - a leading global cloud communications software and solutions provider - has joined Google’s Early Access Program for RCS (Rich Communication Services) business messaging offering in Africa. RCS will allow millions of businesses in Africa to make use of more interactive messaging features such as branding and business verification, suggested reply buttons, rich card carousels and end-to-end payments. IMImobile PLC, who joined the Google’s Early Access Program for RCS Business Messaging in 2017 will be working through its African operations, IMImobile SA, based in Johannesburg to offer RCS business messaging to the wider African continent. For Google, working with mobile messaging specialists, like IMImobile SA, helps with the roll out of RCS business messaging across Africa, a continent with more than one billion people. Devon Meerholz, Chief Creative & Operations Officer at IMImobile SA commented: “We are very excited to offer RCS Business Messaging to our African customer base. RCS is a natural evolution of the traditional SMS communication and allows enterprises to significantly enhance mission critical communication, notifications and alerts. As a leading provider of two-way messaging solutions, processing 42 billion messages annually, we expect a massive acceleration and growth of RCS in 2019, and our enterprise customers will benefit from having access to RCS Business Messaging through IMImobile SA.” According to recent Mobile Squared report, 63% of brands and businesses have already factored RCS into their future marketing and service communication activities. For IMImobile SA, RCS adds another promising communication channel to the evolving messaging ecosystem (alongside SMS, Facebook Messenger, Twitter DM, WeChat and more) which can significantly enhance customer experience, service and interaction. Over the next month, IMImobile SA will drive awareness for RCS . . .
SA’S Home On The Web Achieves 1.2 Million Milestone
South Africa’s Internet namespace has surpassed 1.2 million name registrations across all the Second Level Domains (SLDs) registered and administered by the ZA Central Registry NPC (ZACR), namely co.za, web.za, net.za and org.za. ZACR is the administrator of South Africa’s presence on the worldwide web. In addition to the above-mentioned SLDs, ZACR has also registered a total of three SA cities’ Geographic Top Level Domains (gTLDs): .joburg ('dotJoburg'), .capetown ('dotCapeTown') and .durban ('dotDurban'). The 30-year Registry Operator veteran has furthermore secured the prestigious .africa (‘dotAfrica’) gTLD. “South Africa‘s SLDs, with their impressive 1.2 million total registrations, have cemented .ZA‘s standing as one of the world’s most popular namespaces and successfully capped ZACR‘s third decade serving the South African and global Internet consumer,” says ZACR CEO, Lucky Masilela. The co.za SLD alone currently has over 1 117 000 registrations. South Africa, a country of 57 million people, is the leading domain name market on the continent with over 1.2 million registrations of domain names. By way of comparison, Nigeria, a country of 190 million people, has notched up 102 000 registrations within its .ng country code domain name. Mr Masilela puts the runaway success of co.za down to the globally proven “Triple R” model adopted in 2010 and to which the local domain name sector continues to adhere, with clearly obvious and positive results. The Triple R Model is based on the separation of functions and responsibilities by the Regulator the Registry Operator and the Registrar. “Our current model is the reason South Africa boasts the highest number of Africa’s domain name registrations coupled with our intention to keep the domain costs as low as possible on the continent,” explains Mr. Masilela. The ZACR as the Central Registry responsible for the technical wellbeing of South Africa’s presence on the worldwide web, the dozens of Registrars . . .
Rewards Based Pay It Forward Web-Traffic Crowdfunding Project Now on Jumpstarter
PRETORIA, Gauteng, November 17, 2018 – A new Web-Traffic Creation Project announced today that it is raising funds via a rewards crowdfunding campaign on Jumpstarter Crowdfunding. The fundraising project is called the Pay It Forward Web-Traffic Creation Project, running to develop more web-traffic generation products. The business set out to raise R100,000 on Jumpstarter Crowdfunding to finish development to produce and publish within three months, the next batch of its web-traffic generation properties that is going to change the web-traffic generation market in South Africa. The Web-Traffic Creation Project was set up in July 2018 and published the first of its two original products, the web property called dronearus.com on 20 July 2018. The first batch of projects has enjoyed early traction, with dronesarus.com raking in some multiple Google search top spots within three months. The second product started bringing in customers in under two months. This is when the idea of the Pay It Forward Web-Traffic Creation Project was born. The Pay It Forward Web-Traffic Creation Project was designed to spread the fortunes of early web-traffic and sales, focussed on helping a spectrum of business owners, from individual entrepreneurs and start-up businesses, up to big business in most markets. Responding to the market gap created by the difficulty experienced by most businesses to be found easily by their target market on Google, the Web-Traffic Creation Project sprang into action to bring about an effective way to help all businesses in need, especially in South Africa, to also experience similar success. “All businesses who give out their website name to customers that they get in touch with, can of course be easily found on Google by those specific customers, and indeed anyone else who comes across that business’ website name. However, this limits any business being found by the majority of its potential customers i.e. all the rest of its potential customers who are . . .
CURA Software Wins Da Vinci TT100 Award for Excellence in Management of Innovation
CURA Software Wins Da Vinci TT100 Award for Excellence in Management of Innovation CURA Software Solutions was honoured with the Da Vinci Award for Excellence in Management of Innovation in the Small Business Category at the 2018 Da Vinci TT100 Business Innovations Awards Ceremony held on Wednesday 14 November 2018. The Management of Innovation Award acknowledges how well an organisation capitalises on the ideation process to develop an innovative product, service, process or system and, in turn, how well the business commercialises and implements such innovations. This award is centred around the development, implementation and monitoring of innovative technology strategy within an organisation. Companies are evaluated their ability to maintain a competitive advantage through their incorporation of emerging, pacing, key and base technologies. Key focus is on their improvement of quality and productivity, higher flexibility, cost leadership and new market exploitation. CURA also secured a spot as small enterprise finalists in the Management of Technology, Management of Systems and Overall Excellence categories. Alex Roberts, CURA Software’s Regional Director of Sales and Operations, says, “We are extremely proud that CURA has been recognised for being on the cutting edge of managing Innovation, Technology and Systems. The Small Business Category is extremely competitive, and we were compared to a wide variety of other companies from industries such as mining, water management and ICT companies. CURA has won a TT100 Award for two years consecutively, and the fact that we are expanding the number of areas in which we are placing as finalists really does show that we are moving onward and upwards.” About the Da Vinci TT100 Business Innovations Awards The Da Vinci TT100 Business Innovation Awards Programme is South Africa’s foremost business Awards programme. TT100 has been recognising innovation and technological prowess in South African companies for . . .
IMM Graduate School partners with New leaf Technologies to develop and enhance online course materials
The IMM Graduate School has been providing distance learning to students for the past 60 years. Evolving with the ever-changing needs of students, the school has fully embraced ‘Anywhere, anytime learning’ and says this basic necessity is no longer seen as a ‘nice to have’. Anisa Fielding, Professional Programmes Manager, IMM Graduate School, says: “We met with New Leaf Technologies to discuss their content generation services and made the additional decision to invest in their e-learning platform, aNewspring. When comparing it with other solutions, we found aNewspring to be cost-effective, user-friendly and scalable. We have also implemented integration into our website and CRM systems, which has helped to streamline our student engagement process.” Fielding says that the School’s journey with New Leaf Technologies has been exceptional. Receiving the highest level of support, knowledge and service delivery, aNewspring’s approach to content development is forward-thinking and adheres to international best practices: “We currently have 17 online short courses on the platform and the student feedback has been phenomenal. For each course, we assign an online head tutor who has strict KPIs to ensure each and every student query is dealt with within a 24-hour time frame.” Charmaine du Plessis, CMO, IMM Graduate School adds: “The IMM Graduate School wants to better align with strategic partners to enable us to extend our online course offerings beyond the marketing and supply chain realm. We have thus entered into a partnership with ISO training experts, WWise, and are also offering their Quality Management training programmes on our e-learning platform.” She says that the School is looking to enter into more partnerships with companies like WWise, to be able to provide a more comprehensive selection of online training available. Paul Hanly, Co-Founder of New Leaf Technologies, the distributor of aNewSpring, says: “We are delighted with the outcomes achieved . . .
ICTGlobe boosts ease of doing business in VOIP sector
Independent Tier 1 telco, ICTGlobe, has provided a welcome boost to dozens of ICT sector SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises) with the recent launch of its reseller portal. Dubbed ‘The Ninja’, the new platform radically boosts the ease of doing business in an important ICT market segment. The ICTGlobe reseller base provides Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), Cloud and other key telecoms services to a significant number of South African businesses. “Helping our resellers to lower their cost base through the use of an efficient, single-view online portal has a positive knock-on effect. The ultimate winner is the hard-pressed South African consumer,” says says Riaan van Stryp, ICTGlobe General Manager. ICTGlobe’s new platform is as stealthy and light on its feet as its namesake. ‘The Ninja’ is easy to operate and enables resellers to get on with the business of winning, pleasing and retaining both SME and corporate clients. The powerful yet intuitive portal can provision new client voice and data services in minutes compared to the hours previously required for manual set-up by resellers. Impressive functionality underpins ‘The Ninja’. Resellers can manage their customers, cloud services, voice services, licensing and hardware orders online and in a flash. “Previously, resellers had to log onto several different portals to achieve what can now be done using a single interface. The result was that resellers relied heavily on the ICTGlobe help-desk for manual, human intervention when automation should be the overriding goal in our technology-based sector,” comments Mr Van Stryp. “By giving our resellers full access to ICTGlobe’s entire voice and Cloud infrastructure through ‘The Ninja’, we’ve now achieved a level of automation that means resellers can direct the lion’s share of their energy towards building and maintaining their revenue-generating customer bases,” Mr Van Stryp says. New customers or services can be operational in minutes . . .
SA Wine Industry Innovation Challenge Winners Announced
The winner of the inaugural South Africa Wine Industry Innovation Challenge is Jan Thomas and team from Ask-Jean, with a winning concept of an app which innovatively predicts your wine preferences. He was chosen by a panel of judges from 7 outstanding pitches presented at the Stellenbosch University LaunchLab on Friday, 2 November. The second place went to Torsten Babl from Ackerview, with an idea that uses data to save time and money for farmers. There was also a student award that went to Martha Mukama Asiimwe from Vino Tea, with an innovative tea using grape agri-processing waste which produces quality tea. Winetech, together with the LaunchLab and the Faculty of AgriSciences, Stellenbosch University, went on an entrepreneurial drive to invite business pitches for their first Wine Industry Innovation Challenge in South Africa. This was a major opportunity for South African entrepreneurs and students with excellent business/product/tech ideas that could transform their concepts into a start-up businesses which will support the Wine and related industries in South Africa. The judging panel consisted of wine industry representatives as well as business leaders and technology experts who are familiar with the entrepreneurship journey, namely: Adriaan Oelofse (Winetech) Lucinda Heyns (Winetech) Audrey Verhaege (SA Innovation Summit) Marius Lambrechts (Head of Innovation at Distell) Joubert de Wet, (Technology Transfer Manager Innovus) MJ Freeborough (Faculty Manager of Agrisciences) Albert Strever (Stellenbosch University, Winetech) Aidan Morton (Viticulturist at Tokara) Selected winners will now continue into LaunchLab programmes according to the needs of the startup, and LaunchLab will ensure that the continuous growth, acceleration and valuable connections are made for these startups. “The wine industry is ripe for disruption. A report released earlier in 2018 noted that only 14% of wine brands in South Africa make enough . . .
Smart Home of the Future Centre
Homemation: Home Automation Experience Centre October 2018, Kramerville Johannesburg, Homemation, the AV, home automation and theatre specialists, recently revealed their state-of-the-art Experience Centre. Guests were welcomed into the awe-inspiring, spacious Scandi-style showroom, offered drinks and enjoyed snacks from the live sushi chef. They were able to walk through the ‘home of the future’ viewing invisible speakers, drop down screens, automated blinds and even a robot vacuum cleaner. The spaces were alive with the sound of people talking excitedly about high-tech offerings and tempting DJ’ing coming from outside. The ‘home’ is completely automated, which means that using voice, or the touch of a button, lights are turned off, on or dimmed, the blinds can be adjusted, stove switched on, fireplace lit and music of choice streamed through a variety of speakers – even ones that are completely hidden in the ceiling. Walking into the lounge, the invisible Stewart Filmscreen screen and JVC projector emerge from the ceiling for an even more immersive experience. The bedroom features an LED strip light behind the bed that is motion activated when you get up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. The room that fascinated most, was the THX “CANNES” cinema room where guests could experience a thrilling car chase that had the hairs on the back of their necks stand upright! After the tours, the house warming bourgeoned into a real party… live sushi, premium gin and whisky bars and the ultimate DJ’s Small Paul, Roger Goode and international acclaimed Timo ODV! Founders and Joint CEOs, Nicholas Gliksman and Daniel Mclean, welcomed everyone and their pride of seeing their dream become a reality was evident as they shared the vision behind the first Home Automation Experience Centre in the country. It is a world-class experience, comparable to the US and UK markets. The scale is exciting – a mini-house fitted out with tech, home automation, . . .
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