Synaq’s nondescript offices near the Sandton CBD feel laid back and comfortable. A large blackboard near the entrance has scribbles all over it. These offices check all the boxes of a start-up, but this business is far too big, and a few years too old, to fall into the start-up category. It all started a few years
Browsing: People
Any South African developer who has dabbled with WordPress is probably familiar with WooThemes or its spin-off product for e-commerce websites, WooCommerce, the companies Adii Pienaar co-founded with Magnus Jepson and Mark Forrester. For Pienaar, life in a tech start-up started
Banking systems have not typically made for riveting conversation outside of business IT circles. Today, however, banks, including those in South Africa, are doing some of the coolest things in the technology field. Nedbank’s low-slung building at the top of Katherine Street in Sandton has been the company’s technology and operations
There is a always a buzz at Microsoft South Africa’s head office in Johannesburg’s leafy Bryanston suburb. This week, the buzz is the appointment of new MD Zoaib Hoosen. Like his predecessor, Mteto Nyati, Hoosen, 49, is a former IBM executive. He joined Microsoft in 2010 as enterprise
The quaint “village” of Parkhurst is one of my favourite weekend spots and I often visit its pubs and eateries with the missus. So, as the resident of a neighbouring suburb, news that Parkhurst is planning to roll out fibre broadband to all homes and businesses piqued my interest. What was of particular interest was
As I step into a rather ordinary looking building in the drab Johannesburg suburb of Rivonia, I get the sense there is a buzz in the air, even though there’s no one about as I walk past an unmanned reception desk. Stuck on the desk is a handwritten note instructing interns to head upstairs. That’s where Gareth Cliff, until recently the host
Though he’s mostly been out of the headlines in recent years, Primedia founder William Kirsh didn’t disappear into early retirement when he resigned in September 2009 as CEO of the media empire he led and helped build. Rather, he’s been hard at work creating a new business – with his father
South Africa’s communications minister, Yunus Carrim, likes to joke that his favourite book is Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, a joke which is aimed at those worried about his communist background. But, in reality, the former journalist and academic’s reading tastes are far more
The 2012 US presidential election campaign broke many records: the most money ever raised (and spent), the most ads ever flighted, the most words ever written. And, in the back offices of the Obama campaign, chief technology officer Harper Reed and his team were busy making it the most
AdaptIT founder and CEO Sbu Shabalala looks far younger than his 40 years. Impeccably dressed and softly spoken, Shabalala, a Durbanite, looks more like a backroom accountant than the head of a JSE-listed IT company. Over the