Their father’s death, at the age of just 33, played a big role in shaping the lives of brothers Mark and Brett Levy, the founders and co-CEOs of JSE-listed Blue Label Telecoms. It also gave them some of the drive they needed to thrive in business, says Mark Levy. “I was eight and Brett had just turned five
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Asher Bohbot, CEO of fast-growing JSE-listed IT services group EOH, arrived in SA from Israel at the age of 27. Born in Morocco but raised in Israel, today Bohbot heads up one of SA’s largest and most respected IT companies as an engineer turned businessman who believes work life and personal life are all part of the same life
Justin Arenstein, 42, is an award-winning journalist, digital media strategist and media rights activist who believes the media’s role may become less one of reportage and more one of analysis as digital media grows and traditional media is forced to adapt or close shop. Key to the shift that Arenstein believes is
East London’s Patricia Dlamini found herself in technology partly due to chance and partly for what she calls a “change of scenery”. Now executive manager of the Eastern Cape IT Initiative (ECiti), Dlamini says the province’s biggest challenges are retaining graduates, getting its people connected and making youngsters
When Bernie Fanaroff graduated in physics from the University of the Witwatersrand, he went to his department head and said he would like to be a cosmologist. “I was always interested in the universe but I was never very practical, so I never built a telescope or looked at the stars or anything,” he said
Avatars, warriors, wizards, whizz-kids, mavericks and dreamers. They could all be characters in a fantasy game played with gunships and lasers on a mobile device. But they are actually the descriptions given to employees at Alan Knott-Craig’s World of Avatar, the Stellenbosch-based cellular, social media and
When I sit down with Saki Missaikos, the new Internet Solutions (IS) MD, at the canteen at Dimension Data’s sprawling campus in Bryanston, north of Sandton, he immediately takes a shine to my new Samsung Galaxy S3 smartphone. He confesses that he’s moved almost wholesale to Apple
With an untucked shirt and a casual gait, Steven Cohen doesn’t look like the MD of one of SA’s most successful software companies. Softline Pastel was co-founded by Ivan Epstein and Alan Osrin in 1988 – with Cohen, then a young entrepreneur, joining the pair 22 years ago. As I’m sitting with
At 7ft tall, Mayan Mathen is easy to spot in a crowd. It also means strangers find him a bit of a novelty and he says he’s often asked to be in pictures with tourists, rather than take pictures of them, when he’s travelling. Mathen does a great deal of travel in his role as chief technology officer
Brazilian-born Pete da Silva spent the first 20 years of his working life at the Southern African subsidiary of German industrial and telecommunications giant Siemens, climbing the corporate ladder from trainee technician when he started to group CEO when he resigned in 2007 to pursue his passion for motorsport. Now, after a nearly