Mobiflock, a mobile safety and security company, has launched a parental control service for smartphones and tablets. The service, which has been in beta development for the past six months, allows for Web and application-level blocks on Android smartphones and tablets and parental control services for Android
Browsing: Start-ups
Stellenbosch-based start-up Crowdinvest wants to harness social networking and “crowd sourcing” to make it possible for established investors – and those who want to begin investing but who have limited disposable income – to put money into local start-ups or contribute to charities, all without leaving their
Cape Town-based start-up Snapdisk is a cloud backup and syncing service of the sort made popular by Dropbox and Box.net. Where it differs, though, is the scale of its offering and the fact that it’s offering its basic package of 500GB of online backup space for free for a year. The service went live at the beginning of February and, although most
What do you do when you find that a service you want doesn’t exist? If your name is John Fearon, you create the service yourself. Fearon started a website back up service called Dropmysite after his business website had a hosting problem that took it out of commission. His latest offering, e-mail backup service Dropmyemail is proving
A decade ago, Rob Sussman and Lance Fanaroff started IT group Integr8. Now they’re back with a new venture, ZunguZ, a payment system that allows anyone on Facebook to pay anyone else, directly from within the social network. They’re hoping it’ll give shopping a social element and, if they’re fast, it could become the first serious
SA start-up Mimiboard wants to be the digital equivalent of a community noticeboard, allowing Africans to access and share locally relevant information from a mobile phone, whether it’s using SMS on a feature phone or a smartphone that can handle proprietary applications. The brainchild of Johan Nel
Described by its founder, Gerhard van der Westhuizen, as a “social publishing network”, Pretoria-based Internet start-up Snaglur has managed more than 50 000 sign-ups and generates about 15 000 unique visits a day just two months since launch. Similar to US social platforms Tumblr and Posterous
Launching on 19 March, a new Internet start-up, LiveBids, hopes to shake up the SA online retail market with a combination of online auctions, pay-per-bid sales and group buying. Conceived two-and-a-half years ago, LiveBids is the brainchild of two Capetonians
Bequester is a Johannesburg-based start-up that hopes to give small businesses the buying power of large ones. Launched as a public beta in November 2011, the site facilitates procurement deals between businesses that want products or services and those that can supply them. Founded by Thabo Makenete
In an unassuming house on a golf estate in Centurion, south of Pretoria, nearly 30 Dell desktop computers run 24 hours a day in a makeshift server room. The machines are crawling Web feeds of breaking news along with all of the text of the US Library of Congress. This is the home of technology