Four years in the making, technology entrepreneur Stafford Masie, through his company Thumbzup, has finally taken his mobile payments solution for smartphones commercial — through partner bank Absa. The mobile payment of sale system, called the Payment Pebble, allows merchants – typically small enterprises and
Absa’s transactional banking application for smartphones has been downloaded more than 300 000 times, the bank’s head of digital channels and payments, Adrian Vermooten, said on Thursday. Speaking at a press conference in Johannesburg, Vermooten said the app, which is available
In recent weeks, I’ve been fortunate to meet a range of really smart South African entrepreneurs who are doing incredibly exciting stuff in the technology space, often with relatively few resources. Despite all the doom and gloom that is our politics, and despite the poor state of
Emerge Mobile, an ambitious start-up based in Umhlanga, north of Durban, has developed a smartphone-based mobile payments system similar to the US solution Square, and has secured certifications from international bodies. It now plans to launch
Microsoft South Africa MD Mteto Nyati and former Google sub-Saharan Africa boss Stafford Masie have been appointed to the board of JSE-listed education and recruitment company AdvTech. Nyati, who previously worked at IBM South Africa, and Masie, who is spearheading
The Payment Pebble, the mobile phone point-of-sale device developed by Thumbzup and announced in November 2012, has been delayed by regulatory hurdles, says Absa, the bank partner that will launch the product. Absa had said the product would be launched in the first half of 2013, but was unable
Imagine being able to direct people to your home, your office, your current location or anywhere else on the planet with a single word rather than a lengthy address or set of GPS coordinates. A three-year-old South African company called Waytag is doing just that. Perhaps the easiest
Three weeks ago, in mid-April, Absa became the last of South Africa’s big banks to launch a mobile transactional banking application for smartphones and tablets, beating at the finish line by First National Bank, Standard Bank, Nedbank and Investec. But Absa, South Africa’s
Seacom, the company behind the undersea cable of the same name, has launched a new company, called Pamoja, to offer small and medium-sized enterprises the ability to provide cloud computing-based services to their customers without the capital outlay such services usually require
Banking group Nedbank has launched a mobile point-of-sale (POS) device, called the PocketPOS, that accepts both magnetic and chip-and-Pin credit and debit cards. The device connects to a smartphone using Bluetooth and is operated by means of a mobile application. The PocketPOS
