Tech4Africa turns three this year. Once again, TechCentral is media partner to SA’s premier mobile, Web and emerging technology event.

This year’s event will be held on Wednesday, 31 October and Thursday, 1 November at The Indaba Hotel in Fourways, Johannesburg under the theme, “Unlocking the next billion consumers”.

Sessions will focus on mobile and content, the enterprise opportunity, entrepreneurship and financing, social business, and innovation, while the audience will cut across the technology ecosystem of developers, social media marketers, technologists, corporates, students, investors and media.

The Developer Day and Hackathon on 31 October will include three tracks — a day on agile software development, a hackathon with sessions on Ruby on Rails, Python, Raspberry Pi, PHP and more, as well as workshops for social media marketers on application ecosystems and monetisation.

The conference, the next day, will include keynote speakers Tom Rosemalia, who is vice-president of corporate strategy and GM of enterprise initiatives at IBM, and Ralph Simon, founder and CEO of Mobilium.

Other speakers include Amolo Ng’weno, MD of Digital Divide Data in Kenya; Neal Ford, director, software architect and “meme wrangler” at ThoughtWorks; Vérone Mankou, CEO of Way-C in the Democratic Republic of Congo; and Emma Kaye, CEO of Bozza.

IBM’s Global Entrepreneurship Programme has been brought into the Tech4Africa 2012 agenda and Claudia Fan Munce, MD at IBM Venture Capital Group, will introduce GEP and an award programme. Tech4Africa 2012 will also be running Ignite again. This is a start-up workshop and pitching competition, which is being run by AngelHub and Deloitte.

A Google G+ Hangout will be held live at the conference so that tech hubs from around Africa can be part of the conference and so that delegates can interact with a panel, asking questions and finding out more about what is happening on the ground in Senegal, Liberia, Uganda, Tanzania, Egypt, Kenya, Congo and other parts of Africa.

On the Wednesday night, there will be a CEO dinner to bring together senior business leaders to network, share ideas and discuss key tech issues.

Registration for the Developer Day and Hackathon is R1 140. Early-bird full conference registration is R1 368 for both days. The standard registration fee is R2 052.