The Randolf Jorberg Blog

I first wrote about Angel Investments in South Africa back in 2008 and I'm happy to see that there's now a local movement starting, that's based in Cape Town.

Through Alex Fraser and Roger Norton from the awesome Silicon Cape initiative I received an invitation to an Angel Groups seminar by Craig Mullett from the Branison Group at the UCT Graduate School of Business in Cape Town. The seminar focused on the research topic of bridging the missing middle in entrepreneurial finance in South Africa through developing angel investor networks. It gave an overview of the research on how these groups work in the USA as well as research ideas on how this could be done in South Africa and I'm happy that I was given permission to publish it here on my blog:

Angel groups in South Africa (PDF Download)

To my knowledge, this was scheduled to released on Friday, but Groupon Inc. just issued this press release, where they announce:

CHICAGO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Groupon (http://www.groupon.com) announces the launch of Groupon India, Groupon Israel and Groupon South Africa via acquisition of daily deal sites SoSasta (http://www.sosasta.com), Grouper (http://www.grouper.co.il) and Twangoo (http://www.twangoo.co.za), respectively. Terms of the deals were not disclosed. [...]
The acquisitions continue Groupon’s rapid global growth and extend its reach across India, the Middle East and South Africa. In just three months since launch, SoSasta has grown to run daily deals in 11 Indian cities. Serving Tel Aviv and surrounding cities since March 2010, Grouper is widely recognized as the first and largest deal site in Israel. Twangoo has rapidly grown to serve the most cities of any deal site in South Africa. All three sites will transition to the Groupon brand name and site design in coming months, and will serve deals in the local communities’ primary languages: English in India and South Africa and Hebrew in Israel.

To my best knowledge my blog post "Groupon to launch in South Africa in cooperation with Twangoo" dated December 17th was the first public posting about the Twangoo/Groupon connection and I got quite some interesting follow-up conversation with industry people that indicated the takeover deal that was finally announced today.

Groupon South Africa now looks at a launch from a market leader position, but they might face special problems, they yet have to solve:

- groupon.co.za is currently owned by competiting dailydeal-site wicount and they might face the same problem they're currently facing in Australia: they offered the local domain owners "about $286,000 for the Groupon.com.au domain and trademark" but only got a counter-offer to buy the whole competing business in a package deal. Now that Groupon was stupid enough to publicly value their own brand-typo-domain, I'm interested to hear what might happen if Wicount goes the same route. Will Groupon go to court about the very essential domain name groupon.co.za or will they simply put cash on the table and possibly buy the whole Wicount business ending up with two local companies?

It was this morning that I read via bradley on twitter that a Whale was currently removed from the Sea Point promenade. I was on the scene a few minutes later and could shoot the following incredible photos:

I spoke to an officer in charge and he told me the whale is a Southern right whale, weighting 'only' 15 tons and he had between 9-10 meters in length, before he broke into three pieces when they initially tried lifting him out of the water. The whale was dead for a couple of days already, which you could certainly smell, when you were close as we were...

Great news for Stephan Ekbergh and for South African entrepreneurs hoping to make it big! My Friend Pip just found this story: eTRAVELi acquires the european arm of their competitor Travelstart - this adds just another success story to serial entrepreneur Stephan Ekberghs biography. While Travelstart had sales of approximately ZAR 1.5 billion in Europe during 2009 eTRAVELi and Travelstart together are now expected to sell 5 billion (Rand and Swedish kronor are nearly on par) worth of travel in 2010. The sales price is not disclosed, but Stephan blogs about his motivation to sell the european operation on his personal blog and that he wants to completely concentrate on the emerging markets and he realised that he had to let go of the european arm of his 'baby'.

Reportedly brokering 50,000 flight bookings a month on the South African Travelstart platform alone, Travelstart is a travel giant on the tiny e-commerce market of South Africa and I do seriously hope that this is not the last positive news we hear from this travel powerhouse, operating from Cape Town.

Update: after receiving confirmation and further details from Stephan via this comment, I rewrote the posting and clarified the separation between Travelstart Europe and Travelstart South Africa. Official confirmation can be found on the Travelstart blog where they confirm: "The deal means that Travelstart.co.za will own the rights to the global Travelstart brand, and that eTraveli takes over the European brand management and all its operations there."

It's along time since we last updated anything on weather.co.za but today I'm happy to add the most-requested feature:

Weather widgets are here! You can finally add a button to your homepage with the weather forecast for tomorrow. This means that your visitors don't need to visit weather.co.za anymore to see but stay on your site. You can add this image to any site you wish and we offer you three different versions (Image, PHP and Javascript). While we strive to add customization (color, size and style) in the future, we settled for one default style for now that is very simple and does not add any logo or advertisement to the weather information. The image on the left is actually just the life forecast that you can add to your homepage or blog right now!

That is not everything yet - you can also add weather.co.za data to your iGoogle homepage. Just click on this button and you'll be taken to your Google homepage where you can customize your weather feed:

If you read my social network statuses around October 6th: I'm happily back in South Africa and I intend to stay here for all summer, do lotsa business and live life. I'm not alone anymore, but returning with my Girlfriend Scarlett and into our new house in upper Greenpoint that kept us busy during the last two weeks while watching the construction work for the worldcup stadium below us. I hope to see alot of you at our house warming party this Friday - nudge me for the directions if you wanna come...

If you can't make it I'm sure I'll see at least all Online Marketing Junkies of you at this months 27dinner

The future looks bright for tech-startups in South Africa. My friend Thomas Promny sent me the news via email before I saw it on Jens Kunaths Blog (who also lives in Cape Town half the year) today: Hasso Plattner Ventures did just setup an 30 million Euros Venture Capital fund "aimed at early stage companies, not those within the seed stage". This fits very well into my plans. I intend to invest some of the funds I got from selling gulli.com not only into my own south african projects (weather.co.za being only one of them) but also to help young entrepreneurs to startup their own online-based businesses. But being a seed capital / angel investor alone will not work if there is no infrastructure to support ventures that grow beyond that size and this could be where Hasso Plattner Ventures steps in.

My company in Germany has a proven track record for building high-traffic customer-oriented Portals in various niches and we'll start using this experience help others to grow on the South African market as well... In March I'll be back in Cape Town and I hope to meet the first potential partners, though I'll mainly be there for some well-deserved vacation...

It's now more than a month that I arrived back in Cape Town and lots of things happened but I never got a blogpost ready to talk about these events.

Life here is as different (compared to Germany) as it is beautiful. While productivity is seriously decreased by the lack of instantly available internet-connectivity (Vodacom's HSDPA is the best compromise I was able to find but it lacks speed and reliability to be used for VoIP and permanent connectivity), this wonderful people and scenery of Cape Town more than compensate for the problems I might be running in. Cape Town really is THE city in Africa to be, when it comes to Online Marketing. I was meeting old and new friends in Cape town, specifically at these events:

Podcamp Cape Town on the October 20th was great for me as a first-timer. I met Dave Duarte for the first time and had a great chat with Chris du Toit, Rafiq (of webaddiCTs) and many others. It's good to see that there's a vibrant internet scene here in South Africa. It was here that I first announced the aquisition of the domain name weather.co.za (still without real content) and that I do plan to develop it into a proper weather portal as soon as possible.

The 27dinner in Cape Town just a few days later really showed the size of the online marketing industry in SA. Around 100 people came together to have dinner, talk and listen to the well prepared presentation on user experience by Phil Barret and having to go through that talking thing myself by giving a short speech on my last 9 years in the online marketing world. I was happy to sponsor the corkage at this event so we could enjoy the wonderful Stormhoek Wine. This was a good opportunity to meet new people and I really look forward meeting and doing business with you again. After meeting oh-so-many people there (if I'd start linking and mentioning you, I'd miss out the other half of you) Marcus (of Capetownmagazine.com), Jayx and me decided to end that night at the fabulous Rafiki's.

After some busy working days there are some upcoming events I'll attend. First there is mobile and broadband conference AfricaCom starting tomorrow that I was lucky to get a press pass for and there's the Geekdinner coming up on November 28th where I'll be present as well. Too bad I'll be travelling Namibia, when *Camp (aka Starcamp) hits the town December 8th and 9th. Before I go to Namibia, I'll visit Johannesburg for a few days, and I'm happy to meet new people from the industry over there...