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Ask HN: Which developing nations have interesting tech stories at the moment?

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Re: Ask HN: Which developing nations have interesting tech stories at the moment?

#31

Post by mekicha »

TheHeasman wrote: post #21

There's some pretty exciting stuff happening in the startup scene in Nigeria, most famously Zuckerberg's PR visit to Lagos a few months ago. Konga (a Nigerian company) is trying to upset Joomla (a South African company) to become the Amazon of Africa, and co-working spaces are starting to sprout all over the place. There are over a hundred different mobile payment solutions, not just in the micro-payment sector, but…

Nigerian techies are making great strides in the sector, overcoming challenges the environment and the system poses on them to shine among their peers. Great efforts have been made in the ecommerce and fintech sectors, but I will also like to mention Andela(https://andela.com/what-we-do/) which is doing a great job training and exposing African tech talents to the outside world. There are other platforms of that nature now, springing up across the nation.

Re: Ask HN: Which developing nations have interesting tech stories at the moment?

#32

Post by tomh »

drops wrote: post #28
bbv-if wrote: post #15

Ukraine's IT industry is rather developed with still relatively cheap workforce. And there have been a few successful startups recently: http://www.uadn.net/2017/01/09/top-10-ukrainian-startups-in-...

The workforce is currently cheap compared to western countries because of the local currency's low value, and IT being one of the very few fields where people get paid in dollars. So as a result, what would be a low wage in the west is an extremely high wage in Ukraine (e.g. $1k a month = 25k hryvnias, which is 8 times more than country's minimum wage).

Plus, there's starting to be a lot of promise in Ukrainian startups - Looksery had a great exit a few years ago, and now Grammarly has just attracted $100M+ https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/08/grammarly-raises-110-milli...

Re: Ask HN: Which developing nations have interesting tech stories at the moment?

#34

Post by contingencies »

Nairobi, Kenya: New incubator http://metta.co/#visit could be a good source of contacts and interviewees.

Rangoon, Myanmar: A scene is forming now that internet and mobile phones have become widely available and affordable.

Vietnam: Lots of startups.

Re: Ask HN: Which developing nations have interesting tech stories at the moment?

#35

Post by OmIsMyShield »

South Africa is fascinating - contrasting bad news and great innovation.

Although there have been setbacks from recent government shenanigans the wheels of law are turning (albeit slowly) and the ruling Zuma faction is daily facing more and more resistance. In the meantime the weak rand makes SA cheap, and their interesting ideas enter the world market.

Amazon has a strong presence in SA - and (this is generally a little known fact) EC2 was developed in South Africa[1]

Locally, the Silicon Cape[2] initiative is aiming to create an environment where tech startups thrive, and has grown to 10k members in 500 organisations.

Ventureburn[3] has a lot on the startup scene in emerging markets, and a lot on South Africa in particular.

The limitations and challenges of South Africa actually drives innovation.

South Africa's (actually, Africa as a continent too) large informal and unbanked sector has led to a lot of fintech and mobile-banking related startups.

Limited Internet infrastructure penetration leads to interesting ways to solve, say, the last-mile problem. For instance Flickswitch[4] has focused on greasing the wheels for those within the IoT and M2M market who use the GSM networks to address the last mile problem (disclaimer: I am one of the four original co-founders of and exited last year after being there for 9 years).

Etc. It's a super market to explore, bigger than, say, Ireland, and more innovative than most.

[1] http://www.zdnet.com/article/how-amazon-exposed-its-guts-the...

[2] https://www.siliconcape.com/

[3] http://ventureburn.com/

[4] http://www.flickswitch.co.za

Re: Ask HN: Which developing nations have interesting tech stories at the moment?

#36

Post by ramshanker »

koolba wrote: post #30
erbdex wrote: post #19

India | Telecom | 110M subscribers on-boarded in 100 days To summarize: Jio, which is our cellular telephony play, now is the world's largest cellular data network (pumping 22,000 TB per day) and onboards a million customers a day! We now have 110 million subscribers (in ~100 days). This became possible when the telco regulators here gave a go ahead to use the Govt of India's pet biometric auth project Aadhaar[1] to…

Holy shit are those numbers real? 1M paying subscribers added a day? I'm guessing this is prepay with cards / top ups right? If so the cash play becomes amazing too.

Yes , all those numbers are true. Ever since I subscribed to JIO I have stopped switching off my cellular Data !!

Vacated all music out of phone memory for others useful apps. Now audio on streaming only.

Re: Ask HN: Which developing nations have interesting tech stories at the moment?

#37

Post by oretoz »

erbdex wrote: post #19

India | Telecom | 110M subscribers on-boarded in 100 days To summarize: Jio, which is our cellular telephony play, now is the world's largest cellular data network (pumping 22,000 TB per day) and onboards a million customers a day! We now have 110 million subscribers (in ~100 days). This became possible when the telco regulators here gave a go ahead to use the Govt of India's pet biometric auth project Aadhaar[1] to…

I have not really followed the fintech much but understand the Telecom side of things. You seem like an expert on this space in India and hence my questions: 1. Do you think making everything Aadhar based is a good idea? 2. How much awareness is there about privacy issues related to Aadhar? 3. What risk do you see which would derail the $500B projection for Fintech in India? Also it wasn't clear if that projection was the total payment transactions or the market opportunity for players (e.g. commissions etc.).

Re: Ask HN: Which developing nations have interesting tech stories at the moment?

#38

Post by sandGorgon »

India Fintech - the whole country was demonetized in November and there is a serious push to making the whole country cashless. This is a serious challenge in a country where e-commerce was predominantly cash-on-delivery.

To power this through, it's leveraging the new fangled Aadhaar infrastructure - which is kind of like "social security number with biometric data" and is triggering this huge polarising debate on privacy vs value. However, what cannot be denied is that the tech and regulatory landscape in India around payments has leapfrogged the world. The new NPCI (National Payments Corp of India) API is designed and intended to make VISA/MasterCard redundant...and is well on its way.

We now have a regulatory framework to unlock bank data to make anyone start a service like Yodlee .

Crazy , interesting times

P.S. We (RedCarpetUp.com) are a YC startup building credit-for-billions in India. I love talking about this stuff - never thought I'd see it in my lifetime. Ping me if you want to chat anytime.

Re: Ask HN: Which developing nations have interesting tech stories at the moment?

#39

Post by SimbaOnSteroids »

durian89 wrote: post #3

Vietnam has quite a strong startup ecosystem relative to its development stage. I think it has a lot to do with its government having laid out a plan since the 90s to develop its IT industry. Results are: 1) Lots of IT grads 2) Lots of funding 3) Okay-ish infrastructure If we add this to the interests in entrepreneurship among Vietnamese people, it results in a strong tech scene.

A bit unrelated but perhaps a marker for a healthy Vietnamese tech infrastructure, Vietnam has produced a couple of relatively high caliber e-sports teams in the Saigon Jokers and more recently The GigaByte Marines who are currently giving American team TSM a hard time at Riot Games mid season invitational.

While I realize this isn't exactly related to start ups it is interesting because in order to produce and support esports teams, and especially true if the team is any good, a couple of things must be true.

1) Large population of adolescents/young adults with regular access to internet.

2) Large player base to produce quality players.

3) Money from sponsors who see it as a viable marketing venture.

The fact that Vietnam has been able to do this bodes well for them.

Re: Ask HN: Which developing nations have interesting tech stories at the moment?

#40

Post by [deleted] »

durian89 wrote: post #3

Vietnam has quite a strong startup ecosystem relative to its development stage. I think it has a lot to do with its government having laid out a plan since the 90s to develop its IT industry. Results are: 1) Lots of IT grads 2) Lots of funding 3) Okay-ish infrastructure If we add this to the interests in entrepreneurship among Vietnamese people, it results in a strong tech scene.

[deleted]
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