Independent insights and analysis into global digital transformation — through an African lens 🌍
Joined April 2015
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African Tech Roundup retweeted
My brief observations in Hong Kong suggest that the fintech rails everyday citizens use to keep their lives moving are the digital infrastructure plays to watch.
Here's my #TechTidesTuesday dispatch on who builds, owns and stewards the city’s everyday fintech rails... and what (South) Africa should mind. 📰 👇🏾
africantechroundup.com/op-ed…
African Tech Roundup retweeted
Your weekend reading, sorted, courtesy of my colleague Maya Loon and me at Future in the Humanities (FITH).
Spoiler: The Chinese academics we encountered recently don't seem especially intimidated by AI. 📰 👇🏾
futureinthehumanities.org/p/…
RT @MasukuAndile: Well, what do you know... It's #TechTidesTuesday and Youth Day in South Africa.
What are my thoughts on the UK's decisio…
African Tech Roundup retweeted
In today's Offscript, we're sitting with Andile Masuku @MasukuAndile : journalist, podcaster, editor, and consultant.
One of the early voices of Showmax's ads, Andile has spent his life turning unlikely moments into open doors. He's the creator behind African Tech Roundup, a former BBC Outlook freelancer who once reached 100 million listeners, and now the executive editor of Future in the Humanities.
But beneath all the titles is something simpler: a man who believes he's not building a career so much as cooperating with providence. This is Offscript with Andile Masuku: readcommunique.com/p/offscri…
African Tech Roundup retweeted
Monday newsletter 🚨🚨
Funke Opeke is not taking her foot off the gas!
She laid the cables that expanded internet access across West Africa, sold the company for $320 million, and she's only getting started.
On building MainOne and her conviction behind it, she says, "I think I was probably a little bit insane"
Read the story about how she founded the company responsible for Nigeria's largest tech acquisition: bigtechthisweek.com/p/funke-…
African Tech Roundup retweeted
I asked Claude to track what happens to public markets every time Anthropic drops a new model or capability update. It started calling it the Hit List.
Feb 4. Anthropic releases Cowork. TEAM drops 35%. Intuit drops 34%. $285 billion wiped from SaaS in a single week.
Feb 5. Agent Teams goes live. Software sells off broadly. The IGV, which is the software ETF most funds track, falls 30%. Worst quarter since 2008.
Feb 20. Code Security update. CrowdStrike, Cloudflare, and Okta each drop 8 to 9% in a day. AI just demonstrated it could scan an entire codebase, find vulnerabilities, and suggest patches. Hundreds of bugs missed for decades, caught overnight.
Feb 24. COBOL modernization tool drops. IBM has its worst single day since the year 2000. Down 13% in a day. Down 27% in February alone.
Claude sees what is coming next. Legal research. Financial analysis. Accounting and tax prep. IT consulting. Contact centers. Healthcare admin.
Not financial advice. Just pattern recognition.
African Tech Roundup retweeted
Well, well... The cold, hard capitalist math may already be turning against AI replacement... and that's before you account for markets where labour costs a fraction of Silicon Valley's baseline. Africa, anyone? 👀
What Happens When AI Tokens Cost More Than Your Employees?
@Jason:
“We, with our agents, hit $300/day per agent using the Claude API, like instantly. And that was doing, maybe, 10 or 20%. That's $100k/year per agent.”
@chamath:
“We're getting to a place where we have to basically now say, ‘What is the token budget that we're willing to give our best devs?’”
“And then if you aggregate it across all people, you can clearly see a trend where you're like, ‘Well, hold on a second, now they need to be at least 2x as productive as another employee.’”
“That is actively happening inside my business, because otherwise I'll run out of money.”
Jason:
“Yeah. This is a very interesting trend that you're not going to hear anybody else talk about, but when do tokens outpace the salary of the employee?”
“Because you're about to hit it. I'm about to hit it.”
African Tech Roundup retweeted
#TechTidesTake VIDEO ▶️: There's a summit in Dubai where headline speakers were ranked by follower count.
Surprise surprise, I wasn't invited. I wonder why? 😅🙈
MrBeast at the top. Will Smith at 250 million is one of the first Black faces I see. Precious few African creators anywhere on that list.
Surely there are more useful ways to measure who belongs on a stage?
Meanwhile, LinkedIn just rolled out a massive algorithmic overhaul. Something fundamental is shifting.
This is where it gets weird... Not enough time to unpack in 3 mins, subscribe for Part 2.
African Tech Roundup retweeted
For our first Tech This Week Radio of the year, I'm excited to speak with defence industrialists @_KingNath and @Max_Sengu about their ambitions for Africa's security infrastructure and what their latest $11.75M raise means for their startup's future.
Set ya reminder: xitter.cf/i/spaces/1djGXWq…
See you tomorrow!
Produced by @bigtechthisweek
African Tech Roundup retweeted
#TechTidesTake VIDEO ▶️: Flutterwave just acquired Mono. All-stock deal. $25-40 million.
The coverage has been breathless. "The future of commerce is open." You know the vibes...
But when a $3B unicorn pays entirely in equity instead of cash... that's not necessarily strength.
Lawyer @lumimustapha published a sharp breakdown this week, reverse-engineering Flutterwave's likely balance sheet.
Tiger Global and YC backed both companies. Maybe the aunties are just reading the room.
The hype is ripe. But is the fruit being picked before it's ready?
African Tech Roundup retweeted
So, @lumimustapha has shared some words I'm currently taking in 👇🏾 ☕️ lumibrief.com/p/flutterwave-…
African Tech Roundup retweeted
#TechTidesTake VIDEO ▶️: iShowSpeed is on a 20-country Africa tour. 64 million hours watched on YouTube in 2025.
Meanwhile, AFCON is happening. Africa's biggest football tournament. One American streamer pulling online crowds that rival stadium attendance, while "sold-out" Moroccan stadiums look half-empty.
MTV's music channels just signed off for good. I remember when MTV played music videos. Spawned Channel O and TRACE.
Try explaining that to Gen Z curating playlists on TikTok.
The formats change. The currency doesn't. Attention is what we spend now... and we're paying with our lives.
African Tech Roundup retweeted
#TechTidesTake VIDEO ▶️: Australia just banned social media for under-16s. @Reddit is suing the Ozzie government. Parents are cheering. Teenagers are probably already on VPNs.
Meanwhile, British actor Hugh Grant went viral complaining about screens recently, but he wasn't even talking about social media. He was talking about schools swapping outdoor play for iPads. (I also happen to think that isn't a good idea.)
My sense of things? You can't sustainably solve problems that stem from poor self-regulation through prohibition alone.
Bans just make catchy headlines. Nudges work (albeit slowly).
More on that in this week's video.
ICYMI - Full breakdown in this #TechTidesTuesday article via @africanroundup 📰 👉🏾 africantechroundup.com/op-ed…
#SocialMedia #Policy
African Tech Roundup retweeted
@MasukuAndile - "Signing up for Vitality health insurance in the UK earlier this year taught me something about behaviour change that policymakers elsewhere might find instructive."
businessreport.co.za/opinion…
African Tech Roundup retweeted
VIDEO ▶️: @andrewdsouza (ex-Clearco founder and CEO) just announced his AI, @boardyai, is launching a venture fund - recruiting 1,000 scouts globally. 50% carry. Anyone can apply.
Meanwhile, @BlackRock_UK paid $3.2 billion for @Preqin last year. They're a UK private markets data company most people have never heard of.
My sense of things? The AI tools automating VC dealflow right now are built on decades of structured data that Africa doesn't have yet.
That's the gap AND the opportunity.
More on that in this week's #TechTidesTake.
ICYMI - Full breakdown in this #TechTidesTuesday article via @africanroundup 📰 👉🏾 africantechroundup.com/op-ed…
RT @MasukuAndile: VIDEO ▶️: I lost $10,000 learning this lesson.
In 2021, @africanroundup received a $25,000 project grant from the Celo F…
African Tech Roundup retweeted
VIDEO ▶️: McKinsey is selling million-dollar advice powered partly by the same AI infrastructure that costs you $20/month.
AI is doing to consulting what YouTube did to television: shattering structure, blurring hierarchy, redistributing capability.
What remains un-automatable? Genuine connectivity. Contextual fluency. Activating networks for real outcomes. #ThisIsConnectivity
ICYMI 📰 - Full breakdown in this #TechTidesTuesday article 👉🏾 ✅ africantechroundup.com/op-ed…
African Tech Roundup retweeted
2/2 🔁 Check out my throwback conversation with Oliver Fortuin... Nine years later, the sovereignty questions he raised feel uncomfortably prescient. 🎧 👉🏾 pod.link/1152012104/episode/…
