TC Radio TechCabal

This week: MTN has a bigger surprise; its own cable TV service. We are not sure how it will execute it, if it will. But it's interesting to see MTN moving away slowly from voice before it is aggressively forced out of it.

Meanwhile, another video on demand service has its sight set on South Africa. Do you have a great app or idea? There are at least two places you can shine in the next few day; the AppCircus where you can get a chance to travel to the MWC 2016 in Barcelona (all expense paid) and at the TechCabal Africabeta (powered by WeChat), where investors are waiting to see how big they can make your app. AppCircus 2015 is supported by Intel.

Facebook's user figures in Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa didn't say anything we didn't already know about mobile, but we didn't quite imagine it'll be this extreme. Smile also raised $365 million in funding. And then, Africa, we beleive, is in beta. The continent has stepped out of the chrysalis and it's hardening its wings. We want to begin a conversation on what happens next and Bankole (who returns to the podcast this week) speaks more on that.

This week on TC Radio, Bankole left me to roast all by myself, ahh! Other interesting news; Reggie Rockstone invested in a photo-sharing app; maybe we can send money via gmail soon in Nigeria and Uber is slowly, taking over everything - everywhere.

This week: Naspers' ShowMax is off to a good start in South Africa. Google had a lot of big announcements in Africa. Are you ready for the Blackberry Android handset? And...thanks to our friends from Radar, we finally got a name for the podcast.

Links:

Bankole's article on how Nokia needed to back away from the Kodak way: http://techloy.com/2012/04/18/i-dont-want-nokia-to-end-up-like-kodak/

In the news this week: Nigeria's Venture Garden Group scores $20 million investment from Convergence; Google became Alphabet and M4JAM in South Africa acquires Pondering Panda.