Second edition of TechCrunch Start-up Battlefield Africa held yesterday in Lagos, Nigeria and 15 start-ups across the continent pitched at the event. M-SCAN, an ultra-affordable ultrasound start-up from Uganda won the coveted title of “Africa’s Favourite Start-up” as well as a $25,000 equity-free grand prize and a trip for two to TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco 2019.
Bettr from South Africa – a virtual banking experience powered by smartphone – was the runner-up.
Google CEO, Sundar Pichai says Android users are aware of the size of data they fetch on them, as they agree to the terms of use of its service. He said you are in total control of the data they have about you. Additionally, Google is not planning to relaunch a search engine in China after it was blocked in 2010.
Google officially testified yesterday before the U.S. House Judiciary committee for a hearing – “Transparency & Accountability: Examining Google and its Data Collection, Use and Filtering Practices.”
Africa’s Liquid Telecom has received a $180 million investment fund from U.K. development finance institution, CDC Group Plc as they expand broadband infrastructure across the continent. CDC will have almost a 10 percent stake in Africa’s largest fiber-network operator.
The investment will see Liquid expanding its network to five new countries including Nigeria and Ethiopia.
According to a new report from ITU – the United Nations specialized agency for information and communication technologies – Africa has quite a high internet accessibility index. They opined that at the end of 2018, 51.2% of the global population (3.9 billion people) will be using the Internet.
Of all the region assessed by ITU, the deep-seated growth comes from Africa, where the percentage of people using the Internet increased to 24.4 per cent in 2018 as against the 2.1 per cent recorded in 2005.
And lastly, Tanzania’s Nala was crowned the winner of Seedstars Dar es Salaam, at a pitching event held in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The startup will now proceed to pitch at the continental level.
We hope you had a good read. See you tomorrow for more interesting tech news across Africa.