First-world technology harnessed to third-world challenges

ONE of the mantras in the world of hi-tech start-ups is that Silicon Valley is the only location where you can really make it. That leaves South Africans bemoaning their isolated lot and scraping for the meagre offerings of local investors.

The concept was turned on its head this week at the DigitalLife-Design innovation festival in Tel Aviv, the city ranked as having the second-largest startup ecosystem in the world. It hosts more than 1 500 hi-tech companies, of which almost a thousand are start-ups — a number that has grown by 40% in three years.

The biggest growth came after the 2009 book Start-up Nation, by Saul Singer and Dan Senor, who explained why Israel had become the source of core technologies used by Google, Intel, Microsoft and Facebook. The explosion of start-ups and big names underlines the extent to which “Silicon Wadi” is a sustained revolution.

Ironically, it was Singer himself who provided the most significant pointer away from Silicon Valley, during a DLD panel discussion on “unicorns”, the buzz word for start-ups valued at $1-billion-plus.

“When we imagine unicorns, we think of Facebook, Apple and Google, which grew up in the US and spread to the rest of the world.

“The case of Waze is an example of starting the other way. It got traction in countries alongside the US market.

“This is the new world: it’s not just about the US market. The next unicorns might be even more flipped round, in that multibillion-dollar companies are being built on problems that are not US problems.”

This is the route being taken by one of the South African companies at DLD.

WhereIsMyTransport was one of two winners of the South African leg of this year’s Start Tel Aviv competition, in which start-ups pitched their concepts. Winners from 21 countries were invited to DLD.

Focused on emerging markets, WhereIsMyTransport integrates information on formal and informal transport networks.

“Initially, we were just trying to develop an app to bring together all public transport information,” says founder Devin de Vries. “The problem was that cities, transport providers and commuters lack the tools to put together or digitise information. So our idea evolved into a platform to bring together an ecosystem that services all stakeholders.”

The key difference between this platform and almost anything else that exists is it includes informal stakeholders — “those not recognised as part of the public transport ecosystem but are critical to the ecosystem”, De Vries says.

“The only reason informal transport is ostracised from formal transport networks is that technology is unable to see the order in the chaos.

“In fact, it’s highly ordered, but most solutions are developed out of first-world systems, so this problem is not on their doorstep.”

Uri Levine, co-founder of Waze, which was sold to Google for $1-billion, offered an additional perspective at DLD: “The objective is not becoming a unicorn, but solving a big problem. The question to ask is: ‘How will the market change if I’m successful?’ If you can’t answer that question, you can’t become a unicorn.”

Arthur Goldstuck is founder of World Wide Worx and editorin-chief of Gadget.co.za. Follow him on Twitter on @art2gee, and subscribe to his YouTube channel at http://bit.ly/GGadgets