Afrozaar's Rich Cheary presented to Mobile Entertainment Africa 2012 delegates around mobile apps in a retail environment. He touched on number of hard hitting items such as digital ownership within a mall space, as to who exactly owns and is responsible for this, as well as the fact that perceptions of what goes into building an app is often underestimated. With reference to Afrozaar's www.smartmallapp.com platform he shared with the audience who exactly is in line to benefit and how from having a mall app rolled out. The over all conference was very well attended and managed excellently by the All Amber team.

Afrozaar’s Baobab Team Spreading the word for Sustainable App Ecosystems

Following the launch of their Baobab Suite (MBaaS) digital content distribution platform and app development framework for newspapers wanting to go digital, the Afrozaar.com team has not stopped promoting the need for a focus on mobile app sustainability.

Where and What
The Afrozaar executive team dedicated the month of November to sharing lessons learned by presenting at events, performing product demos, participating on panel discussions, performing TV interviews, judging best app competitions at a number of events; World Publishing Expo 2012, AfricaCom while also co-sponsoring Mobile Web Africa. In between all the events Afrozaar was part of technology delegation representing a Western Cape Government and Silicon Capetrade mission to London (UK) to learn about, and investigate possibilities of obtaining foreign investment, while also sharing their opinions with London’s successful tech incubators on how and what is needed to ensure a sustainable tech start-up environment.

“We enjoy being able to share and contribute our app learnings with the community. If we are able to help development teams and businesses, wanting a mobile app, to be more conscious of the potential value, dangers and risks, the mobile industry will be stronger for it.” says Rich Cheary.

How
Still classified as a start-up, this self-funded proudly African team of technical specialists has decided to take all their experience and lessons learned from building mobile app solutions for financial services, retail corporates, loyalty programmes and media publishing houses over past few years into their own internal development frameworks and have put it into a world leading Mobile Backend as a Service (MBaaS) platform called Baobab Suite.

“We believe in our software product, and have seen it work wonders at one of London’s most traditional and popular newspaper houses. Our aim is to work with some more proud and traditional global newspaper publishers. I’m personally concerned about the status of newspaper print circulations and the way in which some are attacking digital. To be honest, I believe Baobab Suite approaches the challenges faced very differently to other systems, and combined with our team’s consulting services we can help an age-old source of curated content such as a newspaper remain relevant and continue to add value to people’s lives for more decades to come.” Rich Cheary.

Collaborating with Industry
Afrozaar team has collaborated with leading global publishing houses to tailor their Baobab Suite MBaaS to specifically solve and address the challenges currently being faced by the newspaper publishing industry. Baobab Suite now has the specific levers and workflow processes relevant to distribution of newspaper content without disturbing the current systems landscape.  Baobab Suite aims to compliment the current systems, and provide a mechanism from which this valued curated content can be consumed across all tablet and smart phone platforms.

Mobile app development has a reputation for being extremely complicated, costly and risky, which is why it’s refreshing to hear about a solution, such as Baobab Suite, which has the long-term objectives of being to decrease costs through minimizing operational effort and solution change-control process in the world of mobile apps. Not only does Baobab suite claim to decrease costs of app maintenance it also claims to provide monetization channels for a newspaper publisher’s content.

Looking into the Future
“We are very interested in learning how to harness the value of historical newspaper content (yesterday’s news) and breathe life into it by providing controlled access and development frameworks for third parties to leverage. Is there a market, I don’t know? Who’s keen to experiment?” Rich Cheary.

The Afrozaar team played a role in the Global AppsWorld event. The event was well attended in some sections and not so in others. What was great to see was the fact that the expectation and representation from most operators, corporates, handset manufacturers was good. The event had a number of zones that satisfied social media enthusiatss, corprate app enthusiasts and also the technical minded and developer. Afrozaar sat on a few panel discussions around mobile apps and business representation in the mobile space to where and how can developers get involved and start shifting their focus into a mobile direction.

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Cape Town based Afrozaar will launch its Baobab Suite digital news platform at the WAN IFRA World Publishing Expo 2012 in Frankfurt at the end of October 2012

Baobab is a specialized content redistribution and mobile app platform for large newspaper and magazine publishing houses. The Afrozaar team have collaborated with a leading global newspaper's editorial and digital teams for almost a year, designing and developing a publishing suite of products that span all major mobile app platforms. The product addresses the publishing industry’s need to dynamically distribute curated content to a subscription base via custom or licensed mobile, social or web apps.

Baobab was built for large media publishing groups, with numerous and varied content sources in mind. Baobab’s core focus is on efficient distribution of aggregated content in a consistent manner across all digital platforms. Publishers have the flexibility to either commission the development of their own apps using the Baobab SDKs or they can license a Baobab mobile app that has the benefit of an active development roadmap. Baobab app layouts follow a custom purpose built approach for specific devices rather than the traditional facsimile approach offered by most PDF readers in the market today.

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The African Mobile Revolution.

On the 7th November 2011 at the One & Only hotel in Cape Town, Afrozaar's Rich Cheary joined numerous industry leaders invited by Google to discuss and share their views on mobile adoption, uptake and platform decisions with some of South Africa's C-Level execs who are needing to embark on a mobile journey with the general public, customers, staff and partners.

We can all agree that mobile has arrived and is completely revolutionizing Africa. The question is: what are you, as a marketing leader, going to do about it?

Today’s consumers are always connected no matter where they are. Driven by internet connected phone adoption, the mobile internet has become an indispensable part of daily life. As a result, consumers are searching more, browsing more, and engaging with apps more - and these trends are set to accelerate.

Who is this mobile consumer and how are they shifting their engagement from feature phones to smartphones in Africa? As we undergo one of the most dramatic consumer behavior transformations in history, we are challenged to identify new marketing strategies that ensure meaningful connections with the new mobile consumer.

Think Mobile Africa is a gathering of top marketing executives, industry visionaries, and agency leaders to discuss all things mobile.

 Have a squizz at the great agenda that was put together.

Mobile Apps presentation for download. 

 

Cape Town-based start-up Afrozaar thinks there’s a big future in merging cloud computing (computing on the  Internet) and mobile telephony to offer hosted mobile applications to the corporate market. And it thinks it will  soon  be big business across the African continent.

Software developers Dirk le Roux, Richard Cheary, Marco Theart and Tim Bielawski started the company nine  months ago to profit from what they believe will be one of the next growth areas for cloud computing.

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Afrozaar have recently taken on shared responsibility in the coordination and organization of the Cape Town Google Technical User Group. The first event under the new GTUG structure was focused around Android and specifically the launch of Android Developer Challenge

A superb group of Google technical enthusiasts came for what was going to be a great gathering, where networking, ideas, concepts and all things Google and/or Android were topics of discussion.

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