Afrigator

Afrigator is a social media aggregator and directory built especially for African digital citizens who publish and consume content on the Web.

You can use Afrigator to index your blog, podcast, videocast or news site (i.e. any site that publishes an RSS feed) and market it to the rest of Africa and the world. You can also use it to discover new sites in the Afrosphere.

Afrigator attempts to use social media tools and technologies to showcase the best digital content that the African continent has to offer, ranging from syndicated news feeds to blog posts, podcasts, videos and images. We invite citizen publishers with African content (or based on the African continent) to submit their sites and then we send clicks back to them. We also scan the Web for African-related tags and aggregate that content in the site.

Content is divided by country channels, by category (we’ve developed an organic categorisation algorithm that sorts content into single or multiple categories by scanning it as it’s pulled into the site) and finally by content type. One would be able to filter audio content of a business theme originating from Nigeria, as an example. Our goal is to include geotagging to drill down search possibilities even further and improve our data on where our content is coming from.

We built the platform from scratch. Our dream is that it will evolve into the first choice destination for anyone wanting to get a taste of the social vibe on the African continent at any given point. We’d also like to use the site to build useful data around social media users and producers in Africa.

Afrigator has already enjoyed a fair amount of success with a steady 25% month-on-month growth rate, and the wonderful accolade of having being listed as #20 of 31 “top non-US startups to watch worldwide” by Business 2.0 (money.cnn.com).

We’ve also been featured on Read/WriteWeb, Go2Web20.net, KillerStartups.com and we’ve received some press coverage in the Financial Mail, The Times, Intelligence Magazine as well as on Bizcommunity.com here and here.

You can view our Beta version of our website here: http://beta.afrigator.com which will go live in the first 2 weeks of January 2008.

Justin Hartman
http://justinhartman.com/

Justin is the New Media Strategist at The Times newspaper (South Africa) and is heavily involved in the web- based strategies for South Africa's first interactive newspaper. He has a long standing history in the media sector and has worked for various popular, national magazines and publications since early 1997.

In October 2003 he started a web development and hosting company which he ran up until December 2006. During this time he was also heavily involved in various Web 2.0 developments which included a South African search engine, a free blogging platform as well as two localised blog and website directories.

When he's not at The Times he spends most of his time developing and furthering Afrigator which he originally co-founded with Mike Stopforth.

A part of Justin's strength lies in his ability to analyse current and future Web 2.0 trends and in turn interpret and convert large-scale systems for a real world environment. He has a high level of technical expertise which has allowed for the rapid development of Web 2.0 infrastructures.

Mike Stopforth
http://mikestopforth.com/

Mike is an entrepreneur, writer and speaker who helps companies translate real value from Web 2.0 trends and technologies for better business.

He writes a weekly column for the Citizen newspaper (South Africa) and is a technology commentator for popular business and marketing websites. Mike lectures at the Vega School of Branding and features as a guest lecturer on executive programs at the Graduate School of Business in Cape Town.

Mike is a member of the National Speakers Association of South Africa (NSASA) and an associate of the Institute of Technology Strategy and Innovation (ITSI), the Center for Complexity Studies and the TomorrowToday.biz network of futurists.

He heads up Cerebra, South Africa's leading social media consultancy, which enjoys relationships with many leading local and global brands - SAB, Wesbank, Ernst & Young, Liberty, Toyota, Standard Bank, Hollard and Samsung to name a few.

Mike is also involved in a number of sideline projects including the 27 Dinner movement (founder), Amplitude podcast (producer) and Afrigator.

Mark Forrester
http://markforrester.co.za/

Mark Forrester is a freelance website designer currently working in London, UK. His experience is in designing usable and accessible websites, always complying with web standards, for South African and British clients.

Mark is qualified with a Bachelor of Commerce Degree, majoring in Information Systems, which he obtained at the University of Cape Town in 2003. He also holds a Digital Design Diploma which he obtained through a well known design house in Cape Town called Hirt & Carter.

His strengths lie in html/css design, and desktop publishing using Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and Dreamweaver. His portfolio is diverse, ranging from clients that include distinguished bloggers, deep sea fishing charters, a digital stills library, an online Timber Windows store, amongst many more. His weblog and portfolio can be found at http://www.markforrester.co.za, where he has a large readership and obtains 90% of his work from.

Mark is passionate about South Africa, the blogosphere, digital design and photography and focusses his creative expertise in creating a recognizable African brand for Afrigator.

Stiaan Pretorius
http://stii.za.net/

Stiaan Pretorius is a freelance web developer and PHP programmer with a passion for exciting and new trends and technologies. He currently works for Ja! Productions as their lead developer. Every spare moment is spent improving and developing Afrigator.

He loves programming in PHP, Python, Ruby on Rails, and loves writing complex SQL queries. Solving problems and finding solutions is part of his strengths.

Apart from programming, he is also a very keen teacher and started blogging workshops together with another company to help educate people on the powers of social media and blogging.

The business model for the site is primarily an advertising one, with top South African brands already interested in sponsoring sections on the site, supported by a corporate reporting tool which we call AfriData. AfriData allows companies to see what effect their company or brand is having in both social and main-stream media.

Technorati is a website that offers similar functionality to Afrigator, for comparison purposes. Our most competitive edge is our ability to localise content as well as the fact that we aggregate main-stream news which Technorati is not doing.