Afrozaar's Baobab team spreading the word for sustainable app ecosystems

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 Cape trade 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.