It is the darling of the South African technology space, proof that a digital African company can play on the international stage. Perhaps even more importantly, it is an inspiration to any number of mobile startups in South Africa and Africa as a whole. Five years later, it's changed ownership, undergone wide-scale retrenchments, and its user numbers are believed to have fallen even lower than it's willing to admit.
So where did it all go so wrong? And how did it happen so quickly?
"As Memeburn's investigations reveal, it has been a story of a massive drop and confusion around its user numbers over a span of ten years, intense international competition, and a smartphone revolution that appears to have left a company whose success was built largely on feature phones, behind the times."
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