BigFive Digital has released a preliminary agenda for its upcoming BigFive Summit featuring talks that will challenge thinking, stimulate ideas and offer practical tips for those with the common goal of bringing to market digital products for SMEs in Africa and the Middle East. The Summit will focus on the BigFive pillars of the local digital ecosystem — location, mobile, payments, search and social.
The event kicks off informally on 12 May with a reception at Grand Africa Cafe & Beach. The Summit begins in earnest 13 May and runs two full days at our primary venue,Workshop 17, before switching to the Raddison Blu for a half-day B2B sales workshop presented by Trudon and Vendasta. This half-day session is free to all Summit participants, but workshop-only passes are also available.
Some highlights include a headline talks from Katlego Maphai, co-founder and CEO of Yoco, a company helping businesses across South Africa accept credit card and mobile payments. Katlego is a driven entrepreneur with a vision for how digital payments will transform small business in Africa.
This clip features an interview with Katlego in 2017 at Startup Grind Cape Town, also held at the BigFive Summit venue, Workshop 17.
Another prominent BigFive speaker is Louw Barnardt, co-founder & MD of Outsource CFO. Louw is another hard-driving Cape Town entrepreneur helping small and mid-size companies gain access to sophisticated financial knowledge and technology once only available to enterprise companies. Louw will talk about how the cloud is leveling the playing field for start-ups and SMEs.
Louw was recently a guest on the BigFive Podcast. You can listen to our conversation here:
Other event sessions will address location-based marketing, SEO and search marketing, marketing automation and conversational commerce. We will also have a dedicated workshop featuring local small business owners talking about their successes and challenges with using digital marketing solutions. Another workshop will feature local disruptive startups solving problems for small business in Africa.
We will also reveal results of a survey conducted among business leaders addressing the SME market to understand where they are investing, where they see their biggest opportunities and what they see as they greatest barriers to success in the AME small business market.
The agenda is preliminary and subject to change as new ideas and opportunities present themselves. We also have space on the agenda for additional thought-leading content. If you are interested in speaking or have a suggestion for a speaker or a topic for a thought-leading talk, please contact us at info@bigfivedigital.org.
BigFive has assembled a strong, international base of sponsors representing a variety of marketing and back-office software solutions for SMEs. Our initial sponsor list includes Mono Solutions, Matchcraft, Yola, Web.com, Trudon, Vendasta, and vCita. More sponsors will be announced in the coming weeks. Sponsorship inquiries should go to Paul@bigfivedigital.org.