Tech4Africa is a new conference about web, mobile, and emerging technology in Africa. The inaugural conference was held August 12th-13th in Johannesburg, South Africa. Pagatech's CEO, Tayo Oviosu, was invited to speak on a panel on "Unlocking Mobile Payments.”

The Pagatech Management was recently interviewed by Mobile Money Africa Magazine.

New technologies go through a hype cycle. In lay mans terms this means there are various stages in the introduction of a new technology and its wide acceptance and actual value to society. Typically it starts out with inflated expectations and when those expectations are not immediately met there is dissolution, but usually (and we stress usually), the technology offering comes out of this and becomes valuable to society. Jim Rosenberg of CGAP penned down his thoughts on the hype cycle for mobile banking post the 2009 Mobile Money Summit.

We‘ve been following CGAP for over a year now and I must say this is probably one of our favourite blog postings from them. As with most articles on mobile money the focus is around mobile operator led services – though for once we get an admission into why – the GSM Association (GSMA) which is the industry group representing mobile network operators has been the primary driving force in raising awareness for mobile money globally. This one knock aside, there are still many great insights in this article, two salient ones are: