South African startup Talk 360, a leading voice-over-internet protocol (VoIP) player in Africa, has secured a combined $7 million in seed rounds to build a payment platform for Africa.

In May this year, Talk350 had raised $4 million in a seed funding round led by HAVAÍC. However, with the startup’s recent raise of an additional $3 million, the total investment raised so far is $7 million.

The latest investors in this new round include Allan Gray E2 Ventures (AGEV), Kalon Venture Partners, E4E Africa, Endeavor, current lead investor HAVAÍC and a number of angel investors including Tjaart van der Walt and Koenrad Jonker.

According to Talk360, it intends to use this new funding to launch a pan-African payment platform next year and increase its share of the VoIP market.

The payment platform will connect “all payment methods” across the continent, creating a diverse pool of localized payment methods, enabling international and local businesses to sell to African-based customers.

The company said in a statement, “The new platform will allow users across the continent to buy products and services using any currency and more than 160 payment methods. It will also be opened to other merchants”.

According to the Co-Founder of Talk360, despite the existing digital payment methods scattered across Africa, the startup is going to offer something more remarkable by offering micro-entrepreneurship and income-generating opportunities to users.

His words, “Our mission is to bridge distance and connect lives by offering reliable, affordable, and easy-to-use digital services, delivered in a localized manner to all communities, particularly emerging countries, so they can connect to the world

“But we’re not just solving socio-economic issues: we’re also offering micro-entrepreneurship and income generating opportunities to our growing network of agents across the country.”

The startup also has a network of agents, including PesaPoint in Kenya and Flash in South Africa, which enable users to purchase airtime vouchers from over 750,000 physical points of sale.

A software company that provides comprehensive security and IT management solutions for business needs VAB Solutions, through its robust IT and cyber security solutions seek to help businesses in Nigeria to deepen business productivity and continuity.

With the core value of IT infrastructure and security in today’s digital world, VAB solutions want to ensure that businesses in Nigeria get their business updated with IT security to prevent their business from data breach.

Speaking on the mission of the company, the Managing Consultant of VAB Solutions Limited Voke Benjamin said “VAB Solutions started operation January 2018 however the company was incorporated September 2017, We like to think of ourselves as information technology ( IT ) Advisor, meaning we believe our customers ought to understand the core value of IT and appreciate the return on investment (ROI) in any solution that will ease their paint point before getting into any agreement.

“VAB Solutions derives the acronyms VAB from Values Added Business, our core areas of interest are IT infrastructure and IT Security, we are not a jack of all trade organization but we like to harness the knowledge so as to advise our customers and potential customer the benefits from an end to end solution of their pain points”

Also speaking on the way the firm deploys solutions to clients, he said “First, we like to understand the situation, so we can give the best advice, secondly, we then render solutions that will embed the customer’s systems for a long time.

“We are indeed in business to make money but paramount that is to have a have customer call us and gives us a thumbs up. This a lot shows the value and not the money.

“I believe the keyword here is value. Many companies sell security solutions, but the question is how long does it take for the customer to realize that the tool you have provided lacks some features or doesn’t work as expected.

“In lieu of the above we only partner with OEM’s that have long-lasting credibility in the market and solutions that cater not just for the customer but with their solution they can solve the customers’ issues, not for 2, 4, 5 years, NO, but a solution that embeds itself with the customer.”

On how VAB Solutions intend to deploy its services to the SMEs in the country, Voke started that the company has made it known that IT solutions shouldn’t be viewed from the prism of being too pricey or expensive. We have specific solutions for the SME’s he added.

His words, “we sell security solutions for the Enterprise Market and Small medium organizations, we also factor the organization budget in offering their security needs, being an organization that prefers to render value, we have strong relationships with our vendors and preach the needs to factor all organization in our sales circle.

“So, we do not have a particular market we are focused in, we can work with the small firms and big conglomerates.”

Microblogging and Social media platform Twitter has announced that it is adding a new feature on the platform which is a scrollable video feed similar to that of TikTok.

The social media company disclosed that this new feature will make it easier for users to watch and discover videos on the platform.

With the launch of the feature in the coming days, iOS users will be able to click on a video in their feed to enter the new scrollable video feed. Once they are done watching the video they clicked on, they will be able to scroll up to start browsing more video content.

This will take them to a scrollable feed of videos, which is similar to the browsing experience on TikTok. If they want to exit the viewer and go back to the original tweet, they can click on the back arrow in the top left corner.

According to Twitter, it stated that the purpose of this new immersive media viewer is to make it easier for users to discover engaging videos.

Although the social network didn’t disclose when the feature will roll out to users on Android devices. Users will see a new “Videos for you” category that will display popular and trending videos that the app thinks you would be interested in.

Twitter began the testing of the new video feature in December 2021 to give users a more personalized Explore page. In this test, Twitter turned the entire Explore page into a video feed, complete with a “For You” tab.

With the recent changes announced, Twitter isn’t focused on replacing the entire Explore page with a TikTok-like feed. The company’s approach to a TikTok-like feed can be seen as a somewhat optional, considering that it isn’t directly imposing it users, as the previous TikTok-like video feed test did.

People who like scrollable video feeds can access the immersive view if they like, and users who don’t want a video feed can choose to not open up the immersive viewer.