Bottomline: In this piece, I identify three classes of technology-enabled companies and startups. I begin from hardware to services, through firmware, operating system and application software to build the components on how these companies can be classified. By understanding this classification, technology companies can develop the possible growth and profitability models. The fact is this: […]
The World of AgTech And Opportunities for African Entrepreneurs
AgFunder has released its annual AgFunder AgriFood Tech Investing Report – MidYear 2017 which expands the scope of their previous AgTech Investing Reports to include startups across the whole value chain, from farm-to-fork. According to the report, in the first half of 2017, the firm recorded $4.4 billion of early stage investment in agrifood (yes, agriculture or ag) technology startups across 369 deals globally. The key highlight:
- Investment dollars increased 6% year-over-year indicating some recovery from 2016 lows. But there was a 27% decline in deal activity that was particularly acute at seed stage; this was in line with the global venture capital markets where deal activity reached a nine-year low in Q2.
From the report, Tekedia will like to educate on the emerging categories of agriculture technology.
What is AgriFood Tech or Simply AgTech?
Agrifood tech is the small but growing segment of the startup and venture capital universe that’s aiming to improve or disrupt the global food and agriculture industry. As with all industries, technology plays a key role in the operation of the agrifood sector, a $7.8 trillion industry, responsible for feeding the planet and employing well over 40% of the global population. The pace of innovation has not kept up with other industries and today agriculture finds itself as the least digitized of all major industries, according to McKinsey.
The industrial agrifood sector of today is also largely inefficient compared to other industries, with an increasing number of demands and constraints being placed on it. These pressures include a growing global population set to reach 9 billion in 2050; climate change and global warming; environmental degradation; changing consumer demands; limited natural resources; food waste; consumer health issues and chronic disease.
The need for agrifood tech and innovation is greater than ever. This creates many opportunities for entrepreneurs and technologists to disrupt the industry and create new efficiencies at various points in the value chain. Agrifood tech startups are primarily aiming to solve the following challenges: food waste, Co2 emissions, chemical residues and run-off, drought, labor shortages, health and sugar consumption, opaque supply chains and distribution inefficiencies, food safety and traceability, farmer welfare, and unsustainable meat production.
There are many ways to categorize agrifood tech startups highlighting the complexity of the industry, as noted below. These categories are areas of opportunities for entrepreneurs.
- Ag Biotechnology: On-farm inputs for crop & animal ag including genetics, soil microbiome, breeding, animal health
- Farm Management Software, Sensing & IoT: Ag data capturing devices, decision support software, big data analytics
- Farm Robotics, Mechanization & Equipment: On-farm machinery, automation, drone manufacturers, grow equipment
- Bioenergy & Biomaterials: Non-food extraction & processing, feedstock technology, green-chemistry, cannabis pharmaceuticals
- Novel Farming Systems: Indoor farms, aquaculture, insect, algae & microbe production
- Agribusiness Marketplaces: Commodities trading platforms, online input procurement, equipment leasing
- Midstream Technologies: Food safety & traceability tech, logistics & transport, processing tech, shelf-life enhancement
- Innovative Food: Plant-based meat, cultured meat & dairy, novel ingredients, nutraceuticals or innovative supplements
- In-Store Retail & Restaurant Tech: Shelf-stacking robots, 3D food printers, POS systems, food waste monitoring IoT
- eGrocery: On-demand grocery delivery, including farm-to-consumer marketplaces and specialty providers
- Restaurant Marketplaces: Online tech platforms delivering food from a wide range of vendors
- Online Restaurants and Meal Kits: Prepared meal delivery, often based on specialty diets, or pre-portioned ingredient kits to cook at home
- Home & Cooking Tech: Smart kitchen appliances, nutrition technologies, food testing devices
- Miscellaneous: e.g. cultured leather, land management tech, financial services for farmers
Africa’s Path to “Zero-Click Ordering”
Something interesting is happening. A new age of electronic commerce is evolving, and it is going to be exciting for African entrepreneurs. It is very possible that we can grow digital sales despite digital illiteracy in the continent. In other words, we do not need the correlation of improved digital literary rates for digital commerce to happen across rural villages. Today, digital entrepreneurs are losing sales because most of our people are not necessarily good in online purchase.
I have a case study: buying my new book takes a very simple process, we thought. But it seems we are wrong. For some people, it is not that easy to read through a book content, click a button to add to a cart, verify the cart content, and make a payment. It was laborious!
But the process we have mirrors what Konga, Jumia and other digital companies follow. While Amazon has a one-click ordering process, the customer must have setup payment and logged in before beginning that process. So, if you do not discount those early preparations, one-click ordering by Amazon is not really one step. No one needs to be logged in to read a free blog, so the first time to pay for the book is the very first moment the person needs to create an account in this blog.
Most of our readers are techies and geeks. But there is no doubt that Woo Commerce which we use in Tekedia to collect payment is non-optimal. Some customers prefer to handle the registration and payment manually. That is a big concern to me because if our readers – very brilliant people – are experiencing this level of friction with Woo Commerce, then there is a problem.
Interestingly, going deeper to the root cause of this issue, you will notice a factor. What happens is that naturally people do not have time to read everything on their screens. We prefer to talk. For most digital orders, following the steps will remove any problem, but you are assuming that customers will read through. Personally, I do not read all; I just click through, sometimes. So, solutions have to be built with those assumptions.
For me, the very fact that potential clients are having frictions means the system is non-optimal. It has nothing to do with the customer. The system must evolve to eliminate the friction.
I need a way that will simplify my customer’s experience. I think we need “zero-click ordering” so that anyone that wants to order will not have any single reason to wait. I see that coming from voice control or voice ordering. Alexa has it already but that is for Amazon.
Voice ordering is getting very popular in America. Amazon is leading in that space. This is designed to help Walmart catch-up with Amazon. It will also help Google build new services in this area. Finding that leg into the e-commerce and grocery will be very strategic in its capacity to compete against Amazon in the broad technology arena. Above all, many will buy Google Home, partly because of this deal, and that is good for Google.
For the whole world and especially the developing regions like Africa, Google has a template through Google Tez. It is the path to the next billion customers. This is a huge product that will change many things.
According to TechCrunch, Google has a product named Tez that can allow customers to make payments via audio. Period, you talk and the transaction goes through. Where are they testing it? India. It has the same demographics in terms of literacy rate as most parts of Africa. […]
I expect African developers and entrepreneurs to position themselves for this emerging opportunity. They have to find ways to build on top of Tez which will be easier since Google has provided the core elements. Yet, we also have to find ways to manage the accents and our spoken English flavor. There are many opportunities in this area and people have to get excited and begin to explore. I expect banks to begin to explore solutions in this space. Agency banking in Africa and indeed Nigeria will be anchored by voice computing. Google Tez can make that moment happen
What I Need
If you have not gotten the idea, Africa will need a solution that will enable people to make orders with minimal friction, possibly through voice (yes zero-click ordering), online. That will fix many challenges. You will make more sales when people talk than click. Because we like to talk, ordering has to move to the audio universe.
Some pizza companies have zero-click ordering via smile-to-pay where just smiling executes payment and orders a pizza via mobile devices. For others, it is just as easy as launching an app.
Zero-click ordering is as easy as it sounds. Download the app and link it to a Domino’s Pizza Profile. When the new app is opened, the saved Easy Order is automatically re-ordered without a single tap, swipe or click. Customers will see a 10-second countdown timer before the order is placed (giving consumers a chance to stop their order) and voila!
Note: Nigeria’s former minister of agriculture and now the President of the African Development Bank, Dr Akinwumi Adesina, received the World Food Prize for mobilizing agriculture in Nigeria through innovation anchored on mobile technology. He redesigned Nigeria’s agriculture with mobile wallet and other elements. Yet, he executed this turnaround through text-based technologies.
Now, imagine what will happen if “voice agriculture” can be linked to some of the systems in Nigerian agriculture which Dr Adesina and his team pioneered. With voice, farmers can execute contracts through their mobiles devices and records archived in the cloud. They do this with no interference to their farming processes.
All Together
As the voice operating world evolves, voice ordering will emerge and that is going to benefit places like Africa. The one-click ordering will help many businesses improve sales because what we have today can be extremely time-wasting in the age where young people do not have time. I am asking our entrepreneurs who have experiences in voice technology to key into this area because they will have natural advantages over companies like Google through localization and differentiation by mitigating algorithmic bias arising from accent and English flavors. By thinking of commerce, over just dissemination of information, we can solve a market problem that will end up improving the wellbeing of our people.
Your Webinality Inc.
A startup health and wellness company was looking for young graduates to hire. They wanted people that have natural interests on wellness – eating right, exercising often, with positive attitude. What did they do? They asked for the usual resumes, but followed up with searching the online presence of the shortlisted applicants. Those that looked good on paper, but showed minimal online activities on health and wellness were eliminated. The ones with deep online interests in this area, though not strong on paper, were shortlisted for further assessments.
At the early phase of my firm, my colleague handling the team building had a strategy: she connected online with potential interests. She wanted to know the person’s interests. Are you an engineer that will come, and we spend time to train, and once a new bank teller job (a great job, please) comes, you jump?
If the guy likes engineering, you will see from the feeds. That is not the whole strategy. But I can tell you the the best time to audition for some jobs is when you are not planning to apply.
Indeed, across the world, technology is redesigning global commerce and how firms recruit talent is changing. Though the typical resume still matters, professional online network is becoming a more compelling factor for most hiring managers. A blog post could provide a hiring opportunity, just like some media firms have hired excellent blog commentators. Through twitter feeds, Facebook profiles and blogs, potential applicants can be easily evaluated. So, developing a professional online brand has become as important as crafting that resume. It is building a reputation to showcase skills and capability in a field, and telling hiring managers that you can add value in a team.
While thirty years ago, one needed a journal or conference, to present an idea, today, a free blog account is few clicks away. A professional online engagement could help build trust and followership while crafting a web personality. In this team oriented 21st century, not having an online presence, could imply disengagement and most employers will notice. Your professional web presence, i.e. your webinality, is strategic.
The following are some suggestions on how to build a professional online persona:
Presence: Open at least one social media or blog account.
Specialize: Define an area of interest and build around it. A five-minute online search should reveal what you represent. You need to differentiate yourself and showcase your core skills and unique capabilities to potential hiring managers.
Accuracy: Always remember that once that post goes online, you may not control who sees it. Make it accurate – always, otherwise, you will destroy your persona.
Comprehensive: While blog should be short, once in a while, develop comprehensive articles in your field and post them online. It could mean expanding a class project you worked on, adding more contents, and fully proving your expertise. Half-baked contents will not take you too far.
Judgment: What you post or share online defines who you are. Your profile defines your values, interests and reliability. For employers, they want reliable team leaders and you must not offer less in your web personality.
Vertical Integration: Seek to connect with people ahead of you professionally while building a horizontally network.
Generosity: Share and exchange good ideas. Invite people to your network and be generous to promote good ideas from others. Write professional reviews on books, journals and articles. In no distant time, people will reward you.
Policy Matters: If you are working, ensure you adhere to policies on using the company’s name online. There is a threat that you could be a source of data leakage that can hurt a place you work. Your profile must not be another portrait of your employer – you must be wise to separate both, where necessary.
Continuity: Professional online branding is a continuous work-in-progress that requires constant tune-ups of networks, contents and profiles. It must be constantly nurtured.
Solar Power Business With Novel Pricing
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