Just when you thought Cape Town was all beaches, bars, biltong and breath-taking views, South Africa’s Mother City stakes its claim as Africa’s tech hub too.

 

Cape Town, has once again snapped up tourism awards, by winning the Lonely Planet’s vote as the 2nd best city to visit in 2017, Conde Naste’s Best Overseas City for restaurants & bars, second Best Overseas City and Number One Food city in the world for 2016, as well as Luxury Travel Guide’s Luxury City Destination of the Year (2016). But there is more to the cultural, culinary and natural charms that cement Cape Town’s reputation as an African city with a global outlook: it is fast becoming known as Africa’s tech hub. New Zealander and tech product developer, Marcus Smith says, “Cape Town is hands down the best place in the world right now to be building a tech product.” Here’s why.

 

Spend soft, earn hard

One of the main benefits of building and testing tech products in South Africa, says Hey Jude developer, Marcus Smith, is the relatively low cost of labour. Hey Jude is a personal-assistant style app, described as ‘Siri on steroids’, that was conceived, developed and tested in the Western Cape. “I used to outsource this type of work to the Ukraine and Russia, but prices now make this option untenable,” says Smith, “of course, the exchange rate also helps, as you are earning in Dollars or Pounds, but paying for quality services in Rands.”

 

Testing your mettle

Africa is not a market to be forgotten, it seems. With sub-Saharan Africa smartphone penetration predicted to be 80% by 2022 (Ericsson 2016 Global Mobility Report; with almost 50% of all South Africans (28.5 million people) being active internet users, of which 59% access the internet at least once a day, for an average of almost 3 hours daily (We are Social’s 2016 Digital Report: the stats are loud and clear  – South Africa is an ideal testing ground for any app or tech product. “Especially those aimed at developed economies like the UK”, says Smith, “because it has a large enough economy to give you really accurate results and feedback, but if the product fails, you have not sunk yourself in hard currency.”

 

You are in good company

“Some of the smartest brains in the world are here,” says Smith, but he is not alone in hailing Cape Town a tech hub. Amazon’s Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) - a key component of Amazon’s web service offering - was created in Cape Town (in 2005). This was followed in 2012 with the building of its web support group: Amazon Web Services (AWS) Support which provides cloud-based, resizable computing capacity to developers – all from what Amazon calls its “thriving technical centre” in Century City, Cape Town.

 

Tech giant, International Business Machines Corp (IBM), has also hailed South Africa as the next tech hub in its February 2017 announcement to train, for free, 25 million Africans via a cloud-based learning platform in order to build a digital workforce. Head of IBM’s Skills Academy Juan Pablo Napoli told Bloomberg that the platform will offer training in basic computer skills right through to high-end app development, with the hope that by 2040, Africa will have the largest digital workforce in the world, outstripping India and helping to bring to, and keep, digital jobs in Africa. Currently, says IBM’s Country Manager for South Africa, Hamilton Ratshefola, as many as 50,000 of these jobs are farmed out from Africa.

 

Forget Silicon Valley, it’s the Silicon Cape

The City of Cape Town is also throwing its weight behind this vision through the creation of the Cape Silicon Initiative or Silicon Cape. Described, by Founder Justin Stanford, as an ecosystem that brings together investors, entrepreneurs and technical gurus, Silicon Cape aims “to foster the creation and growth of world-class IP start-up companies in an environment that competes with other similar hubs around the world against the backdrop of one of the most beautiful settings and pleasant places to live, work and play on the globe.”

 

The initiative provides opportunities for networking, hosts events, has co-working spaces, facilitates partnerships, helps start-ups navigate red tape and regulations. It also actively markets the Western Cape as an international technology hub to international government and investors with product branding such as “Made in the Silicon Cape.”

 

And yes, living there is cool too

It also helps, of course, that Cape Town is, well, Cape Town. “It is also a fantastic place to live – the weather is awesome, the wine is cheap, and the taste of biltong really grows on you,” says Smith, “and now I can’t imagine trying to raise children – or build apps – without all the amazing help you get here.”

Born and bred New Zealander, Marcus, is a solutions man with an eagle-eye for the way in which technology, science and business can be combined to solve problems.  His business card credits him the title: “Minister of Great Ideas”; and with a guiding motto, ‘All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure.’ (Mark Twain), Marcus, through newly launched app Hey Jude, is changing the way that artificial and emotional intelligence can be combined for a better, more efficient service and superior user experience, giving people more time to do the things they really want to do.

 

“I was underwhelmed by the promise of Siri and Amazon’s Alexa versus the actual user experience.” says Marcus  My solution? Create a virtual assistant-style app: a mobile assistant backed by humans, assisted by artificial intelligence (AI). An app that not only told you where or how to fix something, but actually made sure that the task got done, negotiated prices, arranged payment and delivered it back to me; a Siri on steroids.”

 

But why?

Trained as a Radiation therapist, Marcus spent the first five years of his working life in hospitals treating cancer patients. “It was incredibly monotonous; every patient was treated in exactly the same way, regardless of who they were or what type of cancer they had,” remembers Marcus, “it was a production line of patients, being treated as techniques, not as people. I hated it.”

 

As a way out, Smith applied for, and got, a job as a graphic designer and IT support technician at Waikato Rugby Union, despite having no real IT experience. He figured he had watched over the shoulder of a friend while he had fiddled around on Photoshop, so the rest would follow. And it did. From there, Smith accepted an IT Support Manager role and eventually took over his father’s IT business, where he first focussed on complex series IT infrastructure before developing software solutions to answer complex business problems. “I loved the challenge, but in building the company back up and developing these bespoke software products, I was giving it my everything, putting in extraordinary hours,” remembers Smith, “and the toll was an eventual breakdown.”

 

Hey Jude’s human core

These experiences gave Marcus a deep understanding of the power technology, particularly artificial intelligence, to make the real lives of people better, but also that something essential is still missing from the user experience. His keen sense that AI is not quite yet able to emulate the human experience, underpins his app, Hey Jude. “I can see that in the future these concepts could be blended, but I want to fill in the blanks now: there are things that a bot can do better than humans, but there is still so much that humans can do, that bots just can’t.” says Marcus.

 

Hey Jude is the culmination of Marcus’ drive to use the power of AI and human intellect to give people something they need the most: time (2).  “In the on-demand economy there are a wide range of solutions available, but do they all really make a change to your life?” asks Marcus, “what people really want is relevant, local and personalised help. Someone to do all the menial work for them: find a product or service close by, review a service or product they’re considering, organise a meeting or a delivery, book a service, book a restaurant, tickets and organise payment – so that they have time to do the things they really want to do.”  And unlike other virtual assistant apps, with Hey Jude you never deal with a machine. Type or ask one of the ‘Judes’ – who are real people – anything and Jude will find it, 24/7, all on your mobile.

 

And mobile is where it is all at

Marcus also loves technology innovation focused around mobile devices. “91% of adults have their mobile phone within arm’s reach every hour of every day; that is an incredible statistic and one that is changing the world. I get excited when I see friends, colleagues, and people I don't even know, do things with mobile technology that reshape how we act, how we think about things and how we interact with services and brands.”

Building a tech product is hard (3), especially one that will really make a tangible difference to people lives, but for Marcus seeing the surge in uptake of users for Hey Jude since its March UK launch, confirms his belief that without that human element, AI is just that: artificial.

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2. Link to What ever happened to the 15 hour work week, if it is live

3. Link to the Building a product sucks article, if it is live

For decades the term ‘artificial intelligence’ (AI) has evoked apocalyptic images of robots taking over the world, but the reality is that the rise of AI is so much more subtle than those science fiction movies. AI it is most definitely here and shaping our society more subtly than most of us can imagine, but there is still something fundamentally human missing from the transaction.

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Artificial intelligence is the ability of a machine to mimic intelligent human behaviour. Mechanised warehouses churning out thousands of products per second, Siri answering any question you might have and even iTunes making suggestions for music you would like, are all ways in which AI is impacting our daily lives, perhaps even without us realising.

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Artificial intelligence (AI) is also replacing jobs by the thousand. Experts agree that the role of AI is rapidly expanding, with some saying that artificial intelligence will depose 6% of all jobs in the United States by 2021, so says a report released in 2016 by market research company, Forrester.

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AI even has the capacity to diagnose ill patients. IBM Watson is a supercomputer that can do just that; in 2016 doctors used Watson to diagnose a patient that they themselves had struggled for months to diagnose correctly. It took Watson 10 minutes.

Similarly Watson was called in to aid in the case of a patient with aggressive breast cancer, who risked losing both of her breasts. Using a combination of the patient’s medical history and genetic profile it took Watson 60 seconds to suggest an alternative treatment plan and both breasts were saved.  Remarkably Watson needed only 5 years to gain medical expertise that takes most doctors lifetimes to amalgamate.

 

Real AI or not?
There has been significant debate around whether Watson is ‘real’ AI with scientists claiming that being able to use algorithms to search a database is not AI, just another version of Google.‘Tomay-to, tomah-to’, we say. What is clear is that yes, advances in technology enable computers to perform many of the tasks previously dominated by humans, often better, faster and with more accuracy, but there is still something lacking: something uniquely human, emotional intelligence. So, while many agree that AI is the way of the future, and future that is upon us, it is also clear that jobs of the future will still rely heavily on that human element, empathy.

 

That human touch
Research suggests that poor customer service costs businesses in the United Kingdom at least £243bn a year. When customers are unable to communicate effectively with businesses, most will opt for different companies. Leading many to predict that in 2017 companies that emphasise humanity within their enterprises will win out over their competition.

 

This means that if Watson is asked a question but it takes him longer to respond or his response is unsatisfactory, or he simply doesn’t have the means to formulate a meaningful response, his consumer will take his business elsewhere.

As the world becomes more fast-paced, stressful and technologically advanced; humanity will rely heavily on those with skills in ethics, social sciences, psychology and art. Interestingly experts agree that the more humanity starts to rely on technology and artificial intelligence, the more people will need to employ human sciences and human intelligence.

 

While Watson was able to diagnose patients much faster than his human contemporaries, he could not entirely replace the doctors that came before him. Watson had the medical and genetic profiles of these patients but he still couldn’t fathom their personal histories and employ the empathy that is crucial in sensitive medical cases. Similarly Watson could not fulfil the role of nurses or psychologist when treating those patients.

 

Assisted Intelligence – the AI / EI hybrid solution
Brian Christian, author of The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means To Be Alive, said “To be human is to be ‘a’ human, a specific person with a life history and idiosyncrasy and point of view; artificial intelligence suggests that the line between intelligent machines and people blurs most when a puree is made of that identity.” While a puree of that identity might blur the line between artificial and human intelligence, a combination and partnership of the two seems to be the ideal solution; forming a concept that has been coined ‘Assisted Intelligence’.

Many companies are already employing this concept in their every day practices. Virtual assistant-style app Hey Jude app already makes use of the efficiency of artificial intelligence, but combines it with human intelligence to provide optimum services. “I was underwhelmed by the promise of bots like Siri and Amazon’s Alexa and the actual user experience,” says Hey Jude developer, Marcus Smith, “and there might be a time when AI can do all these things, but until then we are filling in the blanks with a blended AI-human solution.”

 

The app works on three basic premises: firstly it buys its users more time, by doing all of the administrative tasks that you don’t want, or have time, to do yourself; secondly it will organise, negotiate, vet and rate service providers and can facilitate any payment necessary – tasks that a machine simply can’t do, and thirdly at no point are you dealing with a machine; you are always dealing a person.

 

The app works in the following way; using a familiar message-based application you can send your queries to trained operators, or Judes, who can do just about anything you need them to from first request to final delivery, such as travel arrangements, personal admin tasks, to finding you the perfect costume for that dress-up party or the best place to buy bulk goods in your area (and then organise for the goods to be bought, paid for and delivered). The app has also integrated other applications such as AirBnB, Uber and various payment facilities.

 

By combining artificial and human intelligence, Hey Jude users say that they especially enjoyed that the application was both streamlined and efficient and not entirely without a human element. As humanity advances further in technology the world can become a lonely place; just peaking around your favourite local restaurant will betray how many people are engrossed with their cell phones rather than the people sitting across from them. Yet most crave human companionship.

 

The bottom line is that currently, technology is unable to replace those parts of us that make us uniquely human; those qualities that ensure that within the same society we are able to architect designs that are unfathomable in their modernity while still producing films that ensure that people laugh and cry in equal measure. In a new era it will be the combination of the seamless efficiency of technology and the uniqueness of what it means to be human that wins out over the rest.

When John Saddington’s image depicting ‘The emotional journey of creating anything great’ vamped its way across the internet, it hit a raw nerve with a lot of tech developers. Mostly those who were either swamping it in the ‘dark despair’ part of the graph, or dancing it up in the ‘proudest moment’ phase; the rest were too busy in the ‘this sucks, I have no idea what I am doing’ phase to notice it.

 

Building a product is hard, but not necessarily in the way that you’d expect. Of course, technically it’s a challenge, but emotionally it can be a wrencher.

 

“You get so deep into your product, so close to it,” says innovation architect and app developer, Marcus Smith, whose mobile virtual-assistant style app Hey Jude, developed in South Africa has just launched in the UK, “and if you knew in the beginning how much it would take out of you, you would never start. It’s about putting one foot in front of the other, looking forward to what it could be, not what it is right now.”

 

It starts with just one idea

Sage words, from the man whose business card reads: ‘All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure’ (Mark Twain). “I love that quote, and it is so true for Hey Jude,” he says, “Hey Jude has taken longer, been more challenging and cost more than we all first thought, but we now have momentum, and when you get feedback like, ‘your app has changed my life’, then you know all that the gut-wrenching has been worth it.”

 

From ‘great idea’ to ‘this is harder than I thought’…

The idea for Hey Jude – its ‘this is the best idea ever’ moment – hit upon Marcus, a New Zealander who had just moved to South Africa with his young family when his kids broke a Djembe drum (a traditional African drum) in the house he was renting. He needed to get it fixed, but didn’t even know that it was called a ‘Djembe’ drum, let alone where or how to get it repaired.

 

The company Marcus was working for in SA, PLP, offered a customer call centre service that did all the research into who, where and how much it would cost to repair the drum. But, even then, the drum just sat there next to his desk. For months. “I needed more. I need a Siri that works, a Siri on steroids, a Siri that actually gets the job done – basically a Siri with human intellect,” says Marcus. And from this inspiration, the momentum grew, the flywheel effect began and Marcus developed a mobile app that is lives up to its slogan: ‘Just say the word and it’s sorted’.

 

Flywheeling it

One of Marcus’ favourite business book of all time, Good to Great by Jim Collins, talks about the flywheel effect, and he says it is a brilliantly apt way to describe how the momentum in building a tech product can build, but you have to really push. Hard.

 

“Pushing with great effort, you get the flywheel to inch forward, moving almost imperceptibly at first. You keep pushing and, after two or three hours of persistent effort, you get the flywheel to complete one entire turn.

 

You keep pushing, and the flywheel begins to move a bit faster, and with continued great effort, you move it around a second rotation. You keep pushing in a consistent direction.  Three turns ... four ... five ... six ... the flywheel builds up speed ... seven ... eight ... you keep pushing ... nine ... ten ... it builds momentum ... eleven ... twelve ... moving faster with each turn … twenty … thirty … fifty … a hundred.

 

Then, at some point—breakthrough!  The momentum of the thing kicks in your favour, hurling the flywheel forward, turn after turn ... whoosh! ... its own heavy weight working for you. You're pushing no harder than during the first rotation, but the flywheel goes faster and faster.  Each turn of the flywheel builds upon work done earlier, compounding your investment of effort. A thousand times faster, then ten thousand, then a hundred thousand. The huge heavy disk flies forward, with almost unstoppable momentum.”

 

…to Hmm.., ...Hey! …Wow: an emotional process

Jennifer Banta-Kroll, CEO of Career (Re)Search Group, says those mixed feelings are essential when building a product that will change people’s lives, or it won’t change people’s lives “…excitement, frustration, confusion, joy and fear to name a few. There are moments of triumph and moments of pure embarrassment”. All are necessary or the process has not been done right.

 

So each time you hit those ‘this sucks’, …‘ok, but this still sucks’ moments – and there will be lots of them – remember, you are not alone. And without them, your product will suck, truly.​​

Yes, most of us wish we had someone around who was willing to do the grind-work, all those tasks that we never seem to have the time, energy or motivation for, those tasks that we don’t have a clue where or how to start, or get half-way through and then the momentum fizzles away.

 

Someone around 24/7, 365.

 

Someone who will do the research, vet the supplier, negotiate prices, book, collect, deliver, organise the payment and, admit it, maybe even go to your mother-in-law’s birthday party instead of you. Ok maybe not that far, but almost.

 

Well, this is the promise of newly launched virtual assistant-style app, Hey Jude, whose tag line, ‘Just say the word and its sorted,’ means we can all have a Miss Moneypenny tucked away in our pockets, or wherever it is you store your smartphone. Your mobile virtual assistant. But why the big fuss, isn’t the internet littered with freelancers, contractors and personal assistants?

 

The need is clear

As we get busier and technology gets smarter, we can outsource the necessary, but less appealing, parts of our lives, whether you are a large enterprise, start-up, or stay-at-home parent. The internet is brimming with people willing to do your grudge work for you or just the work you aren’t skilled to do. The virtual assistant industry is thought to encompass between 5 000-25 000 people worldwide, with some predictions estimating it will be worth five billion dollars by the end of 2018, just in the UK: this is a vast and growing industry.

 

The ever-changing virtual assistant landscape

Of course, virtual personal assistants are not a novel concept. Since the 1940s when secretaries first took to their typing to the office, the role of the personal assistant has not evolved much from planning and completing the tasks that higher profile executives were too busy to do. It is where and how (and now for who) personal assistants were able to carry out these tasks that has, and continues to, change dramatically.

 

The telephone and the fax machine of the 80s and early 90s, meant that personal assistants could do ‘remote’ admin work – even work for companies in other countries. And when the internet became a household commodity, the concept of working virtually, reached new heights, so much so that personal assistant, Anastacia Brice, along with Life coach Thomas Leonard coined the term ‘virtual assistant’ – someone who provides professional administrative, technical, social assistance to clients remotely from a home office.

 

Personal assistants are now no longer the bastion of high level executives: with virtual assistants, anyone can get support. And the big names are on it with omniscient virtual assistants in various phases of development: Google is developing a ‘butler’ that can call a taxi, order flowers and even check on the laundry; assistants like Siri are being streamlined and tailored to replace search engines and even to, eventually, complete tasks. And it looks like Hey Jude is set to change the virtual assistant landscape again.

 

Why Hey Jude?

Hey Jude is the culmination of developer Marcus Smith’s drive to use the power of artificial intelligence (AI), mobile technology and human intellect to give people something they need the most: time.  “In the on-demand economy there are a wide range of solutions available, but do they all really make a change to your life?” asks Marcus, “what people really want is relevant, local and personalised help. Someone to do all the menial work for them: find a product or service close by, review a service or product they’re considering, organise a meeting or a delivery, book a service, book a restaurant, tickets and organise payment – so that they have time to do the things they really want to do.”  And unlike other virtual assistant apps, with Hey Jude you never deal with a machine. Type or ask one of the ‘Judes’ – who are real people – anything and Jude will find it, 24/7, all on your mobile.

 

Hey Jude stands out above other virtual assistant services through its subscription-based service, payment portal and the scope of tasks the Judes will do for you. Where most virtual assistants offer specific tasks or skills, on a pay-per-hour or per-task model, Hey Jude offers unlimited tasks, whenever you need them, for a set monthly fee and by loading your bank card into Hey Jude’s secure payment portal, all third-party payments are done for you too. The support offered goes way beyond simple administrative tasks: they will do just about anything, “as long as it is not x-rated or illegal,” explains Operations Manager Michelle Harley, “and we have been asked to do some really interesting things: from finding a specific handle for a Miele fridge, to bicycle couriers and birthday present suggestions, even where the best place to buy sex toys is.”

 

But what is really setting Hey Jude apart is the user experience. “I was underwhelmed by the promise of Siri and Amazon’s Alexa versus the actual user experience,” says Marcus. “I can see that AI and emotional intelligence could someday be blended, but I want to fill in the blanks now: there are things that a bot can do better than a human, but there is still so much that humans can do, that bots just can’t.” And it is this keen sense of how AI is not yet quite able to emulate the human experience that underpins Hey Jude, to give users local, personalised and seemless service.

 

And yes, Hey Jude will even do your ironing. You just need to say the word.