Vinny Lingham’s Blog

This is almost a desperate plea for help! Our group is growing rapidly and we really are looking for some amazing people to join in the business! With our recent funding from HBD and the rampant growth, particularly in our services divisions, we have about 10 positions open!

If you’re (or anyone you know is) at all interesting in working in Sunny Cape Town, please have a look at the jobs on offer within the award-winning incuBeta Group.

More specifically, with my Synthasite CEO hat on, we’re desperately looking for great people with great attitudes and exceptional talents, to contribute to a fast growing Web 2.0 startup!

If you know of anyone that would be interested, please steer them our way!

I’m pleased to announce the re-launch of ADT South Africa by incuBeta Consulting. We have totally redeveloped the site from scratch - have a look at the old site here via wayback machine.

Some great SEO work went into this site and we’ve also launched a Pay Per Click campaign for them. We have some more very high profile clients that are launching soon, and our Web Dev/SEO business is growing exponentially at the moment.

On that note : We’re hiring! If you have any SEO/SEM experience, please email careers@incubeta.com (all positions are located in Cape Town), or check the incuBeta careers page.

I’m glad to finally be able to announce the incuBeta has finalised a transaction with Mark Shuttleworth’s Venture Capital company, HBD.  The details of the deal are highlighted in the press release below and the total value of the investment is R25m or c. US $3.7m.  The capital will enable us to grow rapidly across global markets.  We will be making a few more announcements over the next few weeks, relating to how we intend to utilize the capital, but all I can say for now is that exciting times are in store!

Congratulations to the entire incuBeta team (and all our partners & clients) for taking our business to the level that makes this transaction possible - it’s hard to believe we’re in our 4th year of business already!

VC FUNDING BOOST FOR AWARD-WINNING SA ENTREPRENEURS

Cape Town, January 31, 2007: Top Technology 100 winners and internet marketing pioneers, incuBeta, this week received the first R15-million installment from a new R25-million investment from Mark Shuttleworth’s HBD Venture Capital. Already positioned at the forefront of the search engine marketing game, the South African entrepreneurs will use the investment to expand incuBeta’s presence in the US and UK and progress its growth strategy which aims to ultimately list on the Johannesburg or London stock exchange.

incuBeta was founded four years ago by SA entrepreneur Vinny Lingham who recognised the opportunity represented by bidding on Google keyword searches and advertising products and services related to each keyword. The business grew quickly and today it has 50 staff, offices in Cape Town, Johannesburg and London and turnover of over R50-million a year.

Giles Douglas, CEO of incuBeta said the investment would allow several goals to become reality. “Our first priority is to open offices in the heartland of technology in Silicon Valley in California so we can be closer to our major search partners, Google and Yahoo, and our US clients. We are already a major virtual player and a physical presence in the States will allow us to build a stronger brand and accelerate our growth prospects. We will also strengthen our European presence. We ultimately plan to list on either the Johannesburg or London stock exchange within the next 24 months and this funding will assist in this growth strategy.”

Eben van Heerden, Portfolio Manager of HBD Venture Capital – one of the few true venture capital firms in South Africa – said, “We are very excited about this investment. This is a truly South African company with no real local competition. It is rated as one of the top three internet marketing companies in the world by Commission Junction, part of the Nasdaq-listed ValueClick Inc. The company has developed robust technology in-house and this provides the perfect platform to achieve future expansion.  incuBeta’s clients include many of the biggest online retailers in the world and it operates one of the world’s most sophisticated keyword bid management software systems. We plan to work closely with incuBeta to ensure exponential growth happens quickly.”

Douglas said that search engine marketing was growing at over 40 percent per annum – particularly since the advent of Web2.0 which has changed the internet from a tool used largely for information purposes to an interactive social arena. “Google is the fastest growing company of all time, and is at the forefront of search and more recently Web2.0. Its turnover is derived predominantly from auctioning keywords for searches which allow merchants to link advertising or marketing campaigns to each specific search. It allows for highly targeted advertising campaigns and is the preferred marketing method for most online merchants.”

He said, “incuBeta bids on millions of different keyword combinations and links targeted advertisements for its clients to each keyword combination. We currently place over 50 million targeted adverts every month. In the next few years we expect to see search engine marketing moving from personal computers onto mobile phones, television and even in-car navigation systems.  We aim to be at the forefront of these technological changes - and the investment by HBD will help us achieve this.”

Douglas said that incuBeta would remain a South African company. “We will keep our headquarters in South Africa and have recently launched incuBeta Consulting in response to local demand for our expertise. The core focus of the consulting business will be to transfer our knowledge of search engine marketing and other Web2.0 trends to other South African companies that are interested in enhancing their brand online. This will enable them to reap real business benefits from the many possibilities which the internet offers.”

Van Heerden concluded that he hoped incuBeta’s success would inspire more South Africans to take the entrepreneurial plunge. “All too often, we are put off ‘going it alone’ because we believe that our ideas must have already been done abroad – this is often not the case and we encourage local talent with business ideas to explore these to the full. Many of the leading economies of the world were built on small-to-medium size enterprises so this is a definite priority for South Africa’s future growth.”
For more information visit www.hbd.com or www.incubeta.com

Ok - I know a lot of you are probably saying “Enough Awards Already!!”, and I promise that this is the last one (for this year, anyways!).  This final award brings the total awards and accolades that incuBeta has achieved this year to 5 in total, on 3 different continents.
I have no problem posting about incuBeta’s successes and awards - given that this blog is our way of communication to the world - but it does get kinda weird when I have to post about a personal success, even when it is linked to the company’s success.

Well here goes nothing:

I am the very proud recipient of the award for “Top Young Entrepreneur in Africa” in the ICT African Achiever Awards, held in Johannesburg this past weekend (to be broadcast on SABC later this week).  ITWeb reported on it today.  I’ll be posting some pics tomorrow on this posts, and hopefully a video snippet after the broadcast.

A letter from the President of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki, was read out at these awards:

“ICT is recognised as a vital tool that can assist with the development of our country and continent. It is a field that can create substantially new forms of employment and entrepreneurship that are much needed in the country and continent.

“In this context, government has been busy putting appropriate measures in place to ensure there is universal access to ICT services at affordable costs aimed at growing the sector,” Mbeki wrote.

He added that government’s efforts for growth and development are focused on achieving higher rates of investment in the economy, increasing the competitiveness of the South African economy, broadening the participation in the economy, improving the capacity of the state to deliver, and contributing to a better world.

“Universal access to ICT services can now have an impact on all these areas, and has already contributed to an environment conducive for small and growing players to thrive in.”

Even though this is a personal award, it is truly testimony to the fabulous bunch of people at incuBeta that I have the pleasure of working with every day, all our clients and partners!  Thanks to everyone who has worked with us over the past few years!

Rob Stokes over at Quirk beat me to my own scoop this morning - the nerve!

When Google launched their new Co-op program last month it captured our imagination! South Africa’s best search engine is the local Google.co.za, with all the others coming a distant second (based on the fact that Google is the #1 accessed site in the country). So we decided to use Google Co-Op to create a better search engine - the power of Google Search combined with local knowledge of the Internet world should lead to substantially better results.

Google Co-Op allows you to create a custom search engine which either prioritizes or only searches a designated set of pre-determined results. You can add additional refinements and as time goes on, I am sure that they will offer additional features to the product set. We are looking to the South African community to assist us in improving the results by adding the good sites, and removing the poor ones - something that is automated for Google, but will be manual for us - human intervention is a great way to detect poor spam sites, etc.

Lee Stuttaford & Keith Feldwick-Davis from incuBeta are responsible for the design & development of Sekamo - and they’ve done a great job.
The beauty of Google Co-Op is that it allows hundreds of people to team together to improve the listings by adding their favourite sites, relevant to the topic in question (in this case, South African interest). Anyone can sign up on the site, and you just need a Gmail account to get started (email me at vlingham-at-gmail.com if you need one), and start contributing the development of our local search engine.

This is true collaboration around Search - Google understands, and I agree, that search has to verticalize over the next few years - Google.com simply will not be able to improve the quality of the information without hundreds and thousands of sites like Sekamo that will feed better information into them, based upon actual user relevance and collaborator input.

I’m pretty impressed with Google, however, they have restricted the site to 5000 refinements (i.e. we cannot load more then 5000 additional sites into the index for prioritisation) - hopefully this will change soon.

So I invite all South Africans who are interested in creating a better search engine locally, to either volunteer or submit site for prioritisation in our index.

Oh, and keep this watching this space - if Sekamo takes off, you can expect us to launch many more vertical search engines!