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Cape Town - South African developers have an opportunity to show off their skills and earn some cash as a competition to grow start-ups enters its third year.
Byte Orbit announced on Wednesday the third instalment of the Startup Knight competition that seeks to identify local entrepreneurs who have great ideas to use technology to effect efficiency in small businesses.
As with previous iterations of the competition, there are two phases: The Concept and Startup phases.
The winner in the latter category will earn R150 000 but is expected to have a working platform that can be expanded.
Byte Orbit will take a minority share in the winning start-up and the runners up will receive R50 000 in public relations or software development.
Tech incubators
In the Concept phase, the winner will take home R100 000 but will have to cede the rights to the concept to Byte Orbit. It is also expected that the winner in this category has done research into the market for the concept and how it will earn revenue.
Two runner up prizes of R35 000 and R25 000 have also been announced in this category.
The Startup Knight winner from 2013 was Micket and the company which does event marketing is still active.
A key strategy that Micket employed was to make the platform mobile friendly to capitalise on the growth of mobile phone internet connections.
Tech incubators have proved a useful method of driving innovation in the industry and both Cape Town and Johannesburg have healthy incubator lab networks.
Despite the potential, SA lags far behind developed countries and even behind countries in the Brics bloc in terms of developing applications to suit local conditions.
Entries for Startup Knight 2014 close on 26 October and after multiple judging exercises, the winners will be announced on 8 November.
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