With world markets crashing around us, economic activity slowing and the Rand rapidly weakening I thought I should look on the bright side – at some incredible South Africans and their accomplishments.
Most of us are familiar with Mark Shuttleworth’s story, but there are others. Let us applaud and celebrate the achievements of these and all other successful South Africans.
Elon Musk
You may have never heard of this Pretoria Boys’ High matriculant, but you have probably heard of a few little businesses he has founded or co-founded. Musk was a co-founder of the business that eventually became PayPal, and which eBay bought for US$1,5 billion. He is also principal owner and CEO of Silicon Valley’s Tesla Motors, which designs and builds consumer oriented battery driven vehicles like the Tesla Roadster. SolarCity is another of Musk’s businesses and plans are for SolarCity to supply roof-mounted solar chargers for Tesla’s vehicles.
Although Musk’s feet are firmly on the ground, his head is above the clouds. In June 2002 he founded Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX), which develops and manufactures space launch vehicles. On 28 September 2008, after several failed attempts, flight 4 of the Falcon 1 launch vehicle successfully launched and achieved Earth orbit, making it the first privately developed liquid fuel rocket to orbit the Earth.
Stefanus Du Toit
Du Toit has just been named one of an elite group of TR35 members. Each year Technology Review, published by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), honours worthy innovators under the age of 35 in their TR35.
After growing up in South Africa Du Toit enrolled at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada at age 16. Here he became involved in the development of software optimised for operation in parallel computing systems.
In 2004 Du Toit co-founded Serious Hack, later renamed RapidMind to commercialise the development of tools which automate the task of optimising code to run in multicore processors. The company works closely with chip developers like AMD, IBM, Intel and NVIDIA and in April 2007 it raised US$10 million of funding.
Doug Lawson
In 1991 Lawson founded South African software development company Professional Technology Management (PTM). He pulled together a small team of programmers to develop Prealism, an object-oriented historian software product designed for gathering large volumes of realtime production data from manufacturing or process operations.
In December 1995 Wonderware bought PTM and its intellectual property rights for an undisclosed sum and hired the company’s six-person staff to continue product development within Wonderware’s R&D group. Absorbed into Wonderware, Prealism became Wonderware’s IndustrialSQL Server historian.
Lawson established DataWorks Systems in 1998, and created the ActiveFactory client application for manufacturing data analysis, trending and reporting. DataWorks was re-incorporated as Incuity Software in 2004. The company’s flagship Incuity EMI (Enterprise Manufacturing Intelligence) product was launched in 2006.
Incuity Software currently has over 45 000 seats of its products installed in more than 40 countries with support for 13 languages.
In April this year Rockwell Automation announced that it was acquiring Incuity Software and retaining the Incuity Software management team and its employees, who will become part of Rockwell Automation’s Architecture & Software operating segment.
Christmas and holiday greetings
To all our readers and advertisers, thank you for your support this year. I wish you happy holidays and a safe return if you are travelling. To fellow Christians I wish you a blessed Christmas.
Andrew Ashton
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