The big news over the past week is that MIH Print Africa has bought a stake in Afrigator, the local blog and media aggregator that focuses specifically on Africa. To quote Mark Forrester's description: “In layman’s terms it is an online application that tracks Africa’s blogs, podcasts, video content and mainstream media”.

The buy out has been featured on the very well known ReadWriteWeb, where Marshall Kirkpatrick offered his congratulations on the fact that their “work has been recognised by a large traditional company as important enough to warrant a significant acquisition in that space."

The acquisition has been under negotiation since November last year after Afrigator's Beta release. The project was started by Mike Stopforth and Justin Hartman – who brought Stii Pretorius and Mark Forrester on board. They've all dedicated their free time to the Afrigator project because they love it and saw it as something that could be useful to the African community.

As Mike Stopforth said “it's really cool to be a part of something that started as a dream and turned out to be something useful and has become meaningful to people. We'll just have to improve it from there.”

When I met with Stii, he started by making a point of mentioning that Afrigator has been successful because their focus is on Africa and that they offer a localised service that people want. MIH is equally focused on social media growth in the African space, which means that the two brands can act in a happy synergy.

Stii has moved from George to Cape Town in the last month, where he'll now get to work on his hobby full time. He is now working in an office with developers from MIH, who he describes as “moerse nice slim mense”.

The backing behind the venture has meant some basic but fundamental improvements, like the system no longer having to run off one server :). The addition of Lester Hein as product manager and the fact that Justin Hartman will now increasingly be focusing on the business side of the venture, will hopefully also steer Afrigator in a profit-making direction.

According to Stii, one of the biggest challenges faced by Afrigator is “the knowledge of the average user”. When your average user online sees the Afrigator home page, he doesn't necessarily know what he's looking at, so “simplifying” and “explaining” the aggregator is definitely on the cards. Beyond that there are a lot of basic bugs to be sorted and Stii’s new full-time Afrigator focus will allow him to sort the basic system in a way that will allow them to build from a “clean platform”.

While he wouldn't give away too much, one long term consideration that Stii did share is that the MIH offices all over Africa will allow the Afrigator team to extend their reach in a way they wouldn't have been able to do alone. Afrigator can use this reach to entrench themselves in the top blogging countries in Africa, like Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania and Egypt, even though Stii says he can't exactly claim to be able to read an Egyptian blog..

With Afrigator being used as an example of the growth in this arena, I asked which other South African initiatives Stii has his eye on.

“Muti is a site I like, and I like the guys behind it as well. Springleap is also going to go far”.

And his advice to people working in startups?

“Don't run it as if you want to sell out. Love what you're doing and it will come naturally if you're doing it right.”

This may be just the start for African online initiatives and Afrigator could become a case study for those wanting to succeed in this space. We wish them the best and watch eagerly as they grow.

Update:

Charl pointed out that I neglected to link to BandWidth Blog, who broke the excellent news. You can check out their post here.