Eventful day {{ FIRSTNAME }}? The world’s first social media ban for under 16s is in full swing in Australia, Russia blew a hole in the dome around Chernobyl with a war drone (radiation leaking everywhere) and in the US, someone tried to trade a stuffed bobcat for video games. 🎮

In Today’s Open Letter

Setting up a medical practice takes months and costs R1M+ – this new white label platform lets you do it in a few minutes for R500…

Say what you will about doctors, they’re people just like us (we think). And that means they have families, friends, acquaintances… who call in favours. All. The. Time.

“Happens way more often than you think,” says SA founder (and physician) Piet Van Niekerk, “some friend of a friend or a cousin phones you at 8 on a Saturday morning needing a prescription. And what most doctors do then is write a script, set themselves a reminder to log it on Monday and then completely forget about it.”

The problem with that is that doctors are legally liable for their advice and prescriptions. So the risk that poor family doc is taking is immense.

The thing is, almost no doctor’s practice is set up to handle such impromptu online transactions. Until now…

Digitising SA’s doctors practices

Long-time readers will know Piet and the Udok team; they built a lekker sleek online doctors' consult platform where you can log in and see a South African doc from any device, anywhere in the world, in less than 60 seconds – about 240x times faster than going to the clinic, and you don’t even need to get out of bed 😉.

But, even cooler, to make the whole thing work, Piet had to build a digital system that basically does everything a doctor's office does, just better: It’s reception, appointments, scheduling, billing, pharmacy integration, lab integration, medical record-keeping, medical aid integration – everything a doc needs to run a practice in one platform.

And it was about a year ago at a braai with Piet and The Open Letter team that the idea came up: Why not create a plug-and-play online consultation system for SA doctors?

Instant practice setup in minutes

Introducing Udok Virtual Practice Workspace, an all-in-one platform for docs to run their own, fully compliant online consults, with their own branding, complete and ready to go.

With this, every SA doctor can, concurrently with their brick and mortar practice, have a digital version where they can route all those impromptu digital requests through – if someone calls in a favour, ask them to jump on your digital practice quickly, do the consult, send the script, and at least, the doctor takes care of risks and even generate revenue that way.

It can also help out SA’s thousands of unemployed doctors by dropping the price to open a practice from about R1 million to just R500 a month + a 15% service fee.

Smarter medical care? Yeah, we’re watching this space.

Wondering how top companies are using AI? OpenAI’s new Enterprise AI Report shows that while most corporate employees using AI save at 1 hour per week, frontier teams save up to 10+ hours/week (an extra working day!) and unlock tasks they couldn’t do before. Read the report here.

Now anyone can build AI agents: Google has made Workspace Studio available in most territories, letting anyone build AI agents from plain English. No flows, no syntax, you just tell it what you want to do, and it builds the agent for you. Try it here.

Building video at scale? China’s Kling 2.6 now generates audio + video simultaneously, with frame-perfect sync and lower cost per second than Sora or Veo. Try it here.

Imagine you’re building a house. You’re rushing to paint the walls before you’ve even laid the foundation. Weird, right? Yet we see it all the time in data and AI projects. Dashboards up, metrics lit, big visuals… but the plumbing’s leaking and the wiring’s half-done.

At Sidekick Lab, we believe the boring stuff matters: cataloguing what data exists, tagging it, lining up relationships, documenting origins, cleaning up duplications, that’s the foundation.

When the foundation is solid, everything above becomes stable, predictable and scalable. Because once your data landscape is organised, you can hit refresh on strategy, expand analytics, add new channels and bring AI in without chaos.

If you skip the messy groundwork, you’ll be firefighting later. Spend time now getting the logistics right. Build strong. Then the finish line’s not a scramble: it’s a launchpad.

🤖 Ship It Faster. Local AI startup Ageiro has just raised $3 million in funding for its agentic AI platform to help companies cut down on software dev time by turning what the business wants into apps that ship. Nice one.

🗼 Vodacom’s Festive Boost. Vodacom is spoiling us this festive season with a R450 million investment into its Western Cape infrastructure to handle the influx of holiday visitors. From expanded 5G coverage and additional 4G capacity, to six temporary base stations in holiday hotspots, they’re properly stuffing our connectivity stockings. Lekker.

🏄 SA’s Official Tour Guide. SA Tourism has launched a tourist-specific AI called Siyanda to “provide instant answers to any travel or tourism-related questions about the country,” aimed at North American tourists. *In Murcan: “Can you tell me where the nearest Burger King is”?

😁 Ring a Ring it’s Rosie. Amazon’s Ring doorbells now let you know who’s visiting with its new AI-powered facial-recognition feature called “Familiar Faces”. Users can store up to 50 faces, and Ring will tell you “so-and-so is at the door instead” of “a person is at your door”. Super handy when you want to pretend you’re not home when Aunt Muriel comes to visit.

✅ The Stack. Founders need reliable tools, so our Founder’s Stack gives you IP offshoring and global market access with Finance Isle of Man, VC and startup legal sorted by Dommisse Attorneys and more.

Every time you share The Open Letter, the stars shine a little brighter (and we give you cool stuff, too.)

Yesterday, we showed you how OPUS Cactus is producing natural gas locally from cacti, asking what you’d produce from it. Most want a cheaper cooking solution…

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🔥 Cheap cooking gas (42%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🥩 Renewable braai fuel (8%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🧴 Fancy cactus skincare (11%)

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🌵 Just give me the fruit, thanks (6%)

🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🍸 Wait, doesn’t gin come from cactus? (25%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🤔 Wait, I have a better idea… (8%)

Your 2 cents…

Ha ha, most everyone agrees with you there, Ted. 🧂🍋‍🟩

Ja, surprised they're not making wrapping paper out of it yet, Danei. 🎁

Most of SA’s outbound remittances flow from Gauteng.

The SARB's 2024 report highlights a massive, formal flow of cash leaving SA:

💡 R19.4 billion was sent to 15 southern African countries.
💡 Gauteng is the largest source, accounting for 45% remittances.
💡 Zimbabwe is the largest recipient, receiving R11.8 billion of the total.

These flows indicate South Africa’s role as a financial lifeline for southern Africa.

💡 Tool to Try: Foodie Call ends “what’s for dinner” fight with Tinder-style swiping to pick a restaurant fast.

🎴 That’s Interesting: Yu-Gi-Oh creator Kazuki Takahashi died while trying to save three people from drowning.

🥋 Next Level: This Brazilian jiu-jitsu athlete snaps three baseball bats at once.

🔁 Hack: 4 Steps to turn your CRM into a referral engine.

📜 Wow Site: OnlyRecipe strips any recipe page down to just the ingredients + steps — no life story first.

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