Big boom? The world’s largest neutrino observatory launched last week — here’s what it looks like. 700m underground, it’ll help gather way better data on our sun’s fusion processes, supernovae and cosmic events. 🖖

In This Open Letter

SA’s booming grocery last-mile sector is a 50k-plus advertising opportunity, especially if you can get gig drivers to act as brand ambassadors – and this local company is already doing it…

Remember when we told you about the company using vehicles to bring digital moving billboards to SA? Well, it gets even more interesting: See, SA spends about 75% of its R4 billion a year out-of-home (OOH) budget on billboards, despite them not being able to tell you who saw what or whether it even worked. 

(Crazy for an industry that supposedly is all about measurement, accountability and proof of impact. 🤷‍♀️)

But what’s interesting is looking through the lens of another recent boom in SA: Last-mile delivery. Our on-demand grocery sector alone is set to break through the R100 billion mark by 2029 – that’s thousands of bikes criss-crossing Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban and beyond every day.

Needless to say, each of those deliveries is a chance to make a powerful brand impression on a massive buying market, right where they live.

Delivering ads to your customers’ doorsteps

MotionAds is a mobile advertising company that wraps delivery bikes’ top boxes in branded covers and top lid booster fins, paired with optional in-home flyer drops and product sampling – smart, so when the Uber Eats guy arrives with your order, you sommer get some freebies you might want to try next time.

But it’s way smarter than most OOH options…

We caught up with co-founder Jonathan Berkowitz, and he describes MotionAds as a tech platform that just so happens to also brand bikes. See, behind the OOH branding is a range of insights: Advertisers get heat maps, kilometres logged, scan data and campaign reports, things a static billboard can’t deliver. 

As the exclusive ad partner of Uber Eats SA, and with brands like Vodacom, Pick n Pay, Nedbank and more already on board, MotionAds delivers across 7 cities nationwide, with the ability to run suburb-based campaigns as well.

Building on the boom

Interesting things happen on the logistics side, too. For example, MotionAds offers platforms a means to increase gig-driver income – they’ve paid out over R20 million in supplementary income directly to delivery drivers over the last 6 years. (Often representing up to a 10% income boost to drivers for not much extra work.)

And they invest in campaign-specific training, too: Drivers are trained up as brand ambassadors, able to answer questions about the campaigns on their bikes and even drive activations, right there in SA neighbourhoods.

They even removed the time-based incentives and income pressure that force drivers to want to race and try to shave minutes off trips on other apps. Resulting in fewer shortcuts, more stops at stop streets and a new type of driver who earns steadily and represents brands responsibly.

Sustainable impact and advertising don’t have to live in separate columns of a budget, and MotionAds could well be showing that the future of OOH could look less like a skyline and more like a swarm of bikes weaving through it. 

We’re watching this space…

Track competitors in real time. Webtracker.ai monitors rival websites and delivers AI insights on changes that impact your business.

Voice apps just blew up. OpenAI’s new Realtime API makes no-code human-like voice assistants possible — laughing, reasoning, even answering calls. And you don’t need to know how to code at all, just vibe code it.

Levelling up top SMEs. Lula & News24’s SME Excellence Awards put R300k in prizes up for grabs for standout small businesses. Enter here.

Because every law firm has its own documents.

In the US and UK, standardised templates mean faster closings and less legal bloat.

In SA, we’re still redlining Word docs for weeks.

That’s why Dommisse Attorneys worked with SAVCA to create open-source model investment documents to bring South Africa:

✅ Faster deals
✅ More clarity
✅ Less cost

Want in?

😷 Dust Busters. Sentinel AI has unveiled DustScout, an AI-powered dust monitoring system, revolutionising South African mining safety with real-time, vehicle-mounted detection of hazardous dust like silica. Very cool.

🚗 Sigh of Relief. On Wednesday, diesel prices will drop by up to 57c per litre and petrol by a modest 4c. While it doesn't erase earlier hikes, it's a welcome respite, especially with diesel being cheaper than last year. Hello weekend road trip plans.

🚀 Santam Goes Global. SA insurance giant Santam reported a robust first half of 2025 with a 19.53% boost in earnings per share and plans for an ambitious leap abroad, particularly in the United Kingdom and the United States. Watching this…

🎬 Blast From The Past. Movie ticket prices got you down? Well, grab your pricey popcorn and steep Slush Puppy for Ster-Kinekor's Throwback Cinema where old-school flieks hit the big screen for just R50 a pop. Not too shabby.

✅ The Stack. Founders need reliable tools and suppliers. That’s why our Founder’s Stack gives you full-funnel tech performance marketing by Stream, hardware, software, acceleration and funding for remarkable builds with Octoco and loads more vital startup tools & services.

Yesterday, we explored some of the story behind EasyEquities and SA’s investment revolution, asking if you buy shares online. Not surprisingly, most do…

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 📱 Yep — EasyEquities is my happy place, I trade regularly (44%)

🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ 📈 Only ETFs — set & forget (26%)

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🪙 I’m more into crypto — laser eyes on the charts (2%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🧑‍💼 Someone manages it for me — I outsource the stress (10%)

🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🐣 Not yet — keen to start soon (18%)

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🙅 Nope — no interest, thanks (0)

Your 2 cents…

Great, Joanne! Putting Rands to good use. 🫡

LOL, Wendy, but yeah that’s progress. Nice! 🚀

Five years before Google, a Swiss computer science professor created W3 Catalog, the first-ever search engine. It went live on 2 September 1993 and was reportedly also known as “jughead” to some.

It didn’t actually crawl web pages in real-time, btw, it just reformatted the content from web resource lists. But it sparked some ideas: Google launched on 15 Sept 1998, W3 Catalog went offline two months later.

🛠 Tool to Try: Nuraform gives you AI-powered forms that auto-summarise responses and surface insights at a fraction of Typeform’s price.

🤔 That’s Interesting: In 2018, a hurricane washed away the island where half of Hawaii’s green sea turtle nests (don’t worry, 60% recovered again by 2023).

🔥 Next Level: This 9-year-old stops a runaway vehicle all by himself.

🍔 Hack: Better strategy? Try this clean, visual cheat sheet for strategic planning.

🌐 Wow Site: Feeling nostalgic? Head over to Win32 Run and pretend you’re still on Windows XP.

We are always keen to get reader feedback to help make The Open Letter the most useful of its kind for you. So please select