It’s not that often that one of Africa’s new web companies makes a big international splash. Synthasite has done just that, just announcing a $5 million round of financing from Swiss-based Columbus Venture Capital. That’s big money no matter where you’re at, and I’m interested in seeing what Synthasite does with it.

Synthasite is a free Web 2.0 Publishing Platform that allows users to construct a website without any knowledge of HTML or programming, using drag & drop along with configurable dialog windows. The Company recently launched its AJAX based platform into Beta and has attracted nearly 10,000 users so far. Synthasite also plans to open it’s platform to third party developers next year, in order to allow them to create widgets, templates & other plugins for the platform.

I’ve been particularly impressed watching Vinny Lingham’s hard work and determination to make Synthasite into something bigger – something global. When he sent me the press release, I was really happy to hear the news, because it shows that firms in Africa have the possibility of building global software/websites and can play at the same level as their counterparts around the world.

They’ll be using part of this money to create a larger footprint outside of South Africa. Vinny will be opening an office in California, so will have part of his team in the US and the other still in Africa. This is a really important move actually – those who are in this space realize how hard it is to be taken seriously amongst the web intelligentsia if you’re not located in their own back yard.

Giving it a Test Run
I haven’t tested Synthasite since last year, so I got to work creating a simple site to test out what is possible. First off, it is SO much easier to use than the previous version. I remember how hard of a time I had on the first version – and I know what I’m doing on the web, and this new version is so much better that I think the only thing that remains the same is the name of the product.

The basic design templates look outstanding and seem to work well with the editing. Adding images and text was a breeze, as was adding more pages.

One of my favorite features is that you can download your whole website as a zip file. Doing something like this allows you to use their editor to build your site, but you can still host it on your own server if you like. Nice addition!

There seems to be a lack of widgets, the one thing that the old Synthasite had a lot of. Before, you could build Yahoo and Amazon affiliate widgets into your site quite easily, I didn’t see that option at all anymore. Hopefully they’ll see some real 3rd-party development as I’d like to see a full widget library for people to use.

Summary
If you’re in Africa, why should you care about Synthasite? Well, it’s a free website builder offering free hosting – given the internet costs in Africa – this should appeal to many people. It’s a good product, that’s easy to use and will allow novices to build a good looking site easily.

The stock markets in Africa have shown incredible growth over the last few years. There are a lot of investors around the world interested in both information and analysis of the stocks, companies and countries where the exchanges are located. Invariably, entrepreneurs flock to where the money is and you start seeing some interesting websites show up.

The List of African Stock Exchanges
Wikipedia has full list of the current African stock exhanges. There appears to be coverage in 37 countries, with one regional stock exchange, the Bourse Régionale des Valeurs Mobilières (BRVM), which serves 8 countries; Benin, Burkina Faso, Guinea Bissau, Côte d’Ivoire, Mali, Niger, Senegal and Togo. You can also take a look at Mbendi, that has a somewhat dated list, with links and contact information for each exchange.

The Opportunities
Quite obviously, the web is the best place to play with information and make it available worldwide. When a developer looks at the opportunity in this space, he sees a mountain of data – the key ingredient to a successful web application. A smart developer sees this as the beginning, knowing that he has to harness both data AND people in order to make the website a hit. It’s a virtual playground – literally and figuratively.

As an investor, the perfect type of website for you would be a website that allows you to find all the historical information about a specific stock and/or company, see analysis, communicate with other investors and possibly manage transactions as well.

If you play your cards right, you can create the go-to site for information around stocks for a country. If you’re ambitious, you could do it on a continent-wide level.

I wanted to see if consumer sites like Google Finance and Yahoo Finance were tracking stocks in Africa. Google does follow the stocks, but without much more than some cursory company data, financials and news feeds. Yahoo doesn’t track anything besides indexes outside of the US (as far as I could tell).

The Caveat
Each country has it’s own rules regulating how information is passed with regards to stocks. It gets even more interesting when you throw in the ability to actually buy and sell stocks online. Anyone who gets into this space needs to be hyper-aware of the laws that regulate what they can/cannot do.

This is pretty big news. Kiva has been the only option for individuals who want to invest small amounts of money into micro-entrepreneurs around the world. However, it’s a non-profit organization, so the investor cannot actually make any interest on the money lent.

MicroPlace is a new peer-to-peer lending platform backed by eBay that has gone through all the necessary SEC regulatory hoops that make it possible for investors to invest in these individuals and make a return on their investment. It is made primarily for the US market, allowing individuals to loan as little as $50.

For those of us who keep calling for more ways to allow investment money to flow into entrepreneurs hands in Africa, this is a great thing. Personally, I’m glad that an organization the size of eBay was able to muscle their way through the US financial regulatory system in order to put out a platform that allows true investment. Whether or not “real” investors want to get involved in P2P micro-lending, and the inherent risks found in fluctuating currency rates and micro-lenders and -borrowers.

Looking more closely into the opportunities in Africa, I found a total of 4, all offered by the Calvert Foundation. Among them are opportunities with micro-finance institutions in Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania and Ghana. All of the interest rates are set at 2-3%/per year with a 3 year maturity. Impressively, these 4 organizations manage $72 million, but impact a startling 340,000 active borrowers.

Honestly, I’ve been critical of some of eBay’s efforts around the world before, but not this time. This is an excellently designed site, great functionality and one that fulfills their mission.

More reading:

• BusinessWeek has a really good article on MicroPlace.
• Rob Katz at NextBillion gives a good overview of the differences between MicroPlace and Kiva