In early 2020, just before South Africa entered hard lockdown during the COVID pandemic, Heinrich de Lange and I co-founded the Octoco Group, a technology group based in Stellenbosch, South Africa. We initially planned only to share some overheads and clients, but before we knew it the company had grown into a formidable team serving clients across four continents.

The Octoco Group was originally conceived as an "outsourced CTO company" (hence the name) that provides a combination of technology and business development support to clients who do not have an experienced full-time CEO. Today, the Octoco Group's services range from IoT design and software development, to C-level technology risk management, board advisory services, investment readiness support, and tech due diligence support.

Through the Octoco Group I supported the Alphawave Group with Innovation Management for a number of years. While doing this innovation consulting, I was involved in the early ideation of Scout and served in an advisory capacity. ByteFuse later spun out of Scout. From June 2021 through December 2023, I served as Technical Director at Fanfire — a company that used emerging Web3 technologies to support mainstream businesses outside of what would generally be considered "crypto". Fanfire has since closed completely.

Fanfire helped commercialize the "impossible" land art of Strijdom van der Merwe, introduced a new way of collecting fine wine with Vaulted Wine, and made the creation of new NFT marketplaces affordable and fast with Bodega.

In 2013, during my tenure as Associate Professor in Electronic Engineering at Stellenbosch University, we patented a technique to use blockchain bounties directly embedded into media files as a way to trace the origin of piracy. This turned out to be one of the earliest patents describing a use case for what today would be called NFTs. The patent showed commercial value, and we spun out Custos Media Technologies. When the startup raised sufficient funding I resigned my academic position to lead Custos full-time. I stepped down as CEO in 2020, just before the Octoco Group was founded, and now do consulting work for Custos through Octoco Consulting.

Custos embeds a cryptocurrency secret direct into a media file by using forensic watermarks. For example, the Custos system can be used to hide a secret associated with the identity of a movie reviewer who receives a copy of a film before cinematic release. If the movie “leaks”, any recipient of the pirate film can use the secret to anonymously claim a cryptocurrency bounty, thus revealing the identity of the original infringer, namely the movie reviewer. We successfully applied the same concept to images, e-books, and other types of media as well.

In 2020 I briefly returned to Stellenbosch University as the Research Chair in the Internet of Things. However, the Octoco Group soon started growing rapidly and we co-founded Fanfire, where I served as Technical Director. It soon became clear that my industry work was not compatible with a full-time academic position, and I resigned my tenure for a second time 🙈.

I retain my ties to academia as Extra-Ordinary Associate Professor, with a strong interest in innovation management and technology transfer. My research supervision includes the Internet of Things and Blockchain applications, and I lecture on these topics as a small part of the Manufacturing Systems 314 module.

In 2007, Stellenbosch University was approached by Naspers to drive postgraduate research in the emerging field of “New Media” — what we would today call Social Media and “Web2” technologies. Prof Herman Engelbrecht and I co-founded the Media Lab to work on pre-commercial applied research on topics such as Augmented Reality, Gaming, E-Commerce, Broadband Connectivity, Computer Vision and Machine Learning. The lab itself was run a bit like a startup, and had a very strong focus on tech entrepreneurship.

Today, the lab's alumni hold (sometimes very senior) positions with global leaders like DeepMind, YouTube, SourceGraph, Google and Amazon Web Services.

In 2013, Prof Herman Engelbrecht (my co-director at the Lab), Fred Lutz (then a Master's student in the Lab) and myself invented and patented the core blockchain technology underpinning Custos Media Technologies, which eventually spun out from the Lab.