“A change in perspective is worth 80 extra IQ points,” says 4Dst’s Brent Pinkney. “We have 85 extra.” The CTO of the company has reason to be somewhat immodest. He and COO Andrew Gaylard have put together some heavy-duty solutions for the cellular market in just a couple of years. 4Dst has built a base station that fits on a lamp-post, a lunch box-sized asset tracking system and an awareness engine. Pinkney says the company’s skills are serendipitous.

“We have very specialised experience in the telephone industry,” he says. “Through no great master plan, just the journey of life, we know the engineering from end to end, including in some very specialised areas. We know the African market. We watched the commoditisation of the software stacks. Some of them cost upwards of a quarter of a million dollars and were only available on Tandem hardware. Now they were becoming available for a modest fee on commodity hardware.”