If Professor Barry Dwolatzky had his way, his new technology hub in Braamfontein would retain the night club dance floor as a centrepiece on which, perish the thought, geeks could party like it was 1999. The affable, teddy bear-like director of the Johannesburg Centre for Software Engineering (JCSE) at Wits University is pursuing a life-long ambition of owning a night club, albeit a club restyled as the focal point of one of Joburg’s newest technology hubs.

The tech hub concept has been around for decades, sparked by the collaboration between US companies and research institutions to produce innovations that laid the foundations for technology we now take for granted. Silicon Valley in the San Francisco Bay area is credited as the birthplace of such collaboration, led in the main by Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Centre from which companies such as 3Com, Adobe, Cisco, Apple and Microsoft drew inspiration.