Cape Town, South Africa
Burton Labs is a technology company. It builds and publishes its own software: mobile apps, web products and practical tools, most of them built for problems that are specific to how people actually live and work here.
Prepaid electricity, made legible
South African prepaid electricity is opaque by design. PowerMeter logs your token purchases, reads your meter from a photo, and turns the result into cost per kWh, usage trends and a monthly forecast in rands, including VAT.
A smart catalogue for the toolbox
Photograph a tool and Fettle identifies it, catalogues it, and remembers where it lives. It also tracks which batteries fit which tools across Milwaukee, DeWalt, Makita and Bosch, so the wrong pack never gets bought again.
One tap, one very loud bird
A one-tap arcade flyer starring South Africa's least subtle bird. Flap a hadeda past Table Mountain, down jacaranda-lined streets and through Highveld thunderstorms, dodging power lines and minibus taxis.
Know who is running, in seconds
Point a phone at the jockeys before a South African race and silkspotter identifies the silks, matches them against the day's race card, and links straight through to the race. Faster than reading the fine print on a card.
A South African word a day, on your home screen
A different South African word or phrase lands on your home screen every morning, across isiZulu, isiXhosa, Afrikaans, Sesotho, Tsotsitaal and Kaaps. Widget first, so it arrives without you having to remember to open anything.
A technology company in Cape Town. It builds and publishes its own software: 5 products are live, covering prepaid electricity, the contents of a toolbox, South African languages, racing silks and one very loud bird.
3 of them read a photograph to do their actual work. Point a camera at a meter and PowerMeter takes the reading. Photograph a tool and Fettle knows the model and which batteries fit it. Photograph the jockeys and silkspotter tells you who is running.
Everything runs on Cloudflare's edge, which is why a product built here for Cape Town loads the same from anywhere.