01 Capture
Capture
We meet the signal where it lives - an internet radio stream, a solar-powered node on a pole, a phone in someone's hand, a camera beside a highway. Scheduled, resilient, and cheap enough to leave running.
Data product studio South Africa
Most of what happens is never recorded.
Dataflex builds the instruments that capture it. Radio broadcasts, road defects, ambient noise, highway traffic, crowd movement - read continuously, and turned into records you can search, verify and act on.
The method
Same four steps, whatever the signal happens to be.
A radio stream and a noise sensor on a lamp post have nothing in common except this: something is happening continuously, nobody is writing it down, and a decision downstream depends on it.
02 Interpret
Interpret
Audio models, acoustic fingerprinting, computer vision and geospatial rules read the raw capture and propose what it means - always with a confidence attached, never as a bare assertion.
03 Structure
Structure
Every interpretation lands in a schema: timestamped, attributed to its source, auditable against the original capture. If a finding can't be queried and defended, we haven't finished it.
04 Present
Present
Dashboards, charts, maps and print-ready reports built for the person who has to act on the finding - not for the person who built the pipeline.
Flagship in production
RadioSummaries
South African radio reaches millions of people every day and almost none of it is written down. RadioSummaries listens to the stations you choose and produces the record.
Structured summaries of what was actually discussed. Every song identified down to its ISRC. Every ad break logged - and fingerprint-verified proof that the campaign you paid for really aired.
- Reads
- Live streams and previously recorded audio
- Produces
- Broadcast summaries, airplay logs, ad verification
- Exports
- Cue-sheet CSV for royalty submission, print-ready reports
- Runs
- Self-hosted - the archive stays yours
Summaries · 7 days
142
6 monitored stations, 3 formats
Spots verified
38
Mean match confidence 0.94
Airplay · detections per hour00:00 - 23:00
Topic intelligence · "tariff increase"Sentiment, 4 stations
Breakfast talk · 06:40 - 07:10
−0.41
Midday news bulletin · 12:02
−0.18
Drive-time panel · 17:25 - 17:52
−0.63
Current work
Eight products, one method.
Two are in production, the rest are in build or still on the bench. Each one starts with a signal nobody was capturing.
RadioSummaries
LiveRadio intelligence: what was said, what was played, what was advertised - with proof.
Product pageWeAre
In buildFind your group at a festival without handing anyone a location history.
My Beautiful City
In buildPhotographs organised by city, with the location data in the photographer's hands.
Afrolink
In buildA social network built for African bandwidth, African phones and African trends.
Potmap
In designPotholes and dead robots, reported by residents and confirmed by their neighbours.
City Noise Index
PrototypeA public record of how loud a street actually is, measured without ever recording audio.
HighwayCam SA
Pilot planningSolar roadside nodes reporting live road conditions - faces and plates blurred at source.
FrameFeed
LiveTurns a screen already playing something into scheduled ad space, with proof of what ran.
How we build
Four commitments we don't trade away.
Every product on the bench inherits these. They are the reason some features take longer, and the reason we can defend the ones we ship.
01
Privacy is a build constraint, not a policy page.
Our acoustic nodes compute statistics in memory and discard the audio - there is no file to subpoena. Our live-location product never writes a coordinate to disk. Our photo platform asks about location on every single upload rather than once at signup. These are architecture decisions, taken before the first line of product code, because a promise you can't demonstrate isn't worth making.
02
A number you can't audit isn't a finding.
Every record we produce carries its source, its timestamp and its confidence. A detection can be played back against the original capture. An export arrives in the format the receiving body actually accepts. When a client puts our output in front of a regulator, an advertiser or a board, it has to survive the question "how do you know?"
03
Designed for the network you actually have.
Mid-range Android phones, expensive data, load-shedding, patchy LTE, and a user who is standing outside in the sun. We build against South African conditions first - data-saver modes, offline tolerance, solar power budgets, low-bandwidth uplinks - and generalise outward from there. It makes the products better everywhere else too.
04
The last mile is the product.
A pipeline that fills a database table has done half the job. We finish at the report, the chart, the map and the CSV that someone can hand to their client, their municipality or their rights organisation. Presentation isn't the polish on the analysis - for the person receiving it, presentation is the analysis.
Start here
Tell us what you wish you were measuring.
Whether it's a pilot of RadioSummaries, a product from the bench, or a signal in your own operation that nobody is capturing yet - the first conversation is about the problem, not the platform.