PICTURE: ISTOCK Later this year Vinny Lingham will launch a service that has the potential to solve a persistent problem that South Africans seem blissfully unaware of: identity theft.“We are trying to solve the identity problem for consumers,” he told me last week when he returned to SA to speak at several conferences.The affable Lingham is now best known as one of the judges in the local edition of the televised business ideas competition Dragon’s Den. But in geek circles he’s a legend who has built three technology start-ups.The last two are Yola (for building websites), which received $30-million in venture funding, and Gyft (to aggregate gift cards and other loyalty schemes), which he sold for a reported $50-million to First Data, the largest payments company in the world.He started his first company (Clicks2Customers) when he was 24. He says it “drove more than $100-million in annual paid-for search marketing for its clients”.Now, Lingham is turning his knack for spotting a go...
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