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SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises) play a valuable role in emerging economies. For instance: SMEs contribute greatly towards the employment rate and GDP of their respective economies. Nevertheless, the SME sector is faced with various challenges such as high attrition rate, lack of access to finance, training, technology and even basic business and/or legislative related information. On the other hand; mobile devices are omnipresent; virtually all SMEs owners have access to mobile phones. Furthermore, mobile phones usage to access disparate information other than just making a voice calls has increased over the past few years or so. The emergence of Web 2.0 has also revolutionized the fashion in which the web is utilized to seamlessly access services and information. Moreover, with the current innovations of high-speed wireless networks such as 3G/HSPDA and Wi-Fi; Internet usage on mobile devices is now the norm. Especially, with the emergence of web browsers that can provide similar features and capabilities as those used on desktop computers (e.g Opera Mini). At the same time, mobile phones have greatly been improved in terms of process power, memory sizes and even screen sizes. Global Positioning Systems (GPS) applications are now found on various types of mobile devices (e.g. Nokia 6110). This suggests that mobile phones have vastly improved and are now more than just “voice service” devices, where users only make calls or send short-text messages (SMS).

In this paper, we investigate and report on the possibility of employing Web 2.0 technologies for providing a mini-platform that can support and facilitate seamless access to business information and services via mobile devices by SMEs in emerging economies such as in South Africa. Within this paper, we restrict our investigation to two examples of Web 2.0 and that is: Mashups and Ajax, particularly focusing on JQuery.