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White African
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6:33
From: White African
Read This Entry & More At White African
Most of June I spent in Kenya, much of that time talking to developers and getting ready for the next big Ushahidi push. During that time there was a new article about Ushahidi being one of the “Ten Startups to Watch” in the Technology Review, which was exciting for us to say the least!
July and August have been spent working hard on getting the application rebuilt, the site redesigned and creating partnerships with other organizations. September is about launching the NEW Ushahidi.
A New Website
Now we’re off and running with a new website design, live today, that shows how our goals and focus have changed since things blew up in Kenya. (get a new Ushahidi button for your site.)
Funding
I’m very happy to announce that we’ve secured more than the $25,000 prize money from NetSquared (which has allowed us to do so much already). We have also just secured a grant of $200,000 from Humanity United!
 Humanity United is an independent grantmaking organization committed to building a world where modern-day slavery and mass atrocities are no longer possible. They support efforts that empower affected communities and address the root causes of conflict and modern-day slavery to build lasting peace.
There is an obvious fit between Humanity United and Ushahidi, after all, we were founded on the same beliefs back in January in Kenya. Though we’re creating the Ushahidi engine as an open source project, our goal remains to see it used to better understand, give warning of, and recover from mass atrocities.
The Vision
Ushahidi is moving from being a one-time mashup covering the post-election violence in Kenya to something bigger. We are setting out to create an engine that will allow anyone to do what we did. A free and open source tool that will help in the crowdsourcing of information - with our personal focus on crisis and early warning information.
We see this tool being used in two ways:
- First, to crowdsource crisis information by creating an online space that allows “everyday” people all over the world to report what they see during a crisis situation, and whose reports are generally overlooked or under reported by most media and governments.
- Second, make that software engine free and available to the world, so that others can benefit from a tool that allows distributed data gathering and data visualizations.
We’re aiming to release an alpha version of it in just a few weeks for internal testing, and for alpha testing with pre-screened pilot organizations.
Volunteer Devs, Designers and Others
One of the reasons Ory and I were in Kenya was to talk to developers about helping with Ushahidi. We were overwhelmed with the amount of interest and the quality of the people who stepped up. So far we have a team working on mobile phones, a designers group, and a number of PHP experts. Go ahead and take a look at the development wiki as well.
If you’d like to play a part, get in touch and we’ll see where you can best fit in. You don’t have to be a developer or designer either.
[Credits: Richard “Ochie” Flores for the excellent design, Kwame Nyong’o for the beautiful illustrations, and Ivan Bernat for the spotless HTML/CSS markup.)
Press Release: Ushahidi Funding & New Website (PDF)
 
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7:45
From: White African
Read This Entry & More At White African
 Recently Merlin Mann wrote an outstanding post on what makes a good blog, and why they’re so rare. I’d suggest everyone read it, especially if you’re trying to figure out how to be a better blogger. Having said that, in honor of BlogDay 2008, here are 5 Africa-focused blogs that I think are interesting. Keep in mind, I’m particularly interested in African tech so that’s why they lean in that direction…
Nairobi Notes
I initially found out about Nairobi Notes through her Twitter updates (@nairobinotes) - they were interesting, funny and timely, which eventully led me to her blog.
Startup Africa
First off, I love their name - I’m just not sure how they got that amazing URL… How was it not taken? Anyway, Startup Africa does an excellent job of providing news on events, websites and startups in Africa, with a particularly good focus on South Africa.
TechMasai
Another new favorite of mine in the African web tech scene is TechMasai. They profile new African websites and services, often with some opinionated commentary which I like.
Mootbox
Short, interesting, and tends to be Nigeria-focused. In Omodudu’s own words, it’s about, “business, Micro-finance, Social Entrepreneurship, Small business development and other assorted randomness.” Follow Oz on Twitter too @Osize.
Jackfruity
I could just tell you that I like this blog because of it’s design - I’ve always salivated over Rebekah’s site design(s). However, she writes really cool and interesting stuff about Uganda, Sudan and humanitarian issues too. Keep her in your feed.
That’s all for this year!
 
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21:52
From: White African
Read This Entry & More At White African
 I’ve been waiting for someone to create an African ad network for a couple of years, and I’m really happy to see that Pamoja Media has launched. Started by Joshua Wanyama (of AfricanPath) and Benin Mwangi (of Cheetah Index), it’s an ad network created to serve advertisers trying looking for a one-stop-shop for publishers in Africa, or that reach Africans in the diaspora.
Publishers
Pamoja is brand new, and just starting to get going. That hasn’t stopped them from gathering an impressive list of publishers with a total of 10 million impressions dedicated and another 10 million more confirmed impressions if ad inventory is filled. That’s impressive, but more interesting is to see some of the names on their list of publishers, including: Mail & Guardian (South Africa), the Daily Nation (Kenya), Modern Ghana and Stock Market Nigeria.
Other publishers are welcome to apply, as long as they meet the following requirements:
- Be focused on Africa, or the African diaspora
- An Alexa ranking of 250,000 or better
- Have a minimum of 2000 pageviews per day
- Be aesthetically pleasing (or at least not embarassing)
Advertisers
as whoever has been involved in this knows, getting publishers on board is the easy part. Everyone of them is happy to go with the media outfit that will provide them with a solid amount of advertising income. Getting advertisers is the hard part, and that’s where Pamoja Media is focusing their work now that they have the initial 20 million impressions. Current advertisers include Pingo, PoaPay, Accents Telecom and Zain.
Advertisers joining so far have come in because they’ve seen the brand name portals available through the network. Pamoja can get them on board at a better rate for a smaller advertiser than if they go to the Nation or M&G themselves, because they do a bulk buy with multiple advertisers. As the network grows with other large portals giving up excess inventory, Pamoja will become even more attractive than it already is.
Joshua Wanyama and Benin Mwangi of Pamoja Media
(I happened to take this about 1.5 years ago on a chance meet up)
Final Thoughts
Pamoja is onto something here. One of Pamoja’s really big focuses is to get advertisers to start looking and buying advertising on websites built for African readers in Africa. That means they need to continue looking for partners who can extend the value of the African network in Europe and Africa - people and agencies who already have connections. It will be crucial for those relationships to come together in order for more brandname advertisers to come on board and give even greater credibility to the network.
Pamoja is new, so like any other startup they have to prove themselves before the bigger advertisers come to the table. Right now they’re attracting small- to medium-sized advertisers (outside of Zain) through providing value added consulting and design services. With that capability, and time and proof of success, the network should be able to increase their margins and possibly roll out additional business units.
I think a lot about the fact that most Africans aren’t online reading websites in Africa - the penetration just isn’t there yet. That means this is a perfect time to grow a business and grow a name in a space with little to know other competition. As it the market grows, so will Pamoja.
Closely related to that last point is the fact that there’s a wide open space in the mobile market in this space too, and I hope that Joshua and Benin are thinking strategically about how they will incorporate mobile advertising in their network in the near future.
 
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8:21
From: White African
Read This Entry & More At White African
 Earlier this year a new blog burst onto the African tech scene, and it hasn’t let up. In fact, it’s growing from a blog into a place for open source developers to work together. The man behind Appfrica is Jon Gosier, an energetic and proactive developer now living in Kampala, Uganda. Below is a short email interview that I did with him last week.
Q: What do you do?
Jon: I’m a glorified computer geek who works as a self-employed web developer and social media consultant in East Africa.
Q: What inspires you?
Jon: I’m a big fan of what’s going with the internet right now, specifically all the theory and development related to the semantic web (microformats, artificial intelligence, computational linguistics and dataparsing) where all that is heading. Simply put, technology inspires me.
Q: How did you get interested in Africa? Why Uganda?
Jon: I’m in Africa because of my girlfriend. She (also from the United States) works for an NGO called Water For People and they hired her as the African Regional Manager to supervise the launch of new offices in Rwanda, Malawi and Uganda over the next three years. At the time, I was spending a lot of time in San Francisco trying to find funding for various start-up ideas. It became clear to me that Silicon Valley VC space was becoming very insular, people were funding social networks built around other social networks and web apps for tasks like sorting email. My work was more social entrepreneurial and the response in the Valley was lukewarm at best. So I decided I’d go to Africa with her and execute my own ideas.
Q: Appfrica.net sprung onto the scene earlier this year. Where do you see that going, and how will you utilize it as a platform while in Africa?
Jon: App+frica is an initiative that facilitates African software developers and internet entrepreneurs. It’s entirely self-funded. Unfortunately, there aren’t many organizations outside of Africa that see the benefit of mentoring students and entrepreneurs in technology.
Appfrica also organizes events and workshops for local developers. Things like the Facebook Developer Workshop (18 October 2008) and Kampala Barcamp (19 August 2008), the upcoming µganda (Mobile Apps Uganda) and App+Asia. I also do hands on workshops where I’m teaching young developers programming and web development skills that will make them more competitive in the world market. You can read more at Appfrica.org.
The blog is Appfrica.net. Essentially it’s about innovation, development, social media and the internet as it all relates to Africa. There’s been some pretty healthy discussions around the content and Although I currently write everything, I’ve reached out to some local people who are considering joining the staff.
code.appfrica.net is a software repository that hosts and facilitates African developers. You might call it an Amazon S3-like service for Africa. Because there is no easy way to purchase things via the web in Africa (because many financial institutions don’t offer credit cards), something that many people don’t really have is access to is personal space on web servers outside of school. An even bigger problem is that there are very few local servers here and using anything hosted outside of the continent can be incredibly slow. It’s my goal to offer free, local server space to developers so that they can learn from each other, communicate freely and share. The site consists of a forum for African programmers, a subversion (SVN) server and a web version control system (TRACS). It also offers distributed file storage for developers like S3.
Beyond that, I try my best to help reshape misconceptions about Africa in the west by participating in technology conferences around the world. Even in the age of information people are surprisingly ignorant about Africa…especially when it comes to technology. When I mention Africa to people in the western business world, they overwhelmingly start asking questions about Darfur, Idi Amin and Robert Mugabi. It’s especially difficult to get technology conferences to let anyone in to even represent Africa or African technology companies.
The people of Africa account for over 14% of the worlds population and despite the AIDS epidemic, that number is growing (according to the C.I.A’s World Factbook). Why do people to often look the other way when it comes to technology and business here? Are businesses really afraid or do they just not understand the African market enough to care? The blog has largely become a way to get people in the West noticing all the wonderful things going on in the IT space here while also reporting the latest tech news for Africans.
Q: What is Question Box and what are your plans for that project?
Jon: QuestionBox.org is a project launched by Rose Shuman who lives in Los Angeles, CA in the United States. Her idea was to essentially allow people in rural areas around the world to use the internet via their mobile phones. It works like this: people in rural areas call or SMS the service with their question. A local operator consults a database (which also includes web searches) to discover the answer to those questions. The operator then responds in the local language.
My role as Chief Technical Officer is to build the software backend and to help direct growth and scalability. The service will allow for use via mobile device, the web or phone. For the SMS portion we’re integrating a micro-messaging application. When people SMS in their questions, we can index them and add them to a database that can be searched quickly offline. We can also publish the database online for the benefit of researchers or people using the web. Since internet connections aren’t as reliable as they are in the West, the service is built to work offline and only crawls the internet when it has a connection.
This allows people in rural, developing areas to get access to relevant information without the need for computers which are often not an option. What is an option, often already available, is mobile devices which have very high penetration numbers in the African market.
It’s our goal to democratize information in emerging markets using technology. So far the pilot programs have been huge regional successes. QuestionBox ran pilot programs in India last year and it encouraged her to expand to other areas of India as well as Africa starting with rural Uganda.
Q: You’ve been on the ground in Uganda for a couple weeks. First impressions?
Jon: One month exactly and we’ll be here for the next three years. We just got a house in the suburbs of the capital city Kampala. Getting reliable internet has been a huge chore, but that could be expected. I love it so far. Kampala is great, it’s very diverse and friendly. I’m looking forward to seeing more of Africa. I’ve got meetings next month in Rwanda and Tanzania and I’m working on going to Kenya and Egypt which are among the leaders of ICT development in the region.
 
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9:09
From: White African
Read This Entry & More At White African
Paul Jacobson is a lawyer and long-time South African blogger. He wrote a post today, “Blogging is, like, so 2007″, that triggered some thoughts I’ve had on blogging and growth. In it he talks about how the there are many more ways to publish your thoughts to the web other than your blog (lifestreaming), and how that fractured state leads to less value being placed in blogging.
Asymptotic Growth in Publishing
I think there’s more to it than just the number of ways to communicate, it’s also about the number of new people who come online each year with their own blog, Twitter comments, Facebook Note, etc. Each year there is more content being put online and so your own voice matters less relative to the sum of all noise out there. This applies to niches, and the web in general, and I refer to it as asymptotic publishing growth.
Put another way, even if your blog grows more readers every year, it shrinks in relation to the whole.
This is particularly apparent to first-movers in any new platform. At first you have an inordinate amount of “voice” in a specific sphere, which seems to erode over time.
Islands of Influence
One of my theories on what happens as these environments mature is that as they grow and there becomes more and more options for readers, that there tends to be a coalescing or readers around a certain few blogs or publishers. Though every one of the publishers is likely growing in size, there are certain “keystone” blogs to each niche that have an inordinate amount of influence relative to the general blog in that space.
For example, as a technology blog reader, I might visit 10 blogs every day. However, three of those are likely the same as everyone else.
I compare this to teen hangout locations. There are a lot of places to hang out, and everyone tends to go to a few of their favorite places. However, everyone knows the place to be on Friday night, and that’s the place where the majority of teens go.
In Summary
There will always be more noise in the blogosphere, or whichever publishing platform is your choice of the moment, than when you first started in it. However, those that provide the most value to the readers will continue to grow and also garner a greater relative audience than their peers.
Basically, asymptotic growth is a truth that we all have to live with, but there will always be islands of influence.
 
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9:08
From: White African
Read This Entry & More At White African
A heads-up on two upcoming blog event days that are worth participating in.
BlogDay 2008 - August 31
I really like BlogDay as it’s a chance to show a little love to some bloggers that are new, really good or unique. I always tend to find at least a couple new blogs that I didn’t know existed before. All you need to do is pick 5 blogs and write a quick blurb about them with a link to their site. Simple. Easy. Effective. (I’ve already got my 5 picked out, and the post written!)
Blog Action Day - October 15
Blog Action Day focuses on a specific global issue and asks bloggers the world over to focus on that for one day. Last year 20,000 bloggers wrote with a laser focus about the environment - we did a post on AfriGadget for it. This year the conversation is focused on poverty.
Blog Action Day 2008 Poverty from Blog Action Day on Vimeo.
 
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21:31
From: White African
Read This Entry & More At White African
 Last weekend there was a live screencast of the Aspen Institute’s Forum on Communications and Society, and one of the meetings that I tuned in to was the one on Media and Civic Engagement. The members of that meeting was a who’s who of media, regulatory and business moguls that are trying to, or have cracked, the online space (Craig Newmark of Craigslist, Marissa Mayer of Google, Peter Shane of the Knight Foundation, Dana Boyd, etc…).
Google on Anonymity VS Trust
I heard a very troubling comment during that discussion, and surprisingly it came from Marissa Mayer of Google (found at 52:45). That was how anonymity is the enemy of trust, and that she doesn’t see a future for anonymity online. It destroys community and promotes anarchy.
To give some sense of reference, without having to watch the video, here is a word-for-word transcription of Marissa’s comments. It starts with her talking about youth and misinformation on the web leading to apathy, she stated:
“…I think it’s really important as we look at tools to think about how we can support fact checking, how can we guard against misinformation, how is there going to be established an element of authority and trustworthiness? …I grew up with the newspaper and the encyclopedia, which you could trust. And now you have blogs, which are held often as news and often aren’t factual. Or you have Wikipedia, which usually gets most things right, but there are a lot times there is vandalism or corrections that need to be made.”
“When you look at the elements of anonymity and the lack of accountability that happens on the web, it really does start to create doubt in the fibers of who can you trust. Especially when you think of why should I engage? The sense of identity. If I’m anonymous and I’m not accountable for my actions and there are other people out there putting out a lot of misinformation of which the same is true, I think it does lead to apathy and a lack of engagement, which is why I think it is important as we look at these tools to understand the effects of identity. To understand the effect of accountability, authority, trustworthiness and make sure that we’re developing tools and social systems online that encourage an element of engagement and try to fight that apathy trend that says, ‘well I just can’t trust anything. Why should I care?’.
On the question of if there is a way to hone in on the issue of misinformation, beside media literacy:
“Well, I think there are two ways to look at it, on the institutional level and on the individual level. So I think that what you’re seeing is that there are institutions that are rising up online that basically have an element of brand and credibility and standards that they apply. When you look at the Huffington Post, the Drudge Report, inherently the people who run those organizations are saying that here are stories I believe, I believe they’re verified enough that I’m willing to attach my brand and my name to it. So you can see that that’s starting to happen on an institution level online.”
“And I also think there are individual systems where people are verified or credentialed, or you have a profile that tells all about you and shows the other contributions you’ve made to the system. Just there’s greater accountability on the personal level… So I think a lot of the systems that support pure anonymity… I really believe that virtual systems should mirror physical systems. The physical world has been around for a lot longer, and in the physical world you really can’t do anything anonymously. So when you look at systems online that break that paradigm where you can be completely anonymous, or be whoever you want to be, without any since of history or of what you did last week, that’s not really reality and that breaks down the elements of trust and authority.“
That’s about where I jumped in with my comments on not being able to trust those who are monitoring your online speech. Where Marissa then answered:
“Well, I think anonymity has its place. So there’s certainly times, when you know you should have commentary or some type of act giving should be anonymous. But, by and large most systems should have accountability the same way they do in the physical world.”
Besides all of my thoughts swirling around the fact that the web really grew due to anonymity, I balked at this comment because I was surprised at hearing one of the highest Google executives speak so lightly of it.
Projecting Our World Onto Others
Maybe this is where I differ a little from my American tech counterparts. You see, there’s something about growing up in a country where you can’t pretend to believe that the government really has your best interests at heart that makes one a little squeemish about not having this anonymous free speech. For, if it wasn’t anonymous, then it definitely wouldn’t be free.
We have a way of projecting our world view on to those around us. In this case, I believe Google (or Marissa) is doing just that. Having these open, trusting, everyone-knows-everyone systems is all well and good when you live in the US. It’s not so good in other parts of the world.
It’s especially not good when you ask who controls all that personal information, and how they let outside bodies (government or otherwise) access that personal data about you.
I came to terms a few years ago about having a lot of personal information on the web, open to others. That’s a personal decision, and not one that any company should be making claims to knowing what’s right to do or not. What I hear, extrapolating from this, is that it’s okay if you don’t want to be a part of it, you can always opt out - but if you do, you also opt out of any meaningful part in the discussion. Frankly, I find that troubling.
Video Archive
Below is the video archive of this talk on Media and Civic Engagement, and is about 1.5 hours (browse the “on demand library” and it’s the 6th from the top on the list):
[Rachel Sterne of Groundreport created a great backchannel platform for viewers to discuss these items in real-time, and there was some direct discussion happening between online commenters and the participants in the room.]
 
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22:11
From: White African
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8:00
From: White African
Read This Entry & More At White African
 Biz Stone let the world know that Twitter’s SMS service is no longer active in Africa - or anywhere outside of the US, Canada and India. To most people in Africa this means absolutely nothing, as the penetration rate for the service never moved beyond the few fringe users amongst the technology elite.
Why this is Important
I’m guessing that at least half of this blog’s readers are wondering why they should even care about this news. After all, it sounds like some new trendy mobile/web app has failed to expand outside of North America - how is that news for Africa?
Twitter represents a change in communication. By acting as a global gateway for updates via SMS (or the web), that then updates all of your followers, Twitter succeeded in breaking ground in one-to-many messaging. There have been a couple times over the past year where Twitter was used in Africa to get news out that wasn’t possible in any other format.
Two examples come to mind, specifically addressing humanitarian uses; first, there’s the case of it being used in Egypt to help a jailed user, and second was when Juliana used it during the Kenyan post-election violence to update about events in Western Kenya in lieu of a blog post.
Soyapi wrote a post a couple months back talking about the potential for Twitter in Africa. In areas like Africa where mobile phone penetration far outstrips internet penetration, Twitter ends up being an incredibly good way to update friends, family - or in the case of businesses and government, the general public - about things that are happening.
“Realizing that a lot of people in the developing world have migrated from their home villages to cities both within and outside their countries and continents, they still need to some updates about the goings-on in their home towns.”
What’s Next?
In our globally connected world, if your service can’t cover the globe, then you need to open it up for communication between similar services. What we really need is a platform that allows Twitter-like applications to “talk” to each other globally. If I set up a similar platform in West Africa then there should be a way for Twitter users in the US to also accept my updates. Closed gardens in this case create single points of failure. (I’m interested in the less restrictive Identi.ca platform.)
This global contraction by Twitter creates opportunities for others. Jaiku, recently purchased by Google, now has the ability to grow deeper into other regional markets. And, if nothing else, Twitter has done us all a favor by launching a global pilot project that proves out the usefulness of this type of service. Launching country- or region-specific clones of this same type of service is now a real option.
 
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12:52
From: White African
Read This Entry & More At White African
Jeremy at the NaijaBlog talks about two eCommerce websites in Nigeria: Reloadng and Wishstop. He has another interesting one on a simple power solution for Nigeria.
Ethan Zuckerman is using Google Insight to look at what is most important in some African countries. Including the fact that one of the most searched for term in Nigeria is for email spam software. It’s not just Nigeria, but a strong focus in West Africa.
Oluniyi David Ajao talks about Automated Thieving Machines (ATMs) in Lagos, Nigeria.
The Washington Post writes about Reverse Brain Drain in Nigeria, where opportunity and money are drawing back the young businessmen and entrepreneurs from the West.
 
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8:24
From: White African
Read This Entry & More At White African
A couple weeks ago Ellen Petry Leanse and Kaushal Jhalla announced that they wanted to put on a Barcamp Africa for afrophiles living in the San Francisco area. They’re both good friends of Ushahidi and we liked the idea, so David and I jumped in where we could (David created the logo). Ellen is also happens to be very well connected in the Bay area, she used to work as an Apple evangelist back in the day alongside Guy Kawasaki, and was directly involved in the success Ribbit has seen lately.
Due to that connection with Guy Kawasaki, the next thing I knew I was being asked for a list of potential blogs and news services to be a part of a new Africa category on Alltop.com - Guy Kawasaki’s news aggregation site. Being a technology blogger first, most of my contributions were in that field. Many of them taken directly from my RSS feed reader, as there hasn’t been a blogroll here in years (due to a glitch in my sidebar that I never fixed…).
Few other people I know had access to, or cared enough, about Africa to get Guy to create the new Africa.Alltop.com. However, Ellen has a strong desire to see increased innovation and change happen, and she is particularly well connected and knowledgeable in technology. Her connection to Africa was solidified as she and her son were caught in Western Kenya during the post-election violence in Kenya earlier this year (an amazing story that I hope everyone gets to read sometime). She comes directly out of Malcolm Gladwell’s “Tipping Point“, I’m just not sure which category she fits in yet.
I’ll be interested in seeing how the list on Alltop grows and morphs over time. For the time being I’ll use it as a supplement for my daily Africa news. I’m just happy that African news and bloggers are gaining additional attention outside of the traditional African blog echo chamber.
If you think there is a good pan-African blog that was missed, or just a really good African blog with a wide readership, make sure you suggest it.
Sidenote
As is increasingly true, the best place to follow each of these individuals/events is on Twitter at:
Twitter.com/chep2m - Ellen
Twitter.com/ksjhalla - Kaushal
Twitter.com/guykawasaki - Guy
Twitter.com/barcampafrica - Barcamp Africa
 
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0:21
From: White African
Read This Entry & More At White African
The Africa Report’s quarterly magazine has come out, this time with a report on mobile phones, internet penetration, BPO zones and mobile banking. If you’re not subscribed to this quarterly magazine yet, you should - it’s available in almost every country. Personally speaking, it’s one of only three magazines I subscribe to (the others are MAKE and Technology Review).
“The division between the ICT ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ now runs through the heart of the continent, geographically and generationally. While young urban Kenyans and Nigerians feel at home messaging one another on social-networking sites, the elders in the rural landlocked hinterlands have yet to send an email, and many have never made a phone call. Tunisia and Morocco compete furiously with one another in the business process outsourcing (BPO) market for francophone call centres, but most businesses in the Sahel have never heard of doing their accounts on Excel spreadsheets.
Mobile Broadband Internet in Africa
While it’s good to talk about mobile phone penetration, I was a lot more interested in seeing the discussion going on around mobile broadband internet and how that is the next big move in Africa for the operators. Passing data, not just voice, is the battleground of the future in Africa - and all the carriers are fighting to position themselves to win.
I saw this happening in my most recent trip to Kenya where the local ISPs are very much aware of their dongle-toting SIM card competition (see image below) found in Safaricom and Celtel. As voice services begin to erode for mobile carriers in Africa, they have to find new ways to compete. Of course, this means more and increasingly cheaper options for consumers around the continent.
With new carriers still entering into the fray, older ones having to change their business strategies, and ISPs who are also getting better international bandwidth connections the real battle for the internet in Africa is just beginning. It’s very much of a “wild west” atmosphere with huge stakes at both the country and regional levels.
[download the extract of this article here, a 772Kb PDF)
 
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15:03
From: White African
Read This Entry & More At White African
Just today Google has shown that they are willing to invest in African mobile phone businesses. Does Google’s purchase of an equity stake in Mobile Planet mean the big web/mobile money will start flowing throughout Africa? Not necessarily, but it made me think of a conversation that I tend to have a lot in my travels.
The topic of conversation usually turns to this; what type of web or mobile application can you build to make some serious money in Africa? Though there are many answers to that question, as I believe there are many options for successful web and mobile companies in Africa, there are only a few that I think of as “sure things”.
 Any entrepreneur is looking to either a) create a company with solid cash flow and grow it, or b) create a solid company with value and then sell it (or have an IPO). On the web that takes some well-known paths, and the most common is option “b” where the entrepreneur’s sell their company to a larger web entity (Amazon, Google, eBay, Nokia…etc).
A “Sure Thing” Formula
Create a Jabber-based chat application that works on the mobile phone and the web, grow it to a 1-2 million users within a region, sell to Google.
Why does this work?
You build your chat application with Jabber since it can interface with Google’s GTalk. Jabber is free, and also happens to be the what a couple other major applications are built on (see South Africa’s Mxit). Google is trying to grow in Africa, and I assume would be extremely happy to pay a very healthy amount of money to acquire an application with millions of active users that is built on the same protocol as their own chat system.
Challenges
The formula for this particular idea is built on two premises. First, that you can actually get a couple million users within an African region using your chat application. Second, that Google wants more users on their platform(s).
The first challenge is born from the fact most mobile phone users in Africa don’t use data enabled phones, so they can’t run a Jabber application on their phone. Mxit’s answer to this in South Africa was to show that for 10% of the cost of a normal SMS, you could send a message through their system (which happens to be a highly bastardized customized Jabber app). Your goal is to get people who don’t have a data enabled phone to upgrade to one.
The second challenge is beyond your control. You’ll never know if Google wants to buy you out until they come knocking. However, if let’s just say you shouldn’t have to many problems monetizing a system that has 1-2 million users on it anyway…
Your goals to overcome these challenges is found in tapping into communities and spreading your app virally to gain critical mass with speed. Once it spreads, the first application like this to reach a decent amount of saturation will be the winner, even if it has some faults (see Twitter).
Opportunities
Though chat is the core of your application, that is both web and mobile phone accessible, it’s not the only value added service that you can provide. With some creativity, you can add services that allow more people to tap into, including locally relevant events, news, marketplaces, personals, jobs, etc…
On top of these services, you’ve got the advantage of building on an open source platform that other services use as their core.
Lastly, and most importantly. If you were to reach even 500,000 users you would have an incredibly viable opportunity for advertising revenue. The ability to target specific advertisements, or sponsorships, through the platform make it a marketers dream. Basically, you might not need, nor want, a buy out after all.
In Summary
Is it really a “sure thing”? No, every business move has inherent risk and depends on execution of the strategy.
Is it a good basic idea that could be built into a real product with a solid exit strategy? Yes, undoubtedly so.
We’ve already seen the booming success of Mxit in South Africa. There’s no reason to believe that you couldn’t have a margin of that same success in East, West or North Africa with the same type of service. If you build it with an end-goal of Google integration in it at the end, you also set yourself up for a real possibility of a buy out.
 
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14:13
From: White African
Read This Entry & More At White African
I am badly in need of an illustrator to help with the Ushahidi.com redesign - mainly for accenting and icons. I’m looking for someone who can do work in a similar style to the image seen below. If you’ve ever been to Africa, or seen an African children’s book, you’ll realize how iconic this type of illustration work is to Africa.
We don’t have a large budget, but I will pay for this work. Pass it on to your friends who are good illustrators.
If you know who did the above work, I’d love to talk to him/her. Contact me here. Thanks!
 
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8:47
From: White African
Read This Entry & More At White African
Africa Telcom News has released a free report, called the African Mobile Factbook, that gives all of the major numbers on subscribers, penetration rates, profitability and growth potential for every African carrier and country. As anyone who is tries to do research in this space knows, it can be difficult to get some of these mobile phone statistics for Africa, so this is a welcome source for information.
Interesting Facts
- Nigeria, South Africa and Egypt are the fastest growing markets
- Africa has become the fastest growing mobile market in the world with mobile penetration in the region ranging from 100% to 30%
- Pre-paid subscriptions account for nearly 95 percent of total mobile subscriptions in the region
- Most of the mobile operators are home-grown. In 2005, the continent’s seven largest investors controlled 53% of the African mobile market
- Across most of Africa, SMS is likely to be the only non-voice value-added service to gain mass market popularity in the immediate future
- East Africans pay taxes of between 25% and 30% on mobile phone services, compared with an average of 17% across Africa
- African states with less than 600,000 subscribers and includes Burundi, Cape Verde, Central African Republic, Comoros (Union of the), Djibouti, Equitorial Guinea, Eritrea, Gambia (The), Lesotho, Liberia, Mayotte, Sao Tome and Principe, Seychelles, Somalia, Swaziland and Rwanda.
Subscriber Numbers and Penetration Rates
At the end of 2007 there were 280.7 million mobile phone subscribers in Africa, representing a penetration rate of 30.4%. The chart below shows the historical numbers up until 2007, with projected growth and penetration rates through 2012.
Even more interesting, when you look at the major African markets, is to see the huge growth potential for areas that are already very profitable. As can be seen Nigeria, Kenya and Egypt have the greatest growth potential.
Africa’s Mobile Phone Operators (carriers)
There are (or will be) a staggering 11 mobile phone operators in Nigeria, with 4 in Kenya and South Africa, and 3 in egypt and Morocco.
“MTN dominates the African market with over 73.9 million subscribers in the region as of 4Q 2007 followed by Vodacom (33.4 million), Orascom (32.4 million), Zain (30.6 million) and Orange (27.7 million), respectively.”
Size doesn’t mean everything though, Millicom has the highest growth in revenues, and Orascom has the highest EBITDA margin, primarily due to its strategy of investing in the emerging mobile markets.
The chart below shows five of the leading mobile network operators in Africa in terms of their subscriber base (size of the bubble), revenue growth rate and EBITDA margin for the latest completed financial year.
In Summary
The growth rate in Africa over the last couple of years has been phenomenal, and will likely continue for the next 3-5 years. Major drivers of increased growth include:
- Subsidization of handsets
- Pre-paid offerings
- Continued liberalization of the telcom sector
- Low penetration rates
- Expected uptake of 3G services
Growth inhibitors include:
- Taxation - especially in East Africa
- Low income across the continent hampers growth
- Widespread illiteracy decreases the growth of value added services, even SMS
- Unreliable electricity supplies
- Corruption
I’m curious to see the uptake of both data services (3G and EDGE) as well as the increased number of low-cost handsets. Just yesterday I read a report of a Malaysian company setting up a mobile phone manufacturing plant in Mozambique, so there very well might be some super low-end phones available soon.
 
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11:03
From: White African
Read This Entry & More At White African
Spurred on by a question from a reader about successful implementation of wireless mesh networks in Africa, I started to do a little digging. The appeal of wireless meshes is especially high in very remote and unconnected areas of Africa, primarily because it allows simple (though limited) connectivity where it wasn’t available before.
A good example of a deployment in Africa, and the reasons behind it, is Wireless Africa’s Mpumulanga deployment in South Africa. Here they answer, “what problem is being addressed?“:
“The main thrust is to connect the clinic to its community hospice and thus allow them to extend their computer facilities to the hospice (practise management software and statistics gathering). This is most easily achieved through a wireless network and more specifically a mesh because of the terrain.
A mesh network requires a number of nodes in areas not owned by the clinic but that are part of the commuity: schools and farmers. The main thrust of the research question is to implement the network in such a way that the firstly the clinic and secondly the community have taken ownership of the network. That they have created systems that ensure that the infrastructure is maintained and expanded by the users of the network.”
A DIY Wireless Mesh Guide (3.2Mb PDF) based on Freifunk was put out by Wireless Africa late last year.
Looking for More Success Stories
I’m still looking for cases of successful wireless mesh networks in Africa. If you have heard of one, please comment below, or use the contact form.
I realize that there have been some larger, industrial strength, deployments by the likes of KDN in Kenya with their Butterfly Network (though I haven’t heard to many stories of people actually getting online with it). But what I’m more interested in right now is examples of use in the more rural areas of Africa.
More Resources:
Wireless Lab Website
Open Mesh - open source mesh
Meraki Mesh - business solution
Mesh Dynamics
Wire.Less.DK
Older, but good, conversation on O’Reilly Net
MIT’s Roofnet
 
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9:47
From: White African
Read This Entry & More At White African
For the last year there has been quite a bit of talk about mobile phone reporting in Africa. For good reason too, since this lowers the technology barrier to getting stories out of hard-to-reach places. Imagine, all you need to do is find a journalist and equip them with an adequate mobile phone Now you can record interviews in video and audio, take pictures and upload in almost any part of the continent.
Netherland’s based AfricaNews has been a pioneer in this space, starting last year with their “Voices of Africa” section of their site. I’ve been continually impressed with how they find, train and equip their journalists all over Africa. My one problem with what they do is that they don’t allow for the proliferation of their reporters work around the web by hamstringing the ability to share by embedding the reports in other websites.
Colin Daniels is the Publisher for Times Online in South Africa, arguably one of the better newspapers and always on the cutting edge of news sites online globally. A couple weeks ago he posted on his personal blog about a new initiative in where Nokia is testing mobile journalism through local universities using the Nokia/Reuter’s mobile newskit. He says,
“This has all been made possible by constant technological breakthroughs and the portability and immediacy of connected mobile devices; it is becoming increasingly feasible for journalists to replace their pens and dictaphones for converged smart phones with exceptional audio/visual capabilities such as the Nokia N95. Add a keyboard, tripod, and an external microphone and all of a sudden you have a portable newsroom and studio in one…”
A true, and exciting statement that applies to mainstream journalism and blogging. Colin refers to the N95 “Mojo” toolkit (pictured above) that Reuters uses as well. The value here is that as mainstream news sources put more resources towards mobile journalism the tools get better for everyone (amateur and professional).
All of this optimism has to be tempered with some real-world examples of how it’s still a difficult field to work in and how the technology is still not quite there for full-fledged real-time news feeds. David Axe, a war journalist, wrote a fascinating article for Wired on the failures of his mobile phone trials in Chad matching up a Nokia N95 with streaming mobile news service Qik.
It should be noted the problem was not with the phone, but with the web service Qik and the poor mobile data network in Chad. This can be a real problem for anyone using MMS or any other GSM service. Though some parts of Africa have strong networks, many others are home to the worst in the world. Of course, this makes Africa one of the great testing grounds for any new device or service, so there is a silver lining to every cloud.
“…there should be a “store” function, whereby you can shoot a video in some austere location, save it to your phone’s memory, then stream it later once you’ve got a solid network. With that function alone, I could’ve filed scores of fascinating videos about refugee camps, peacekeepers and urban combat.”
A simple solution, utilizing SD card memory could have made his trial a success. David’s quote above serves to underscore one other incredibly important point; web and mobile services need to at least test in Africa, if not have a small development shop there to truly create robust applications. After all, if it can work in Africa, it can work anywhere.
 
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5:57
From: White African
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A few more conferences to add to my earlier list of events going on around the continent, though one is in the US and another is in Europe, and are about Africa.
In Africa
Tech4Africa - The Technology for Africa conference has a group of really interestin speakers from around the web, mobile and ISP space in Africa. A lot of grassroots guys who are actually doing things, intermixed with some international, and well-known, speakers.
Dates: October 3-4, 2008
Location: Johannesburg, South Africa
Int’l Bloggers Roadshow - Still being put together, it sounds like an interesting group of US-based big name bloggers will be heading to South Africa. More by Matthew Buckland.
Dates: Unannounced
Locations: Unannounced
FOSS4G (Free and Open-Source Software for Geospatial) - A meeting of international mapping gurus. Hopefully we can get some major African mapping work started here.
Dates: September 29 - October 3, 2008
Location: Cape Town, South Africa
In the United States
BarCamp Africa - Organized in California as a way to bring people interested in Africa, on a variety of levels and topics, together in one place for a day of exploration, connection and enjoyment. Some big Silicon Valley names are getting behind this. (more on Twitter, Facebook and the wiki). Note: not the real logo above, I made that up…
Dates: October 11, 2008
Location: Pending
In Europe
Surprising Africa @ Picnic’08 - A one-day program designed to inspire and update the Picnic public - creatives, innovators, trendsetters and technologists - with a range of cross media and culture happenings from various Africa countries. From South African urban identity photography to Ethiopian architecture, to mobile banking to Kenya (online) critical writing, amongst others.
Dates: September 26, 2008
Location: Amsterdam, Netherlands
 
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12:43
From: White African
Read This Entry & More At White African
So, I’ve been eagerly awaiting the new iPhone WordPress app [iTunes link]. Not because I forsee creating a lot of new content with my thumbs, but because it’ll make it easier to add images straight from my phone and easier to edit old posts. Lastly, the team behind WordPress tends to put out good stuff, so I want to see what it’s like.
Setup is simple and intuitive, just enter domain, username and password. Choose how many old posts to archive on the phone, and then get writing.
Now, I’m going to try to add pictures from my phone. Hmmm, not possible to just add an image inline, seems I can only create a gallery. I’d like some way to add individual images easily. I wonder if they could do this by allowing you to hide the keyboard?
I like how the screen automatically scrolls to the bottom when you revisit a draft.
Overall, this is going to be a useful app and will stay in an honored position of page 1 on my iPhone.
UPDATE: looks like the photos were not added correctly as a gallery, but inline. Not good. Let’s see if manually adding the gallery tag will fix it.
Update 2: that fixed it. Now to delete all the code injected. The last 2 images show the frontside and editor-side of this mess.
 
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20:27
From: White African
Read This Entry & More At White African
Gregg Zachary happened by Barcamp Nairobi last month and had a chance to meet with a few of the techies who were lingering around after the event. Conversations from that night spurred his article today in the New York Times titled, “Inside Nairobi, the Next Palo Alto?“.
It’s a good read on why Kenya, even after the violence in January and February, is still a tech hub in Africa. Between Skunkworks, Google Kenya and an active (and creative) coding community you have the makings of a great place to do web and mobile development in Africa.
Here’s the excerpt on Wilfred, who is building the Ushahidi iPhone application. He’s also using my old MacBook Pro and, assuming everything goes right, he’ll have an iPhone to play with later on this year. 
“Consider Wilfred Mworia, a 22-year-old engineering student and freelance code writer in Nairobi, Kenya. In the four weeks leading up to Apple’s much-anticipated release of a new iPhone on July 11, Mr. Mworia created an application for the phone that shows where events in Nairobi are happening and allows people to add details about them.
Mr. Mworia’s desire to develop an application for the iPhone is not unusual: many designers around the world are writing programs for the device. But his location posed some daunting obstacles: the iPhone doesn’t work in Nairobi, and Mr. Mworia doesn’t even own one. He wrote his program on an iPhone simulator.
“Even if I don’t have an iPhone,” Mr. Mworia says defiantly, “I can still have a world market for my work.”
It’s really good to see the Kenyan tech community get this high profile piece. Riyaz, Josiah and Eric have been the steady center-pieces of the growing Skunkworks crowd. Chris and Joe are doing great things at Google Kenya.
Oh, and Nairobi is a small town after all… Most don’t know that Josiah (Skunkworks) and Chris (Google Kenya) are old classmates from Starehe. A lot of old connections just like that tend to be the glue that keeps everything together.
 
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19:31
From: White African
Read This Entry & More At White African
Ruud Elmendorp is a well-known freelance videographer in East Africa, and someone I have been meaning to meet-up with while there. Last month while in Nairobi we finally got to link up for a coffee and discuss a little about his business and the kinds of stories he does. When you get a chance to talk to someone who has interviewed the infamous Joseph Kony in person, you don’t pass it up!
Interestingly enough, six years ago he decided to just pick up and move to Kenya to begin his business. It came after having done some work in Southern Sudan, and at a time when life beckoned for him to leave the Netherlands behind. It’s how a lot of first-timers get to Africa, for some it sticks and they thrive, others it breaks them.</ | |
