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Permalink for 'Geeking out on a Motorcycle Trip'

13:52

Geeking out on a Motorcycle Trip

Today I had a lot of fun, one of my old schoolmates (Markus) from here in Kenya asked me if I wanted to get out of Nairobi and hit the trails on our motorcycles. Of course, the answer was yes. We headed out towards Naivasha early this morning and then took a side road off towards the escarpment.

The roads are dirt and with the recent rains they’re really quite rugged and beyond most normal vehicles. Markus is an experienced trail rider on a KTM 450 (kitted out), I’ve ridden a lot of trails, but years ago and not nearly as experienced as Markus – and I’m riding an offroad/onroad Suzuki DR 650 (stock).

We ended up having to run through, and beside, a lot of 5-10 acre farms that sit at the base of the escarpment in order to find a road up to the top of the escarpment. A lot of this was on cow paths and required some fine-tuned leveraging of our bikes through gates and streams. The road to the top of the escarpment, when found was a fun ride, minus the part where I wiped out on a simple turn (the one below)…

Bruises (and bruised ego) aside, we kept going up into small-farm, where quite a few more people live, and which is almost entirely denuded of trees that were there just 15 years ago.

After talking to some of the local community, we were advised to head down a certain road, with assurances that it would lead us to the bottom of the escarpment. It did, eventually, but not until we had backtracked, sidetracked, followed animal trails (in buffalo country), and then realized that the washed out gully we were in was supposed to be the road.

3.5 hours of wrestling a mammoth 650cc bike through this terrain left me exhausted. This type of bike is not made for that level of technical riding down boulder strewn gully’s and game trails. However, it was also hugely rewarding when we finally found our way to the bottom of the escarpment and much easier riding.

Mapping the Malewa Motorcycle Trip

I also brought my Android Nexus One along for the ride, hoping that the battery life would allow me to use it for tracking our trip. The Nexus One has a GPS, and there’s an Android app called My Tracks, that tracks your trip, allows you to add waypoints, then easily shares it to Google’s MyMaps.

Here is the result:

View Malewa Motorcycle Trip in a larger map

It doesn’t look very exciting like that, but it does give you the exact data for having your own challenging ride if you’re in Kenya.

Permalink for 'Crowdfunding and Seed Funding in African Tech'

11:27

Crowdfunding and Seed Funding in African Tech

» ‎ White African

I’ve written a couple of times about the lack of seed funding in Africa, and how to find the entrepreneurs to fund if you did have seed capital. We’re starting to see a few angel investors like Sean Murphy of Chembe Ventures making their way around the continent, but they are not nearly enough to fulfill the capacity of ideas and individuals who need startup capital.

Crowdfunding

Just this week the CrowdFunding South Africa site was launched (look for them at SXSW this week in Austin), working off the theory that, “South Africa cannot compete in the global online sector if it isn’t funding start-ups at the beginning stage.” Their plan is to do this by getting:

“1000 people get together investing R1,000+ each by pooling the money into the Crowdfund.”

Seed funding is risky, and the idea of Crowdfund is to distribute that risk over a number of people thereby reducing it for everyone. Their goal is to invest 50,000-100,000 Rand in 10-20 “excellent ideas”, and also provide legal advice and contracts, designers, specialized developers, bandwidth, hosting, office space and running costs, mentorship and time saved.

This idea is similar to what Ben White at VC4Africa is thinking about, basically a “Kiva on steroids” as Bill Zimmerman puts it. A way for you to invest in people and projects with larger sums of money and greater risk and returns than on the microfinance investing sites.

Finding the Real Tech Entrepreneurs

Both the Crowdfund and VC4Africa initiatives are excellent steps in the right direction, as they both provide platforms that allow less-knowledgeable investors (of tech in Africa), and deeply involved African tech investors alike, to get involved without too much risk at one time. There remains one issue to be solved though, and that is finding the entrepreneurs to invest in.

Any VC worth their salt will tell you that they invest in the people behind good ideas, not just the product/service that the entrepreneur is trying to create. So, how do you find these individuals? It’s generally through your network, people you trust, that serve as a filter to guide you towards the promising ones. That’s the same in Africa as it is anywhere else, yet here in Africa, there are fewer of these trusted intermediaries who act as filters (especially for international capital), than there are in the US or Europe.

In a meeting this last week of the people behind Limbe Labs (Cameroon), Appfrica Labs (Uganda), the iHub and the iLAB (Kenya) we discussed how these spaces could act as that type of a filter for investors and funds. Each of us sees more young tech entrepreneurs every day, and sees these individuals consistently, than most any other single person could by themselves.

Could these labs, which are now showing up all over Africa, be a way for entrepreneurs to make themselves known, show their stuff, then be introduced to the funds and investors with a greater level of confidence than normal?

Permalink for 'Tandaa Kenya Meeting: Local Digital Content'

3:48

Tandaa Kenya Meeting: Local Digital Content

» ‎ White African

“If Africans are to get online en masse, they need a reason to go there. Their lives, their stories”

- Dennis Gikunda of Google Kenya, requoting Alim Walji who was at Google.org and is now at the World Bank.

The Kenya ICT Board is throwing the Tandaa event today in Nairobi at the iHub, sponsored by Google Kenya. It’s all about getting more local Kenyan content online, and it’s a good mixture of speakers so far, with Dennis Gikunda starting off, giving us examples of successful local content plays.

A “remember when” session just started, talking about how slow the internet used to be just a couple short years ago. Jimmy Gitonga scolds us for not doing more with what we have, figuring out business models and ways to make money off of our fast connections. He also reminds us that 2 million Kenyans access Facebook on their phones today. Moses Kemibaro steps up to give the real numbers showing the costs of internet, and the speeds, that has happened over the last year.

Joshua Wanyama, of Pamoja Media and Africa Knows, is up to talk about “The internet at 500Mb” – how to help Kenyan companies make money online. He’s giving us a short summary of his background, about how he started a web development company from the ground up in the US, then how he’s brought that same mindset back to Kenya.

“If I were to go online and try to find all the dentists nearby me in Nairobi, I couldn’t find it since it has not been digitized yet.” – Joshua Wanyama

Josh goes on to say that we don’t have enough success stories, though he does reference Ushahidi and Safaricom’s Mpesa. We need more of them, as it will help get more young, smart entrepreneurs operating in the internet space. Most of the internet traffic from Africa goes to websites like Facebook, YouTube and Yahoo, all outside of Africa. What are we doing to get our own content up and make it more of a viable business alternative for our own society?

Eddie Malitt of Sega Silicon Valley is here to talk about turning Sega village, a remote village of over 10,000 inhabitants located in Ugenya district – 25 km from the Kenya- Uganda border, into a “Silicon Valley” – an African ICT hub. One of the interesting findings that Eddie shared with us is that the children are leading the training of their parents and other adults. It doesn’t sound like their operations are self-sustainable, but that good things happen due to them being there.

[More of the Tandaa event will be going on today, but I'll be unable to keep up with it due to other meetings. Follow it on Twitter at #Tandaa or @TandaaKENYA. I'm sure that Moses and Mbugua will also have something up later today.]

0:29

ICANN Comes to Nairobi

» ‎ White African

Permalink for 'iHub Nairobi Launch and IgniteNairobi'

2:43

iHub Nairobi Launch and IgniteNairobi

» ‎ White African

Permalink for 'Quick Hits in the African Tech Space'

13:13

Quick Hits in the African Tech Space

» ‎ White African

Permalink for 'In San Francisco this week'

3:15

In San Francisco this week

» ‎ White African

I’ve spent this week in the San Francisco bay area going to meetings, speaking and discussing everything from the iHub to Ushahidi and AfriGadget.

University Students and the Aid Industry

Last night I spoke to a group of university students for 3 hours at the University of San Francisco to Wanjiru Kamau-Rutenberg’s class on “the Politics of International Aid and Development”. My bent is towards technology and the practical applications of such in Africa. I’m no expert on international aid, but that didn’t stop us from having a lively debate on what works and doesn’t work in Africa.

My main points were centered around technology allowing people to bypass government (and other) inefficiencies in Africa – creating opportunity where none existed before. In my experience, most aid programs don’t work, in fact we’ve seen more good come out of the mobile phone industry’s foray into Africa over the last 10 years than we’ve seen in the past 50 years of aid work.

Some questions that arose during the conversation, each of which we could have spent a day unpacking and dissecting in detail:

Can wealth generation alleviate the ills of Africa?
Is corruption trickle up or trickle down?
Should corruption just be seen as a “cost of doing business”?
What’s the most compelling innovation that you’ve seen come out of Africa?
Is there such a thing as “good aid”?

Google

This morning I spent some time with the Google.org and the Google crisis mapping team discussing ideas and thoughts about what we all did in the digital space around Haiti. More importantly we asked the question, “what are we going to do the next time a huge global disaster strikes?”

That’s an important question because we need to ensure that we’re further along next time. That, the next time disaster strikes we’re ready with a toolkit of useful applications and platforms that can all be deployed within just a few short hours.

One of the cool things to see was the Google street mapping vehicles parked in a row.

Citizen Space

There are more and more co-working spaces showing up all over the world, including our own iHub in Nairobi. However, one of the early pioneers in this was Citizen Space started by Chris Messina and Tara Hunt. My main purpose visiting was to see how it’s setup and how it has changed since I last visited a couple years ago.

My takeaways: big open space, desks and cool eclectic design. Rent desk space and have a cool vibe about it. I’m sure there’s more than this, but it’s what struck me during my short visit.

Twitter

Most of the afternoon was spent at Twitter where I gave a lunchtime presentation. Ryan Sarver, head of platforms and the API, asked me to do more general talk on innovation in Africa starting with AfriGadget. Having a good 50-60 Twitter employees listening in on AfriGadget, then a talk on mobile phones in Africa, and finishing with the Ushahidi usage in Haiti was interesting to say the least.

The questions asked made me realize that there’s a good opportunity for top-end Twitter employees (and likely other high-level techies from Silicon Valley) to stretch themselves a little bit, head out to Africa and really see what’s going on. They would probably get some ideas that caused them to be a little more creative back in the US.

A longer discussion was had with the leads for the Geo/Mapping team and the Internationalization team. More refreshing than anything else was realizing how open they were to outside ideas and how willing they were to listen. Twitter is doing a lot of things to make sure that their platform is more accessible all over the world, and I think we’ll see some pleasant surprises this year in Africa.

Summary

There’s obviously much more to discuss than this brief summary can do justice to, but not all of it can be put down at one time, or is even relevant at this stage in the game. What I’m excited about is the fact that more people in the Bay Area are talking about relevant issues to African technologists and that there are opportunities for the two groups to start interacting in ways that haven’t been that common in the past. There’s room for both sides to learn from the other.

Permalink for 'TED 2010: Session 1 Highlights'

17:58

TED 2010: Session 1 Highlights

» ‎ White African

Session 1 at TED just ended, and it can only be described as an “only at TED” moment for me.

Why?

Simply because it showcased just how eclectic and fascinating this event is. Where else do you start with a talk by professor Daniel Khaneman who originated the study of Behavioral Economics, move on to the London and here a talk live from David Cameron who is leading the Conservative party in the UK, and then on to Jake Shimabukuro an amazing ukelele player…

Khaneman gave an engaging talk on “happiness”, where he talked about the difference between “being happy with your life versus being happy in your life.” There’s a difference between how we experience life and how we remember our experiences of life.

“If you knew that all of your pictures would be destroyed and that you would get amnesia, would you choose the same vacation?”

David Cameron is expected to be the next Prime Minister of the UK, he was the surprise talk this morning, telecasting in from London. He asked, “How do we make things better without spending more money?”. Pointing out that the global debt level is over 32 trillion (Pounds?).

His answer: use behavioral economics plus the information revolution and let’s see how we can change society.

Cameron’s prescription for this comes in three parts:

He wants to see greater transparency of government data. Stating that we have only scratched the surface of what can be done with open government data.
Choice. What happens if the government doesn’t mandate, but allows people to choose? He uses examples of web-based shopping engines and wonders how that can be applied to things like healthcare.
Accountability. Using an example of the Chicago crime map he wonders what will happen as we give the people power to see what is happening and hold the government and police to account for what happens.

Esther Duflo, from the Poverty Action Lab at MIT, gave a mesmerizing talk on the aid and development sphere, using examples from Africa and India. She’s asking the hard questions and trying to answer them scientifically, pointing out that much of the arguments (ie, Easterly vs Sachs) being made for/against things like bed nets in Africa are more emotional than substantial.

“It’s not the middle ages any more, it’s the 21st century.”

We can find answers to these questions using randomized control trials. She gave examples like the one where they ran test of 130+ communities using a control, camps and camps with incentives to test if children would be brought in more/less often for immunizations if they were given an incentive of a kilo of lentils.

The answer: they were, 38% more actually. That, and the fact that it was actually cheaper to run the incentivized camps than the normal ones.

Permalink for 'TED 2010 – Fellows Program'

14:41

TED 2010 – Fellows Program

» ‎ White African

I’m in Long Beach, California for the annual TED conference. This year I’m a Senior Fellow, which means that I get to see and spend time with old friends like Jon Gosier and Juliana Rotich, other Fellows from year’s past and enjoy some first class discussions and mentoring from groups like McKinsey and Duarte Design.

I’ve been taking pictures of the TED Fellows, you can find them on my Flickr set. The really great shots are by the TED photographers, and you can find those here and the TED Blog. More on the amazing and eclectic group that is this years TED Fellows.

Some TED Fellows Talks highlights:

I met Hugo Van Vuuren, a fellow white African, at PopTech last year. He’s doing some amazing work in Africa around creating energy with off-grid technologies. Figuring out how to use simple things like dirt to create power at Lebone. Hugo says that they’ll be ready to sell this type of product by summer 2010.

I was mesmerized by Angelo Vermeulen’s talk on “Biomodd“, which is a riff off of the gaming communities case modding trend.

Nigerian Ndubuisi Ekekwe, an engineer, inventor, author and founder of the African Institution of Technology, an organization seeking to develop microelectronics in Africa.

Kellee Santiago is a gamer and creates games based on emotions. She gave a great talk on what her company “That Game Company” does, with games like Flower.

Ben Gulak is a 20 year old inventor. He’s created the UNO, an electronic motorized unicycle and the DTV (Dual Tracked Vehicle), taking the best characteristics of a snow mobile, a skateboard and motorcross bike.

This new TED Fellows class is an eclectic group of polymaths. People who have expertise and interest in multiple areas. What sets them apart though is the fact that they actually “DO” things, not just talk about them. Seeing their work, talking to them about their projects and realizing just how special it is to be able to do that is what makes being a TED Fellow an amazing experience.

Permalink for 'Mobile Web East Africa – Stream'

1:45

Mobile Web East Africa – Stream

» ‎ White African

[I probably won't be able to keep this up all day, but I'll try to blog/stream what's happening here at Mobile Web East Africa as best I can. Refresh for updates]

It’s day one of the Mobile Web East Africa conference in Nairobi. This is a new conference, started up in South Africa to great success, and now spreading to other regions of the continent.

Paul Kukubo of the ICT Board

Paul Kukubo, of the Kenya ICT Board, is talking about the future of tech in Kenya, and how the government’s aim is to be a major hub for technology in the region. Explaining how the changes in the industry are brought into context for the government’s vision 2030. He talks about mobile payments, digitizing of government documents and processes, developing software standards and the growing tech community within Nairobi.

Paul continues with mentioning how their approach is to influence policy formulation, intellectual property, data protection, linkages to venture capital and basically catalyzing growth in the ICT sector between government, the public and business.

Rick Joubert of Yonder Media

Rick Joubert, from Yonder Media, “the mobile phone is the most ubiquitous consumer device in the world.” He goes on to talk about how the phone is now even more spread through South Africa than radios. There are 2x as many phones as TV sets. There are 6x more mobile phone subscribers than internet users (in South Africa).

Rick defines the Mobile Web this way:

Tier 1: The WAP internet
Tier 2: The mobile web application internet
Tier 3: Web browsing on phone

**Interruption**
PS Ndemo, who I know and like, is going to give a short address. This isn’t cool, as he’s interrupting Rick Joubert mid-talk (and a very interesting one too). Case-in-point for why government needs to get out of the way more than anything else in the technology field… [Yes, I note that this is probably the American viewpoint on equality coming out].

PS Ndemo is talking through how there were 3.5 million internet users in Kenya last year. Now, with the cost of laptops dropping, we now see 500 laptops sold per day (there were only 20k per year sold before).

Kenya also has the digital villages project (Pasha) with the World Bank is seeing long lines of individuals in far off places coming in to try the internet, get on Skype and figure out how to set up email and other services.

PS Ndemo, ever the gracious person, has at least apologized for the interruption and made amends to the speaker and the conference as a whole. There’s a reason I like him…

**Back to our scheduled program**

“The Apple iPhone is the number one handset on every continent in the world, except… Africa”. The Nokia 3110 and Samsung E250 are the two biggest phones on the continent. The fact of the matter is, the real money is being made in the inexpensive DVD/Nollywood areas, not in the mobile web yet. Services that play to USSD, Voice and SMS are where the real opportunities lie.

Driving forces:

Growth in data networks and coverage
Mobile data access charges
Local content
Better quality handsets shipping at the cheapest possible price
Mobile wallets, mobile commerce, mobile banking

Business models and monetization routes:

Commerce
Transactions and financial institutions
Content
Advertising

Rick projects that the “size of the prize” in mobile advertising is approximately $8 billion per year in Africa.

Rick finishes showing a video from LynxEffect on how consumers see mobile web, the seductive side of it.

Eric Cantor of AppLab Uganda & Grameen Foundation

I wrote about AppLab and their work with MTN and Google last year. Eric wants to talk about a critical look at a critical space, the 95% of the African population that doesn’t own a smartphone.

(Get the full presentation of Eric Cantor’s slides as a PDF)

“There are more people having conferences and running too many pilots around the use of social mobile work than there is real practical applications and scaling of the products in the market.”

Technology: Be Patient
SMS is not the only way. It’s very challenging and very expensive to work with SMS. One way to adjust this focus is into voice – people like people, and want to talk with each other.

Handsets need to evolve. Nokia 1100 vs Java 1680 ($20 vs $60) – we’re waiting on the $40 smartphone.

Eric reminds us that we need to get back to the Four-Ps of marketing. We can’t forget user experience, the services might be serious, but still need to be fun to use. At the AppLab they don’t believe what they hear (because everyone says “yes, this product will be great in our market”). They try to dig deeper, learned from Google, on what customers really want and see what people are really using.

Question time

I’ve asked the question for Eric Cantor about why we’re not seeing very simple data hooks built into some of the USSD and SMS applications running in Uganda. (more on this here: “Should we be building SMS or internet services for Africa?“). Eric agrees that there is a lot of upside in that space, and that they’re trying to push more towards the data channel, but until we start seeing more data-enabled handsets in ordinary people’s hands out in the villages, it’s just not a main priority yet.

Robert Alai asks what is driving advertising growth in South Africa? Is it the large companies, or smaller organizations?
Rick responds saying that it’s large companies trying to reach their customers, from banks to Coca Cola and everyone in between. Businesses build grow in this space to find solutions for that, and that’s primarily small innovative companies (like his own), small nimble startups.

Agatha Gikonda of Nokia East Africa talks about the Ovi Store and the opportunities for local developers to create applications and put them on the store to make money.

Peter Arina of Safaricom

What are we going to do to drive interent usage in Kenya? Some stats:

Mobile users are estitmated at 19.05m subscribers. Kenya population estimated at 40m with 22m being the addressable market (15yo or older).

70% of mobile data users spend less than 20ksh on a monthly basis. Industry data enabled handsets estimated at 5m or 26% of GSM users. Cost of a 3G handset is 3x higher than that of a non-data enabled handset. Computer prices are way too high compared to the disposable income of majority of Kenyans.

“The cost of devices that access the internet is the biggest barrier to entry for ordinary Kenyans.”

Cost of broadband (price) is prohibitive due to infrastructure investment.

Local content – the most popular sites accessed on the Safaricom network is Facebook and YouTube. Limited content which is highly priced, is also a barrier locally. There’s a need for high quality data enabled handsets to get good experience.

Conclusion
Mobile data users estimated to reach 10m in the next five years subject to availability of affordable devices, increase awareness, local content development and drop in data prices. Safaricom is trying to work directly with the manufacturers to get more data-enabled devices into normal Kenyan’s hands.

There is a need for more local content that is relevant at affordable rates. Need for reduction in frequency costs, a creation of daily usage habits among users and a need for the government to remove VAT on modems.

Questions
@Kahenya is asking a question. Safaricom is trying to become more affordable, it’s still the most expensive network in Kenya. It’s still has no fixed rate for the mobile data network access. It doesn’t work for small and medium sized business, is Safaricom doing anything to change this?

Peter Arina says they are trying to be cautious. They’re trying to focus on quality (bull$%@& as they have the worst network connectivity in Kenya). He says that they have plans to reduce the cost of data as well, but he has no details on it.

The Safaricom rep says that their main goal is to provide services to the Wananchi (the ordinary/mass Kenyan). The question remains then, why is the cost so high for all of their services?

Paul Kukubo asks when Safaricom will open up their network for value added services for developers and other companies. He’s wondering why the revenue share is so high here (currently if you partner with Safaricom, they’ll take about 60% of revenues), meanwhile elsewhere in the world, like Japan, give 70% to the developer.

Paul asks about the issue with the networks taking advantage of the developers who are out there who come to them with ideas and new products.

The Safaricom rep states that this is not the case any longer. They partner with MobilePlanet and Cellulant (as examples, but it’s a poor one because they’re established companies now). He says that at first they start off with a big chunk of the revenues, but as the product does better, then the developer will get more of the share.

Basically, we get no straight answers from Safaricom and only promises of better things in the future with no details.

Jose Henriques, Executive Head: Online Product Management, Vodacom South Africa

6.65% of the African population currently uses PC internet. The top ten countries make up 85% of that.

Some more stats:

Africa represents 15% of the world population, but only 3.9″% of the world’s PC internet usage.
Africa’s PC Internet users have increased by 1359% from 2000 to 2009.
The global service revenue generated from subscriptions to mobile internet access are forecasted by Informa Telecoms & Media to rise from $57 billion in 2008 to $120 billion in 2013.
Mobile ad revenue is estimated to be at $2 billion by 2014. Total value of marketing spend on mobile to be around $6 billion.
Mobile subscription rose from 54 million to almost 350 million between 2003 and 2008.
On average there are 60% mobile penetration in the world. In developing countries the figure stands at 48% , which is 8x bigger than in 2000.
Lack of fixed-line access will drive huge mobile internet usage and revenues.
Vodacom generates 49 million ad impressions per month in South Africa (big opportunity).

(Full presentation by Jose Henriques from Vodacom South Africa)

Questions
What has been defined as a smartphone, is not what we define one as today. How would you define it?
Cheapest data enabled devices are about 2000Ksh in Kenya. Safaricom thinks that these are smartphones.

Mpesa… Why is Safaricom unable to cooperate with and provide third-party access (opening their APIs) to developers in Kenya for Mpesa?

The Safaricom rep says that they are willing to do this, and that they’re hungry for people to come in with ideas and products. No specifics given on this. @TMSruge, the moderator, asks her to provide details on how they are actively trying to seek out and help grow this as there is no API or SDK.

@wanjiku says she’s heard Safaricom saying that they have a tendency to do well with big companies, but holding smaller company money for 3-4 months, hurting their cash flow.

Steve Vosloo asks what types of local content are people really willing to pay for?
The Safaricom rep is out of touch… she states that, “no one is willing to pay anything for mobile content”. This is bunk.

Rick Joubert comes in to state facts on how much money there is being made in South Africa in mobile content, $540 million is the real number just in SA. It’s not whether people will pay or not, it’s whether they find value in local content.

A question was asked of Safaricom, why they don’t open up the ability for third-party service providers to bill consumers? The answer by Safaricom is that they are. (I can’t confirm this)

We have Zap, Mobile Pay, Mpesa, etc… when are we going to have an agnostic system to send/receive money? by @kahenya

MTN rep says to come to Uganda to see this working. It’s there working on the MTN system. It’s a serious issue of not having your payment system to go beyond your own network.

Mpesa is a wall gardened. Kahenya and Teddy Ruge ask when there will be a need to NOT walk around with 3 handsets to send money within each one.

Safaricom states that they can already do this within their system. They lay the blame at the regulators feet for why it hasn’t happened.

**Lunch**

Brett StClair of AdMob

Brett starts by asking, “what is mobile internet?” It’s a website that is built for mobile handsets. Admob puts banner advertisement on these sites. They server 12-14 billion advertisements into this network each month. The man on the street can earn revenues start advertising today. There’s a 60% payout to publishers.

Have access to 53 countries in Africa. Monthly ads serves is 750 million in Africa alone.

African Mobile Web currently has South Africa, Nigeria, Libya, Egypt and Kenya as the top 5. Data prices do have a huge effect on the advertising revenues available in Africa.

Nokia 3110c is the most pervasive phone in the market (3.8%), Samsung E250 is at 3.7% penetration. Top smartphones are the Nokia N70 at 10.8% and then Nokia 6300 at 10.3% and then the iPhone at 8.2%.

Top reasons why South Africa is working:

5 million fixed line internet vs 10 million mobile internet users
Strong operator billing infrastructure
However, mobile money is not mature yet
Early adoption by premium traditional publishers
consumers traditionally have had a fast adoption rate
Due to vast competition for impressions average CPC pricing grew from $0.03 to $0.27 in a year.

Is Africa next? The rest of the world thinks it is, but we need to get the local people to understand this.

Cheapest inventory in the world is in Africa… global accesss average is $0.03, in Africa it’s at $0.01. Local contet providers will benefit as they understand the local African consumers.

Key to making this work:

3g network coverage
Cheap data pricing
GPRS enabled handset penetration

What are the opportunities in Africa?
Strong tend to follow the West and South Africa. Paid for content, reliant on operator billing. Free content, which is ad funded. The top publisher types are communities, portals and downloads. The top categories are music, religion (15%), games and brands.

African traffic is made of 54% Nokia handsets, then 18% Samsung handsets. iPhone requests make up 18 million impressions in Africa.

Permalink for 'Malili: Kenya’s Planned Technopolis'

4:52

Malili: Kenya’s Planned Technopolis

» ‎ White African

I’ve had two meetings with Kenya’s Permanent Secretary Bitange Ndemo (Ministry of Information and Communications) in the last week. Both times a certain project kept coming up in the conversation. It’s called Malili – a 5,000 acre East African technopolis – a city built up for technology firms and it’s the Kenyan government’s way of creating a regional ICT brand.

My first thought up on seeing the pictures: it looks like Dubai has come to Kenya.

The Malili project is modeled off of other large technology and research parks around the world. One often cited in comparison is Smart Village Cairo, which currently hosts 120 companies and 20,000 professionals and they’re expecting that to increase to 500 companies and 100,000 professionals by 2012.

One of Kenya’s goals is to grow IT contribution to GDP from 3% to more than 10% in three years. This won’t happen using Malili as it’s yet to be built. In the interim, PS Ndemo has moved to secure a good portion of the Sameer Business Park, which is on Mombasa road and is almost finished being constructed. This type of space will be available for companies who eventually want to move to Malili in the future, and it also sets the stage for Nairobi being an even more prominent tech hub in Africa.

Location, Location, Location

I like this project, it shows Kenya as a forward thinking country with ambitious plans. My only misgiving is in the location. It’s 60km from Nairobi, and though the Mombasa road is much better, it’s still the most congested and prone-to-jams point on the Kenya roadway system. Yes, it will be a city all it’s own, over time, but Nairobi will still be the “place to be”, so there will be a great deal of traffic.

The airport sits between Malili and Nairobi, so for incoming people, it will be easier to get to than having to drive into, or through, Nairobi.

There’s a lot of discussion within the Kenyan tech community about Malili. It’s a big government project, with private sector participation, and Kenya’s track record of completing these types of big projects has been spotty (think Nyayo Car). Time will tell though, I’m of the mindset to not discount it. It’s time for us to start being optimistic about the possibilities that this country offers in technology.

Some, like the Nairobi tech community and the new Nairobi iHub tend to start small and grow from there. But, government has a different role to play, and it’s good for them to aim high and use their size to make big things happen.

Download the PDF:
Malili Technopolis overview slides – PDF

Permalink for 'iHub: Nairobi’s Tech Innovation Hub is Here!'

6:11

iHub: Nairobi’s Tech Innovation Hub is Here!

» ‎ White African

iHub – Nairobi’s Innovation Hub for the technology community – is here! It’s an open space for the technologists, investors, tech companies and hackers in the area. This space is a tech community facility with a focus on young entrepreneurs, web and mobile phone programmers and designers. It is part open community workspace (co-working), part investor and VC hub and part incubator.

A number of us in the Nairobi tech community have been discussing the need for a physical nexus for the tech community here for a couple years, so it’s great to finally be so close to uncorking the bottles and celebrating a big step forward for all of us.

iHub opens on March 3, 2010!

Here’s a rough video of the iHub. A first-look at the space, before any design or wiring is done:

[Note: my apologies for the video quality, it was taken with my phone.]

Background and Info

The iHub will have a redundant 10Mbs connection, hardwired and WiFi, and it’s freely available to any tech person in Nairobi to use once they become members. Membership is free, our only requirement is that you are indeed involved in the tech space as a programmer, web designer or mobile application developer.

Data connectivity is the most important aspect of the iHub, but after that comes a fresh design and an atmosphere that is conducive to techies getting cool stuff done.

Finally, we’re putting our networks into place to give special access to the entrepreneurs and startups who need space to meet with VCs, seed funders and local businesses. We’re trying to create the place where seeds are planted and are easily found by the people with money to help them grow.

A Blank Canvas

The iHub is what we as a tech community make it. It is a blank canvas, a big open room with a great view and wonderful location, but still an empty room that needs some input from people within the community to design, and create a culture around.

What part are you going to play?

Want to have bragging rights on being the logo designer for the iHub? There’s $500 (38,000 Ksh) up for grabs at the iHub logo contest!
Have a penchant for design, want to help layout the floor plan, pick the wall colors or design the signage?
We’re wiring this place with the latest and best data connections in Kenya. Can you help us make sure the network is sound?
Good at creating intranets for fast and easy file sharing of 1gb+ downloads like the Android SDK? Want to help us build that?
Maybe you’ve got great business connections. Will you help us connect the iHub and the people in it to the business community?

iHub Location

The new iHub’s location is going to be on the 4th floor of the new Bishop Magua Centre on Ngong Road (directly opposite the Uchumi Hyper). It’s an amazing location, with quick access to public transportation, food and the rest of town.

View iHub – Nairobi’s Innovation Hub in a larger map

Community Involvement

I’ve been working closely with a couple of people from the community to find a place and get some basic items squared away. This advisory group is made up of individuals with a long standing presence in tech locally, including:

Riyaz Bachani, CTO of Wananchi
Josiah Mugambi, Co-Founder of Skunkworks
Rebeccah Wanjiku, Tech reporter and entrepreneur
Conrad Akunga, Blogger and Software Manager
Erik Hersman (me), Tech blogger, Founder of AfriGadget and co-Founder of Ushahidi

As mentioned earlier, there are a number of things still to be done, and we all need to band together in order to make this space what we hope it will become. Your ideas and drive will make the iHub into the space to be in all of East Africa for tech-related activities.

If you would like be involved, leave a comment below.

Permalink for 'Working on Ushahidi’s Haiti Response'

10:25

Working on Ushahidi’s Haiti Response

» ‎ White African

Permalink for 'AfricaKnows: An African Photo Project'

6:07

AfricaKnows: An African Photo Project

» ‎ White African

Where do you go to find quality and *real* African pictures? How about the non-tourist ones, the ones that show everyday Africans, work places, bus stops and the lives of your neighbors?

AfricaKnows is a new project by TED Fellows Josh Wanyama and Sheila Ochugboju. Their job: to tell a different story of Africa, through big pictures that let you see directly into the heart of African cities.

“Africa Knows is about the challenges, triumphs, dreams and nightmares of being an African in a 21st century city that is straddling several revolutions at the same time; the technological revolution, the agricultural revolution, a democratic resurgence and a post-colonial identity crisis complicated by old ethnic tensions.”

If you like an image that you see, you can buy a print or a card of it.

Sourcing

I talked with Josh and Sheila about the site this last week. Right now they get the majority of images by taking them themselves and from other African photographer friends who have good shots of their locale. One of my first suggestions to them was that it would be wonderful if there was a submission page for others to add images in easily. The curating of what shows up on the site would need to be maintained.

There are two reasons why AfricaKnows is a good site:

Quality
So far, the images on the site are pretty good. They’re not all “professional” quality images, but they’re much better than average. A purely open site where anyone could dump images (a la Flickr) wouldn’t work as the noise would quickly outdo the signal, so quality is important.

reality
The reality of the images is the second big reason, it’s why I care to visit and get the feed. If I want to see what the world thinks of Africa I’ll go to a newspaper. If I want to see how Africans view Africa, I’ll go to AfricaKnows.

Suggestions

As mentioned earlier, there are others who have good quality shots that would be worth the team looking at. A simple submission form that allowed for me to send in images whenever I took one would be useful – for both me and the editing team.

There’s a real possibility of taking this platform further, making it into a place that is focused on African images and highlights African photographers across the continent. I’d be interested in seeing some images from Teddy Ruge (Uganda) and Nana Kofi Acquah (Ghana) on the site, among others. This could be done by first just allowing them to showcase some of their best images, linking to them and putting contact information on the site (giving them a page).

If others are sending in pictures, then there needs to be a clearly outlined understanding of image rights and ownership.

Lastly, we live in a social web with social lives. There should be the ability to embed the image on another site. Images for this post I had to download (bypassing the javascript security features), and upload into it, which is way to much work for most people. Sharing matters, as it’s how people get found in our digital age. You have to learn to let go – of at least the lower res images. Plus, removing that security will allow more Google image search juice to send more traffic.

Permalink for 'Low-Cost Solar Invades Kenya'

14:43

Low-Cost Solar Invades Kenya

» ‎ White African

Meredith watching the Brunton 52 Solar panels - a boring job Reliable electricity in Kenya is an oxymoron. Last year’s rationing was up to 4 days per week in some parts of Nairobi, and with the low levels of water in the dam, it’s looking like 2010 won’t be such a bright year (pun intended…).

This is why I’m writing a post about solar power, which incidentally isn’t something I’m overly-well versed in, I usually leave this up to people like Afromusing. I did take the FLAP bags around Ghana, Kenya and Uganda earlier, but hadn’t started to truly delve into this arena until now. Before moving back, I picked up a Brunton Solaris 52solar power kit for my laptop needs. It has already proved indispensable.

Solantern

Joseph Nganga, a Kenyan businessman who I’ve known for a couple of years, has come back to Kenya and is taking the clean energy position firmly. He’s working with the World Bank on a plan for a “Cleantech Innovation Centre” in East Africa, and knows his way around both small- and large-scale renewable energy systems.

Right now he’s marketing and finding distributors for his Solantern product. It’s a Green Planet Lantern that is sold locally for 2000 Ksh ($25). His goal is to replace the unclean, and sometimes hazardous, kerosene lanterns that everyone uses in Kenya.

[Note: the electricity is off right now, and my wife is using one of Joseph's Solanterns below]

My wife with a Solantern tonight

An average Kenyan family spends 20 Ksh ($.25) on Kerosene every night, a total of $91 per year. There’s a real value buying a Solantern, and the light lasts for much longer than that 20 Ksh of Kerosene would (and it’s cleaner).

ToughStuff

Chance would have it, that on this power-challenged day, I would also meet up with Nick Sowden from ToughStuff. He’s here in Kenya to do for East Africa what they’ve already done for Madagascar: create an industry for entrepreneurs out of 1 watt solar panels.

ToughStuff Products ToughStuff offers a large selection of accessories for their panel, with extensions like an LED lamp (530 Ksh/$7), phone connectors (75 Ksh/$1), a rechargeable powerpack (550 Ksh/$7.25) and fake D-cell batteries that take direct input from the panel – used to power radios. It’s a compelling mix, and you can tell why they’ve done so well in Madagascar, and which bodes well for them in East Africa as well.

They’ve already started selling them through Chloride Exide in Kenya, at two shops in the industrial area you can pick up the kits for yourself. One shop is on Dunga Road, the other is on Kampala Road.

ToughStuff has a focus on entrepreneurs, which is why they have the “Buy One: Fund One” program. To entrepreneurs they offer financing through local MFIs.

Final Thoughts

Besides Solantern and ToughStuff, there are other projects like Portable Light (and others) working on low-cost solar for East Africa. It’s like the stars have aligned and all the cleantech companies are starting to really look at Africa as a place to make money – which it is.

The AfriGadget-side of me is waiting for local fundis to get their hands on these and to start customizing them for local needs. I want to see 8 ToughStuff solar panels daisy-chained together and used to power something larger. I want to see the wall-of-panels that light up 10 lights across a large room for night classes. The sort of thing that takes local needs, local technical talent and local businessmen to make happen.

Another thought… People think that these low-cost solar light kits are only for the poor. They’re wrong. I use them, as do many middle-class Kenyans if they can get their hands on them. The market is bigger than just the “bottom of the pyramid”.

Finally, I’m greatly pleased to see legitimate businesses, not NGOs, leading this charge. The quickest way to ruin this fledgling industry is by false ceilings imposed by development/aid subsidies around these products.

3:42

Testing iScribe

» ‎ White African

In the Summer of 2009 I was approached by Wilfred Mworia, a talented programmer in Nairobi. Wilfred’s big idea was to open up a small company where his main goal was to create mobile phone applications for platforms like the iPhone and Android operating systems. This company is called African Pixel, and Wilfred is well on his way to becoming a mobile app developer of some note, regardless of the fact that he lives in Kenya.

His first application is iScribe (iTunes link), a simple tool for writing a journal on your phone. It’s the tool I’m using to write this post as it pushes to WordPress.

Scribe

iScribe was built to be simple. A way for you to write a journal entry quickly, and then add images, video or audio if you so choose. While I’ve been actively involved providing feedback to Wilfred on the app, I’ve had to constantly remind myself not to ask for more features.

iscribe-writing

“How does it work? Simply, type text, take photos or videos, press a button to record and play back audio recordings, save your stuff, press another button to share online or by email and voila!”

Besides the simple journaling and multimedia capabilities iScribe entries can be emailed or pushed to a blog. This is especially useful as few people write solely for themselves.

Here’s Wilfred giving a walk through of the application:

Go ahead and give this first iteration of iScribe a try. Send Wilfred your feedback on how it can be made better or if you find a bug.

My feedback
The pushing to a WordPress blog is where there are a few shortcomings. I did push most of this post from there, but the images didn’t work right, nor was I able to add links. There are some user experience items where the user needs feedback on when they pushed a button and if something is happening. These are mostly minor issues though, nothing which makes iScribe unusable.

African Pixel

This is one application, something that should make some residual income for Wilfred. I know he’s interested in building more applications that he can sell on the iPhone app store and the Android marketplace. That’s the idea anyway, and it’s encouraging to see that he’s doing it from here, realizing that the web/mobile world means that you can do this anywhere.

Wilfred is currently working on a second application, one that he started in August which has even more potential than iScribe. To keep up to date with Wilfred and African Pixels, follow him on Twitter, African Pixel on Facebook and the blog. Guys like Wilfred need seed capital to get going, to buy the time to create those first apps where they can begin seeing cash flow. If you’re interested in that, I know he’d like to talk to you.

Permalink for 'Internet & Mobile Stats: Africa Grows Fastest in the World (2009)'

10:03

Internet & Mobile Stats: Africa Grows Fastest in the World (2009)

» ‎ White African

Each year the International Telecommunications Union puts out statistics on the state of mobile and internet data around the world. What I’m interested in is their “Information Society Statistical Profiles 2009 – Africa” report, put out just this week. Here are some key takeaways, but you should really go download the full report for yourself.

A decade of ICT penetration in Africa

“By the end of 2008, Africa had 246 million mobile subscriptions and mobile penetration has risen from just five per cent in 2003 to well over 30 per cent today. The high ratio of mobile cellular subscriptions to fixed telephone lines and the high mobile cellular growth rate suggest that Africa has taken the lead in the shift from fixed to mobile telephony, a trend that can be observed worldwide. The number of Internet users has also grown faster than in other regions.”

Despite this growth rate, penetration is far below the rest of the world. As the report states, “Less than 5% of Africans use the Internet, and fixed and mobile broadband penetration levels are negligible.” The global average is 23% internet penetration. This is due mainly to cost, but also to coverage over a very large continent that lacks population density outside of major cities.

Not all of Africa is created equal

If you’re a company trying to make money off of providing services or products to mobile phone users in Africa, you have to think strategically. You can see from the chart below that the countries you should focus on first are Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya, Ghana, Tanzania and Côte d’Ivoire.

This holds true for the internet as well. You’ll note that many of the top countries for mobile penetration are also countries with a strong internet growth rate.

“According to a recent household survey conducted by Research ICT Africa, the main location of Internet use in such countries as Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Tanzania and Zambia is the cyber/Internet café.”

Leapfrogging… with a catch

Many reports you read will sing the praises of the mobile networks and how the leapfrogging of landlines has helped Africa. That’s true, and I’m one of those people. However, it comes with a catch, and that catch is that the lack of landlines in Africa means that it’s a lot harder to get fixed-line broadband penetration, whether ADSL or otherwise. This keeps prices high and primarily availability is only in urban areas.

This gives the mobile operators a significant advantage in Africa, and it’s the reason why 3G (mobile broadband) technology is leading the way and why most of the growth will be through the mobile networks.

To put it in real numbers. By the end of 2008 there were only 635,000 fixed-line broadband subscribers in all of Africa, representing 0.1% of the population, whereas the world average is 6%. Mobile broadband sees 7 million subscribers with a penetration representing 0.9% of the population, again 6% being the global average.

In Summary

This report is an absolute gold mine of valuable data on internet and mobile phone usage, penetration and growth rates in Africa. I could go on with more graphs and thoughts on each section, but you should do yourself a favor and download the free copy and read it.

Finally, some last charts showing mobile cellular subscriptions, mobile broadband and internet subscriptions by country in Africa:

Permalink for 'Africa Gathering Nairobi 2009 (day 2)'

3:49

Africa Gathering Nairobi 2009 (day 2)

» ‎ White African

I’m here at day 2 of Africa Gathering in Nairobi, but can only spend part of the day here today, so it won’t be a full listing of all the talks. Day 1 talks are here.

I missed Nkeiru Joe’s talk about the sea and fibre cables. However, I’ve known and debated this with her for a long time. Here’s her presentation on this topic, but to get the flavor on it you should talk to her or hear her speak.

Nkeiru Joes Africa Gathering Presentation – 2009

Digital Integration (lifestyle and webstyle)

David Nahinga, one of the organizers for Africa Gathering. He’s taking a few minutes to talk about the difference between digital culture and everyone else. How we need to use our time effectively, not try to be on 20 social networks and to prioritize the tools and platforms that we use that help us reach our goals.

It’s interesting, David is really doing a primer on why social media and digital tools are useful, and a reminder to use the “hard disk as another lobe of our brain.” Having a tight digital framework helps us to adapt quickly to a constant change, which is a characteristic of web lifestyle.

GotIssuez

Got Issuez Christmas logo Mark Kaigwa is here to talk about his startup project called GotIssuez, which I’ve blogged about before. They are creating a digital means for Kenyans to talk about customer service issues – by mobile phone and the web. It’s an African social platform that crowdsources rants and resolutions from Eastern Africans on Products, Brands and Service Delivery. Users rant, rate and resolve issues, and where companies can get involved is in acting on the feedback.

Mark asks, “Do we as Africans have a problem with really listening?”

He draws lines from everyday customer service by businesses in Kenya, with the way that politicians operate, how police try to direct traffic and to the post-election violence last year.

“If the ballot box can’t bring me change, why should a suggestion box?”

The suggestion box is dead, or at the least it’s in need of a revamp. That’s why tools like GotIssuez, which is similar to Get Satisfaction in ideology, are important.

4 things that GotIssuez is doing to create change in the customer service space in Africa. (How do you get an African to believe in change?)

1. Creating community
Their community is made of people from Generation Y, with a very strong presence in universities. They’re the ones who will have a large voice in the future of Kenya. Providing a digital way to complain, but also a way to come up with solutions.

They’re using gifts and prizes as an incentive to get more people to use the platform.

2. Evolve Culture
In the beginning, the users who came to the site were there complaining about non-issue type items, like why they couldn’t get a date for valentines. Now however, the complaints are about mobile phone operators, ISPs, restaurants and things that others are having problems with as well.

3. Involve Companies
How do companies get feedback? How do they engage with customers online and offline? GotIssuez is trying to become the official voice of the people by providing a platform that both consumers and companies can use.

4. Change Circumstances
Actually create change by involving both ordinary people and companies. The example he used here was a popular coffee shop called Savannah that only has one bathroom. People weren’t happy about this and created a GotIssuez report on it. The managing director of Savannah was directed towards this and came up with a solution (finding nearby restrooms that people could use).

Mobile Cloud Computing

Simeon Oriko is a 3rd year student at University of Eastern Africa Beraton and he’s here to talk about mobile phones and cloud computing, and where the two meet. Mobile Cloud Computing is a combination of two major emerging technologies: Mobile computing and Cloud Computing. Both these technologies are increasingly growing at a high rate. The concept of Mobile Cloud Computing involves the integration of mobile phones and the internet (the ‘cloud’) to create a cheaper, more convenient way of accessing information and other resources on the internet.

“How do we give people access to information and other resources that allow them to be all that they can be?”

Simeon was driven to think about this knowledge gap as he went to different high schools and talked to students who wanted to learn about things, but couldn’t, which was holding them back from different professions and futures. The example he gives is of a young lady who wanted to be a pilot, but had no idea where to start.

The Mobile Web
Mobile phones are not the same as desktop computers, but people create sites and applications that don’t allow true access via the mobile phone. We have this hugely fractured space, with browsers, phones, operating systems that are so different that it’s impossible to operate in them.

4 problems:

Limited memory and storage – Various data formats are used and it depends on the device as to how powerful it is. Data storage is expensive. There are major interoperability issues between phones, so a different application needs to be created for each device.
Small display screens – Desktop version websites are optimized for 1024×768 pixels – and there’s no good solution for that on a mobile phone. Technical solutions exist using CSS and javascript… if your phone renders them
Flaky browsers – There are MANY mobile browsers (Android, Safari, Opera, s60, Opera Mini, Blackberry, NetFront, IE Mobile (old), Iris, Bolt, Skyfire, Obigo, Fennec, Teashark, etc…). They all vary in standards and modes of rendering
Bad Connections – Connectivity is spotty outside urban areas.

Cloud Computing

Solutions
Take processing away from the mobile phone and into the cloud – put it on the internet. For instance, if you want to upload a picture, you should be able to expand the storage space online from that which you have on your phone/memory stick.

Create a common platform that all the mobile phones try to share in common. Examples are the mobile web, SMS and USSD.

What will mobile cloud computing look like?

“Smartphones will increase in percentage, but that will not be the future. Feature phones will become more sophisticated, as more of the processing is taken away from the device and put in the cloud. Lower end phones will be the driving force, using SMS and USSD, even if they don’t have the mobile web.”

Applications will be of two types:

Native apps will still be there (Android, iPhone, WinMo, etc.)
Web apps will be used a lot more.

Faster mobile networks and improved network connectivity.

Simeon is working on Kuyu, a mobile web application that allows African devs to build African apps for real world African solutions.

Permalink for 'Africa Gathering Nairobi 2009'

23:43

Africa Gathering Nairobi 2009

» ‎ White African

Today I’m at AfricaGathering, a small conference focused on tech in Africa. I was at the first one in London earlier this year, and we had a great time, so I hope this will be just as good. This is the third one of it’s kind, but the first to take place in Africa – in this case Nairobi, Kenya at the British Council. I’ve decided to do one long running post today, where I’ll just keep adding to the post as the day goes on – refresh the page for more.

British Council in Nairobi

Today’s speaker list

PesaPal

PesaPal logo Right now Agosta Liko, a smart tech businessman who runs Verviant, is talking. He launched PesaPal just 2 months ago as a web-based mobile payments system for Kenya. Now that I’ve moved back to Kenya, I’m looking forward to trying PesaPal out in person.

“Life is 98% boring, work is boring and operational. 2% is inspiration and that’s where you get all the press. Make no mistake, the boring stuff is where you grow your business.” – Agosta Liko

There is no consumer oriented web payment system in Kenya. It’s a way for the unbanked (and banked) to buy online in Kenya. Agosta thinks that they are well positioned to be the most efficient transaction system in Africa. PesaPal is trying to find equilibrium between value, payment systems and real money. Making a transaction of beans or cows equivalent to one made by credit cards or PayPal.

PesaPal value flow

The transaction rate for merchants holding an account with PesaPal is currently 2.75%. PayPal, the closest comparable online payment system is set at 2.9%.

Kenyans for Change

Jane Munga is here to tell us about a social movement called Kenyans for Change (K4C). They’ve been working on uniting Kenyans worldwide, starting with a group on Facebook and quickly moving around the world with 10,000 users in the diaspora and in Kenya itself. It’s a voice for national reform online.

Jane Munga of Kenyans for Change

Jane is talking about what’s needed to restore hope in the “Kenyan Dream”. This dream is defined by the Harambee spirit, equality, national unity and sound leadership. With last year’s post-election violence, the poor state of roads and hospitals and all the other ails that we face in Kenya, it’s a hard sell. What’s interesting to me here is to see that the impetus for this initiative seems to come from the diaspora, after all, Jane lives in Alabama most of the time. This begs the questions, will it take the diaspora taking part to make real change happen?

One of the projects that Kenyans for Change is working on is called Project Amani (“peace” in Swahili), focused on the youth by the youth.

Africa Rural Connect

Molly Mattessich is here to talk to us about an initiative by the US National Peace Corps Association, Africa Rural Connect is an online platform with a mission to connect current and returned Peace Corps Volunteers with the African Diaspora, development practitioners, scholars, technologists and innovators to discuss rural agricultural development challenges and solutions in Africa.

“Find answers to Africa’s rural agricultural problems”

ARC is a way to use global collaboration to solve endemic agricultural issues across the continent. They focused the project on two main groups. First, Peace Corps Volunteers who have lived in the rural areas and who have a good understanding of what is going on at the village level as they lived there for two years. The second is the Afrian diaspora living around the world.

The $20k grand prize winner is actually here in the room, Jacky Foo with his “The Ndekero Challenge: A Systems Approach for Rabbit Keeping by a Rural Community in Partnership with a Commercial Rabbit Farm”.

The ARC project is built on Wegora, a tool that’s part blogging, commenting and voting. It’s built specifically for use by communities and collaboration amongst them. It’s really well designed platform and I’d expect to see it used by a lot of other organizations in the future.

We’re currently running through a workshop on collaboration (Low-tech social networking), where we write down our “big dream” and the steps we need to get there. Others in the room can then come up and offer help on what can be done to make it happen.

Kenya Airways

Rose Ohingo and Ann Muthui (who’s in charge of the social networking side of customer service) are here to talk about how Kenya Airways has created an online presence and a social networking strategy. They are here to talk about how the airline is using social media networks like twitter to attract new business and keep in touch with it’s client base to great success.

Look for Kenya Airways on Twitter at @KenyaAirways, on YouTube and Facebook.

What have we learned about “being out there“?

First off, people are surprised and impressed to find Kenya Airways interacting with them on social networks where they are online. Where they build relationships with people on a personal basis. People try to verify if it really is a KQ representative, and then they dig even deeper trying to find the names of the people behind the account(s).

Using analytics, Kenya Airways really tries to understand who is following them and who is interacting with them online. It turns out that 17% of their Twitter followers are travel guides, they have almost 2200+ followers, and their greatest growth has been 26% in the month of December (more stats).

“It’s a human face that they’ve never seen. They ask about jobs and how it is to work for KQ. They want to have a look inside the company.”

Marketing on social media has been very successful, case-in-point was the KQ tweet on the ability to use Mpesa to pay for flights using mobile phones.

Access Kenya

Kris Senanu is here representing Access Kenya, one of the countries largest ISPs, which services the corporate market. Kris will be talking about: “Fibre – the dawn of a new era”.

In 1995 Kris was graduating out of college, and the fastest internet connection you could get was 9.6kb and you needed a phone line – at that time there were only about 210,000 working phone lines, most within Nairobi and Mombasa. If it was raining, you had even less of a chance getting online. Times have changed.

Ultimately, the world is now flat, now that we have fibre in Kenya – we can compete and connect at a global level in ways we could never do before. Job creation and lifestyles will change as knowledge workers, who are needed in the new economy, now have access to the same level of connectivity as anyone in else in the world. Africa would have followed Europe and the West by going towards eCommerce – we have the ability to leapfrog that and go straight to mCommerce. We have the ability to do transactions that you would have spent a long time doing before, getting in 2 hour long lines and dealing with city traffic, just withour mobile phones.

Technology is a key enabler and facilitator for our transformation in Africa.

I agreed with Kris about the technology gap decreasing. I asked him if the challenge wasn’t any longer a technological one, is it a cultural one? Is it an issue of Africans using technology in a way that truly makes them equal on the global level – on time, reliability, quality?

Kris had a brilliant answer, starting with Kenya having a culture of excusability, where peopel always have an excuse for why things are late or shoddy. He then went into the difference between “Matatu-time” vs “train-time”. The train leaves at 8:05 on the dot, if you’re not on it by that time, your loss. Matatu-time leaves at 8-ish – time isn’t as important. This cultural understanding of time is an area where there is a gap that might be the biggest issue between Africa and the rest of the world.

On Customer Service
Juliana aksed, “How does Access Kenya deal with customer service and support when there are high expectations in the market?”

Kris goes on to talk about the way Access Kenya grew from being a company that dealt with corporate clients. They would rather pass up business than deal with consumers. Now however, they found that they had excess bandwidth, especially in the evenings – so they decided to create a consumer-focused service. This hasn’t worked out so well. Kris fell on his sword, stating that they are trying to improve their consumer services, but they are no where near where they need to be and are trying to make it better, trying to make it as good as their corporate services.

Essential Africa

Jimmy Gitonga & Juliet Mukunga are here to talk about Essential Africa, an African search engine, portal, and free web directory with comprehensive listings covering all African countries on one single virtual platform.

Jimmy tells us how in Africa, there’s not normal street names or directories for things. In Africa, you need a guy. As in, “I know a guy…” who can help you as you’re trying to find something.

An example, you’re trying to plan a trip across Africa on a bicycle, how do you know where to stop, eat, sleep and visit? There is no directory. There is no content.

This is why they created Essential Africa, a way for people to get a free African listing. He gets an address, map directions, contact number, and a description and a URL to the company’s website.

“Everyone thinks that we’re philanthropic. No, we’re not blue-eyed like that. We make money off of the eyeballs and the advertising.” – Jimmy Gitonga

Essential Africa has been at it for two years. They started with spidering the web (with limited success) and then getting people to start entering their own information. It’s been a long road, but they’ve started to gather a lot of information, a lot of listings for organizations and small businesses who have never been on the internet at all.

They are hoping to be the African “human” search engine. It’s built for computer and mobile devices, covering all African countries on one single virtual comprehensive platform. They’re hoping to be the gateway for Africans and the friends of Africa who are visiting.

Movirtu

Christine Ogonji is here as one of the newest members of Movirtu. They are creating a way for poor people to share a phone, but not a phone number. They target services to the bottom of the pyramid, for profit – the classic “do well by doing good”.

Out of 3.4 billion people in the world who have a handset and a SIM card, 1 billion only have a SIM card, but no phone. Their income is $1-2 per day, but they spend 5-30% of their income on mobile communications.

Here’s a video about Movirtu, and why it’s a product that could make a big difference in Africa:

Funding for Movirtu has come from Gray Chost Ventures and Grassroots Business Fund.

Right now Christine says that Movirtu is looking to provide an Mpesa-like account for people using the virtual phone numbers. The name for this service is MXPay, and is going to have mobile money integration with a regular account and one time use. Distribution of monies or acceptance of payment from specific people below the poverty line who do now own a phone or a SIM card.

They’re targeting their first 1 million customers in 2010.

The End

A big thanks to Ed Scotcher and team for today. Tomorrow is the big “open” day here at the British Council. Get here by 9AM if you want to get a seat.

Permalink for 'Testing Google Driving Directions in Kenya'

3:06

Testing Google Driving Directions in Kenya

» ‎ White African

Gone are the days where you had to have lived in Nairobi for a couple years before you understood all the backroads and neighborhoods in order to get from one place to another. Kenya has an advantage as the only non-sales office in all of Africa for Google is here. When they create new tools, or customize a feature from the developing world, for Africa they do it here in their own backyard first (and sometimes Uganda).

Google Maps in Kenya A couple weeks ago Google turned on mapping directions for Kenya. Like me, most of the people who know Nairobi were shocked and didn’t believe it. Could this really work? It does, and it works well.

I’ve been testing it out for the last week to see what type of results I get, and I’ve been impressed with the results. Fortunately I have my iPhone with me, and it allows me to do things like challenge Google/Apple to find my current location and then give directions from that location to somewhere in Nairobi that I happen know every backroad, alley and footpath between.

Shortcomings

No control for traffic
As omnipotent as Google seems to be, what they’re unable to do is track the vagaries of Nairobi traffic. So, as logical as the directions you get from Google might seem, they are not the best way to go much of the time. While they give accurate directions for new people to Nairobi to follow, they are also the “obvious” route and will cost you hours of sitting in gridlock while you watch the matatu’s clog the road even further.

Alternate route to gigiri

Lack of detail on the maps
Some areas, even large towns like Ongata Rongai aren’t even shown on the map. Below is the failure screen for getting directions from Rongai to Eastleigh. I had to go with Langata instead, as that was the next closest “town” in Google Maps. This pattern holds true for dirt roads and paths that are usable by vehicles, but which don’t show up on the map.

Lack of data - fail on Google map direction in Nairobi

I’ve also seen this in regards to offices and buildings, where they are put on the wrong part of the road, sometimes off by a good half kilometer, as was my father’s office in Upper Hill shown below.

Finding the BTL office in Upper Hill, Nairobi

Final Thoughts

Anyone living or working in Kenya should buy a drink for every intern and Google employee who has done the manual work to get Kenya mapped to the level that it is. It’s an iterative process that only gets better as time goes by and more people work on it.

As Google states:

“This essential tool is by no means Google’s effort alone – we’re enormously grateful to Kenya’s active online cartographers who have helped us build these maps from ground up with the use of Google Map Maker, a tool that allows people to help create a map by adding or editing features such as roads, businesses, parks, schools and more.”

The directions provided by Google in Nairobi (I haven’t tested up-country) are adequate. They’ll get you to and from the locations in Nairobi that you need to go. You’re better off now than you were before, and as someone new to the city you’ll have a lot better luck with Google’s maps and directions than you’ll have with asking someone on the side of the road.

Permalink for 'The (Small, Slow and Sufficient) $99 “Africa” Laptop'

3:23

The (Small, Slow and Sufficient) $99 “Africa” Laptop

» ‎ White African

Just in time for Christmas, a new low-cost, low-power netbook is hitting the scenes that actually retails for only $99. Cherrypal, the company behind it, has dubbed it “Africa”, as they’re focusing the little computer on developing countries. As the company states, this is a “no thrills” laptop – it’s basic and won’t be attractive for most of the tech people reading this blog for their own heavy use.

“At just $99, the new 7” Cherrypal Africa is one of the best buys in the world of electronics. Created with developing countries in mind, the Africa is our latest step toward closing the “digital divide”, and we’re extremely proud of this achievement. Whether you live in Ghana or Texas, the Cherrypal Africa is right for you! “

[Note the Texas bit? Yes, I thought that was funny too...]

The computer runs on a 400 MHz processor and features 256 MB RAM, 2 GB flash memory, Ethernet, Wi-Fi, two USB ports and can run either Linux or Windows CE operating systems. It has only a 7″ screen as well, so it’s not a monster that you’re going to be able to do a lot of heavy work on.

There’s always room for low-cost, yet usable, computers in Africa. I’m happy to see this operating as a real business, available to everyone.

The problem is distribution

It’s easy enough to buy one online if you’re from the US, but how does an unconnected, no-credit card (or PayPal) owning African buy one? Let’s be honest, here we need a store that you can walk into, cash in hand, and walk out with a computer. There is no payment mechanism that works beyond in-country mechanisms and delivery to any African nation will double the price of an individual “Africa” laptop.

What I’m trying to determine is the distribution model for getting these to actually be for sale in Africa for $99. Is it even possible?

UPDATE:
I just got in touch with Max Seybold, the founder of Cherrypal, saying the following:

“We can ship to Kenya for the same cost too, let us know.

We are looking into established distributors/resellers but also encourage schools and other organizations to sign up as distribution channel. This would be a win-win situation, since this organizations are in dire need to generate additional income and we could teach them how to promote and distribute the products. It’s a learning experience for all of us but we are willing to try unconventional approaches in order to help the cause.”

Any takers? I’d be interested, but not by myself.

14:00

3G Internet as Backup

» ‎ White African

0:56

Heading Home

» ‎ White African

You might have noticed a lack of posts, or at least an erratic nature to my blogging over the last 6 weeks. This is due to the fact that I’ve been packing up and getting ready to move my family back to Kenya after living the last few years in the US. I won’t lie, it’s been pure madness and I apologize to all the people who I didn’t answer emails from, return calls or tweets…

Nairobi Skyline

I’m very excited though, as this is where it’s happening. Nairobi, where I’ll be living, is one of the four main technology hubs in Africa (Jo’burg, Accra and Cairo being the others). Nairobi is also home, that’s where I grew up and where I know the most people. It’s where I can relax and eat nyama choma (which I will do in abundance).

Why?

Nairobi is also where Ushahidi started almost 2 years ago (wow, time flies!), which is providing the means and the reason for this move. There will be two main activities that I’ll be involved with:

I’ll be working with the Nairobi programmers, designers, end users and members of the Ushahidi community in person. (These guys and gals are already rockin’ it, wait until you see the “Mogadishu” release of the code next week!)
My other main focus is opening up an innovation hub, a physical nexus point for the tech community in the city. This hub will also be a place for us at Ushahidi to reach out and better engage with our own user and dev community.

There is a slew of big announcements coming out on the Ushahidi-front over the next week. I’ll be in the air for the biggest of them, but will link to it when I land. Keep an eye on our blog and twitter feed for more.

Leaving

Orlando has been a good home base for us. While it might not be the tech capital of…well, anywhere, it’s still home to some amazing people and we’ve loved being a part of it. A big thanks for the friendships and a shoutout to those techies who have made Central Florida home:

Chris Scott, Alex Rudloff, Josh Hallett, Ted Murphy, Scott Allen, Dawn Hatton, Gregg Pollack, MindComet, Paul Lewis, Cory Collier, Bill Ferrante, Celly, Bill Dean, Etan Horowitz, Ryan Price, Eric Marden, Jason Seifer, John Rife, Ochie, Alex Spoerer, Doug White, Robert Jordan, Jim Hathaway, Robert Shade, Scott Toncray, Damian Scott, Chris Droessler, Allison Jordan, Gavin Hall, Gabriel Chapman, Jermaine Pulliam, Josh Lindsey, Marcelle Turner, Jon Shuler, (and many others I’m forgetting)…

I think of all the great BarCamp Orlando’s, BlogOrlando’s, Likemind and Florida Creative meetings… For a small tech community, it does throw an awfully big punch.

So, a big thank you to all the friends and family that have made this next chapter in our lives possible. We’re looking forward to it. All will be the same, just from the Kenya primarily.

Permalink for 'Announcing the TED Senior Fellowships'

9:17

Announcing the TED Senior Fellowships

» ‎ White African

It all started with a TED Fellowship to Arusha, Tanzania in 2007, and today it’s a great honor to be selected as one of the inaugural 20 TED Senior Fellows, especially as it’s in the company of people that I know and respect greatly. It’s also neat to see that 25% of us represent Africa (in bold below), no doubt a nod to the African roots of the TED Fellowship program.

Joshua Wanyama, Sheila Ochugboju and myself at the TED Talks viewing in Nairobi earlier this year.

The TED Fellows program brings together extraordinary individuals who are working on an eclectic group of projects and programs, or are building organizations and companies that are changing the world. Our role as TED Senior Fellows will be to mentor the newer Fellows, help with TEDx events in our communities, post on the TED Fellows blog, and continued year-round participation in the TED community.

The greatest benefit to being a TED Senior Fellow is being able to attend five additional TED conferences (TED and TEDGlobal), participating in five Senior Fellows pre-conferences, the potential to deliver a full-length talk on the TED University or main TED stage, and the possibility to have that talk posted on TED.com.

That’s a lot, but maybe the greatest advantage this type of opportunity provides is the chance to be part of the TED community on a long-term basis. Something that’s hard for those of us who are doing interesting things, but don’t necessarily have the resources to spend on getting to multiple TED conferences.

Check out the TED Fellows site if you’re interested in becoming a Fellow, or want to know more about the program. The TED Fellows blog is also a good source of eclectic information from people doing amazing things around the world.

My TED Senior Fellow colleagues:

Taghi Amirani (Iran/UK) – Documentary filmmaker, Amirani Films
Rachel Armstrong (UK) – Teaching fellow, The Bartlett School of Architecture; physician; science-fiction author
Frederick Balagadde (Uganda/US) – Research scientist, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; co-inventor of the microchemostat, a medical diagnostic chip
April Karen Baptiste (Trinidad) – Associate Professor of Environmental Studies, Colgate University
Faisal Chohan (Pakistan) – CEO, Cogilent Solutions; founder, Brightspyre, Pakistan’s largest online job portal
Colleen Flanigan (US) – Fine artist; stop-motion armaturist, coral reef restoration expert
Gabriella Gómez-Mont (Mexico) – Founder, Tóxico Cultura, a Mexico City-based artistic think tank
Jonathan Gosier (US/Uganda) – Founder, Appfrica, a business incubator in Kampala
Peter Haas (US/Haiti/Guatemala) – Founder, Appropriate Infrastructure Development Group (AIDG)
Erik Hersman(Kenya) – Co-founder, Ushahidi; blogger, AfriGadget and White African
Adrian Hong (US/North Korea/South Korea) – Director, The Pegasus Project; former director, Liberty in North Korea
Juliette LaMontagne (US) – Education consultant; innovation facilitator
Alexander MacDonald (US) – Economist, NASA Ames Research Center
Juliana Machado-Ferreira (Brazil) – Biologist, SOS FAUNA; PhD candidate, Sao Paulo University
VK Madhavan (India) – Executive Director, Central Himalayan Rural Action Group (Chirag)
Naomi Natale (Italy/US) – Founder, One Million Bones, a large-scale social activism art installation
Bola Olabisi (Nigeria/UK) – Founder, Global Women Inventors and Innovators Network (GWIIN)
Alexander Petroff (US/Democratic Republic of the Congo) – Founder, Working Villages International
Juliana Rotich (Kenya/US) – Co-founder, Ushahidi; blogger, Afromusing and Global Voices
Mohammad Tauheed (Bangladesh) – Architect; founder, ArchSociety

Permalink for 'African Mobile Market, Q2 2009 Numbers'

11:37

African Mobile Market, Q2 2009 Numbers

» ‎ White African

Africa has 415,010,625 mobile phone subscribers, with an average growth rate across the continent of 5.4% between Q1 and Q2 2009.

Blycroft does an excellent job of aggregating data on African mobile phone markets each quarter. They’ve compiled their report for Q2 2009 which includes subscriber numbers and other useful data, titled “The Africa and Middle East Mobile Telecoms Market in Figures 2Q 2009“. The mobile data includes GSM and CDMA networks, but excludes fixed and CDMA-wireless networks, which are classed as an extension of the fixed network. Make sure you get over to their site and pickup the full report, available for £399.

Mobile subscriber growth numbers by African region:

comparing Q1 to Q2 2009

Statistics for the North Africa region for 2Q 2009 cover 6 states and 131,109,223 subscribers, up from 123,903,195 in 1Q 2009, and representing a net gain of 7,206,028 ( 5.8 percent)

Statistics for East Africa cover 12 states and 61,983,813 subscribers, up from 58,257,266 in the previous quarter – an increase of 6 percent. Year- on-year growth saw some additional 18,382,201 mobile subscribers in the region; a growth of 42 percent.

Statistics for South Africa cover 10 states and 62,175,521 subscribers, up from 60,093,764 in the previous quarter – an increase of about 3.5%

Statistics for West Africa cover 16 states and 125,616,329 subscribers, up from 118,644,669 in 4Q 2008 – an increase of approximately 6%.

Statistics for Central Africa covers 11 states, and 34,125,739 subscribers. (Note: I’m missing the Q1 2009 numbers for Central Africa, if you have them, please pass them on so I can update the chart)

Top 20 African States by Mobile Penetration

There’s not much available in the non-pay version to see, in fact, they’ve removed almost every meaningful number and graph. However, there is one graphic covering the top 20 African states by mobile penetration.

As usual, South Africa and Egypt show large subscriber numbers, both at around 50 million users. Interestingly, penetration in South Africa is over 100%, but is still only at 60% in Egypt, meaning there will be much more growth there than South Africa in the future.

When discussing penetration rates, we always see a higher proportion of small and island countries due to the fact that it takes a lot less mobile users to have a significant percentage covered. Unfortunately, that’s somewhat meaningless in a chart like this, because they’re mixing small with large countries. More useful would be two charts that are separated on population levels.

Permalink for 'Quick Hits Around African Tech'

9:39

Quick Hits Around African Tech

» ‎ White African

Permalink for 'African Connectivity Visualized'

13:49

African Connectivity Visualized

» ‎ White African

19:52

Creative Juices

» ‎ White African

What gets you thinking creatively?

I’ve been thinking a lot about the need to have more time spent away from the normal timesinks that define our working lives. Getting more dead time. Daydreaming time. Doodling time.

My main ways:

1. Daydreaming

I had 10 hours of driving time on Friday. That’s the perfect environment for me to get some thinking done, I’m unable to escape to the digital tethers of mobile phone or computer, and reading a book isn’t possible. Therefore I think, and seemingly unrelated patterns start to become apparent from different projects, people and initiatives that I’m involved in.

This fits in with an article I read on Fast Company recently, “Hard Work’s Overrated, Maybe Detrimental“.

“By most measures, we spend about a third of our time daydreaming, yet our brain is unusually active during these seemingly idle moments. Left to its own devices, our brain activates several areas associated with complex problem solving, which researchers had previously assumed were dormant during daydreams. Moreover, it appears to be the only time these areas work in unison.”

Honestly, I don’t do this daydreaming stuff enough, I need to do it more. My goal is to untether myself from my iPhone and books more often. Some of my best ideas last year came from an airplane flight where I forgot my book and my iPhone was dead, leaving me with 5 hours an pen and a notebook…

2. Doodling

I used to draw a lot, but about 7-8 years ago I just kind of stopped. I’m determined to get started again, even if it is just doodling spaceships in a notebook.

Closely related to doodling is finding crazy, yet professional and cool, images that inspire me to strange thoughts. Case in point…

Good blogs to follow for occasional posts with reams of these types of images are InstantShift or Smashing Magazine.

How about you?

I’m very interested in hearing how others get their creative juices flowing. At some point we all have to shake up the norm, the status quo, in our lives or work. Is there a way that you do this purposefully?

0:28

Tags, Time and Location

» ‎ White African

On Friday I had a long conversation with Noam Cohen from the New York Times about Ushahidi and Twitter. He was doing some homework for an article he was writing on the increased value that geolocation data can add to the massive streams of data coming out of tools like Twitter, called “Refining the Twitter Explosion with GPS“.

A lot of our discussion was centered around location, especially since he was thinking of the Ft. Hood shootings and the value of location in determining useful information from the Twitter stream during that crisis. This is what we’ve built Ushahidi around of course, the idea that location and even small bits of information give us a better understanding of an unfolding crisis. This is just as true of mundane information, or trending topics in a locale, which is why Twitter is building a new geo infrastructure. It couldn’t be in better hands either, with both Ryan Sarver and Schuyler Erle on the team, what Twitter puts out will be top notch.

What was more interesting than just geographical references for information was the combination of two other big ways to parse this data: Time an Tags. We’ve started to see a lot more apps mixing time and location in the past year or two, and we’ll see more as the visualizations for it improve. Categorizing information, pictures and video by keywords (tags) have been around even longer.

TwitterThoughts

We need to see more combinations of tags, time and location in visualizations and platforms. I can’t think of anyone who does all three really well (if you can, please leave the link), though there are a number who do two of them incredibly well – including Flickr’s geocoding of images (tag + location), TwitterThoughts (tag + time) and TwitterVision (time + location), etc.

We have a widening stream of information. The lowered barriers for entry globally, and the encouragement by social tools, means we’re seeing exponential growth rates. Twitter alone saw an increase from 2.4 to 26 million tweets per day in just the last 8 months. We need some way to make sense of this information. Our ability to create information has far surpassed our ability to understand it in a timely manner.

Chris Blow outlined this best with a visual for Swift River for use in a presentation I did at TED this year:

It’s a serious problem and one that only gets deeper with every month that passes. In most areas, it’s not a big deal, but when a crisis, emergency or disaster hits the misinformation and lack of understanding has very real consequences.

I’d love to see more work being done with all three: Time, Tags and Location.

Permalink for 'An African Tech List on Twitter'

18:06

An African Tech List on Twitter

» ‎ White African

21:52

Trusted Intermediaries

» ‎ White African

If you’ve run into me in the last couple months you’ll likely have heard me talking a lot about the need, power and abilities of trusted intermediaries. What is a trusted intermediary? It’s someone who sits between two parties, entities or ideas that don’t naturally trust each other and provides a bridge.

Do you trust this bridge? Why?

In some ways, this train of thought stems from the posts on bridgers and xenophiles started by Ethan Zuckerman and riffed on by myself. It’s only as my continued work in the African tech space has evolved that I have come to understand the true value of this concept. Seeing my position makes me realize how valuable it is to be trusted and in the center of a group of unknowns (ideas, funding, people or projects). It’s in the unknown areas of our lives that we search for trust, for people or conduits that impart a measure of confidence to our next decision. For the nod that tells us we’re heading out on the right path.

We lean on trusted intermediaries all the time, in both mundane decisions and important interactions. When you’re looking for a mechanic, you’ll trust your neighbor’s opinion over the phone book. If you need a new bike helmet, you’ll trust online reviews before you buy one with no reviews. Likewise, when you’re going to make a large investment in the African tech space, you’ll search out trusted intermediaries first.

A case study: Ushahidi

When someone is looking to invest in an African tech startup, using seed funding or grants (and it is the same for non-profits or for-profits) they are nervous. There’s a lot of other good ideas out there in other parts of the world, the low hanging fruit, that they feel more comfortable in putting money into. Why Africa? Why you?

Ushahidi started off quickly, and we were able to raise funds for continued operations much faster than many other similar non-profit tech organizations. While we’d all like to think it’s due to the brilliant tool we’ve built, we have to be honest and recognize that the individuals behind it are what gave the funders confidence to move forward. Ory, David, Juliana and I had been on the public stage for a while; we were known quantities.

We were trusted intermediaries before Ushahidi was even thought of. Which begs the question: would our team have been able to raise funds for almost any idea just as easily? Probably not, as the Ushahidi idea, timing and application are special. However, the point is still made, money flows when the people are trusted.

Trusted intermediaries elsewhere

Jon Gosier is a trusted intermediary. His Appfrica Labs incubator and innovation center in Kampala provides a person and entity that funders, projects and individuals are drawn too. His blog keeps him front and center in people’s minds.

Glenna Gordon is a trusted intermediary. She’s a photographer who has been romping around Central, East and West Africa for a couple of years. If you need a pro shooter in a hard spot like Liberia, you’ll find her blogging away at Scarlett Lion.

Eric Osiakwan in Ghana is a trusted intermediary. His leadership at the African ISP Association and the track record he’s had on projects makes him an easy person to go to in West Africa, and his Internet Research firm makes a perfect conduit for interacting with him.

Of course, these three are just a sample, there are many more like them cross the continent in different fields.

What is consistent about trusted intermediaries is that they have found a way to create a bridge between two things, and are trusted by both sides of that bridge. It’s why personal relationships, consistency, reliability and trust are more important now than ever before.

Permalink for 'PesaPal: Kenyan Web & Mobile Payments'

21:52

PesaPal: Kenyan Web & Mobile Payments

» ‎ White African

Start local, then Africa, then the world. That’s the mantra app developers in Africa should be repeating to themselves as they build their game changing tools. That’s what Agosta Liko and his team at Verviant are doing with their new web and mobile payment platform: PesaPal.

PesaPal is an eCommerce platform focused on Kenya. It’s built to work seamlessly with Kenya’s main mobile payment services; Zain’s Zap with approximately 300,000 users and Safaricom’s MPesa with around 2 million users.

The Need

Most Kenyans do not use credit cards, many are unbanked, and there is no consumer-oriented payment system in the country. PesaPal is aimed squarely at these wananchi (ordinary Kenyans). It’s a way for local vendors to offer digital payment for goods in a systematic way that they can track, and in a format that Kenyans have and are familiar with: mobile phone transactions.

Think of PesaPal as akin to the services offered by PayPal and Google Checkout to businesses – except that it actually works in Africa. (long rant coming if I continue down that thought path…).

Phase 1 (this release) is about vendors being able to receive money, think mCommerce, ticketing, education, online stores, etc.
Phase 2 (time TBD) is about paying money, which would include things like payroll, payday loans, micro-loans, etc.

How it Works

A prototypical business might be someone who manages a school or a vendor who wants to sell products via a website or billboard. They would come and sign up with PesaPal and get approved mobile phone payments set up using their own Zap or Mpesa account.

At this point the business is up and running and can receive payments.

If the business has a website, there are a few more options. They can pay a one-time fee of 4,000/= ($50) and get a pre-built plugin for common website content management systems like Joomla or osCommerce. The more advanced implementers can access and use the exposed web services (API) that PesaPal has built to allow for merchant and buyer verification or transaction processing.

A good example of this is Totally Toto, a website that sells children’s clothes and delivers them locally. Their only option in the past was cash-on-delivery, with PesaPal they are now also accepting, and tracking, payment in advance.

The business model for PesaPal is a transactional one, where they make approximately 15/= ($.20) per transaction that uses their system. I’m in favor of this because it gives PesaPal a great incentive to grow their user base and provide a service that truly helps vendors using their tool.

Further revenue opportunities for the PesaPal team include customized product integration, web site design and licensing of more advanced API functions by larger organizations.

Out of the box in phase 1, users will have:

Immediate receipting and confirmation
Transaction details stored for 7 years
Vetted merchants/vendors
Monitoring for KYC (Know Your Customer) and AMC (Anti-money Laundering) to protect vendors
Safe and secure hosting within Kenya, the same place that Swift (money transfers) hosts theirs

The People and the Business

Agosta Liko is the Founder of PesaPal. He brings to the table a wealth of experience working in the US banking sector, Insurance field and Consulting. Agosta has worked on Wire Transfer, Loans Origination and Anti Money Laundering Systems for First Citizens Bancshares in USA. Paul Mungai, PesaPal’s Chief Software Engineer has over 5 years experience with Verviant Consulting Services where he worked on a wide array of ecommerce outsourcing projects. Onesmus Kamau Kagwanja, PesaPal’s Chief Technology Officer has been building software in East Africa for years, creating enterprise-level applications for some of the larger insurance companies in the region.

This background gives the seasoned team a particular edge when it comes to doing this work in Kenya. It has also helped them to bootstrap the venture, to build the application, launch it and keep them running through next year. The need and the ability to raise funds locally is a big deal in and of itself, and it’s a big mark in PesaPal’s favor that they’ve been able to pull this off.

It takes more than just pushing the “go” button on a website to make a business take off. It also takes deep pockets to launch a country-wide marketing campaign, a necessary expense for consumer products. Look for a major billboard, radio and web push by their team starting in October.

Permalink for 'The FLAP Bag Project at Pop!Tech'

11:58

The FLAP Bag Project at Pop!Tech

» ‎ White African

If you follow AfriGadget, you’ll know that this summer I spent some time testing some new bags made by combining flexible solar panels from the people at Portable Light with the top-notch bags made by Timbuk2 in Ghana and Kenya over the summer. The whole initiative was put together by Pop!Tech, and it’s called the FLAP (Flexible Light and Power) bag.

The FLAP bag is still very much in its testing phase. What I was doing was alpha level, today more people are getting access to the bag and will help with beta testing in more places. This is good. It means that the team behind the project are not just rushing something to market to take advantage of the buzz, but are really trying to get it right.

Some of the suggestions from the African users can be found in the Fast Company article I wrote last week, but there are more coming in too, from South America and an Indian reservation in the US.

A few suggestions from African users

The American-style Timbuk2 bags were generally thought of as too large
Electronics need to be put into a more rugged case to survive the beatings that they’ll take in Africa
People wondered if there was a way to hide, or cover, the solar panels to disguise what the bag was – for security reasons
There was a general feeling that there was more use for portable light and power in rural settings rather than urban
The ability to remove the solar components from the bag was genius
The tailors wanted to make their own designs, and wanted access to cheap components to experiment with, and then sell

Testing, Local Relevancy & a Challenge

One of the most compelling things that happened on the trip was my interaction with tailors. I would give them a bag, but also give them the raw components and challenge them to make a bag of their own design, using local materials that they thought would be right for them, or right to sell in their market.

The bag above is my favorite customized bag design, it’s a smallish backpack that was made by Stephen Omollo in Nairobi. There are others though (see them here), and these creations serve as an indicator of the desire to own the technology. To make the technology relevant to specific local needs.

What this left me with was a nagging thought – that I was the wrong person to do this testing project. Sure, AfriGadget connections make me and the other editors a likely vector to do this, but that It was Timbuk2 that needed to be out in Africa with us. (I’m letting Portable Light off the hook, because I know they already do this)

Luckily, I’m here at Pop!Tech with the team from Timbuk2 and the team from Portable Light. I’m inviting them out to Kenya to actually get on the ground with these tailors and people who understand the pulse and cultural usage norms of the clients that they serve locally. With a little luck, we’ll get even further with the project, seeing a true partnership across two continents.

A big thank you goes out to my colleague Henry Addo in Ghana and David Ngigi in Kenya for their help with both videography and the interviews.

Permalink for 'Brain Food: Pop!Tech Fellows 2009'

0:51

Brain Food: Pop!Tech Fellows 2009

» ‎ White African

[More Pop!Tech Fellows 2009 pictures]

There are a lot of reasons to come to Pop!Tech, the conference, but honestly the highlight of my Fall is the Pop!Tech Fellows program that precedes it. It’s one of those seamlessly executed events where every detail is taken care of, which is a tribute to those orchestrating it, that pulls together some of the most amazing minds in the social innovator space into one place for a 5 days of immersion. The faculty is world-class and the innovation Fellows are exceptional in so many ways, not least among them their areas of focus.

This year I’ve met a young man figuring out ways to turn waste products into charcoal soil additives that increase crop yield by up to 200%. I thought I knew a little about the mobile space in Africa – and I did know a little, very little, especially compared to what Nigel Waller knows… Oh, and I sat amazed as a lady from Saudi Arabia shares how she won both the MIT and Harvard prizes for innovative business ideas (as a non-profit!) in one year – which is unheard of.

The first thing you need to understand about this pre-conference Fellows event is that it takes place in an incredible location. It’s Fall in the woods of Maine, where we’re housed in cabins surrounded by trees of varying shades of yellow, orange and red. The bay sits below us, with wooded hills behind the idyllic and well-appointed retreat center. It’s the perfect setting to leave behind your daily life and embrace a few days of learning, discussion, renewal and growth.

I was fortunate enough to be part of last year’s inaugural Fellows class, where fast-friends were made that still stay in contact. This year, I’m here as one of the two returning Fellows from 2008, with my partner Abby Falik, to serve as a bridge between the classes and help maintain a consistent ethos and to lend a helping hand wherever necessary.

One of the things I’ve been asked to do this year is help photograph the Fellows program. I can’t hold a candle to Kris Krug’s brilliant work from last year. Fortunately, Andrew Zolli (Pop!Tech’s curator) is letting me borrow his much better camera, which I hope will make up for any lack of talent.

[More Pop!Tech Fellows 2009 pictures]

Beyond the photos, beyond the scenery, beyond the relaxing wood cabins – this event is about feeding my brain. It’s about the chance to meet and share a unique experience with my peers and learn from some of the world-class faculty. It’s about challenging ourselves and not just talking about the successes and “good stuff”, but about ways we can all be better and speak openly of our failures.

Permalink for 'MoneyGram Tackles Mobile Payments'

21:09

MoneyGram Tackles Mobile Payments

» ‎ White African

Transacting money to and from Africa comes in a variety of flavors. Generally, besides country-specific solutions, there are: bank wires, Western Union or MoneyGram, buying phone cards in-country that can be resold, cash in a suitcase, mail a check (that will be stolen in the post office), etc.

As you can see, there are limited practical ways for getting money transferred internationally on a regular basis. It’s no wonder then, that even with the transaction costs ranging from $15-70, people tend to use the safer, more secure methods of banks, and money transfer businesses like Western Union and MoneyGram. I’ve used all three of these, and over time have started to drift towards MoneyGram as my favorite. They have a cheaper transaction cost than the other two, and I’ve experienced a much easier time with them over the hurdles that Western Union decides to throw in your way.

All this to say, if we consider banks wires a static white-collar service, then MoneyGram is quickly becoming the best option as the common man’s way to transfer money internationally. As such, I’ve been getting deeper into their services, seeing what types of API and digital offerings that they have which could be useful.

Mobile Payments

Currently, MoneyGram has around 180,000 agent locations around the world. More importantly, they’ve just announced that they are set to tackle the mobile payments space by creating relationships with the mobile networks.

“Mobile money transfer services are an emerging part of our product offering and we are eager to bring these services to the Middle East. Overall, we expect mobile service to be in highest demand in developing economies where individuals are more likely to have mobile phones than bank accounts.”

This is an important point, as it merges two different ecosystems of payments. At the local level, in countries that have the right tools and cultures for them, mobile payment solutions act as transfer services for people within the country. Traditionally, this local mobile payment system is not available for use by those internationally.

Right now MoneyGram’s connection to the mobile payments agents is focused on the Middle East and Asia, my hope is that countries in Africa will soon follow. My guess is that Zain’s Zap service might be one of the first, due to their connection to the Middle East, but no one knows for sure yet.

[Update: Just before posting this I heard about a couple of banks and Western Union in the UK working with Mpesa in Kenya to do transfers via mobile. Others are working hard in this space too, and for good reason, it provides a great deal more usability for end-users on both sides of the ocean. If one entity catches that mindshare, they’ll have a lot more profitability in the space)

Permalink for 'iWarrior: an African iPhone Game'

19:41

iWarrior: an African iPhone Game

» ‎ White African

There aren’t a lot of African gamers, as would be expected due to the general lack of access to gaming technology and platforms in Africa, relative to other parts of the world. There are even fewer game developers on the continent. Due to being a gamer myself, I like to keep track of this as much as possible, and it’s always fun to announce a new one.

iWarrior is an iPhone game (iTunes link), created by the cross-Afrian team of Kenyan Wesley Kirinya and Ghanaian Eyram Tawia of Leti Games. It’s a unique top-down shooter game that utilizes the iPhone’s inbuilt accelerometer to both move and shoot. Your goal: protect your village, livestock and garden from the incoming marauding animals.

It’s a great first-effort from the team, and I believe it’s the first game created by a team in Africa. This itself is a much more difficult task than what many might expect. Just to get an iTunes account and a way to be be paid for your application is a challenge due to Apple’s inbuilt prejudice against Africa (they’re not alone in this, as many other platforms, like PayPal’s or Google Checkout’s are the same). That seems like a dramatic statement to make, but I ask you to stay your judgment until you’ve walked in the shoes of an African programmer.

Gameplay
I’m not an exceptionally talented twitch gamer, so I found the unique movement plus shooting actions hard to come to terms with. However, as I played it longer, I found myself slowly figuring it out and getting better at it. Thankfully, the team has built in a completely different way to play using your finger to slide and tap, you can move and shoot. So, for the accelerometer-challenged (like me) there’s another option.

iWarrior also allows you to play your own music while playing the game. This might seem small, but it’s something a lot of game maker’s overlook, and it’s a lot more fun than listening to the same repetitious in-game music.

The game costs $2.99, which is a little steep for new games on the iPhone. For many reasons the costs of most applications (games or otherwise) on the App Store have been driven to about 99cents. So, it takes either a really big name or an app that has hard to replicate features in order to break past $1.99 and sell a lot. In the team’s defense, it’s difficult for them to download paid games to test and see if they compare to their own prior to putting it on the market (again, due to them being in Africa).

Graphics
The graphics are okay. I’m a stickler on this type of thing though, and I go for either over-the-top quality or simplicity. Examples of this is comparing Fieldrunners to Doodle Jump, both excellent graphically, yet with completely different aesthetics.

iPhone game design - fieldrunners vs doodle jump

So, I’m going to ding the team on this part of the game. This, after a lengthy discussion in Ghana with Eyram over the difficulties of finding quality digital artists. It’s not an easy thing to do, the best designers aren’t digitally literate, with a few exceptions. So, you get great sketching and painting, but few can put that into vector graphics, 3d or even Photoshop.

Though the challenge is high, we live in a digitally connected world where top quality digital artists from Asia and Eastern Europe can be found to do the work at acceptable rates. There are other options, and a game can be made or broken on looks alone.

Summary

iWarrior is an excellent first game on the iPhone platform from two highly talented and creative African game developers. I expect that there will be a lot of good games, and other applications, coming from this team over time – both on the iPhone and other platforms. It’s a game to be proud of and one that I hope a lot of others will buy.

Permalink for 'Text2Fly: Flight Schedules by SMS in Nigeria'

2:45

Text2Fly: Flight Schedules by SMS in Nigeria

» ‎ White African

Timi Agama was frustrated with his experiences in trying to get information about flights in Nigeria. It just didn’t make sense that there was no electronic means to track flight schedules. About five years ago he set out on a path to create a mobile solution for the problem. Out of that came Text2Fly, a mobile service that let’s you search for flight schedules by sending an SMS.

“The simple task of finding the next available flight is an inefficient and labor intensive undertaking for the Nigerian business traveller. Nigerian airlines don’t operate call centers and the Internet is slow. So the business traveller must assign staff to search all airline web sites or even send them to the ticketing office through stifling traffic.”

How it Works

A user sends in a text message to +447786201082 with a simple command, like “From Lagos to Abuja on Monday at 8am”. In response, the system gathers the information about all of the flights in Nigeria that fit your requirements, and sends them back to you as an SMS message.

As Timi states, this is ” A Nigerian solution to a Nigerian problem”. Interestingly, it’s not only useful in Nigeria, and I could see this same application being used elsewhere, not just in Africa but in the developed world as well.

I’m curious as to why the service is only available via SMS. It seems that if you have the data, then it’s easy to make it web-accessible. The advantage there is that you also can start creating ways for people to purchase tickets and thereby have another revenue stream.

The Business Behind Text2Fly

Text2Fly Quote In terms of business model Text2Fly is paid for by premium SMS once it officially launches. It’s free right now though, so definitely worth testing out to see how much it helps in your daily life.

User numbers are still modest because the site and backend system was only flipped on 3 weeks ago. There has been very limited marketing to this point, but there is a plan to launch a real-world and digital campaign once the service is fully tested and stable.

When I asked Timi about how local Nigerians are taking to the product, he stated:

The reactions from people who have used the service has been far better than I could have imagined. One chap I spoke to on the phone enthused about how Text2Fly is not just for busy business people but for “everybody”. Another told me a story of how he showed it to some friends while they were having a drink and all 7 of them stored the Text2Fly number.

[Note: David Ajao has also done a review, worth reading as he's a fellow Nigerian.]

Permalink for 'When do You Need Funding?'

6:54

When do You Need Funding?

» ‎ White African

I’ve spent the last couple days in scenic Salzburg, Austria with 20 other people from both traditional journalism and new media backgrounds. Our goal: discuss strategies for more effective engagement and investment in “tomorrow’s media“. There are a mixture of organizations in the room, some established and others start-ups, like myself representing Ushahidi.

One of the questions posed, and which I’ve been ruminating on, is “when do you need funding?” (At this particular meeting, we’re talking grants primarily, but this applies to traditional seed and VC funding as well.)

Invest in Doers not Talkers

972816_tape_measure I don’t think it’s as early as most people think. There are a lot of people out there who claim they need funds in order to build a product. I disagree. Your first job is to build it. It might be in your nights and weekends, but that’s to be expected.

Yes, at a certain level you need funding that allows you to live, feed yourself and grow a business, but that’s not until you actually have something to show. Why would you expect someone to pay you money for a good idea? There are good ideas everywhere, but few examples of great execution upon these ideas.

A great presentation, Powerpoint or speech will get you a long way, and the ability to communicate is essential in both getting funding and getting user adoption or partners to work with you. However, nothing sells a good idea like a working product.

Whether it’s building a prototype, like we did with Ushahidi in Kenya, or a couple guys in a garage creating a new search algorithm and having to shop the product of that research around before they find investors, it’s too be expected that the work comes first, the funds second.

Growing

When is funding needed then? It’s needed when you have a product and it shows potential for success. Where you can talk to smaller investors who can support your work a little longer so that it can be refined and grow into something that has a real chance to make a difference, make money or both.

The second level of funding is about scale. It’s when you have a proven product that already has some success and needs more than it’s current cash-flow, or personnel, to take it to make a broader impact.

Permalink for 'William Kamkwamba: Harnessing the Wind'

13:12

William Kamkwamba: Harnessing the Wind

» ‎ White African

“A rare and inspiring story of hope in rural Africa, a true story of youth challenging and winning against all of the adversity that life throws at it. William represents a new generation of Africans, using ingenuity and invention to overcome life’s challenges. Where so many tilt at windmills, William builds them!”

Three years ago I came across a fascinating story of a young man in Malawi who had built a windmill from scratch, and I wrote about it on AfriGadget. Since then, I’ve gotten to know William Kamkwamba as TED Africa fellows and most recently we spent a good deal of time together in Ghana at Maker Faire Africa.

There is now a book, a documentary and a foundation all set up around the inspired story of windmills from Malawi.

Fortunately, I was given a pre-release version of the ” The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind” to review, and as it comes out in just 4 days it’s about time that I did that. It should also be noted that Bryan Mealer, who wrote the book with William, is an incredibly talented writer that knows his way around Africa and has a knack for getting the nuances of African life across in a way few others do.

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind

I found the most fascinating part of this book to be William’s description of living through a famine. Imagine only one meal a day, and only a few bites at that. William’s family felt like they were the lucky ones because they at least had something to eat. I’ve seen pictures of people starving, but to have it described so frankly made it so much more real.

Because of this famine, William wasn’t able to go to school. His desire to still learn was what led to his reading books from the local library. It was there that he discovered the books “Using Energy,” “Explaining physics” and “integrated science.” Ironically, he discovered “using energy” (the book that inspired his famous windmill) while looking for the dictionary to look up “grapes.” On the front of “using energy” was a row of windmills, and William was reminded of the pinwheels that he and his friends made as a child out of cut up water bottles. He spent days looking through old parts at a junk yard, trying to find the right parts to build his own windmill.

As a young boy, William and his friends would often take radios apart and put them back together, cannabilizing some of them to fix others that were broken. A prototypical AfriGadget inventor, William was an expert at creative thinking and improvising, using a bicycle dynamo to power his first windmill.

Final Thoughts

What I appreciate the most about William is, despite all the notoriety that has come with his inventions, he remains humble, easy to talk to, loyal to his family and home, and full of desire to learn. You see this come through in his interviews, even with all of the success he has had, he is still a well-grounded individual.

A final bit of trivia: William’s windmill came very close to being the final logo for Maker Faire Africa this year, here’s the prototype of that. It’s great to see how he has influenced my work with AfriGadget over the intervening years. Many times he is on the stage at big western-focused events, however last month in Ghana he stood in front of his peers at Maker Faire Africa. The room of 300-400 fellow African inventors was enthralled… After all, how much more exciting is it to see home-grown ingenuity and innovation making it big than it is if it’s imported in from overseas?

Okay, go buy the book!

Permalink for 'Is There Technology Arbitrage in Africa?'

11:27

Is There Technology Arbitrage in Africa?

» ‎ White African

The term arbitrage traditionally refers to taking advantage of the price differential (the gap) between two or more markets. One example is how search engine marketers use arbitrage to make money off of Google Adwords with keyword buying and landing pages. Another is when traders take advantage of differences in exchange rates on currencies in two separate markets.

Is there technology arbitrage in Africa?

Tucked away in a blog post on Calestous Juma talking about the future of African communications, Ethan Zuckerman states:

“The spread of connection infrastructure into Africa now points to the need for devices that can access the internet, content to be delivered and applications. These, in turn, point to the need for institutions, laws and policies to regulate this space, which are currently lagging far behind the technology.“

We all like to discuss the technology gap in Africa, which is this space between those who have access to technology and can use it (the West) and those who do not (Africa). Does this create the environment to take advantage of technology arbitrage?

From a certain perspective that can all seem very bleak and depressing. From another, it smells like opportunity.

This time and knowledge lag between government “institutions, laws and policies” that Calestous Juma and Ethan are discussing is just the sort of gap that allows arbitrage to happen. You should be able to turn the lack of technology in one place, or at least information, compared to the other to your advantage.

Put another way, when a government is too slow, inefficient and technologically incompetent to keep up with the rest of the world, what happens?

I think we see the answer in a number of places already, not all of them savory. We see this in business executives who corner a market, like we’ve seen with Safaricom in Kenya, or the notorious 419 scammers in Nigeria. We read about it when Egyptian youth use Twitter to broadcast police brutality, or when Zimbabweans send MMS images of completed ballot counts from voting precincts in advance of those trying to perpetrate fraud.

Two main groups seem to take advantage of this: businesses and activists.

The natural inclination of the market is to leverage these gaps and inefficiencies, to create opportunities out of the void, that technology can often overcome. The best businesses in our current era are built to do this as are the activist groups with the greatest impact.

[Authors note: I've made up this term "technology arbitrage", but I couldn't think of a better way to describe what I've been thinking about. Speaking of which, I've been muddling this over in my head for a week and just wanted to air it out to hear other's thoughts.]

15:06

Quick Hits around African Tech

» ‎ White African

Permalink for 'Never Good Enough: Speed (pt 1/3)'

12:40

Never Good Enough: Speed (pt 1/3)

» ‎ White African

We’re never good enough when it comes to speed, stability or simplicity of our mobile and web applications. This is a three-part series where I unpack my experience building apps on each of these subjects. It’s not just for those of us working on Ushahidi, these are the three most crucial abilities of any web or mobile application.

Let me tell you a personal story:

Libera, March 2009

I’m sitting, sweating in the sweltering heat of a Monrovia cyber cafe, I have my notebook out and my am watching the clock. My goal is to see how fast I can load up the Ushahidi home page for the Democratic Republic of the Congo, it has a map, timeline and list of recent events tracking the current level of unrest in the country.

It’s not looking good. As I look around, waiting for the page to load, I count 8 others in the room – 6 of which have fired up stuttering and unusable Yahoo and Skype video chat windows. Why this is the channel and usage of choice, when it so obviously doesn’t work, I cannot answer. But this is reality, and if we expect ordinary Africans to use our application, we had better make sure that it loads up relatively fast on the low-bandwidth, shared internet connections that proliferate across the continent.

Utter failure. After 20 minutes painfully watching the page load byte by byte, I give up. I quickly type out a message to our team, imploring everyone to streamline this “fat, squeeling pig of a page”. Peppering them with questions… Can I buy some caching please? What can we do with this map to make it not kill the load? Can we get rid of 75% of the images on the page? Do we need to redesign this from the ground up?

Granted, Liberia’s internet situation is worse than almost any other on the continent. Especially when it comes to the grinding halt you see in the cyber cafes during the daylight hours as the local population piles on at the same time, completely overwhelming the limited satellite connection. That’s no excuse though. Ushahidi is built on the idea that the lowest common denominator, whether it’s PC or mobile-phone based access, will work. The PC-side is clearly failing.

Worst of all, my patience is short, Liberia is pissing me off with the heat, humidity, lack of bandwidth and no electricity grid. Objectively, this is the perfect state to be in, I am now able to come up with a solution for normal users in Africa.

What other’s know

Speed… if there’s only one thing that you do with your application, make it faster. No, it’s not fast enough.

This isn’t news to anyone, or it shouldn’t be. For years the major web sites around the world have known this and have been building for it. Mozilla, Amazon, Google and Facebook are all aware of just how critical speed is to their success. It boils down to attention threshold and what we, as users ourselves, are willing to put up with.

There is no area in which our team has felt more pain than in trying to speed up the page loads of our apps. Maps tend to be page killers by themselves. Once we add multiple calls to the database we start to get some truly agonizing speeds. It’s a constant pressure that sits on every one of our development cycles, and for which we dedicate a great deal of energy.

User experience research needed in Africa

One area that hasn’t seen enough true user experience testing is Africa. We know that internet speeds are slower, sometimes by orders of magnitude. I’ve got a lot of questions, more than answers at this point. Should we cut out the maps and all images? What’s the true cost of a page load +/- 7 seconds? What is the real value of maps in Africa compared to the West – do they matter?

Jessica Colaco is a top-notch programmer who has shifted to doing research in Kenya. I hope that she, and others like Eric Osiakwan and his team from Internet Research in Ghana, will help us dig out these answers. More than that, I hope they will help us ask the right questions.

Permalink for 'GotIssuez: Exposing Bad Customer Service in Kenya'

13:53

GotIssuez: Exposing Bad Customer Service in Kenya

» ‎ White African

How do we call out problems with businesses, customer service interaction and lack of service? That’s what Mark Kaigwa and team are trying to answer in Kenya and East Africa. The header on the GotIssuez website states:

“The customer is always right. Gotissuez.com is a platform where customers exercise their right to expose product shortcomings, poor service delivery or suggest ways of improving the products or services.”

GotIssuez is an on-line market research company primarily concentrating on three areas: consumer research, product research and service delivery. Their website is a tool to address the real shortcomings that many in East Africa face when trying to deal with the unusually bad customer service that permeates most of the businesses that operate in the region.

Their tool is mainly focused on the younger generation, people who are web and mobile phone savvy and who aren’t hesitant to raise their voice in protest of bad customer service or bad experiences. At any given time you might see complaints on the “crappy YU (mobile) network”, “Ngong Hills – A poor welcome at the entrance” or griping about political issues. Other users can go in and agree, disagree or help solve the problem the stated problem.

It’s a play to the crowd, a home-brewed combination of what we see on sites like Digg married up with the functionality of sites like Dell’s IdeaStorm.

I was intrigued by the one above actually, as it’s a complaint over the campaign to save endangered lions in Kenya. It’s had a pretty big impact on a certain group of people, mainly businesses and the upper class (so the poster to GotIssuez states). It’s also a good reminder that one mans treasure is another mans trash…

The Business

GotIssuez is currently implementing a large research and development project called ‘Tangaza.’ With this they have already began looking and measuring high-end statistics and detailed metrics on trends, opinions, comparisons and key information relevant to brands. Their focus is to continue to work on this as their business model develops and evolves.

It’s important to note that their tool is not their only effort in the brand monitoring, consumer research and service delivery space. While that is a primary outreach and awareness tool, much of their business comes from the services that they offer to organizations offline.

13:33

African Tech Quicklinks

» ‎ White African

Permalink for 'Finding and Funding African Innovators'

21:19

Finding and Funding African Innovators

» ‎ White African

How do you find the entrepreneurs and innovators in Africa who need investment funding to scale?

Agosta Liko - web entrepreneur in Kenya

That’s the question I was most intrigued by on my panel today at SoCap with Emeka Okafor, Nii Simmonds and Ashifi Gogo about identifying opportunities for innovation in Africa.

There are really two big issues at stake. First, how to find the right people. Second, what funding level is needed.

Boots on the ground

You’re not going to find the compelling African entrepreneurs while sitting in an office in the US or Europe. It’s only by spending significant time on the ground in the countries you’re wanting to invest in that you find the people you need to know. It’s there that you get past the first-level of non-expert opportunity profiteers and attention seekers and find the people who actually do the work.

Two examples:

AfriGadget is a blog about finding interesting stories of African innovation. It’s not always easy to come up with the stories though. You have to look hard, teach yourself to see things, in order to find these extraordinary individuals. Without the great blogging team and the people sending in stories from the ground, we wouldn’t have anything.
I grew up in Nairobi, yet it took me a solid two years of meeting people and networking within the city to get beneath the surface and find the people with the talent and drive to create actual businesses.

It’s generally not cost-effective for every funding source to have their own person canvassing the continent. The question then becomes, how do you find the trusted intermediaries who know the real story on the ground, know the players and can spot the talent?

The seed (angel) funding gap

Most of the individuals with the skills to create their own businesses in the high-tech space are working for large NGOs and multinationals. Why? They got to a place in their life where they had to make the choice of going out on their own, armed with a good idea and no hope of funding, or putting food on the table. This is similar to entrepreneurs worldwide, however in Africa the gap between success and failure is a lot less forgiving and the choices are a lot fewer.

Most of the funding available for companies in Africa comes through loans, debt financing. It’s mostly used in SMEs at the medium-sized level. There’s a gap, and that is seed funding. There are very few opportunities to get equity-based funding, especially at the levels where most entrepreneurs starting off need it. This is the $10-300k range.

Who funds them? There are a few organizations internationally who run business plan competitions with money prizes, others that fund a few startups each year (TechnoServe, Kuv and Acumen come to mind). There are also some local people and organizations that do some of the funding (as was the case for Agosta Liko pictured above), but it’s very hard to come by even within Africa’s most advanced tech/finance cities (Nairobi, Johannesburg and Accra).

Who else is out there?
How can we bridge this gap?

Permalink for 'Social Entrepreneurs and SoCap ‘09'

18:27

Social Entrepreneurs and SoCap ‘09

» ‎ White African

Permalink for 'Maker Faire Africa video compilation'

19:29

Maker Faire Africa video compilation

» ‎ White African

Permalink for 'Should we be Building SMS or Internet Services for Africa?'

12:36

Should we be Building SMS or Internet Services for Africa?

» ‎ White African

Probably one of my favorite discussions of this trip was entered into after the Uganda Linux User Group (LUG) meeting here in Kampala. It was about whether we should be providing internet protocol (IP) services first, rather than SMS. If cost is the single most important factor for any mobile service aimed at ordinary Africans, then what will it take to move the ball from the SMS court to the IP court? This isn’t just for non-profits to consider, but everyday businesses as well.

Phones that can access data networks have always been in short supply here, so the easy answer has always been to use SMS, just because that’s what people have in their pocket and can use right now. While there are great arguments for either decreasing the costs of SMS, or of moving to IP, the practicality of that was remote due to the costs involved. Either you need a big organization, or a government, who can force the mobile operators to lower their rates on SMS (their cash cow), or you need to have the costs of data-enabled phones to decrease enough that the majority of users switch to them.

There is an argument that says that Grameen’s and Google’s recent deal with MTN Uganda didn’t go far enough in pushing for free, or cheaper, messaging for their new services. Whether you agree or disagree on that matter isn’t relevant if you bypass the argument altogether and provide services via data, which is drastically cheaper, using SMS as the backup.

What a lot of people don’t realize is that for the first time, last year, mobile phones shipped to Africa with data service capabilities outnumbered the simple SMS-only phones that are so prevalent on the continent (Gartner 2009). Of course, this doesn’t mean that there will be a majority of IP accessible phone users immediately, but it is on its way.

Equally important to understand, and a point that increases the momentum of the mobile services over IP argument, is the fact that where there is mobile penetration, there is also available data services. This stands true in Uganda, where MTN says there is 92% GPRS coverage on their network. It’s even true in countries still trying to catch up, like Liberia, where though there are only islands of coverage, that coverage generally comes with data.

Reinier Battenberg, who runs the only local hosting in Uganda, brought up a great point. The fact that Google and Grameen weren’t able to significantly alter MTN’s position on the prices of SMS doesn’t matter. What matters is that Google didn’t offer an IP-based solution for their new Google Trader that they launched. That’s simply unbelievable! It’s doubtful if that type of work would take more than a day for an engineer to implement. Instead of effectively providing an end-run on the strategy around SMS, they just played the same game that the operator wants to play and will win. Something that Google really wants to do is drive people to the web, so why not at least provide web-services for those that can use it? It doesn’t make sense… all around it’s both curious and a questionable strategy.

Permalink for 'Web Hosting and IXP Issues in Uganda'

5:33

Web Hosting and IXP Issues in Uganda

» ‎ White African

I’ve spent the last couple days talking to web designers, programmers, systems administrators and businessmen about the situation in Uganda.

Technologists in Uganda have quite a job on their hands. Sitting, land-locked, behind Kenya and Tanzania they share most of those two countries problems, find that everything is more expensive, and then have to deal with a government who has little to know understanding of how technology can spur economic growth. On top of that, the local ISPs and the mobile operators are happily providing sub-par services at larcenous rates.

It’s no surprise then that we see a lot fewer quality programmers and web designers in Kampala than in Nairobi. However, though there are fewer, there is a great depth of talent available here in those that are doing this work, whether it’s Solomon King’s Node Six, Jon Gosier’s Appfrica Labs or Software Factory the creators of Kiva’s rival MYC4.

Local web hosting and the IXP

From what I could tell, there is only one hosting company setup for anyone to get started with a website in Uganda that runs a server from within the country. Few government websites are hosted locally, and the same remains true for almost all business or personal sites. Though there is excellent bandwidth locally, the international bandwidth is what is used, which means that no one (local) is winning.

What is surprising is that there is no local caching of international content going on at the Uganda IXP. If the Google Global Cache was being used, that alone would speed up local performance and make a better user experience. There are rumors of a Google Cache being used at either the ISP-level or Makerere, but that since it’s not using the UIXP, it cannot provide the service to all of the ISPs.

However, more important than that is the fact that it would significantly decrease the amount of international traffic. What’s mind boggling is that the local providers would still be able to charge the same rates, but decreasing international traffic through caching would increase their profit margins. I’m not quite sure why this isn’t being done, I wonder if the ISPs and mobile operators are just making too much money as it is and this is seen as more work than it’s worth.

Uganda’s IXP (international exchange point) is something of a mess too. Apparently, the two founders are in a bit of a squabble, with means each neutralizes the others decisions and nothing gets done. To make matters worse, the environment where it resides can only be considered as hostile to any type of electrical equipment. It’s in the basement of a parking garage where people wash cars providing a healthy dose of moisture, dust is in the air, and there is a general lack of upkeep on it.

Basically, all of the money ($106m) that the Ugandan government and the local ISPs and mobile operators are pouring into the infrastructure is reliant upon this one poor excuse for an IXP. It works, and the packets are switching, it’s just that the operation is not working in the optimal environment – physically or organizationally.

This is troubling for a number of reasons, but perhaps the biggest reason why it sits so poorly with me is that the government has a stated aim of getting more “local content” online. So, while there might be 10 Wimax providers going live by the end of the year in Kampala, there is little foundational infrastructure to support the peering between providers locally, regionally or internationally.

It seems that the biggest problems within the Uganda internet space is more about lack of holistic focus by the government and local ISPs and mobile operators. With a little effort, the peering, content hosting, costs and speed could be improved.

Permalink for 'Meltwater: Training Tech Entrepreneurs in Ghana'

16:14

Meltwater: Training Tech Entrepreneurs in Ghana

» ‎ White African

Before I left Ghana yesterday I had a chance to run by the Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology (MEST) and spoke to Ylva Strander, the managing director of this two year old institution. Their mission is to train up technology entrepreneurs with the skills and acumen to take part on the global stage. It’s run out of a large building in Accra with enough space to run the program for 60 students and their trainers.

Every six months, hundreds of potential “Entrepreneurs in Training” go through a rigorous screening process, which are finally whittled down to 20 finalists. It’s a two year program where young technologists are taught business and refined technology skills.

Their goal: by the end of their time at MEST, come up with a viable business plan for the Meltwater Incubator to fund.

The first graduating class is due to walk out of the building to present their business plan this year. They will have the opportunity for seed funding, which teams of them have been working on since they began this process almost 24 months ago. These are all supposed to be internationally-focused businesses, not locally-focused on Ghana.

The whole operation is a not-for profit, funded by the Meltwater Foundation, part of the Meltwater Group in Europe. The idea is for the Foundation to hold an undisclosed equity stake in the startups, then sink that money back into the educational institution for sustainability. The seed capital used to get the startups going was also unclear, but probably in the $15-50k range.

I asked Ylva why they chose Ghana, after all, there are a couple of good spots to do this type of operation across the continent. Ghana was chosen due to it being an English speaking country with good connectivity, proximity to the US and Europe, a stated government focus on ICT and political stability. It came down to a choice between Ghana and Uganda, with Ghana winning out due to stability and the general higher level of business ambition.

MEST is an impressive undertaking, and one that is hard to duplicate due to the upfront costs of running an institution and the time needed to prove it out as being successful or not. All of the students that I met, and I met a good number, were incredibly bright and engaging. If MEST truly does arm them with the best training, then I believe there could be a higher than average number of “wins” coming from the graduates.

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