March 2011

Umbono: Google’s South African Incubator

In Cape Town, Google has initiated a tech incubator that gives 6 months of free space, $25-50k startup funding and access to an extensive mentoring network. The secret sauce here is in the angel & mentor network, who will be providing 50% of all investment money, while Google provides the rest. Johanna Kollar leads this initiative, and tells me they’re looking for at least 5 companies to get behind in this first go at it, though if there are enough exceptional applicants, they might do more. If you’re a registered business in South Africa, then you can participate. (more on the Google Africa blog)

The BoBs

Deutsche Welle runs the “Best of Blogs” awards each year, showcasing excellent blogs from all over the world. If you haven’t yet, take a few minutes and vote for your favorites. There are quite a few from North Africa.

21st Century Challenges: Digital Technology in Africa

I’ll be a guest to the Royal Geographic Society in London on May 18th for a discussion on technology in Africa with Nicholas Negroponte, Herman Chinery-Hesse and moderated by Bog Geldof. Our main topic:

“Can digital technology such as laptops and mobile phones offer the countries of Africa realistic economic and educational opportunities?”

If you’re in London, you can get a ticket to the event and join us.

Ushahidi moves

There are over 10,000 deployments of the Ushahidi platform around the world, and as you might imagine, a lot has been happening at Ushahidi, including:

• The launch of Crowdmap Checkins at SXSW, a way to “roll your own Foursquare-type service”. It’s in it’s beta stage, but you can play with it now, as others have already using the Ushahidi Android or iOS apps.
• Some amazing people created a Japan deployment after the earthquake and tsunami there, we helped by getting our SwiftRiver Sweeper app to do real-time translation using Google’s APIs.


Japan earthquake Ushahidi data, heatmapped

• We’ve released some reports on past deployments and are part way through an evaluation by the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative.

One of our volunteer deployers, Anahi Ayala Iacucci, spent a great deal of time and created a 90+ page Ushahidi manual for anyone looking to deploy Ushahidi. Having worked on over 20 deployments of her own, she’s one of the best placed people in the world to do this.

Samsung Seeks to Grow in Africa

Samsung is opening a new Electronics Engineering Academy for youth in Boksburg, South Africa. As Afrinnovator states, they have about 20% of the market, which will only increase as they’ve been smart enough to get behind Android in their devices (currently with 22 models). We’ve felt this presence at the iHub in Nairobi as well, where Samsung has a great interest in reaching out to Android programmers.

[A HUGE thank you to the team who put this video together: Ahmed Deen, Michael Kimani, Norah Kithaka, Bob Muchiri, Barbara Muriungi and David Muthami.]

It’s this week that we’re celebrating the iHub’s one year anniversary, and oh-so-much has happened in this last year… What started out as a little idea and an experiment has blossomed into a full-fledged community hub and a model for labs and hubs around the continent.

By the Numbers

• There are a total of 3,036 members in the iHub community.
• There are 1,236 Developers
• We have 876 Creatives amongst us
• We have 235 Green members
• We’ve held 70+ events in the last 12 months, ranging from hackathons to investor pitches to product launches.
• At least 12 companies formed off of relationships made in the space.
• We have 4 outstanding corporate partners (Wananchi, Google, Nokia, Microsoft)
• 3 companies found funding through investors that came through the iHub.
• 2 funding partners who took a gamble (Omidyar Network and Hivos).
• 1 iHub Foosball championship team.

What’s next?

2010 was big, but 2011 is going to be huge! I don’t have time to cover everything in detail, but here are the top items.

• The new m:lab incubator with space for 7 companies, a training room and a mobile testing lab for all devices and operating systems. Will be open in April.
• The Pivot 25 event on June 14-15th. Pivot 25 is an event bringing together 25 of East Africa’s top mobile entrepreneurs and startups to pitch their ideas to an audience of 400 people, with a chance of winning monetary prizes and increasing awareness of their work to local and global investors, media and businesses. In East Africa’s hot mobile market, this is a way to find out “what’s next?“. All proceeds go to support the m:lab.
• A new research arm, dedicated to facilitating local technology research capacity building and to conduct local qualitative and quantitative research in Africa.
• Advanced programming and business training and mentoring. Starting in April, a mentoring program with some of Kenya’s leading tech programmers and business minds.
• The Afrilabs Association has been founded, and the iHub is a leading member of that, where we’re sharing what we’ve learned to help others across the continent build their own hub or lab. We’re also looking to grow an Afrilabs Seed Fund, which we’ll share more with everyone about as it gets solidified.

An iHub Party!

To celebrate this, we’re putting on a big party today, March 11th. Due to size of the space, it’s invite only and for Green members who have RSVP’d in time. We’ve got Just A Band coming in, a cool party atmosphere, food and the best cake in Nairobi. Plus, those who get to the iHub on time (and are on the list) get an iHub zawadi.

Big thanks to Nokia for sponsoring the gift, Google for sponsoring the after-party drinks at Capri7, and to Microsoft, InMobi and Ushahidi for covering some of the additional costs on food, drinks, etc.

Over 2.5 years ago Twitter shut down all operations in Africa. Back then, in August of 2008, it really didn’t matter too much as the penetration rates for the service in Africa, and most of the world, were negligible. A lot has changed since then as Twitter has become a defacto communications too, and in many ways a new communications protocol, all over the globe.

Now, they really hadn’t “shut down” as the service is accessible always via the internet. What they had shut down was text messaging – SMS, due to non-sustainable business relationships with the mobile operators in each country. Since then, the Twitter team has grown, and their ambitions beyond North America, the UK and India have increased as well.

In Africa, three countries have it working; Nigeria, Kenya and Madagascar (Note: there used to be a fourth, but Cameroon has banned mobile Twitter as they go towards elections). Just send a text message with the word “start” to the following shortcodes in each country go get started:

Nigeria: 40404 (Airtel); 20644 (Glo Mobile)
Kenya: 8988 (Safaricom); 40404 (Airtel)
Madagascar: 40404 (VIP)

The Twitter team is working on relationships for expanding SMS service throughout a lot of countries in Africa. How those deals are structured with the network operators and why they’re slow in coming online with the service isn’t yet known.

You can find out which countries do have Twitter’s mobile SMS service on this page. You can also keep up with Jessica Verilli (@Jess), in charge of Corporate Development & Strategic Initiatives at Twitter, and the one who has been the most visibly active on the continent.

I’m fortunate to be a Senior TED Fellow, which means that I go to five TED conferences over 3 years. To date, I’ve been to five TED conferences, ranging from Tanzania to Long Beach and Oxford, and each one has amazing speakers, jaw-dropping discoveries revealed and true ideas worth spreading.

I say fortunate because it puts me in the presence of others who ask, “Imagine what could happen...” That’s an important statement, because it means that the we’re looking for possibilities. We’re challenging the norms. We’re following what makes us curious.

A TED Moment

Everyone tends to have a moment at TED that you remember, that makes you realize this isn’t just another conference. I’ve had a number of interesting meetings/chats with big-name entertainers, politicians, actors, scientists and technology entrepreneurs. While interesting and fun, they didn’t shift my thinking.

That moment happened yesterday as I was listening to Sal Khan talking about his project, the Khan Academy. He’s made thousands of videos and activities that make it easy for kids to learn subjects like math and science in a non-judgmental and reapeatable environment.

Sal Khan was nearing the end of his talk when I shot an email off to my 8 year old daughter saying that she might be interested in looking at this website. An hour later I got an SMS from my wife stating, “You’re going to make your daughter into a math nerd like me, she’s been on this site since she got your email.”

It might be that I’m excited that I could link my time at TED and share it to my daughter in near real-time. It’s partly that, but it’s also knowing that the simplicity of a well executed online video tutorial site, something not technologically exciting, can have such a massive impact on millions of children learning. Most of all, my own.

The TED Talk

I was saving this blog post, which I wrote last week, until the video of Sal Khan’s talk was published. Here it is: