Africa

In an age of information abundance, curating meaning is key.

9 months ago that is just what Jon Gosier set out to do as he took over the reins of the SwiftRiver initiative at Ushahidi. Today he announces the Beta release, and unveils the new website at Swiftly.org.

What is SwiftRiver?

SwiftRiver Open Beta Announcement. from Ushahidi on Vimeo.

“SwiftRiver is an open source intelligence gathering platform for managing realtime streams of data.”

Using 5 different tools in the toolbox, you can create a host of useful applications. Tools ranging from natural language processing to handling duplicates, or a source’s importance in the ecosystem. Much like a box of Lego’s, the value and usefulness of the apps created are up to the creator.

SwiftRiver lets users:

• Manage realtime data streams (e.g. RSS, SMS, Twitter, Email)
• Identify relationships between content (e.g. email and tweets)
• Set parameters to auto-filter incoming feeds
• Curate content based on preferences

Swift code and web services

Like all Ushahidi work, the code is free and open source, anyone can download it, contribute to the code, and run it on their own server. Due to it’s complexity, SwiftRiver also offers a software as a service solution, allowing you to tap our servers for your own needs. Swift Web Services (SWS) is our cloud platform. The platform offers a number of different APIs to developers. With this platform you can easily beef up your applications with natural language processing & active learning, reverse geocaching, distributed reputation, content filtering and web analytics.

This first app, called the Sweeper is the first project to enter Beta and now ships with SwiftRiver. Sweeper, is a term Ushahidi uses to refer to people who ’sweep’ through a system, performing certain tasks, and it was for this reason that we put the Ushahidi resources behind the whole initiative.

SwiftRiver | Sweeper

History, contributors and code

The origins of SwiftRiver are in the community of Ushahidi developers and users. Chris Blow and Kaushal Jhalla asked some hard questions after the Mumbai terrorist attacks in 2008, discussing the need for something that can help with this information overload we have in the first few hours of an emergency or disaster. Today, we’re seeing the first fruits of that technology, and it’s exciting to know that the potential for it’s use goes far beyond the crisis scenarios that we first envisioned.

Matthew Griffiths (Uganda) and Neville Newey (South Africa) have done a great job hacking out much of the code and designing the architecture for the platform. They’ve been joined by an army of volunteers and contributors, including: Joshua Bronson, Soe, Nishith Rastogi, Mang-Git Ng, Josh Bronson, Ivan Kavuma, Andrew Turner, Chris Blow, Kaushal Jhalla, Ed Bice, Moses Mugisha, Victor Miclovich, Wolfgang Werner, M. Edward Borasky, Maarten J. van der Veen, Ahmed Maawy, Colin Meinke. A huge round of thanks to everyone who gave freely of their time and energy to move this project forward!

Find out more on the website at Swiftly.org
Download the code, v.0.5 Cape Jazz

Here’s an interesting study by AVG on internet security, asking “Where in the World are you most likely to be hit by a malicious computer attack or virus?”.

Apparently, and surprisingly to me, the answer is “not Africa” or South America.

“During the last week of July, AVG researchers compiled a list of virus and malware attacks by country picked up by AVG security software. This means we have compiled data from over 127 million computers in 144 countries to determine the incidence rates of virus attacks by country.”

Dirk Singer, of AVG sent over the list of African countries, here they are country-by-country. As you can see, sub-saharan Africa is compatively ‘safe’ compared to other areas of the World. Your chances of being attacked while surfing the web in each country are:

North Africa

• Egypt 1 in 62.4
• Algeria 1 in 86.9
• Libya 1 in 87.7
• Mauritania 1 in 92.4
• Tunisia 1 in 110.7
• Morocco 1 in 112.1

Sub-Saharan Africa

• Mali 1 in 49.9
• Sudan 1 in 53.9
• Nigeria 1 in 67.5
• Benin 1 in 76.6
• Ghana 1 in 99.4
• Ivory Coast 1 in 101.5
• Gabon 1 in 113.1
• Angola 1 in 129.7
• Botswana 1 in 134.4
• Ethiopia 1 in 135.8
• Senegal 1 in 140.6
• Uganda 1 in 153.6
• Liberia 1 in 153.8
• Burkina Faso 1 in 163.4
• South Africa 1 in 172.3
• Tanzania 1 in 180.6
• Kenya 1 in 216.1
• Zambia 1 in 262.2
• Mozambique 1 in 263.8
• Zambia 1 in 262.2
• Namibia 1 in 353.1
• Togo 1 in 359.4
• Niger 1 in 442.0
• Sierra Leone 1 in 696.0

Keep in mind, this was over one week and it also doesn’t point directly towards where the attacks are originating from. Interesting data though, and not what I would have expected to see.

There’s an good post over at the CGAP blog about mobile money’s innovation crisis. The author claims that nothing new has happened in mobile money since Mpesa was launched in Kenya, except for maybe the launch of Mkesho this year in Kenya as well. Besides that, everyone around the world pretty much tries to duplicate what Safaricom is doing in this space.

Why?

“There may also be one partnership in particular that could be hampering innovation—that with the banks. Historically, these two players have taken very different strategies for new product development, especially in resource poor countries.”

Thinking big picture

You can send up to $500 for as little as 37 cents using Mpesa. On Zain it will cost you 74 cents. That’s an insanely low transaction cost compared to what banks charge, and that’s not even going into the fact that they can’t do transactions as low as 50 to 100 Ksh ($.60 to $1.24). The kicker, you can store your money in it for no fee at all (unlike the usurious rates that the banks charge).

Simply put, banks cannot compete with mobile operators when it comes to transacting payments for the majority of Africans.

Regulators make and enforce the rules around everything. How do they make their decisions, who lobbies them and why? Is the reason that we haven’t seen a true replication of Mpesa anywhere besides Kenya due to the banking sector protecting its interest?

Opportunity lost

Right now anyone in Kenya can do every type of transaction within our own borders, and if creative into neighboring countries as well. A few other countries have the ability to do this type of thing as well, if less efficient and/or elegantly conceived.

Currently opportunity is lost by local merchants in not integrating mobile payment structures better into goods and services offered to both businesses and the public. This is changing, businessmen are quick to move to figure out new ways to increase margins and customers. It’s only held back by the operators not willingly opening up their platforms for easier integration into business.

11% of Kenya’s GDP was shifted through Mpesa in 2009, and the company expects that to be around 20% this year.

We can all agree those are big numbers and that a massive ability to make money has been shown in Kenya. This begs two questions:

• Why has no one allowed it to truly replicate in another country?
• Why is no one throwing big money after this, trying to figure a way to scale a mobile operator and bank agnostic payment solution across a region, if not the whole continent?

There are big players trying to break into the greater African market (I’m looking at you Naspers). There are banks who have the money to spend on figuring this out, but aren’t thinking beyond their own brand, so continue to fail. Maybe the answer is we just should sit here and let all this lost opportunity continue to drift by us, waiting on the big credit card players of the world like Visa or Mastercard to make a move.

That’s a fatalistic stance, and I certainly hope it’s not true. Unfortunately, I don’t think we’ll see this service come from 2 guys coding in a garage. Instead, I hope that there are mobile operators and banks banding together to make something bigger than themselves that make more profits for everyone. If not them, a big investor willing to wager millions of dollars on making billions.

[Below is my Tech4Africa talk, given today in Johannesburg, South Africa, titled "How we built Ushahidi, w]

I’m used to talking about Ushahidi, and as all of you guys who frequently talk about your product or company know: it gets old spouting off the same old stuff over and over again. That’s why I’m excited about today and for being invited to this excellent conference, since I’ll be telling the backstory, the quirks and funny bits that got us to this point and made our Ushahidi culture what it is today.

This is my story of Ushahidi – Of a small organization that dislikes hierarchy and being told what we can’t do. One that questions everything, embraces innovative thinking, takes risks boldly, and sometimes learns the hard way that we’re human after all.

In January 2008 I spent a week watching news reports roll in from Kenya, frustrated. Frustrated because I had said for years that “technology helps us overcome inefficiencies”. Wasn’t the madness of Kenya, in it’s post-election violence throws, it’s lack of media coverage, and lack of real information just this? Why was I unable to do anything?

It turned out that I needed an idea, and for once I couldn’t come up with one on my own. That seed of an idea that grew into what you see today came from a simple bullet point by my friend and fellow blogger Ory Okolloh, asking if we could map reports of violence around the country. Thus Ushahidi was born.

I’m going to walk you through three defining moments for our organization, and our platform, not all of them pretty, but which make us who we are.

1. Let’s look at the ad hoc cast that got it started:

Ory Okolloh – lawyer, blogger and Kenyan political pundit
Juliana Rotich – renewable tech geek, blogger and database admin
David Kobia – developer and top Kenya forum webmaster
Daudi Were – blogger and web guy
Erik Hersman – Africa tech blogger, web guy
Others – a various cast of tech and non-tech people swarmed around the first Ushahidi deployment in Kenya, helping with small tasks and then disappearing.

Key points:

• You’ll notice that there was not a single one of us who had any humanitarian experience
• None of us had taken part in any open source project. (v1 was built in .NET)
• Most of us were self-employed, running our own businesses or consulting, and didn’t like working for big companies.
• The only common denominators that we shared was our love of our home; Kenya, and the ability to blog.

Thus, we felt we were the best placed to create an African open source platform for crowdsourcing information, our tech gift to the rest of the world.

We didn’t think of that at all actually. Instead we were madly Skyping, emailing, wireframing and coding over a 3 day period to get something up as quickly as possible.

We were brutal about every decision:

• If it wasn’t absolutely necessary, throw it out.
• Pick a name, any name, we don’t care if non-Kenyans can’t say it, just get a domain up asap
• Launch this app, it’s functional, we’ll fix bugs and features on the fly
• No one has a short code for us yet? Screw it, it’s not worth waiting, we’ll get one eventually.
• Money, what’s that for? Media budgets are overrated, we’ll blog it.
• We don’t have a logo. Oh well… Launch already!

How our team came together, the way we made those initial decisions and how we interacted and leaned on what would become our community was defining. It still colors how we operate, our organizational communications and our community focus.

Lessons learned:

• This taught us to keep a shallow and wide decision-making structure so that everyone had access to all the information about ops or platform that they desired. Anyone was empowered to make decisions, since thy understood the macro-game.
• Release code early, it’s better to have it out and being tested and worked on in the real world, than hidden away in a sandbox somewhere.
• If you want it done, build it yourself, don’t put it off onto another team member.
• Community = success
• No money, no worries. Build good stuff and good stuff happens, money follows.

2. Technology is only a tool

No background in open source projects meant that we had little experience in how to engage programmers, designers and the help needed to get things moved from that initial .NET build into an open source language. David and I were trying to decide what language to write this in, and we ended up picking PHP over Python since we thought more African programmers would be proficient in it.

David wasn’t a PHP guy (yet), so the early helpers, the volunteers like Jason Mule, Henry Addo and Chris Blow were a huge help in making the decision to go with the Kohana framework and a myriad of other decisions.

3 months later we announced v0.1 of “THE NEW AND REBUILT USHAHIDI PLATFORM!”

We were very excited, after all, wasn’t this the platform that would save the world? And we were ready to show the world just how it could be done. Gamely mounting our white steeds we charged into a deployment of Ushahidi in the troubled North Kivu region of the DR Congo.

Echoes of that failure splatting against the ground remind us still, today, of the complexities of the space we build software in. We learned from those lessons though, and Ory wrote a good blog post making sure that it was shared within and without.

Lessons learned:

• Technology is only 10% of the solution needed. The rest is administration and messaging.
• Stick to what you do well. Our team is built to build software, not be a deploying organization
• (caveat! We do help in deploying rarely, like Haiti and Kenya, but we now pass those off, or partner)
• Own your failures publicly, learn from them.

3. Enter the failephant!

Only a few months later, after the DRC debacle, we were rested and ready to fail again.

Al Jazeera had used the alpha version of the Ushahidi platform in Gaza, a group of organizations and individuals were deploying it to monitor the worlds biggest elections in Indian, and we had a number of groups in East Africa testing it out.

Our model was that we had a small team at Ushahidi whose job was to come up with and guide the core architecture of the platform. Volunteers also worked on core, but were also encouraged to extend the platform in their own ways. It was working very well, and still does.

We were ready to release the code publicly.

Before I say anything, let’s revisit that point earlier about none of us having eroded on an open source project before…

Preperations were made, blog posts were written, tweets were tweeted – and we got lambasted by one of the guys we respect a great deal in the open source community. Rabble called us out on all the things we did wong.

- The code repository was behind a user/password wall
- We weren’t available in the normal programmer channels like IRC
- Hard to plug into the rest of the dev community

Our team went to work, madly working over the next 12 hours to get our stuff straightened out. Finally I wrote another blog post, introducing our failephant mascot and apologizing for our ignorance and missteps.

Lessons Learned:

• Listen and apply that listening to real changes
• Again, own your failures. Fix things that are wrong.
• It’s okay to think different in how you execute on a project as long as you don’t stray from the spirit of your community and self

.

Finally, I’ll end with this.

We’ve learned that technology does overcome inefficiencies, but that it still takes people to make it happen.

We’ve learned that more people need to buck the status quo, that questioning everything makes us better.

We’ve learned that Africans can build world-class software, and to expect nothing less.

DukaPress is a new customized WordPress eCommerce platform. It allows you to easily set up a fully featured online shop which can be used to sell digital or physical goods to customers all over the world.

I’ve been using WordPress for many years, and am a huge fan. When I saw DukaPress last week, I was at impressed to see that it was built locally in Nairobi, but I also wondered why another eCommerce WordPress build was needed, as there are already some good ones out there such as WP-ecommerce and Shopp. So, I asked the Kelvin, from Nickel Pro, and here is his response:

I know you’ve probably been using WordPress even longer than I and the rest of the DukaPress team so I can probably say you know that WP-ecommerce is a bit…buggy (I say this with the highest amount of humility, we are nowhere near achieving what they have). The other free WordPress e-commerce plugins are much less usable, to us, than Wp-ecommerce.

Shopp is really really good but it sits behind a pay-wall – which is okay.

We built DukaPress to be fully featured, yet super simple to use and, well, free. It actually did not start out life as something we’d give out to the public – we built it primarily to serve our own purposes at Nickel Pro because we build a lot with WordPress and when it came to building e-commerce stuff it was always a big problem. One thing led to another and DukaPress, the plugin for public release, was born.

Around the net where WordPress e-commerce is being discussed, there is always a lot of complaints, primarily against WP ecommerce (some people call wp ecommerce a trojan for their ‘for sale’ upgrade), we hope that with DukaPress, people out there have a viable and better (I hope!) alternative.

Other than that, we offer features that none of the other WordPress e-commerce plugins do! As you rightly assumed, we support all three Kenyan mobile payment systems ZAP, yuCash and MPESA! Although I have to qualify that and say that integration of this is still being developed to be more fliud. We’re just at version 1.0.1

How shall we make money with this? We already do, we’ve used it in at least 4 major projects for our client work and it has already paid for itself.

Other than that, we’re currently working on version 2 which will bring full WordPress Multisites support – so that you can build your own etsy.com in 15 minutes – among other features we think are nice. At that point (in the next month or two), we may launch our own etsy.com-type service (or, in better terms, a wordpress.com which can host fully featured shops); or licence the multi-site version of DukaPress for a fee; or both. No other e-commerce plugin has “successfully” pulled off a WordPress Multisites integration to date i.e. users still cannot build a wordpress.com that can host shops without a great amount of hacking.

DukaPress is also a gateway for www.madoido.com.

I think there are certainly similar plugins which may outperform DukaPress but I also do think it probably beats some of the more established ones. I hope the larger WordPress userbase gets to prove me right, but even if they don’t, DukaPress certainly makes our lives easier, and gives a really welcome international perspective to our business.

On a personal level, I’m impressed to see Kelvin and his team at Nickel Pro working on DukaPress, and I hope that they continue to make it better. If you’re a WordPress pro, or in need of an eCommerce solution, check out their website, documentation and features.

It’s been hectic lately… In the course of one week I’m going from the madness that is running any situation room for a major Ushahidi deployment (Uchaguzi), to what is looking to be one of Africa’s best tech conferences (Tech4Africa).

(video by Jon Shuler)

Uchaguzi: Monitoring Kenya’s Referendum Vote

Uchaguzi is a deployment of the Ushahidi platform that marries up traditional election monitoring groups and practices with voices from the crowd. It was an experiment in a more holistic approach to monitoring an election.

Our goal is to make this an election monitoring platform that can be used by anyone (at least in E. Africa), as a mixture of the core Ushahidi platform, with a package of customized plugins that do things such as:

• Map known election monitor phone numbers to specific locations
• Content-map the election monitoring number codes into an automated full report
• Use shape files to get make reports not just point-based, but heatmapped
• Ticketing system for escalated items
• Ability to mark items as “actionable” and/or “action taken”

We started Ushahidi 2.5 years ago here in Kenya to crowdsource and visualize some of the stories coming from ordinary people in the midst of Kenya’s post election violence. Last Wednesday the whole country went to the polls again, this time to vote “yes” or “no” on a referendum for a new constitution for the country – arguably something even more important than a politician who will only be in office for 5 years.

Being Ushahidi, and this being Kenya, we were ready to do our part. This came in the form of Uchaguzi, a deployment where we partnered with local groups like SODNET, Twaweza, CRECO and HIVOS. Ordinary Kenyans and election monitors alike could send in text messages to a local shortcode, which was widely advertised before the date. (read more here)

Over 50% of all incoming reports were verified in real-time, and an overwhelming 60+% were reports that things were going well. A win for both the deployment and the country!

A Thank You

Through a combination of great partners and a huge volunteer outpouring of time at the iHub, we were able to manage the inflow of information, mapping and verification.

The Uchaguzi project brought more than 70 volunteers to the iHub August 3rd and 4th (with at least 12 others joining remotely). Volunteers helped map and process over 1400 messages as well as assisted our team of Ushahidi developers fix bugs that popped up during the Uchaguzi deployment. The volunteers met the challenge with incredible enthusiasm, focus, patience, and a spirit of fun! We couldn’t be prouder to have such a wonderful Ushahidi community!

“We” isn’t just the Ushahidi team. Yes, deployments like this do take some time to customize and we did build some new functionality in (than everyone now has access to use), but it’s largely not the technology, it’s the people. The 80+ volunteers, tech and non-tech alike, were amazing and came through in a big way. Not enough can be said about Jessica Heinzelman, Ushahidi intern for this summer, who wrangled all of the volunteers and operations for the situation room.

Media Hits

Fast Company
Christian Science Monitor
Business Daily Africa
UN Dispatch
CNN iReport
All Africa
Reuters
Internews

Safaricom is Kenya’s largest mobile operator with approximately 80% of the market. Most people don’t know this, but they get hundreds of business and technology proposals each week from people all over the country – techies and non-techies alike. It was with this problem in hand that they decided to open up an “Innovation Forum” for Kenyans to share their ideas.

In short, it was a disaster. Draconian legal terms and conditions mixed with ham-handed community engagement meant that they met with a lot of resistance and outright mockery on public channels such as Twitter and Facebook. Just a sample from one blogger:

Engaging the Community

Safaricom is now back to the drawing board. Their problem hasn’t gone away, they’re still overwhelmed with emails, letters and proposals for business ideas that might/might not make sense for them to engage on. Wadzanai Chiota-Madziva heads up their VAS (value added services) department, and is in charge of this. After the noise caused by the less-than-stellar launch of the Innovation Forum, she and CEO Michael Joseph met with one of the techies who was very concerned about the way they were handling this: Al Kags.

Al Kags has sat down in a couple of meetings with them thus far, finally he suggested a board that could serve as a buffer between Safaricom and the people sending in proposals. The Innovation Forum Board’s job would be to speak for the community to Safaricom, as well as push for better access to APIs, a developer sandbox and possibly and app store. They would also be responsible for helping to translate Safaricom’s position to the community.

I was invited, along with some other’s from the tech community, to sit down and discuss this with them last week. It was a fruitful discussion about the possibilities and the roles and responsibilities that the board would have.

Some of the discussion was about the need for a buffer to be created between Safaricom and submissions to foster fairness and openness, to provide confidence to developers to innovate without fears of intellectual property (IP) misappropriation.

“The intention is for the board to create a fair environment for innovatioin by playing the middle ground between Safaricom Ltd and the developer and innovator community”

The position is largely one of an enabler. The board would oversee the Innovation Forum by:

• Create and agree rules of engagement with all parties
• Advocate developers perspectives at Safaricom
• Facilitate understanding of Safaricom position with the developer/innovator community.

Figuring out the Board

The people invited for the meeting, as the potential board, were Moses Kemibaro, Jessica Colaco, Al Kags, Karanja Macharia, Rehema Parmena and myself.

While it is up to Safaricom to decide who is on their Innovation Forum Board, those of us at the meeting pushed back a little on how they had done this. If they want to interact with the community, it might behoove them to reach out to that community for some of the nominations.

They listened, and starting today going through the end of the week, you can make your own nominations for the Innovation Forum Board for Safaricom to review on the website. This is your chance to put a name in of someone that you think would represent the community well on the board.

Kenya is quickly gaining a competitive advantage in the mobile payments space. Led by mobile operator giant Safaricom with their Mpesa product, the market locally sees huge value in mobile money transactions. Add to that a regulatory system that is relaxed enough for innovation to be encouraged, and you have a great space for interesting things to happen.

Pay.Zunguka

The team at Symbiotic always have more than one iron in the fire. I was surprised by their most recent release of a new product called Pay.Zunguka last week. Simply put, it’s a payment gateway and aggregator, allowing merchants, developers and content providers a way to monetize their work with the public.

There are two sources of inspiration in Pay.Zunguka (guys, we need to talk about names at some point…), that is the ability for people to utilize international online payment methods like PayPal and Google Checkout, but more importantly that users here in Kenya can do it all without a credit card, only using their phones. That’s a big deal, and it’s a nod towards recognizing that credit cards aren’t necessary, we can bypass that mess.

Mbugua Njihia, CEO of Symbiotic, tells me that their plan is to first integrate with content providers and create an easy-to-use micropayment space, charging 3% per transaction. This will be followed by a partnership campaign to work with larger organizations who don’t have an efficient payment platform for consumers.

PesaPal

PesaPal I’ve written about before. It’s a mobile payment gateway as well, but one with a specific focus online. Liko and team have made great headway recently, but not just in the technology, which is critical. They’ve made headway in some other important areas, funding and marketing.

We’ve talked about the need for local investors to buy into local technology startups. When that doesn’t happen, the international ones swoop in and take advantage of local investor myopia. In this case, PesaPal is receiving a healthy seed capital investment for scaling and marketing. With cash flow happening right now, it’s a good time to invest, and I’m glad to see someone doing so with this team.

I talked to Liko yesterday about this. Their strategy has shifted somewhat since last year, instead of just focusing on web merchants, the PesaPal team is working on relationships with educational institutions and educational book suppliers to make parents lives easier when their child starts the school year. The parent can now pay their child’s school fees using Mpesa or Zap, and then are directly linked to the list of that year’s books with the option to buy them too, and have them delivered to the school for their child’s first day. Brilliant!

This is the kind of fresh thinking that is great to see coming from tech startups: they’re not thinking or selling the tech, they’re selling a solution to a problem.

Zynde

Zynde is a new player in the space, but you’ll start to see a pattern here when you jump over to their website. Because none of the large companies are addressing the very real need for agnostic payment gateways the market is filling in that gap for them.

A quick email chat with David Kagiri of Zynde gave me more insight into their focus behind the service:

“My main driver was that new technologies existed that could enable me deliver cost effective solutions. After interaction with owners of small businesses I realized that most don’t keep track of their business finances and the cost of the available off shelf software that would help them with that was beyond their reach. I came up with a simple solution that uses the SaaS (software as a service) model so that I could deliver cost-effective solutions to them and an API that will enable creative developers to extend it to multiple mobile platforms and reach the masses.”

Zynde will have to prove themselves in what is quickly turning out to be a highly competitive space with competent players.

We’re just a month away from one of my favorite events of the year: Maker Faire Africa! It’s where we bring inventors, innovators and ingenious designers and artists into one place. Last year we did it in Ghana, this year it’s in Kenya on August the 27th to 28th. Submit your project here!

“The aim of a Maker Faire-like event is to create a space on the continent where Afrigadget-type innovations, inventions and initiatives can be sought, identified, brought to life, supported, amplified and propagated.”

The aim is to identify, spur and support local innovation. At the same time, Maker Faire Africa would seek to imbue creative types in science and technology with an appreciation of fabrication and by default manufacturing. The long-term interest here is to cultivate an endogenous manufacturing base that supplies innovative products in response to market needs.

Projects, Sponsors and Links

‘Match a Maker’ was started last year, and it was such a big success that we’re doing it again this year. It’s done in order to link people up who could help each other with technical advice, contacts and business advice.

There will be a business corner for entrepreneurs to get help from local experts, a time devoted to kids experimenting with technology, and talks by local and international experts on everything from manufacturing to scaling your business.

Workshops

• ‘Think Solar’ : Solar technology for young people
• ‘Crafting peace’ : Hand crafts for children
• ‘Hack your mobile’ all ages

A BIG thanks to Freedom to Create, Butterflyworks and ASME for sponsoring this year’s event!

Keep up to date on the Maker Faire Africa:
Blog
Twitter: @makerfairafrica
Flickr Group

"The African Scifi factory is a highend production facility located in Thika-Kenya, dedicated to re-establishing popular African science and fiction narrative using animation ..."

The African Scifi Factory in Thika, Kenya sounds like a great place. It looks like one too, their site looks pretty good. However, no one will ever hear of them or find them online through a search engine. That text above, it’s their meta name=”Description” tag, and it’s about the only thing that Google or any other search engine can see about them. They’re virtually invisible to the web.

It’s 2010 and we still have people designing websites in pure images (as above) or Flash. It doesn’t make sense. Why the need to hamstring yourself, your business and your clients by not designing an XHTML site?

The African Scifi Factory isn’t the only one, I’m just using their site as an example. We actually have designers being trained today who only learn how to use Flash. We have others who still don’t know how to handcode HTML and CSS. I still see CVs and resumes from “serious” designers who use Dreamweaver to create websites.

There are no borders on the web

We all need to realize that we live in a global ecosystem, especially online. There are no borders in this space.

If you’re a web designer who does crappy XHTML and CSS, then know that you’re becoming less relevant with every day that you don’t learn your trade better and update your skills. Kids in the Ukraine, Indonesia and elsewhere are eating your lunch. I can Google a PSD to HTML business in 5 seconds, take the top result, and have my designs put into excellent XHTML/CSS for as little as $45. Why should I use your services? What do you offer that’s so much better?

You’re not a quality web designer if you can only put together a fancy looking Photoshop file, that makes you a designer. A web designer needs to know how the HTML and CSS work, understand user-interaction and usability of the functions in the design and be able to create bulletproof markup.

Design and Coding

Interestingly enough, the programming community in Africa seems to be better off than the web design community. There seems to be a lot more quality programmers per capita than there are quality web designers per capita.

Why?

What will it take for us to take our web design skills as seriously as our programming skills?

[Update: African Scifi Site fixed by local Kenyan web designer]

A young designer by the name of Martin Kariuki decided to take the specific example of African SciFi Factory into his own hands after this blog post, and re-created the whole site in HTML. See his blog post and work on this here.

Great job by Martin for doing this! Impressive initiative and a nod to the goodwill in this community.

Mobile Subscriber Growth in Africa

A new report shows that Africa has 12% of the new mobile subscribers in the world, adding 20.1 million in Q1 2010. That’s a sizable amount. What’s actually more interesting to me is that they’re saying that the continent now has 47% penetration, which means that there’s a lot of growth yet to be had as compared to the rest of the world.

[One of these days I'll have the £400 to purchase and really dig into these reports...]

Street hackers and the Neighbourhood App Store

Jan Chipchase gives us some background on how the mobile phone street-hacker culture originates:

“I like to think of it as a neighbourhood app store – and in many ways it’s the edges of the internet, where entrepreneurs are taking content online and offering it to local, offline and/or technologically illiterate customers. Also these corner shop app stores can be content editors for their community: they filter content they think their customers like, but they also guide what their customers might like as well.”

Nokia battles the Chinese

As David put it, “Nokia lost the high end to iPhone/Android/Blackberry, now battling China’s cheap phones on the low end. Things not looking good.” (link)

“For instance, it sold 432 million devices in 2009, or more than its top three competitors combined, however, its average selling price for all models has plummeted 44 percent in the past five years to 62 euros.”

[Read Ethan's notes]

Ethan Zuckerman is giving his first TED talk today in Oxford. He’s a long-time friend, a well-known blogger, tech entrepreneur, thinker and visionary. For the last few years he’s been a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Democracy at Harvard. He’s the founder of Global Voices, and one of the best real-time bloggers in the world.

Ethan starts off talking about football, the world cup and Galvao birds and his confusion around this meme coming alive. He also learned that this is a prank, relating to Lady Gaga and also a leading commenter (Carlos Eduardo) for football. The lesson you can take from this, is that you cannot go wrong as long as you ask people to be activists online by only tweeting a phrase.

What happens on the social network, that you choose to interact with the people you want to. Therefore, most people don’t realize how many people of different demographics are online doing things as well. Ethan brings up the fact that 24% of Twitter users are African-American.

The prediction of the past decade were that there was a utopian vision for the future online. He brings up Negroponte’s “Being Digital” book.

It turns out that in many cases, atoms are much more mobile than bits.

We look at the infrastructure of visualization. From a macro-level view, it looks like everything is flat and connected. However, when you look at what actually happens, you realize it’s not all what it seems. There’s a virtual sky-bridge between London and New York, but not Africa.

International news is another area, one that Ethan is very interested in, where we see that the amount of international news in the US is less than any time in the past. It turns out that new media isn’t necessarily helping us that much. He shows a map of the total number of Wikipedia articles that have been geocoded. In the UK you can pick up a newspaper and read news from everywhere in the world. You probably won’t. You’ll read your own.

Imaginary Cosmopolitanism – we have the ability to see and read about things happening all over the world, and the infrastructure to do it, but we don’t.

Global Voices is his project to bring together news from all over the world using bloggers from those areas. Raising Voices is a program run by GV to get more people working on social media, especially blogging. Ethan brings up Foko in Madagascar as an example.

Global Voices is also about translation in these other countries. He brings up Yeeyan in China who pick articles every day and translates them into Chinese (due to the horrible news coverage). He asks, if there is Yeeyan for Chinese, where is the group translating from Chinese to English?

“The wisdom of the flock” – congregating around news with people who are probably very similar to you. Skilled human curators are able to do this, they are virtual DJs who bring together information and news that push people outside of their norm.

AfriGadget image brought up. He talks about my work around blogging in Africa and that I’m a bridge figure (blogged before by Ethan). The bridge figures are the way the world will get wider on the web.

Xenophiles are different, they’re people interested in areas of the world that their normal demographic isn’t. They then visit and translate that world to others.

We have to figure out how to re-wire the systems that we have.

I haven’t been able to use PayPal for two months. I just got profiled for extra security measures on Facebook. I can’t make certain purchases from Africa. Few organizations ship goods to me here.

Let’s be honest; living in Africa, or being African, gives you a certain unwelcome aroma in the eyes of global corporations. Frankly, we’re just not trustworthy.

The Africa trust problem

This isn’t new to any of us who live, or spend a great deal of time, in Africa. You’re blacklisted, given extra screening, and generally treated like a second-rate human. You’re not trusted, and you’re not worth the time to figure out if you can be trusted.

Frankly, as a total continent-wide user base, we just don’t make enough of a blip on the radar to be worth their time. There’s not enough money here in their minds, there is lower-hanging fruit elsewhere with a lot more spending history – and therefore power.

Does it make it right? No. Do my own stories of wrongs and misbehavior matter? No.

Jon Gosier states it well when reflecting on his blacklisting by PayPal (one of the very worst company offenders):

“Once again, the message perpetuated here is to be cautious when dealing with Africans, Africa or anything you suspect of being related to the aforementioned.”

A closer look at African cyber crime

From the Internet Crimes Complaints Centre (IC3) 2009 Annual Report [PDF download]

Nigeria has a significant 8%, but Ghana, South Africa and Cameroon all come in at a measly 0.7%. How in the world do Africans get so much worse treatment for so little compared to the others? There’s no doubt that one country in a continent of 52 countries has a problem – we all get punished for it.

Here are some more interesting statistics, according to the Consumer Fraud Reporting statistics for 2009:

“The majority of reported perpetrators (66.1%) were from the United States; however, a significant number of perpetrators where also located in the United Kingdom , Nigeria , Canada , China, and South Africa.”

So, there are two strong Africa contenders for fraud, but it’s amazing how much more hell internet consumers in African nations (outside of Nigeria and South Africa even!) have to go through in comparison to their much more cybercrime-ridden finalists like the US, Canada and the UK…

Texas in Africa puts this well after a recent foray into this space with Delta:

“it also reflects knee-jerk prejudice and the willingness to write off an entire continent of people as liars and cheaters. The consequences of this attitude are far reaching”

Too true, and there are only two ways that this might change:

First, we in Africa come up with our own payment and business solutions that work here first, and then interact with other global systems.

Second, the global corporates wake up and realize that there is quite a bit of spending power and money to be made in Africa, just like the mobile operators found out in the 90′s.

It’s not often that you hear of a tech startup from South Africa who chooses to build and deploy their product to Kenya first. In fact, I’ve never heard of such a thing. However, that is just what is happening with Mocality, a mobile and web-based business listings and directory application built for Africa.

Mocality’s job: create a digital platform that makes it easy for business owners to promote and expand their businesses in Africa.

“As a business owner, you get free SMS, a contact list, a free mobile website and a free mobile business card.”

Mocality represents this change in the paradigm that we’ve seen coming on for years in Africa. An application built agnostic to the client platform (mobile phone or PC), where data is fed into whatever you use in a meaningful way. Where the mobile usage is just as rich as the PC use.

In fact, they’ve studied usage of mobile phones on their system and have seen the usage of smartphones to be so negligible as to not matter. As CEO Stefan Magdalinski says, “This is the Mocality reality: RIM, Android, Apple are 2% of usage.”

About the Team

Successful startups generally have great leaders, Mocality has that. Stefan Magdalinski (@smagdali) is a seasoned web veteran and entrepreneur, co-founder of Moo.com and an early entrant into the programming space in England in the mid-90′s, and just recently relocating to South Africa for Mocality. They have plenty of funding, from MIH, a subsidiary of Naspers Group (who has been eying Kenya with recent forays such as Kalahari and Haiya).

I’ve met with Stefan in Kenya and South Africa, and I’ve also had the chance to meet some of the members of his team here in Nairobi. The impression that I’m left with is that this is a serious startup, with plenty of funding and a great vision and a strategy put in place to pull it off.

How it Works

Mocality is built for Kenyan businesses that don’t have enough money (or value to gain) to advertise in a print directory.

Again, a paradigm shift. They’re saying that they don’t care about the big end of the power law of distribution (the big companies), only the longtail (small, marginalized businesses). This is apparent in the images below of their typical user:

• SMS, WAP & Web tools (now J2Me, iPhone)
• Businesses can self list
• Geo-coding All business locations
• Map view of business
• Business toolkit:
1. Add customers & suppliers
2. Send bulk messages (400 free SMS monthly) (but with anti-spam controls)
3. Send mobile business card
4. Add details (e.g. Menus, Special Offers)
• Website, google optimised (white hat only)

Important to business owners in this segment is that the platform is free. Services will be added to the platform over time that business owners can pay for, but currently the only cost to them is data or SMS usage on their own mobile phone to access Mocality.

Scaling using the Crowd

Initially, the Mocality team walked all over Nairobi getting businesses to put their listings on the platform. They were successful, and in about 6 months of hard work were able to get approximately 11,000 businesses listed. That’s good, but barely puts a dent in the number of companies operating in this city.

The team then launched a crowdsourcing option, where they experimented with allowing anyone in Nairobi to add their own (and other’s) businesses to Mocality, and they got paid a bounty to do so. Within the last 6 weeks they have as many listings entered as the previous 6 months. If you live in Nairobi and want to become an agent, you need a WAP-enabled cameraphone and only need to visit http://www.mocality.com/money.

That’s impressive, but the impact is even more apparent when you look at the visualization:

If you have a business in Nairobi, you can get your listing onto it by visiting www.mocality.com email to info@mocality.co.ke or SMS callme to 2202 from within Kenya.

Jon Gosier is the founder of Appfrica Labs in Kampala, Uganda, he’s also a Senior TED Fellow, a great African tech blogger and a good friend. I’m fortunate enough to work with him at Ushahidi too, where Jon heads up the SwiftRiver initiative with his team in Uganda.

“SwiftRiver is a free and open source software platform that uses algorithms and crowdsourcing to validate and filter news.”

SwiftRiver v0.2.0 (Batuque) is out. There’s a new plugin structure called “turbines” already sporting 3 new ones for natural language processing, Google’s Language Services and TagTheNet. (see video below for more)

Jon is in Nairobi, he’s here to lead two SwiftRiver 101 classes at the iHub tomorrow. The morning session is for non-techies, or anyone who just wants a primer on the platform. The afternoon session is for programmers who want to see how they can get involved.

Join us!

Getting Started with SwiftRiver – Batuque from Ushahidi on Vimeo.