Gadgets

[Read Ethan's blog for liveblogging of TED 2009, and check out the "TED2009" tag on Flickr for images.]

I’ve spent most of the day inside the main theatre at TED. It’s been great getting up close to the speakers and performers, watching them go through their paces, putting on amazing performances. Here are a few of my personal favorites:

Jennifer Mather asks whether octopuses have intelligence. If they have personalities, play and can problem solve, then they have the characteristics that pass a rudimentary intelligence test.

Nalini Nadkarni tells us how she’s trying to get a new generation to think about trees, especially the upper level canopy, and how she thinks “Treetop Barbie” can help.

Bonnie Bassler gave us a story of light emitting bacteria that live within a certain type of shallow-water squid off the coast of Hawaii. How this squid uses a shutter to let out certain amounts of light beneath its body so that it mimics the sky above. It is the “stealth bomber of the ocean”.

Nathan Wolfe blew my mind with his talk on viruses, especially when he started describing his research and travel into central Africa (Cameroon), to study bush meat hunting of primates. It really challenged me to think about local communities in Africa and their needs, and I’m thinking hard on what would it really take to replace this type of activity. Read Ethan’s blog for a full rendition of his talk, but please, join me in thinking about this.

Evan Williams of Twitter was on stage for a few minutes, telling about how he didn’t realize how useful Twitter would be, especially in real-time events. He stated, “It seems that when you give people easy tools to communicate, that good things happen.”

Dickson Despommier, shared some incredible slides describing the need for vertical farming. The advantages include:

• No agricultural runoff
• Year-round crop production
• No crop loss due to severe weather
• Uses 70% less water than outdoors
• Restoration of damaged ecosystems

Willie Smits has lived in Borneo for 30 years, and he set out to save orangutans. He tells everyone of how he has 1000 baby orangutans saved, but shushes everyone’s applause, claiming that this is a failure by all of us because they are not growing up in the wild. Over the last years he has been reclaiming burnt out/used land in Borneo, working with the local communities to make it happen. My favorite quote of his, “Ensure that the local people benefit most.“

[Sidenote: follow the real TED 2009 liveblogging by Ethan Zuckerman]

There have been some phenomenal talks in this first day of TED 2009. If I had to pick a favorite, I don’t think any quite caught my imagination as did PW Singer’s talk on “Wired for War” talk on robots use in modern warfare. Singer is an interesting character, he’s a military analyst that doesn’t study or write about the normal topics that you think would come from someone with that profession. Apparently, his new book by that name just came out 5 days ago, and I’ve decided that will be my read for the flight back home.

Maybe it’s my infatuation with gadgets or making things, maybe it’s because I, like so many boys, fantasized about robots and all the cool things they could do as a child. Either way, I was mesmerized by his story, and the images he showed of this new breed of mechanized warfare and the “cubicle warriors” that control them.

Singer said that the robots we have now are the equivalent of the Model-T for vehicles 100 years ago. When you see what they can do, what they are capable of, that can be a very scary picture. The US military is on the cutting edge with the leading technology in this space right now, however there are 42 other countries working on military robotics too, so no one knows what will come next.

He takes us a step deeper and asks, “How do we rethink the rules of war?” What are the repercussions of a having robots that have the capability and “go ahead” to kill?

So, at the end, I’m troubled and I’m excited. It’s an amazing world of technology that I don’t know much about, but that has such potential for great good and for great harm.

Paul Currion recently compared Abraham Moslow’s quote, “When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail.” to an article by Cory Doctorow in the Guardian titled, “Laptops, not mobile phones, are the means to liberate the developing world“.

The basic premise is that we cannot expect great innovation and technological breakthroughs from Africans until computers are ubiquitous in Africa. He states that the mobile phone just doesn’t provide the platform necessary for real programming and hacking to happen. That mobile phones are an interim step, not the final answer. And finally, that IT infiltrates social groups when, and as, they find a personal need for it.

Mobiles vs PCs

Cory’s points are valid. All things being equal the best device to get into the hands of kids is a personal computer. Having a full-sized keyboard and monitor are better than trying to program on a mobile phone. There’s nothing to disagree with there.

One of the reasons I have liked the OLPC initiative is because they have forced the door open to low-cost laptops in the developing world. The more computers we get into the hands of kids, the better Africa’s future will be.

However, there’s the reality that I see on the ground as I travel. Sure, there are a few people with access to computers and who are creating applications and services through it for the web, PCs and mobile phones. They generally have a college-level education and are entrepreneurial in nature. A lot of the innovative work being done on the PC is applications for the mobile phone.

So, PC access plus education tend to equal more mobile applications.

The other item that I’m finding more and more of a problem for mobile developers is getting the license to actually get their product to market, much less sell it. If they do, it’s at outrageous rates that the carriers should be ashamed of.

Merging mobile phones, PCs and the web

Here’s an interesting question. What happens as we see the merging of mobile phones, PCs and the web? We’re talking about the “mobile web” more and more, and how smarter devices like the iPhone, Android and Symbian devices let us do almost as much as we can on a PC.

Will full-sized PC computers become less relevant as we simply attach keyboards and/or monitors to the device in our pocket?

That’s a question I’d like to explore more. Are there examples of this type of work happening already in any organized fashion?

[Update: I see that MobileActive and Steve Song have weighed in on this as well.]

WhiteAfrican {2}, originally uploaded by Jon Shuler.

Thanks to everyone for 2008. What an amazing (and unexpected) year!

My “Weapons of Choice”:

• Moleskin notebook
• Zebra pen
• Sanyo Xacti waterproof camera (dustproof for Africa!)
• MacBook Pro (not pictured)
• Nikon D50 (not pictured)

What are yours?

Maker Faire Africa is an event happening next summer in Ghana. It needs a logo though, and for the designers who read this, it’s your chance to win a quick $250. Jump on over to THE CONTEST to get started.

Update: some of the recent designs

(Not a designer? Pass this on to someone who is, and feel free to leave your comments on which designs you like/don’t like.)

What is Maker Faire Africa?

As Emeka puts it:

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, propagated, etc. Maker Faire Africa asks the question, “What happens when you put the drivers of ingenious concepts from Mali with those from Ghana and Kenya, and add resources to the mix?”

This logo will be used on the redesigned website, print materials and t-shirts.

How it Works

A couple months back I tested out 99designs.com for logo creation, and was incredibly impressed with how easy it was to get going and for designers to take part in quick project work. The contest is open for 7 days (Dec 25th – Christmas), and anyone can go register as a designer to submit an entry.

Once you’ve registered and submitted a design, I’ll be leaving feedback on what direction to take it, and I’ll rate them using their 5-star system. You can submit as many entries as you like. Make sure you read the creative brief before you go too far. We realize that one of the main problems with any contest like this is Africa is payment to the winner. We’ll be creative in making sure that if the winner does come from anywhere in Africa, you’ll get paid.

Who is behind it?

I am part of the organizing team, along with Emeka (Timbuktu Chronicles), Mark (Ned.com), Amy Smith (MIT IDDS), Lars (MIT), Nii (Nubian Cheetah), and Juliana (Afromusing). It is in the very early stages of organization, and we’ve each contributed some money to get the logo created.

O’Reilly, along with the guys at Maker Faire have given us their blessing to use the name.

I’ve had some recurring thoughts over the last couple weeks, mostly pertaining to how technologists in Africa present ourselves, and how those outside Africa see us. How does “Brand Africa” – from the technology angle – play out, and why? What is unique that we offer to the world, and why should African technology matter in the global context?

It’s about “Brand Africa”

We need to re-frame the way we think about technology in Africa before we can expect others outside of Africa to do the same. Our challenge is to get people to realize that there is a real competitive advantage to developing and testing software in Africa. After all, if it works in Africa, it will work anywhere.

The development conditions are unreliable and the environment is harsh. It isn’t fun to work off slow internet connections or deal with expensive and poor mobile phone networks. All of these things, and more, make just the technological side of developing in Africa a challenge, which is why it’s also a particularly good place to try new things.

If we embrace those handicaps, we might find that there’s a silver-lining inside.

African technology exported to the world

Fring and Ubuntu are two popular products coming out of South Africa that have gone global. There are more though. When Ken Banks built FrontlineSMS, he first tested and developed it within the African context. Ushahidi is being developed in Africa because these are the conditions that will make it work anywhere in the world.

In the enterprise solutions space there are a couple companies that do some good work. Two examples of this are Herman Chinery-Hesse‘s Softtribe in Ghana, and Microhouse in Kenya. Some of their solutions are for the local markets, and some are used in bidding on international projects.

Africa as a testing grounds for new applications

There’s a really neat application called Qik, which allows you to stream video live from your phone to a website. It has amazing potential for live video reporting, especially in a war zone. So, that’s just what David Axe did – and it failed miserably. Why? Because Qik designed their application not thinking of the unreliable and poor data connections found in much of the developing world.

David gives a couple suggestions:

First, there should be a “store” function, whereby you can shoot a video in some austere location, save it to your phone’s memory, then stream it later once you’ve got a solid network.

Second, Qik needs some way to buffer videos so that, if the software briefly loses its wireless network connection, it doesn’t also lose the whole video.

Granted, Qik is probably not aiming at a global market, just the US and Europe. However, it’s a good example of how creating or testing software to work in harsh settings can make your product more robust and help you think of simple solutions (like David’s) that can make your product better for everyone.

Final Thoughts

Most people outside of Africa don’t align any type of technological edge to what we do here on the continent. In fact, most are surprised when a developer from Africa pops up on the international stage at all. Though there are fewer software developers in Africa per capita relative to their Western counterparts, what most don’t realize is that those few are really quite talented.

This means the South Africans as well as their counter parts in Ghana, Uganda and Senegal. We’re all in this together, whether we like it or not. Remember, to outsiders we’re one homogeneous landmass. What we each do reflects on everyone, whether we’re creating for local or global markets.

Finally, let’s first realize that the challenges we face also provide excellent opportunities and a competitive advantage. Then, let’s start creating world-class software here, and start exporting it to the world.

(Brand Africa image via Brand Africa Project)

[Update June 2009: A great example of just this is seen by Google with their Gmail Preview release.]

Most of June I spent in Kenya, much of that time talking to developers and getting ready for the next big Ushahidi push. During that time there was a new article about Ushahidi being one of the “Ten Startups to Watch” in the Technology Review, which was exciting for us to say the least!

July and August have been spent working hard on getting the application rebuilt, the site redesigned and creating partnerships with other organizations. September is about launching the NEW Ushahidi.

A New Website

Now we’re off and running with a new website design, live today, that shows how our goals and focus have changed since things blew up in Kenya. (get a new Ushahidi button for your site.)

Funding

I’m very happy to announce that we’ve secured more than the $25,000 prize money from NetSquared (which has allowed us to do so much already). We have also just secured a grant of $200,000 from Humanity United!

Humanity United is an independent grantmaking organization committed to building a world where modern-day slavery and mass atrocities are no longer possible. They support efforts that empower affected communities and address the root causes of conflict and modern-day slavery to build lasting peace.

There is an obvious fit between Humanity United and Ushahidi, after all, we were founded on the same beliefs back in January in Kenya. Though we’re creating the Ushahidi engine as an open source project, our goal remains to see it used to better understand, give warning of, and recover from mass atrocities.

The Vision

Ushahidi is moving from being a one-time mashup covering the post-election violence in Kenya to something bigger. We are setting out to create an engine that will allow anyone to do what we did. A free and open source tool that will help in the crowdsourcing of information – with our personal focus on crisis and early warning information.

We see this tool being used in two ways:

• First, to crowdsource crisis information by creating an online space that allows “everyday” people all over the world to report what they see during a crisis situation, and whose reports are generally overlooked or under reported by most media and governments.
• Second, make that software engine free and available to the world, so that others can benefit from a tool that allows distributed data gathering and data visualizations.

We’re aiming to release an alpha version of it in just a few weeks for internal testing, and for alpha testing with pre-screened pilot organizations.

Volunteer Devs, Designers and Others

One of the reasons Ory and I were in Kenya was to talk to developers about helping with Ushahidi. We were overwhelmed with the amount of interest and the quality of the people who stepped up. So far we have a team working on mobile phones, a designers group, and a number of PHP experts. Go ahead and take a look at the development wiki as well.

If you’d like to play a part, get in touch and we’ll see where you can best fit in. You don’t have to be a developer or designer either.

[Credits: Richard “Ochie” Flores for the excellent design, Kwame Nyong’o for the beautiful illustrations, and Ivan Bernat for the spotless HTML/CSS markup.)

Press Release: Ushahidi Funding & New Website (PDF)

For the last year there has been quite a bit of talk about mobile phone reporting in Africa. For good reason too, since this lowers the technology barrier to getting stories out of hard-to-reach places. Imagine, all you need to do is find a journalist and equip them with an adequate mobile phone Now you can record interviews in video and audio, take pictures and upload in almost any part of the continent.

Netherland’s based AfricaNews has been a pioneer in this space, starting last year with their “Voices of Africa” section of their site. I’ve been continually impressed with how they find, train and equip their journalists all over Africa. My one problem with what they do is that they don’t allow for the proliferation of their reporters work around the web by hamstringing the ability to share by embedding the reports in other websites.

Colin Daniels is the Publisher for Times Online in South Africa, arguably one of the better newspapers and always on the cutting edge of news sites online globally. A couple weeks ago he posted on his personal blog about a new initiative in where Nokia is testing mobile journalism through local universities using the Nokia/Reuter’s mobile newskit. He says,

“This has all been made possible by constant technological breakthroughs and the portability and immediacy of connected mobile devices; it is becoming increasingly feasible for journalists to replace their pens and dictaphones for converged smart phones with exceptional audio/visual capabilities such as the Nokia N95. Add a keyboard, tripod, and an external microphone and all of a sudden you have a portable newsroom and studio in one…”

A true, and exciting statement that applies to mainstream journalism and blogging. Colin refers to the N95 “Mojo” toolkit (pictured above) that Reuters uses as well. The value here is that as mainstream news sources put more resources towards mobile journalism the tools get better for everyone (amateur and professional).

All of this optimism has to be tempered with some real-world examples of how it’s still a difficult field to work in and how the technology is still not quite there for full-fledged real-time news feeds. David Axe, a war journalist, wrote a fascinating article for Wired on the failures of his mobile phone trials in Chad matching up a Nokia N95 with streaming mobile news service Qik.

It should be noted the problem was not with the phone, but with the web service Qik and the poor mobile data network in Chad. This can be a real problem for anyone using MMS or any other GSM service. Though some parts of Africa have strong networks, many others are home to the worst in the world. Of course, this makes Africa one of the great testing grounds for any new device or service, so there is a silver lining to every cloud.

“…there should be a “store” function, whereby you can shoot a video in some austere location, save it to your phone’s memory, then stream it later once you’ve got a solid network. With that function alone, I could’ve filed scores of fascinating videos about refugee camps, peacekeepers and urban combat.”

A simple solution, utilizing SD card memory could have made his trial a success. David’s quote above serves to underscore one other incredibly important point; web and mobile services need to at least test in Africa, if not have a small development shop there to truly create robust applications. After all, if it can work in Africa, it can work anywhere.

So, I’ve been eagerly awaiting the new iPhone WordPress app [iTunes link]. Not because I forsee creating a lot of new content with my thumbs, but because it’ll make it easier to add images straight from my phone and easier to edit old posts. Lastly, the team behind WordPress tends to put out good stuff, so I want to see what it’s like.

Setup is simple and intuitive, just enter domain, username and password. Choose how many old posts to archive on the phone, and then get writing.

Now, I’m going to try to add pictures from my phone. Hmmm, not possible to just add an image inline, seems I can only create a gallery. I’d like some way to add individual images easily. I wonder if they could do this by allowing you to hide the keyboard?

I like how the screen automatically scrolls to the bottom when you revisit a draft.

Overall, this is going to be a useful app and will stay in an honored position of page 1 on my iPhone.

UPDATE: looks like the photos were not added correctly as a gallery, but inline. Not good. Let’s see if manually adding the gallery tag will fix it.

Update 2: that fixed it. Now to delete all the code injected. The last 2 images show the frontside and editor-side of this mess.

Last week I talked about Google’s Global Cache, and how they will be housing this new project at Internet Exchange Points (IXP). A quote from Wikipedia’s definition explains the importance of IXPs best.

“The primary purpose of an IXP is to allow networks to interconnect directly, via the exchange, rather than through one or more 3rd party networks. The advantages of the direct interconnection are numerous, but the primary reasons are cost, latency, and bandwidth. Traffic passing through an exchange is typically not billed by any party, whereas traffic to an ISP’s upstream provider is.”

There are 18 IXPs in Africa in 15 countries (I stated 17 last week). A map of those countries is below (click on it to be taken to the interactive version):

Most of these are found in the capital of the country, but not always. For instance, iBiX is located in Ibadan, Nigeria not Abuja and Tanzania has two IXPs, one in Arusha and one in Dar es Salaam.

In list form, they are:

• Angola: IXP-ang
• Botswana: BINX
• Cote D’Ivoire: CI-IXP
• Dem. Rep. of Congo: KINIX
• Egypt: CR-IX and GPX
• Ghana: GIX
• Kenya: KIXP
• Nigeria: iBiX
• Mozambique: Moz-ix
• Rwanda: RINEX
• South Africa: JINX and GINX
• Swaziland: SZIXP
• Tanzania: TIX and AIXP
• Uganda: UiXP
• Zimbabwe: ZINX

There seems to be a definite advantage to having an IXP located in your country. Why then do so many African countries not have one? From my understanding, it isn’t cost prohibitive to create an IXP or to maintain it. Why would so many African nations, who all have local ISPs, not have a local IXP?

[Update: Michuki Mwangi, one of the godfather's of Kenyan tech (I believe he's responsible for getting Kenya's TLD: yourdomain.co.ke), responded with the following answers to my question.]

“Most of the reasons that countries dont have IXPs are non-technical and are either policy or politics. For instance in Senegal, Sonatel the Senegalese Telco operates in a monopolistic environment. There are almost no ISPs that exist there and those that do just resell ADSL links for the telco. In such a case, they own no infrastructure or services outside what the telco provides. Therefore, there’s been no need/demand for such. A similar case exists in Ethiopia.

In other countries like Nigeria, its getting the players to agree and look beyond the mistrust and competitive advantages that others have to form one. That takes a while.

In other countries its purely a regulatory policy issue that does not permit the existence of an IXP – its as a way of protecting the incumbent telco’s.”

If you are interested in finding out more about Africa’s IXPs, here are some resources:

AfrISPA – African Internet Server Provider Association
AfNOG – African Network Operators Group
EP.net – Africa – List of African IXPs with links
Packet Clearing House (PCH) – for information, statistics and locations
AfriNIC – African Internet Numbers Registry IP Addresses (IPv6)

Google is well known for snatching up top-level talent, this holds true in Kenya as well. ICT groundbreaker Joe Mucheru heads up the Kenya office, and he’s surrounded by a team of smart young technologists. I had the chance to meet Isis Nyong’o (Strategic Parter Development Manager) while getting ready for Barcamp Nairobi, and then Chris Kiagiri (Tech Lead) and Mark de Blois (Geographic Supervisor) last week before I left.

Google Kenya is Different

I found out a couple of interesting points that make the Google Kenya office even more interesting than before. It turns out that there are 3 offices in Africa; Kenya, South Africa and Egypt. However, the office in Kenya is neither a sales office nor an engineering office, which makes it unique globally. In fact, it is the only “deployment office” worldwide. This means that the Kenya office can be used as a launch point for new ideas and is the central focal point for Google’s Africa strategy.

It came down to a choice between Senegal and Kenya – one French-speaking and one English-speaking, and both with a fairly well developed technology sector. Senegal had a direct transatlantic cable, but Kenya had the right people available. At Google it seems, finding the right personnel usually trumps about everything else.

Speaking of which, they’re still looking for the right people, not only in Senegal, but also in Nigeria, Ghana, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda. Unfortunately, Google HR seems to be geographically challenged, as jobs in Egypt are somehow not in Africa…

Dealing with a Slow Internet in Africa

The Google Global Cache (GGC) was announced in May at the African Network Operators Group (AFNOG) conference in Morocco. In lieu of data centers in Africa, Google has created a strategy that is housed at major exchange points to serve Africa at the edge of Google’s network. Internal tests suggested at least 20% performance increase in high latency links, like East Africa.

[The top cycle (1,2,3 & 4) is how things normally work. The bottom cycle (5,6 &7) is where the changes are.]

It works like this. Once anyone within that exchange point’s sphere visits a webpage, the information is cached and it becomes much faster for anyone else visiting that website to access it. Pre-fetching of data also that improves performance over time, even for dynamic content.

This is an interesting strategy. It’s a win for ISP’s (less international traffic means lower costs), a win for end users (pages load faster), and a win for Google (faster, better usage).

The pilot in Africa was turned on in Kenya just 2 weeks ago. There are 17 international exchange points (IXP) in 15 African nations, so with a positive pilot in Kenya, this could soon be seen continent-wide.

Keep your ears open, there are hints of even more interesting stuff coming out of the Google Kenya office.

An article over at Ostatic blog about the escalating open source wars at the OLPC got me thinking again about this project. In general, I’m a big proponent of using OS in the OLPC and hate where this fight is taking things. Why do I even like the OLPC? Well, it has something to do with this quote:

It should be noted that the point of the laptop project was not to give children access to the Internet, or to word processors, or even so that they could learn to touch-type. The idea was to provide children with an open-ended system with which they could tinker and explore — and through that exploration, learn. Papert long referred to computers as “the children’s machine,” because it offers children the chance to learn by creating and sharing, two key elements of Papert’s educational theory known as “constructionism.”

At the end of the day, I just want more computers in the hands of kids in Africa. It’s only by younger generations gaining access to technology that we see major change happen.

Of course, this begs the question about mobile phones. Is it possible to program for mobile phones on mobile phones? If so, maybe we can skip some of this PC paradigm altogether…

I’m beginning to think that this David Kobia fellow lives life on a caffeine drip, he must never sleep to be this productive. Okay, first two months of this year have seen: Ushahidi, IHaveNoTribe, and normal client work for Kobia Interactive. Today I just found out about his newest project, AfricanTees, a website where you can buy cool Kenya designed t-shirts.

From the name, you can tell that Kobia’s ambitions are to grow this outside of just the Kenyan market (thus the name “AfricanTees”, not “KenyanTees”). That’s a good idea, and it’s scalable. You see, he’s using a third party for actual manufacturing, printing and distribution of the shirts, so all he needs to worry about is designs.

The big question
The question I asked myself when I saw this site though was: Why has no one else done this who actually lives in Africa? (Kobia lives in the US).

After all, it seems like an easy, low barrier to entry model that could be done by good designers anywhere on the continent with access to a computer. Also, the margins are low, but very acceptable to people living in areas with lower costs of living.

I have two thoughts on that, though I’d love to hear yours.

First, the eternal thorn in my digital Africa thoughts: payment. It’s difficult to buy anything like this from Africa, much less receive payment for it electronically. (I could blather on about this infinitum, but I’ll spare you for now. Just know that it irks me to know end and this is where it started and went here.)

Second, it requires both design skill and web knowledge. I can think of many friends in Kenya and Sudan who are excellent artists, but don’t know how to translate that to a digital canvas. Those that do are usually busy enough doing their own web design work, so they don’t bother with a t-shirt shop online.

Some thoughts for AfricanTees
I had a chat with David after he sent me the link to AfricanTees, and had a couple of ideas immediately. First and foremost is the need for him to grow a community around this new site. There are a lot of great designers from Africa, and there are even more people with a good idea for an African t-shirt.

What about taking a page from the Threadless book and creating a way for people to submit ideas or designs? Everyone could then vote ideas up and down, comment and chat up what they like and don’t like. Go ahead a prizing system around the top designs and foster creative growth and community.

Another quick thought would be to really tap into the communities that are already out there for African diaspora and Africans still on the continent. There’s a little bit of marketing in that, but an even greater pent up capacity of creativity looking for an outlet. Let the community owners make an affiliate cut, and let the top design submitters get a free shirt and maybe even a cut of future sales.

Okay, just because I can’t stop, I’m going to give one more idea. Why not create sub-niche’s… Why not a “Kenyan Schools” section so you can proudly display your alma mater’s emblem? Why not an “African Web” section so I can buy an Amagama or MamaMikes shirt?

must. stop. writing. about. this.

[Update: Steve made a good point. When speaking of Kenyan T-shirts, I should have mentioned Jamhuri Wear, who have some of the best designs around.]

[note: images being uploaded to Flickr]

My favorites so far…

Blist
I just got excited about a really cool product: Blist. They describe themselves as, “a database for the rest of us”. Basically, Blist allows anyone to create a database, you don’t have to be a programmer or DBA in order to do this anymore.

I liked the way the presenter described how so many of us twist programs like Excel to our needs. We do, and it generally doesn’t work very well. Have you ever tried inserting images into cells on Excel? Not fun, easy or usable. Anyway, I’m going to get on the beta list and try this out in greater detail. I really like the potential of this product.

Voyant @Home (PlanitwithVoyant.com)
Possibly the best execution on a demonstration yet, absolutely flawless. Voyant @Home is allows you to manage your financial planning on your own. You can model different financial options, and you can also visually see what those decisions might mean for you.

When I first heard about their service, I thought it was a competitor of applications like Mint. It’s not though, if anything it starts where financial tools like Mint leave off. The social tools available within the Voyant @Home application look interesting as well. Definitely one to watch.

Sprout
A tool that makes it easy for anyone to create a Flash widget by anyone, which they call “sprouts”. Watching the demo, it looks like it really does allow anyone to create a sophisticated Flash widget without laying down any lines of code. See one below:

GreenPlug
This is an interesting device that cuts out a lot of the wire clutter you see at desks worldwide. This technology allows for the charging of multiple DC-powered devices with differing power requirements from a single power supply.

I’m proud to announce a brand new design for AfriGadget!

The old design was rather… old and ugly. I mocked up some ideas, and one of my friends was kind enough to take my amateur work and put a truly professional touch on it. (thanks Jared)

2 New Things:

The AfriGadget Grassroots Reporting Project
We’re intent on getting more AfriGadget contributors from all over Africa. Part of that plan is to find potential editors and set them up with a mobile phone with which to take pictures and do interviews. If you know someone that would make a good fit, let me know.

The AfriGadget Store (phase 1)
The first phase of the store is making some AfriGadget gear (t-shirts and mugs) available to everyone (hint: you can customize any design and select any type of shirt/color to put it on). The next step is to create a full-featured store with some of the items that are made by the entrepreneurs shown on AfriGadget. This would include products, as well as plans.

If you find any errors, which I’m sure there will be some, please leave a comment or shoot me an email. Thanks!