Web Tools – Page 3 – WhiteAfrican

Category: Web Tools (page 3 of 17)

Web-based tools and applications.

Quick Hits Around African Tech

I’m thoroughly enjoying Dambisa Moyo’s “Dead Aid” book. Buy it, has great food for thought, and numbers to back it up.

The New York Times article on big web content companies lack of profitability in places like Africa.

We’re seeing a new trend of microblogging platforms emerge across Africa. Most recently in the Congo with Akouaba, but also in Nigeria with Naijapulse and South Africa’s Gatorpeeps.

Matt Berg writes about the “Off-grid solar calculator” in North Africa.

Mobility Nigeria points out that Nigeria displaces Germany in the Opera Mini top 10 list.

Bankelele breaks down some of mobile payment tool M-Pesa’s strengths and weaknesses in Kenya.

We’ve announced Ushahidi’s Beta stage, and another round of funding.

APC talks about the broadband rollout issues and a movement to change policy in South Africa.

Tracking Mobile and Internet Services Across Africa

April 14, 2009 / HASH / 14 Comments

I’m continually frustrated trying to find the providers and costs of mobile phone and web services in African countries. This site was inspired by, and dedicated to, the many ranting and raving conversations amongst the technorati of Africa.

One of the issues is that the providers themselves do a shoddy job of getting the information out through convoluted (if any) marketing and price gimmicks. Another issue is that once you find out what services are available, you have no idea what to expect in terms of service levels and data speeds.

I decided to put together a site, African Signals, where people could leave information on the availability, costs and service levels of mobile phone and internet connections in their country. Right now there is a basic skeleton for every country, but it needs to be updated and improved.

Your Job:

Find your country and enter whatever you know about your local costs, speeds and service levels for mobile phone operators and internet service providers (ISPs).

Take 5 minutes and jump see if you can add anything new, or if the info is correct. Then, tell your tech friends from that country too, share this. It’s a resource, something for you to give to and to take from. It is strengthened by your information, and I hope that you in turn will benefit from it too one day.

Example pages

Liberia:

More good example pages, and a special thanks to:

Kenya: thanks to Josiah Mugambi and Brian Muita
Uganda: thanks to Jon Gosier
Liberia: thanks to John Etherton

[Note: Some might notice that I am repurposing a domain that I used to have a podcast on 2 years ago, but subsequently was abandoned.]

Radio Gbarpolu and Travel in Liberia

March 8, 2009 / HASH / 16 Comments

Liberian Bush Trip from WhiteAfrican on Vimeo.

I took an opportunity to travel to Bopolu, a small town in the Liberian bush that is the center of government for Gbarpolu county (don’t say the “G”).

My goal was to talk to someone from a rural community radio station. I also wanted to talk to the local leaders to determine how information flows in the community, and how it gets from local villages to Monrovia.

Here is a quick video that I put together showing some of the highlights of this trip.

Growing Muti: A 3 Year Tale of Patience and Persistence

February 26, 2009 / HASH / 5 Comments

Three years ago I wrote about this new site called Muti, created by South African Neville Newey. It’s a site that allows everyone to participate by putting in links to content of interest to Africans or those interested in Africa. Other uses can then vote it up and, generally, the cream rises to the top. We originally thought it should be for “all Africans”, but the community quickly proved that they though it was for South Africans – and that is how it has remained.

Over the intervening years I’ve become good friends with Neville and have watched him crunch the early morning hours to fine-tune and evolve his site into a real community. There have been a number of times that Neville has wanted to throw in the towel, with real (paying) work taking up so much time, and with all of the life that comes at you when you have a family. He didn’t though, and what we’re seeing is that Muti is growing and his patience is starting to pay off.

I asked Neville to shoot me his numbers for the past two years. Here are the last two years subscriber growth:

Here are the last two years news submission chart:

Going mainstream

We’re seeing Muti grow in other ways too. News 24 is one of the largest media houses in South Africa. In their new mobile application, Muti is listed along with Digg and Reddit as a place to submit a story to. It has become South Africa’s version of those services, and you can see that change coming as more submissions are not just about technology (though that is still the foundation).

The community

Neville started Muti, but he didn’t grow it, the community did. It’s the hundreds of bloggers, social media gurus and African news hounds. Among them are other South African developers like Charl Van Niekerk, who has been instrumental in extending and debugging the site. People know each other and start to gain a reputation – good and bad – which makes the community sticky too.

One interesting place that the community came into play is the Muti logo. There was a contest to see who could create the best logo, and then everyone in the community voted on it. It went from something that Neville hacked together, to a really well designed logo by Fred of World Wide Creative.

Neville tells me that this is going to happen again, with the skin for the new site. He’s done an initial design (below), but plans to allow users to submit their own style sheets and then have a gallery of all the style sheets and let the users decide which one to go with.

What we’ve seen so far is a bootstrapped startup, that sells one or two ads per month to cover server costs. It’s a hobby. But, it’s a hobby that is continuing to grow and gain a larger following in South Africa. I hope Neville serves as an example and an inspiration to all those other startups and bootstrappers across Africa – to stick with it. Longevity has its own value.

NaijaPulse: Microblogging in Nigeria

February 23, 2009 / HASH / 22 Comments

I was pleased to find out about a NaijaPulse yesterday, through Loy Okezie at Startup Africa. It’s a new microblogging platform, like Twitter, except made to operate in Nigeria (Twitter used to be global, but shut that down to just the US, Canada and India last summer). Everyone is tied to a 140-character update limit, and as Twitter is showing, that is plenty.

I really like what NaijaPulse has done with connecting the service to Facebook and Twitter. That way users of the service don’t need to duplicate their entries in both systems. They’ve also created a group feature and support the OpenMicroBlogging protocol that let’s their service share with others easily.

Growing Africa’s federated microblogging network

NaijaPulse represents a significant step forward on the African continent: utilizing the web + mobile phone to provide communication services that can ultimately be built on top of. I know of one other project going on to do the same thing in another African country. My hope is that we see this implementation of federated systems continue to proliferate around the continent. Where we can find localized versions for every country, but that also allow you to connect to a broader network if you so choose.

From the founder:

“The idea of NaijaPulse is that instead of we Africans or Nigerians getting lost in Twitter, we can use NaijaPulse where we get to meet more people from the same background, country or even streets, in doing this we get more fun from this service because our stories will be more familiar and similar and our community will be more fun. But even so, we can still even sync to both Twitter and Facebook from NaijaPulse – its a win and win situation.”

This idea of a local microblogging platforms for each country/region is where I differ on opinion from Loy. I don’t think that NaijaPulse should try to go for an Africa-wide platform. Instead, they should focus on Nigeria and getting ordinary, non-tech people using their platform. Then, as other sites like this come online around the continent, they should link up and make sure their services are compatible (which should be the case, since they’ll all likely use Laconica).

The SMS problem

Currently, NaijaPulse does not truly support SMS functionality. Instead they use your carrier’s email gateway to send and receive messages. This is a problem, as it hamstrings the future growth of a “general user” consumer base that have only basic SMS-enabled phones, and no data plans, in Nigeria. The reason why is simple, it costs to send SMS messages (not receive). If you have a person that sends out an update, and they have 100 people receiving that update via SMS then it gets expensive. Who carries that cost?

There area two possible outcomes. First, that NaijaPulse figures out a business model that allows for them to cover the cost for their service (most likely it would include subscription model and/or advertising). Second, if they can draw enough of a following, they might be able to go the way of Mxit in South Africa. Their Java-based app sits on the phone, and so a lot of people have found a way to upgrade their phones and get a data plan.

What’s next?

I think we’ll start to see new microblogging services showing up in the “hot spots” of African digerati around the continent. Nigeria was an obvious first choice, followed by the South Africans, Ghana and someone in East Africa (Uganda).

Whoever does figure out a model that works in Africa could be sitting on a gold mine of users. If there was ever a simple communication service that can work well in almost every part of Africa, this could be it.

Location, Mobiles and Social Networks

February 19, 2009 / HASH / 1 Comment

It’s all beginning to come together, at least on the fringe where all of us technocrats live. Social networks have been humming along quite nicely, many people you know are now part of a service like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Bebo or Mxit. On the edges, some applications have started to pair up location-based services around them, thus the rise of smaller applications like FireEagle, Loopt and Brightkite.

What’s always seemed to be missing is a way for location, mobile phones and social networks to coalesce. A way for you to communicate with people, be it updates, comments or chat – and then apply location to that as you chose. Those social networks that tried to do it all couldn’t do it at this level, because they didn’t have critical mass (such as Brightkite). Those that had reach, like Twitter or Facebook, don’t have a simple way to play with location for everyone.

Enter Google Latitude

Just over a week ago, Google Latitude launched. It’s a location-based service that mashes up Google’s own mapping products with Google’s communication products; Gmail and gTalk (chat). One week later, they announced that a million people were already using the service in the 27 countries that they had released it into.

While people are discussing how great the technology works, and it does seem to be quite impressive if you carry one of the supported smart phones platforms (BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Symbian and Android), I believe there’s something even bigger going on here. Google has not had much success in the social network space, so they are taking a rather nontraditional approach to getting embedded into people’s lives at a much more foundational level. Gmail has a base of 50 million+ accounts, and each comes with a chat service, which has gained quite a bit of popularity. Not to mention, SMS was enabled within chat just a couple months ago, in December.

What Google appears to be doing, is leveraging its massive user base, tied together through email and chat services, and pairing it together into a larger community that works within it’s mapping infrastructure.

(Putting on my Ushahidi hat, this has some pretty big ramifications for disaster and emergency work in locations where Google use is heavy.)

The competition

It also has the potential to change the game for some other large services. What happens if people start using Google Latitude for their status updates instead of Twitter and Facebook? What service do you use to find out what’s happening on a Friday night?

It will be very interesting to see what types of reactions to this service arise out of the large social networks, especially those with a large international footprint. Getting location, mobile and social networks to play together isn’t easy, yet these organizations will not sit by as Google whittles away at their empire.

Here’s something to think about. If you didn’t realize this before, pay attention: the big international showdown in this space is between Google and Nokia in the coming years. They have been gaming each other for over two years, and as the race to the edges begins, you’ll see them come head-to-head more often.

1.5 years ago Nokia bought mapping service Navteq in a mega-deal at over $8 billion. Last summer they launched Ovi, which allows remote sync capability for photos, contacts and calender, gains access to music and games, and marries up their mapping and sharing capabilities. It’s what Nokia is banking on for their consumer value-added services in the future.

I’m not sure who will win out on usage in the end, but I do think that Google’s Latitude is an incredibly strong and under-the-radar type play that should be watched very closely. One thing is for sure though, the organization that opens up for easy third-party development on their platform will have a better chance.

30 Great African Tech Blogs

February 9, 2009 / HASH / 59 Comments

A conversation on Twitter with Marshall Kirkpatrick of RWW about the top tech blogs to read in Africa made me realize that there is no great list to start from. Most of us just have them in our head, RSS feeds or blogrolls. Some of them don’t update frequently enough, and many of the range across topics, but all of them are useful if you are trying to figure out what is going on in technology around Africa.

Here is a list of African tech blogs that I follow. Hopefully it can be a resource, and a good place for everyone to start from when exploring the mobile, web and general tech space in Africa:

General Web and African Tech

AfriGadget – Stories of low-tech African ingenuity and innovation
Afromusing – Juliana’s insights and thoughts on alternative energy in Africa
Appfrica – Pan-African and Ugandan web and mobile tech developments
Bandwidth Blog – Charl Norman’s blog in South Africa
Bankelele – One of East Africa’s top business bloggers, also has great insights into the business side of African technology
Build Africa – Matt’s musings on technology in Africa
Charl van Niekerk – Always insightful post from one of South Africa’s great coders
Coda.co.za – One of Africa’s very best web designers
Dewberry – Shaun’s frenetic blog on general, and South African tech
My Hearts in Accra – More of generalist these days, but excellent analysis of African tech space by Ethan Zuckerman
Henry Addo – A perspective on tech from Henry in Ghana
Geek Rebel – Henk’s blog on entrepreneurship and technology
Matthew Buckland – From one of the pioneers, and big thinkers, in the South African media space
Mike Stopforth – Entrepreneur and South African social media nexus point
Nubian Cheetah – Thoughts and news on West African tech
Oluniyi David Ajao – Web coverage from Ghana
Open Source Africa – Just what the name describes… talking about open source development in Africa
Paul in Sierra Leone – hardware tech news from a very hard place to get news/info from
Startup Africa – Tracking mostly South African web startups
Startups Nigeria – Just what the title says
Stii – One of my favorite true coder blogs out of South Africa
Timbuktu Chronicles – A must-read covering pan-African technology, from web to mobile to hardware
Bits/Bytes – Coding thoughts by the unique and always hilarious “M” from Thinker’s Room.
Vincent Maher – Vincent’s excellent, fun and controversial blog on all things South African tech
Web Addict(s) – From the mind of Rafiq, opinionated coverage and thoughts on South African tech

African Mobile-focused Blogs

Epic Mobile – mobile phone tips and tricks from South Africa
Jopsa.org – (aka Mobiles in Malawi), thoughts by Josh Nesbit in Malawi
Kiwanja – Ken Banks on mobile usage and his FrontlineSMS app, much of it in Africa
Mobile Africa – A great resource for mobile news across Africa
Mobility Nigeria – track what’s happening in the Nigerian mobile phone space
Fring – the only tool/app on this list

5 Non-blog Tech Sites and Tools for Africa

Afrigator – the defacto blog tracking tool for African blogs
Amatomu – the South African blogosphere tracker
Mobile Active – Katrin does a good job of finding reports and stories about mobiles in Africa
Muti – mostly South African tech news and gossip, a reddit/digg for interesting African news/blog links
Videoreporter.nl – Ruud’s videos consistently have great tech stories
Akouaba – A French language blog tracker for West Africa

The, “If I missed it”…

I likely missed many blogs that should be on this list. Please add them to the comments below. I know I’ve missed quite a few Francophone and Arabic ones, so PLEASE add those especially.

Additions (aka, ones I missed):

Many Possibilities – Steve Song on open source in Africa
Africa 2.0 – A French language blog talking about all things new media in Africa
Subsaharska – Miquel, building a blogging tool for Africa (Maneno)
Arthur Devriendt – French blog on web tech in Africa

Negroponte on the New (lowercase): olpc

February 7, 2009 / HASH / 4 Comments

Nicholas Negroponte comes up on stage at TED and tells us that, due to the OLPC, there’s a whole new product line: Netbooks. However, they copied all the wrong things. Next thing you know there are a couple being thrown around the stage, and he’s asking us how well a netbook would stand up to that, or being submerged in water, or being sent to Africa…

My question is about how well an OLPC works when you just open it up…? 🙂

“Commercial markets will do anything they can to stop you, even when you’re non-profit, even if you’re a humanitarian organization.”

Now we want to build something that everybody copies. Go from the OLPC to the olpc (lowercase). That’s what’s going to happen over the next 3 years. Open source hardware: where you publish all the specs and all the designs so that anyone can copy it.

In a side conversation with Ethan Zuckerman here, this is what they should have done 3 years ago, and it would have saved them a lot of heartache.

Cameron Sinclair adds via Twitter, “OLPC to be open sourced. email nn@MIT.edu with ideas about olpc. I suggest adding SketchUp and making it o.l.p.innovator”

Using Web 2.0 Sites to Market Your Company in Africa

January 29, 2009 / HASH / 10 Comments

I came across a fascinating site today. At Discover Africa, you can search for images with only an African flavor. So, search for “playing soccer” and you’ll get ones that are geo-tagged in Africa or that also have another tag of “africa” on them. To do this, they’ve plugged into one of the poster children of Web 2.0, Flickr, to do it too. Pretty useful.

After a quick email dialogue with the organizers of the site, I came away more impressed They didn’t stop there though, and this is where they move from “pretty useful” to “pretty smart”. They’ve created this service as a way to generate a list of people who are interested in Africa and they are also running a campaign where two winners will win a dream African safari. You can enter the competition by blogging (using a traditional blog, Flickr or YouTube) about your dream trip to Africa in 100+ words with a link to Discover Africa.

“To do this you’re going to have to have a genuine interest in, or love for Africa – we’d like to see that come through in your entry.”

Why I like this

I like what Discover Africa is doing because it’s smart.

They have created a valuable African image search tool.
They’re using the hosting, computing power of Flickr and all of their huge user base.
They’re giving the value first, then asking you to join in and be a part of it.
The campaign looks easy and fun, and it has a big prize.
If it works, they’ll get a ton of search engine love.

I’m interested in seeing how this campaign goes. Who knows if they’ll actually share the numbers, but I plan to scan the web, in another 2 months, for results on the number of blog posts that have been written to enter this competition.

[Update: the below issue has been taken care of already. That was quick.]

Okay, the one thing I don’t like… When you click on an image to show it (see below), then there’s no way to get from their site to the image on Flickr. If I want to see the licensing usage for that image, I can’t easily find it. All they need to do to make me happy is make the image clickable, or create a link beneath it. Simple, and I’m sure it’ll make a lot of photographers happy too.

The Fastest Growing Mobile Networks in Africa (Q3 2008)

January 24, 2009 / HASH / 8 Comments

The Mobile World Briefing has just released a newsletter with the numbers for the fastest growing Mobile Network Operators in the Middle East and Africa. To little surprise, Egypt leads the pack followed by Nigeria and Kenya.

“Mobinil in Egypt produced by far the best result in the region, with 2.58m net adds – more than it connected in the first two quarters of the year and nearly one million more than second placed MTN Nigeria managed. The Egyptian market has been booming since the launch of the countryâ€™s third network, but as is so often the way, the incumbents have been the main beneficiaries.”

Nigeria has had absolutely amazing growth numbers in mobile phone subscribers, and even though they’re one of the top in this report, they still can’t beat their Q2 2008 quarter when they added 7,380,000 connections (yes, that many in one quarter). That is more than double what any other carrier has been able to grow their connections by in any other African country.

“Kenyan companies take sixth and tenth. Safaricom, the Vodafone associate, added 1.12m new connections in the quarter to strengthen its lead over Zain Kenya. Zain remains the main threat in Kenya, but its 0.65m net adds in Q3 do not fully offset the loss of 0.98m seen in Q4 07 and Q1 08 and the companyâ€™s base is still down, year on year.”

Overall, we’re seeing a slight decrease in growth in Africa as a whole. Not much, not even near a plateau, but lower growth rates than in previous years. There are still many more fat bottom lines ahead for these carriers, but they do have to start thinking a lot more about two big areas: data and customer service.

Where Africa and Technology Collide!