south africa – Page 6

Tag: south africa (page 6 of 6)

Thanks for Sending Ushahidi to NetSquared!

I need to write a big thank you post today. It was through you, the greater African community, that David and myself are heading to San Francisco today to present Ushahidi at the NetSquared Mashup Challenge that gives us a chance to win up to $20,000 for further development work. Your support helped us get the most votes going in, so now it’s up to us to win over the conference attendees (who are the final voters).

As I mentioned in my last blog post, we were sidetracked from our preparations a little bit this last week by an even more important event/crisis – the xenophobic attacks happening in South Africa. The Ushahidi engine is being used there now at UnitedforAfrica.co.za.

We’re also unveiling our new logo today, designed by David. Watch the flash presentation to see why we chose it.

New Ushahidi Logo

Ushahidi is now a registered non-profit in Florida, jumping all the hoops to become a 501c3, with Ory, myself, Juliana and David as part of the team. Get in touch if you’d like to be part of the growing Ushahidi community.

Mapping Xenophobic Attacks in South Africa

May 23, 2008 / HASH / 13 Comments

The Ushahidi engine (version 1) is being used to map reports of the current xenophobic attacks happening in South Africa on a site called UnitedforAfrica.co.za. The attacks are a product of foreigners moving across the borders, especially Zimbabwean, and encroaching on the lives of South Africans. I suggest reading this BBC article for more information.

Quirk, a web marketing agency in Cape Town is leading this charge, with Tim Shier, Rafiq and David Kobia all pulling VERY late nights last night to make this come together. Quirk will act as administrators on this build, and the Ushahidi team will step away from it as soon as the build is done.

The most important part of this type of campaign is to get the word out. SMS, email, call your friends and family all over South Africa and get them to tell their friends so that more reports come in. The more that come in, the better the tool.

A couple resources for this crisis in South Africa:

A list of organizations that can/are helping in this situation
Afrigator’s xenophobia page aggregating blog posts and news articles on the crisis
BizCommunity’s aggregation of online coverage of xenophobia attacks
The Times “Flames of Hate” video
Recent Google News results

So, what’s up with this “Ushahidi engine”?
As you might/might not be aware, we’ve worked up a plan for a new version of Ushahidi (v2) that would replace what we’ve done as a free and open source tool for crowdsourcing crisis information and then visualizing that on a map. We’ll be presenting that idea next week at the NetSquared challenge in California, and are already building the basic architecture for that. This collaboration with the guys in South Africa ends up being a perfect example of the need for a rapid deployment tool like Ushahidi.

What we could use is more developers from around the world to help us. We already have a good dozen who have committed to helping in some way or other, ranging from the Bay area in California to Kenya to South Africa and Malawi. If you’d like to take part, please get in touch!

Blueworld: South Africa’s Social Network

May 22, 2008 / HASH / 9 Comments

Charl Norman is one of the great examples of new media entrepreneurs coming out of South Africa. He’s has an amazing work ethic, showcased in a growing blog empire and three popular social networks. What Charl has been able to do in the last couple years should put the fire under any other web entrepreneur in Africa. He does quality work, finds hidden niches and works hard to promote them.

One of the social networks that Charl created was Blueworld, a social networking site for (younger) South Africans. Recently 24.com acquired a controlling stake in Blueworld for an undisclosed amount. That’s a big success story for a little startup, and one that gives Charl enough money to go do even more exciting things.

Blueworld is a social community where anyone can join and create a profile so your friends can find you online, upload an unlimited number of photos, share videos, write your own blogs, support your peers with groups, send text messages to any network for free, discover new people and connect with friends.

I remember when Blueworld first came out a couple years ago. Like many social networks, it was fairly simple and bare-bones. Looking at the most recent version though, you can see major changes. There are a lot more people using it, and the site is more robust.

Like any other social network, once you gain enough users you have critical mass and the site grows on its own. With 137,000 registered users by March of this year, Blueworld is becoming quite a force in the web space in South Africa. By any measure, Blueworld is a resounding success story for Africa.

Find out more about Charl at his blog, but also check out some of his other work:

Bandwidth Blog (SA web startup news)
BlogBuzz (a mini SA blog aggregator)
Carblog
GayPeers (social network for gays/lesbians in SA)
NetBuzz (a mini SA news aggregator)
Powerloss (focused on power/energy issues in SA)
SA Rugby Blog
Zoopedup (automotive social network)

Quick Hits Around Africa

April 29, 2008 / HASH / 9 Comments

“Building a Startup You Love is Hard”
A new paper by South African Gareth Knight that gives valuable advice for new entrepreneurs in the digital space. He’s the creator of Kindo, a family tree application.

Startups Nigeria Blog
I’m really digging this new blog by a Nigerian named Loy. He’s covering some cool new apps by Nigerians, including CVCrib, which I plan on reviewing myself soon.

Techpreneurs in Kenya
A PDF document by Business Daily that discusses some of the brilliant young entrepreneurs and their ideas in Kenya. Here’s the PDF for download

“Why Africa May Never Produce a Microsoft, Google, Yahoo or Facebook”
An interesting article that discusses the challenge that young college-level entrepreneurs face in Africa.

South African Tech: A Tale of Two Success Stories

April 27, 2008 / HASH / 10 Comments

There are a number of technology companies from South Africa that have had no small amount of success. I want to take a minute to highlight two of them though, because I think they show something important.

The decision you have to make when deciding to create a technology business, a web or mobile application in Africa, is whether it’s something for the local market or international. Very few companies are solving for both. In my examples you’ll see Mxit, a company solving for a local problem, and Synthasite, a company solving for an international problem.

For those who don’t know, Mxit created a java-enabled chat application for mobile phones that decreases the cost per message compared by ~90% of a normal SMS message. They have over 7.5 million users after just a few years in action, and are the staple communication system for young mobile users in South Africa. It’s a phenomenon, and they’re looking to expand internationally.

Mxit Users in South Africa

Synthasite is the free web site creator and publishing platform, designed and created in the mold of any Web 2.0 app coming out of the Silicon Valley. Vinny, the founder, tells me that they have over 70k users and are increasing that by 1000 each day – which puts them as one of the top 3 services like this in the world. They have just moved 1/3 of their operations to San Francisco, with 2/3 of the company still in Cape Town.

Both of these companies had completely different strategies: local and global. These companies serve to prove that any developer in Africa with a good idea that solves a problem, and has the drive to see it through, can be incredibly successful. It’s inspiring, and I hope that more of Africa’s web developers will see the opportunities all around them.

[Image courtesy of Rafiq via Flickr]

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Where Africa and Technology Collide!

Tag: south africa (page 6 of 6)