web – Page 5 – WhiteAfrican

Tag: web (page 5 of 5)

Google on Anonymity VS Trust

Last weekend there was a live screencast of the Aspen Institute’s Forum on Communications and Society, and one of the meetings that I tuned in to was the one on Media and Civic Engagement. The members of that meeting was a who’s who of media, regulatory and business moguls that are trying to, or have cracked, the online space (Craig Newmark of Craigslist, Marissa Mayer of Google, Peter Shane of the Knight Foundation, Dana Boyd, etc…).

Google on Anonymity VS Trust

I heard a very troubling comment during that discussion, and surprisingly it came from Marissa Mayer of Google (found at 52:45). That was how anonymity is the enemy of trust, and that she doesn’t see a future for anonymity online. It destroys community and promotes anarchy.

To give some sense of reference, without having to watch the video, here is a word-for-word transcription of Marissa’s comments. It starts with her talking about youth and misinformation on the web leading to apathy, she stated:

“…I think it’s really important as we look at tools to think about how we can support fact checking, how can we guard against misinformation, how is there going to be established an element of authority and trustworthiness? …I grew up with the newspaper and the encyclopedia, which you could trust. And now you have blogs, which are held often as news and often aren’t factual. Or you have Wikipedia, which usually gets most things right, but there are a lot times there is vandalism or corrections that need to be made.”

“When you look at the elements of anonymity and the lack of accountability that happens on the web, it really does start to create doubt in the fibers of who can you trust. Especially when you think of why should I engage? The sense of identity. If I’m anonymous and I’m not accountable for my actions and there are other people out there putting out a lot of misinformation of which the same is true, I think it does lead to apathy and a lack of engagement, which is why I think it is important as we look at these tools to understand the effects of identity. To understand the effect of accountability, authority, trustworthiness and make sure that we’re developing tools and social systems online that encourage an element of engagement and try to fight that apathy trend that says, ‘well I just can’t trust anything. Why should I care?’.

On the question of if there is a way to hone in on the issue of misinformation, beside media literacy:

“Well, I think there are two ways to look at it, on the institutional level and on the individual level. So I think that what you’re seeing is that there are institutions that are rising up online that basically have an element of brand and credibility and standards that they apply. When you look at the Huffington Post, the Drudge Report, inherently the people who run those organizations are saying that here are stories I believe, I believe they’re verified enough that I’m willing to attach my brand and my name to it. So you can see that that’s starting to happen on an institution level online.”

“And I also think there are individual systems where people are verified or credentialed, or you have a profile that tells all about you and shows the other contributions you’ve made to the system. Just there’s greater accountability on the personal level… So I think a lot of the systems that support pure anonymity… I really believe that virtual systems should mirror physical systems. The physical world has been around for a lot longer, and in the physical world you really can’t do anything anonymously. So when you look at systems online that break that paradigm where you can be completely anonymous, or be whoever you want to be, without any since of history or of what you did last week, that’s not really reality and that breaks down the elements of trust and authority.“

That’s about where I jumped in with my comments on not being able to trust those who are monitoring your online speech. Where Marissa then answered:

“Well, I think anonymity has its place. So there’s certainly times, when you know you should have commentary or some type of act giving should be anonymous. But, by and large most systems should have accountability the same way they do in the physical world.”

Besides all of my thoughts swirling around the fact that the web really grew due to anonymity, I balked at this comment because I was surprised at hearing one of the highest Google executives speak so lightly of it.

Projecting Our World Onto Others

Maybe this is where I differ a little from my American tech counterparts. You see, there’s something about growing up in a country where you can’t pretend to believe that the government really has your best interests at heart that makes one a little squeemish about not having this anonymous free speech. For, if it wasn’t anonymous, then it definitely wouldn’t be free.

We have a way of projecting our world view on to those around us. In this case, I believe Google (or Marissa) is doing just that. Having these open, trusting, everyone-knows-everyone systems is all well and good when you live in the US. It’s not so good in other parts of the world.

It’s especially not good when you ask who controls all that personal information, and how they let outside bodies (government or otherwise) access that personal data about you.

I came to terms a few years ago about having a lot of personal information on the web, open to others. That’s a personal decision, and not one that any company should be making claims to knowing what’s right to do or not. What I hear, extrapolating from this, is that it’s okay if you don’t want to be a part of it, you can always opt out – but if you do, you also opt out of any meaningful part in the discussion. Frankly, I find that troubling.

Video Archive

Below is the video archive of this talk on Media and Civic Engagement, and is about 1.5 hours (browse the “on demand library” and it’s the 6th from the top on the list):

[Rachel Sterne of Groundreport created a great backchannel platform for viewers to discuss these items in real-time, and there was some direct discussion happening between online commenters and the participants in the room.]

Happenings on the Web Front Around Africa

July 10, 2008 / HASH / 12 Comments

Worldclass Brand Monitoring Service from South Africa

South African marketing firm Quirk has launched a new brand monitoring service called BrandsEye. Global firms like Ogilvy, Standard Bank and the South African Tourism Board are already using it. I’ve yet to try it out, but Quirk is a solid company, and they have good companies already using it, so that’s promising.

Custom/Premium WordPress Themes out of South Africa

I’m a big fan of WordPress and all the customization and businesses that can grow out of it. A couple South African guys have been working in this space for a while, and have a great premium (meaning you pay money for them) themes offered at the new website WooThemes. (Adii, Mark, Magnus and Elliot have a great eye for detail, a boatload of experience with WordPress, and continue to impress on the international level.)

Google Launches an Africa Blog

Joe, head of Google Kenya, launched the Google Africa Blog last week. I’m sure all of us will be watching it with interest. No comments allowed though, which is kind of lame.

Thoughts on Ecommerce Problems in Africa

June 29, 2008 / HASH / 23 Comments

Recently, I’ve noticed a sudden buzz about ecommerce in Kenya. Brian Longwe talks about the beginnings of this with Mpesa, emails are bouncing around between companies I know, and last week I spent a morning listening in to what the Kenya ICT Board and Federation had to say about it.

Let me start with the Kenya ICT Board. The meeting was basically about legislation and the fact that ecommerce would be good for Kenya. Of course it is, anything that lowers transaction costs for both buyers and sellers greases the wheels of commerce and increases the amount of trade across all industries and sectors. That’s a given.

But how? See, that’s the big sticking point that I’ve been banging my head against the wall over for 2 years now. It’s not enough that you can buy and sell with a Visa or Mastercard in Kenya. As long as you continue to ignore the wananchi (average person), then you’ll only help the wealthy and not see the real gains and advantages of a level playing field.

Which brings me to Brian talking about Mpesa, the mobile phone payment system in Kenya. For, in Mpesa, we have the beginnings of a payment system that can be used by everyone. He’s right about that. What’s wrong is that it’s mobile phone carrier dependent (Safaricom).

What we need is a carrier and bank agnostic ecommerce platform for Africa. Why?

Let’s go back to our “average person” again and talk about banks. They are generally unbanked (thus the use of Mpesa), or if they are, they have only a couple thousand shillings (less than $100) in the bank. The transaction costs for them having to keep their money in these aging institutions is often impractical. They have no, or very limited, opportunities to borrow money and they have no realistic way of getting any type of credit.

So, as can be seen, tying money, credit and debt to banks is not practical.

Now, let’s talk about why it needs to be carrier agnostic. This is even easier to understand. In Kenya there are two carriers; Safaricom (Mpesa) and Celtel (me2u). By the end of the year, there will be four. The barriers to use of a system that relies on one carrier is as ridiculous as requiring any payment system on the web to only go through one ISP. Sure, it makes sense if you’re that company to control that monopoly, but it’s bad for everyone else.

What does this mean then? Where do we go from here?

The upsides of a carrier and bank agnostic payment system is high. Not only would a system like this be used for the obvious domestic transactions (Kenya-to-Kenya) and external transactions (Kenya-to-world), but all of the sudden we have the ability to create real micro-loans and a new system to create credit scores for unbanked people over time. That’s wealth building, and it would transform Kenya.

Well, first off, let those who have the funds to do so, start building the right type of payment gateway. Start in Kenya and grow regionally, then continent-wide. It’s a semi-heavy investment (relative to who you are of course), but the return is absolutely insane. In fact, it’s ridiculous that after this long no one has done anything beyond build monopolies in this space.

[Note: My first post on this from 2 years ago]

Wananchi: Severely Curbing Web Costs in Kenya

June 16, 2008 / HASH / 32 Comments

Wananchi is one of the largest ISPs in Kenya. I was invited to come see the installation of Wananchi’s brand new Intel Sat satellite dish, for use in their new WiMax, fiber and cable TV offerings. Two reasons it was interesting.

First, because it’s being installed in Upper Hill, my old neighborhood. I just don’t recognize this place anymore with all of the new commercial buildings.

Second, and probably more interesting to everyone else, is that this dish is aimed directly at the mass market in Kenya and stands to drastically lower the costs of bandwidth to the home. Wananchi will be offering 512k broadband to the home for 3000 shillings ($). Compare that to the next best offerings by Safaricom with their new 3G service for 2000/= (700Mb) or 4000/= (2Gb), and Access Kenya with 256k at 6000 shillings.

From here, it looks like anyone wanting to stay untethered and who doesn’t have that high of bandwidth consumption would likely choose Safaricom (700Mb isn’t a lot). However, if you’re going to spend more than a modicum of your time on the internet, then Wananchi’s new service is the most attractive.

Wananchi’s towers also have fiber pumped directly into them, so more speed and reliability out of the gate. To manage their large 100 tower rollout in the Nairobi area, they’re piggybacking cell towers with Celtel, and hope to be done by around October. Certain towers, with service off of this new dish, will go live by the beginning of July.

All told, I have to say I’m impressed. Not just by Wananchi’s offering, which will come as great news for the public, but that the communications industry is moving along so quickly. Thought international fiber is still a dream in Kenya, local connectivity is booming.

So, where’s the local version of WordPress MU setup for local bloggers? Where are the local web services by local software guys for local companies? That we shall find out shortly, this weekend at Barcamp Nairobi.

(Update: Full-sized images on Flickr)

Two New East African Web Sites

June 2, 2008 / HASH / 7 Comments

Two sites recently caught my attention coming out of East Africa.

Bongoza is a new search engine for Tanzania. I’m intrigued by this idea of a niche search engine by country. Usually I would think that the big search engines would do an adequate job for any area, however it might be different if there’s a human helping to index uniquely Tanzanian content, especially as much of it is in Swahili.

The sites in the index are mostly sites that end in the .tz TLD. But since most companies in Tanzania have .com’s, he searches on the internet for hosting companies in Tanzania and gets a list of websites that they host and index them accordingly.

Ali Damji is the gentleman behind the Bongoza. He also created the Tanzania Startpage, which is a useful index of interesting Tanzanian websites, and and Mshikaji (which appears to be down). I love seeing this kind of online entrepreneurship and will make sure to watch this space for more from Tanzania.

EA Collective is a new blog that aims to showcase Kenyan designers. I hope that Barbara Muriungi takes their name seriously though and broadens the scope to web designers from Uganda and Tanzania as well. I know I’ll be paying attention, as I’m always looking for top-notch web designers and developers from Africa.

If you’re a web designer from East Africa, you should consider getting your work in front of Barbara for her to post to the EA Collective blog at bkagwiria [at] gmail.com.

Think Different: Africa’s Technology Gap

April 25, 2008 / HASH / 11 Comments

I was fortunate enough to spend an evening talking to Kaushal yesterday. He’s a third-generation Kenyan of Indian descent, now working in the tech-land of San Francisco.

During the course of our discussion, we talked about mobile phones and the web. An interesting point that Kaushal brought up was the fact that only a certain layer of society really has access to the web, and the rest only have access to simple communications through their mobile phone.

That little insight gets pretty interesting when you start applying some real project concepts to that thought. One of Kaushal’s ideas was to create a job platform that had two different levels and forms of interaction (using some of the same ideas behind Babajob in India).

Those hiring would interact on the web level first, and also the mobile at some point.
Job seekers would only need to ever interact through their mobile phone.

This allows those without access to high bandwidth technology to bypass the normal flaws (in a Western ideology) in the technology loop that generally break the cycle in Africa.

The Technology Gap in Africa
UNCTAD defines the technology gap:

“There is a wide gap between those who have access to technology and use it effectively and those who do not. The technology gap exists between those who can create and innovate to produce new technologies and those who cannot. It also exists between those who can access, adapt, master and use existing technologies and those who cannot.”

In Africa, the world thinks of the technology gap as the lack of bandwidth, low access to computers and non-data enabled mobile phones. This is all true, these deficiencies do cause a technology gap to grow. African income levels just won’t allow the same type of consumer behavior towards all technologies as we see in the West.

The average African is not the same type of technology user as the average European or American. Information flows differently, African’s don’t drink from the fire-hose of data that we do. They do use technology though, almost everyone has the minimal level of access to a mobile phone.

What if the technology gap that we see is not as big as we think?
In the UNCTAD definition, we can agree that there is a difference of levels between access and use. However, the gap between creation and innovation is less clear. It gets downright blurry when talking about adaptation and mastering of technologies.

You see, most Africans have a better understanding of the abilities and limitations of their mobile phones that most Americans. There is more modding and hacking of hardware happening in Africa than almost anywhere in Europe.

Summarizing these many thoughts…
What Kaushal is getting at with his ideas on using technology is really about adapting cultural and technological norms to everyday problems. Like any entrepreneurial thought, it’s about finding a challenge and creatively solving it. Ignoring the status quo way of thinking finding another way to make it work.

The R&D that goes into solving technical problems doesn’t always happen in the traditional form in Africa. It happens on the street level with little fan fair, it’s not always flashy and it doesn’t always conform to the way that Westerners would like to see a problem solved.

More high school and university programs should be in place to train technologists, but what is really needed is more businesses being created by solving African technology and communication problems. African government organizations generally do a poor job of marshaling their resources to foster growth in the technology sector – so more businesses pressuring their leaders to pay attention to this industry would be welcome as well.

Online Shopping Services for the African Diaspora

April 21, 2008 / HASH / 7 Comments

There are more and more services popping up created for Africans living abroad to shop and deliver commodities to their relatives in their home country. As covered in a previous story, the sub-Saharan African remittance market is about $20 billion annually, so it only makes sense for more tech-smart businessmen to tap into this.

The lack of any cost-effective traditional money transfer service has also played a part in the creation of this financial back-channel. Africans in the diaspora can buy (or send) a wide variety of goods and services including; airtime minutes, flowers, cakes, school fees, shopping vouchers, etc… the list goes on.

Below are a couple of these websites and their respective country:

I’m sure there will be more innovation and interesting sites building out in this place throughout the continent. In fact, I’m sure I’ve missed a great deal of the sites that are already out there. If there is a site that you think I have missed, add it to the comment area below.

Thoughts from Day 2 at the Global Philanthropy Forum

April 11, 2008 / HASH / 6 Comments

The only other event that I’ve attended that brings as many high profile and high net worth individuals together besides the GPF is TED. What’s wonderful about both events is how open everyone you meet is to discussing new ideas, no matter if they’re (literally) a rockstar or not.

Unfortunately for me, I woke up to only about 20% voice usability. I could barely talk. After drinking gallons of hot water, with lemon and honey, I was able to croak well enough for my panel session on early warning systems.

Sitting on the panel listening to my fellow panelists was actually one of the best parts. Jan Chipchase of Nokia, who writes the wonderful Future Perfect blog, had some incredibly good thoughts on mobile phones and their real-world usage. In honor of how he takes photos of random things he sees around the world, I’ve added the image below of his Moleskin notebook.

Jan Chipchase Moleskin Notebook

One of the great examples he brought up was the how people were being incentivized to take their medications in some developing nations. They were given a piece of paper that when urinated on would show a specific code that needed to be SMS’d in to the health clinic. If it was right, that person would receive top-up minutes for their phone. Just brilliant.

The other panelist was Mark Smolinski, Director of the Predict and Prevent Initiative at Google.org. Again, another class-act with more experience covering health-related crisis in his pinky finger than I have in my whole body. He covered some thoughts on getting “two steps to the left“, thoughts on how hyper-early warning in epidemics can drastically reduce the impact of a pandemic. Fascinating and an infinitely difficult task to perform.

After the panel I was approached to take part in some digital strategy discussions with The Elders – a group of “retired” politicians and high-profile individuals who work to ease human suffering. A prime example of this was when Elders Kofi Annan and GraÃ§a Machel went to Kenya for 5 weeks to help resolve the post-election dispute. Needless to say, it was somewhat surreal sitting next to Peter Gabriel while talking with people like Mary Robinson.

Before the night was over, we were treated to a talk about doing something around the HIV/AIDS “genocide” in Africa, and a few songs by Annie Lennox. Her new campaign on AIDS in Africa is called Sing.

We ended the night with a stage discussion with Richard Branson, where he talked about being one of the founders of The Elders and how he uses his business success for global good. He made some polarizing statements about Mbeki and Zuma in South Africa, followed by some thoughts on letting Mugabe walk away in Zimbabwe. In the question and answer session he was called to task by some of the audience.

What I wanted to ask him, but didn’t have the voice for, was his thoughts what he likes to call crisis “war rooms”. He has big ideas on these for both epidemic crisis in Africa and the climate crisis globally. What I wanted to know was why he doesn’t throw a third one in to his collection – a crisis “war room” for human rights and mass atrocities so we’re more prepared for events like Kenya and Zimbabwe.

I’m praying that I get my voice back by tomorrow.

Where Africa and Technology Collide!

Tag: web (page 5 of 5)

Google on Anonymity VS Trust

Projecting Our World Onto Others

Video Archive

Worldclass Brand Monitoring Service from South Africa

Custom/Premium WordPress Themes out of South Africa

Google Launches an Africa Blog

What we need is a carrier and bank agnostic ecommerce platform for Africa. Why?

What does this mean then? Where do we go from here?