Comments on: Building Mobile Apps for Africa

By: Five products and services that started in the developing world that are taking off in the developed world–and one more than might » azeem.azhar

Fri, 13 Mar 2009 11:16:54 +0000

[…] Building Mobile Apps for Africa (whiteafrican.com) […]

By: WhiteAfrican on Mobile Development at Drew Cogbill | Thesis Blog

WhiteAfrican on Mobile Development at Drew Cogbill | Thesis Blog — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 19:20:23 +0000

[…] WhiteAfrican on Mobile Development […]

By: The Park Paradigm - Africa: the new new (new?) thing.

The Park Paradigm - Africa: the new new (new?) thing. — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 13:32:59 +0000

[…] Building Mobile Apps for Africa Permalink||View commentsComments|Filed under ‘Africa, Business, Mobile X.0, Sixth Paradigm, Tools, markets’ seedcamp: only 3 weeks left to apply! Impressive. […]

By: How technology and social media can help Africa bridge the gap | Daniel Patricio

Wed, 07 Jan 2009 08:10:20 +0000

[…] raised Erik Hersman has some great ideas about building mobile apps for Africans and how to use the related technology to fight against media blackouts and how to use social media […]

By: Louis

Louis — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 00:08:37 +0000

in africa laot of information that we take for granted is not readily available. for exmaple simple things such as court records, title and land records, business records, government statistcis are hard to come by and when they exist are generally innacessibel. The hypothetical utility company as part of there responsibility will be charged with digitizing this information and amking it available to the public provide apis (perhaps rent) to allows other developers to tap into this information for there applications.

By: Louis

Louis — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 23:40:25 +0000

a couple of thoughts on mobile apps.
1. mobile phones as a platform has only been successful in one area – messaging sending and receiving messages. Any application that goes beyond that in the traditional mobile space has not been very successful
2. Smartphones are changing the game but i’m not sure if thati in itself is good thing due to propriety designs and creation of “internet walled gardens”
3.Judging by the moves of industry players, googel w android,nokia w symbian and MS the future of the mobile apps is the web applications
maybe UI’s will change to accomodate new smartphones.
4. Africa needs to think out of the box – how about embarcing utility computing perhaps looking at companies like Google and Microsoft as utility companies . govts could for example let companies bid to be the computing utility in the same way cellphone companies bid for bandwidth. In return this computing utilities would provide certain basic services and information on weather and or provide free api access to certain services that would be part of there bid. in return the utilities would be allowed to charge/rent computing services (amazon aws comes to mind).
while this model may not make sense in developed countries where capacity is great and the technical know how is great for countries with limited skills this would provide an opportunity to ramp up their technology infrastrucure.

By: 3 Great Blog Reads for Today « fortySouth

3 Great Blog Reads for Today « fortySouth — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 05:58:23 +0000

[…] Hersman opens up a discussion on building of mobile apps in Africa, offering his thoughts on what people should know when considering building mobile phone services […]

By: adaptive path » blog » Adaptive Path » Signposts for the Week Ending December 19, 2008

Fri, 19 Dec 2008 23:42:58 +0000

[…] about mobile app development in Africa and join the conversation by adding your ideas to the […]

By: Miquel

Miquel — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 22:36:55 +0000

@hash Yes, I think that you absolutely must have some kind of “wikiness” for localization. While it’s not completely open as you need to have someone moderating the flow of it to maintain consistency, resolve dialectal disputes, etc. it’s really the only way. Well, there is the other way in which you direct hire translators, but technology moves too fast and the expense is too high to make this tenable, especially if you’re doing more than say two or three languages.
I think Google even shows this as they have more money than the Beatles and yet, they still have their community work on localization, which is one of the reasons that I think their translation system is getting really powerful. I speak two other languages beyond English and that Google’s system even picks up on a number of idioms in some languages, which is impressive.
I’m trying to figure out some way to do this with Maneno as I keep bumping in to people who are willing to translate, but despite the fact it’s not that much work, getting one person to do the whole job is tricky. I’ve had a lot more luck with one person doing a little and then another person a littler more etc, but still it’s a lot of back and forth. To that end, I’m trying to do something along the lines of what David did and creating a Google doc spreadsheet. It’s just the issue of open sourcing it somehow that freaks me out. That’s going to require more thought and probably building some kind of a simple system for members to contribute to along the lines of having a piece of text that’s untranslated and a link there that allows them to translate it, which then goes to a moderator for approval.
Now, that’s all fine with a website, but how in the heck do you do that with a mobile app? That kind of two-way interaction doesn’t really exist and the lack of a mouse makes these kinds of things trickier. Being that I’m a web developer first and mobile developer an evolving second, my thoughts always drift back to using some form of web system to manage this, but somehow that is going to have to be overcome which I think is going to be an interesting topic for those much smarter than me in the mobile world to take a look at.

By: HASH

HASH — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 18:46:14 +0000

@Niti Bhan – you and I have talked offline about this now, so thanks for your excellent contribution here too!

@Miquel – I couldn’t agree more. Really, I think we’re on the front-end of something, and we’ll realize over time that Africa (generally) is well situated to dive right into this new mobile world. The technology gap isn’t nearly as wide as in other areas.

Your point on localization is extremely relevant, and a great addition, something that I overlooked completely. The question is, do you leave this open for the community? Do you give them editing tools, otherwise it’s too difficult for a central company to setup and maintain the apps for 1000’s of local language dialects.

@Fimbo – Most apps (web or mobile) really should leave the heavy lifting on the backend. In fact, almost all successful apps, regardless of platform, do this. This leaves a simple and elegant user experience for the main users, and the company earns its money by making the difficult seem doable.

As far as getting the network providers, and infrastructure all lined up… that might be difficult, especially for your small app creators. However, you’re absolutely correct in the grand scheme of things. Those governments in Africa that make this a priority will be clear economic winners in the next decade.