WhiteAfrican – Page 30 – Where Africa and Technology Collide!

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Reactions to SEACOM Going Live Today

People all over East and Southern Africa have been awaiting faster internet speeds for a LONG time. I, for one, won’t miss hearing the infamous, “when the cable comes…“ quote that plagues so many of our conversations. It’s here. Now.

SEACOM has done a good with PR and reaching out to people via their blog and Twitter accounts. SEACOM’s media team was also uploading video in real-time to their YouTube channel, so click there if you want to hear really bad audio of the speeches… 🙂 They have their new press release out here, if you’re looking for the “official” talk.

SEACOM in Tweets and Blogs

(note: if I missed one, link it in the comments below and I’ll add it here)

Kung Fu Baby and the SEACOM Cable Launch by Joshua Goldstein (Uganda)
“We launched Kung Fu baby and for the first time in Africa, I saw a YouTube video load completely and play in 6 seconds. We ran a speed test and showed 1.8mbps, 10x what we have in the Appfrica office.”

“1.28 Terabits per second-now that’s what I call digital heaven! Seacom, dare I say I love you? Now, don’t make the Africans pay too much!” by @zanibots

Seacom is here but donâ€™t be surprised if nothing changes by Kachwanya (Kenya)
“Shockingly the people at Seacom think that revealing the names of their clients (ISPs) will jeopardize their relationship with others which are not yet on board. May be I am not getting something here but ISPs will only buy the bandwidth from the Seacom if they have somewhere to sell it.”

“This is one small MB for my laptop, one giant TB for Africa …” by @Akianastasiou on Twitter

How fast can you read this article? by Arthur Goldstuck (South Africa)
“However, the most dramatic indication of the power of SEACOM was the quality of live video links to Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Mozambique. Addresses by, among other, a range of dignitaries, executives and the President of Tanzania, were carried live to large screens at simultaneous events in each of these countries.”

“This is turning to be another major hoax. Why is the internet so slow as ever? Why is it Seacom not telling us which ISPâ€™s are enrolled?” by @KenyaFocus

“The President of Tanzania envisions having a “Silicon Valley” in Africa – This could have only be imagined thanks to #Seacom” by @SeacomLive

Oh Kenyans, we have been duped again by TrueKenyan
“According to the information already on the public domain, Safaricom have said that the cost of internet will reduce by upto 30-33% over the next five years. Access Kenya still remains mum since itâ€™s charges are exorbitant compared to other ISPâ€™s. Recently UUnet CEO Tom Omariba claimed that cables will only bring down costs by 20-30 percent.”

In the News

Africa News: Seacom connects East Africa with the world
BBC: Circle of light is Africa’s Net gain
TeleGeography: SEACOM lights up East Africa
Daily Nation: Superfast internet goes live in East Africa and Seacom says undersea cable to spur Africa investment
The Citizen: Dawn of new era for telecom sector

My BBC Post on Blogging’s Evolution and Growth

July 22, 2009 / HASH / 2 Comments

I was asked to do a guest post for the BBC, as they’re doing a new full-production special titled “Digital Revolution“, which is set to focus on the first 20 years of the internet.

The producer asked me to write about the changing face of blogging. Answering the question on, “has blogging lost its feeling of freedom, untethered and raw that once defined it?”

My answer is simply: no. You can read why on the link below:

Voices on the rise: raw and unfiltered blogging still lives

An excerpt (read the full post to catch the arguments):

“So, in answering my question at the beginning, we see not a loss in the freedom and raw power of citizen-based communication, but a burgeoning growth in it that threatens to overwhelm us all. In fact, the wave is coming on so strong and big that the most important question we need to ask is not how to get more citizen blogs, updates and voices, but how to filter it so that it remains useful.”

The Curious Case of Africa Blindness

July 20, 2009 / HASH / 13 Comments

A scotoma is a blind spot in your vision. Everyone has it, and it’s due to the lack of photoreceptors where your optic nerve exits your eyeball. Normally, it’s right at the center of your vision. It’s curious to note that most maps have Africa placed squarely in the center, and most are blind to it as well.

I’m a big fan of infographics, visualization tools that help us understand something faster than reading a long-winded explanation or a spreadsheet of data. It’s disappointed to see how Africa is usually missing from the global ones – especially in relation to technology.

I call this “Africa blindness”.

Luke Wertz linked one to me earlier today from the New Scientist on Twitter saying, “Notice anything missing from this image? Oh yea, the ENTIRE continent of Africa.”:

It’s a good graphic, really well designed and it does gets a point across. However, it’s missing two continents: Africa and Australia. Thank goodness, we’re not just dealing with Africa-blindness, but Oz-blindess too. 🙂

Here’s another great technology infographic, this time by XKCD where he’s showing the IPv4 space (that’s how you get an IP address). Note the glaringly obvious fact that the entire continent of Africa has the same-sized IP allocation as the likes of Apple and half as much as Japan.

Is there a case for Africa Blindness in tech?

A part of me can understand how a graphic designer sitting in the US or Europe, tasked with creating a graphic, would bypass Africa. After all, if you’re not from the continent, you surely don’t think of it as having much relevance in the high-tech world. On top of that, it’s not always easy to find web and mobile data in Africa as it is in the rest of the world. The first is an issue of education and media focus. The second is far more serious of a problem.

You’d think that finding aggregate information on tech in Africa would be fairly easy to find. It’s not, at least not for free like it is for much of the rest of the world. If anyone should know this, it’s me. After all, this is what I spend a great deal of time tracking…

My Favorite African Tech Blog Reads of the Week

July 20, 2009 / HASH / Comments Off

This last week has seen a higher than average number of great technology blog pieces by a number of people. Here are my favorites.

Bankelele writes about Professor Calestous Juma with a review of a talk that he gave on how Africa can use technological innovation to stimulate economic recovery, spur economic growth and spread prosperity.

Aptivate gave us their Top 10 Rules for Designing Low-Bandwidth Websites. This is a goldmine, every web designer in Africa should print this out and hang it above their monitor.

Jon Gosier gave us a Comparison between On- and Off-network GSM Rates in Nigeria. Proving that, “with the exception of Etisalat, itâ€™s quite clear that itâ€™s cheaper to own four cell phones than one [in Nigeria].” (I hope this data makes its way to African Signals)

Ethan writes about Mike Best and his team’s work in post-conflict Liberia around digital storytelling.

South Africa’s popular mobile social networking application, Mxit, is now at 14 million users. “MXit users currently send approximately 35,000 messages per second during peak times and visit the system more than 20 million times per day.” Wow!

Bill does a review of Ndiyo, the thin-client computing solution for Africa. Specifically, on how Ndiyo “provides an alternative to traditional Western notions of how technologies should be deployed, used and paid for in developing countries”.

Ghana – International Development and Design Summit (IDDS)

July 15, 2009 / HASH / 3 Comments

Lessons from the mLearning Summit in Zambia

July 14, 2009 / HASH / Comments Off

There’s an excellent post up on MobileActive about the recent mLearning Summit held in Zambia, titled “Go Mobile: Using Mobile Learning to Teach 21st Century Skills”. Steve Vosloo is a South African who has spent a lot of time researching how mobile phones can be used in education, here’s a video put together by him from this event.

“Steve Vosloo noted that m-learning summits have two main goals: To introduce and popularize the mobile phone as a tool for engaging students, and secondly, to identify local content needs. Examples of this may include applications that support grade submissions and attendance in remote locations or projects that explore how texting can be used in literacy.”

Kazang: A Truly Mobile Prepaid Service Terminal for Africa

July 10, 2009 / HASH / 19 Comments

Psitek is a company that deeply understands the African market, I’m convinced that this is due to them having all of their work done on the continent. The last time I wrote about them was after I came across the nearly indestructible Streetwise mobile-accessible computer for children.

As Hannes notes:

“They are the inventors of that trusted voice access device that anyone that ever travelled to Africa would know about: the Adondo. Designed for Africa with anti-insect electronics, high temperature and humidity tolerance, their devices still ship with car-battery ready clamps.”

The Kazang service and terminal

This time it’s about Kazang, a prepaid terminal for merchants selling mobile phone services, such as prepaid airtime, paying of electricity bills or insurance. The service is a year and a half old now, and boasts nearly 5,000 vendors ranging from South Africa to Kenya to Zambia.

The newest device, the Timpa, comes with all of the necessary requirements for the challenges that a merchant running a business in a rural (or urban) setting in Africa would need. It has a built-in printer and rechargeable battery which makes it fully mobile, uses GPRS technology to communicate with the Content Ready (back-end) server (just plug in a data SIM card), and a large LCD with backlighting. They have also built in fail-safes for when the GPRS connection drops, or the electricity goes out, so that the merchant doesn’t get charged for a voucher that they didn’t receive.

Psitek claims that clearing $1000/month is a reasonable to expect by vendors, which would bring home about $80/month of profit (8% margin). This alone makes it a fairly good proposition for a lot of merchants, meaning they can add a Kazang terminal to their shop as an added draw for more customers and it acts as to supplement their other revenue streams.

Not written about much relative to their impact, Psitek is one of those tech firms offering devices that run behind the scenes of many businesses in the southern part of Africa.

A Job Board Aimed at African Devs and Designers

July 7, 2009 / HASH / 12 Comments

This week I launched a little side project: JOBS.whiteafrican.com I think of it as a place to connect freelancers and small teams with gigs and project work in the African tech sphere.

I’ve been getting a number of emails lately asking me connect people in the US, Europe or large organizations in Africa with local (as in “in-Africa”) talent. They’re usually interested in finding a knowledgeable designer, a good blogger or editor, and I’ve had quite a few people ask me to put them in touch with programmers.

The White African Job Board

At this time, it’s a simple and free place to post jobs for African technology professionals. So, what I’m really looking forward to seeing are opportunities listed specifically for people in Africa. That last bit is important, it’s for African devs, designers and bloggers.

A lot of these might be for short-term gigs and volunteer opportunities, but who knows… It’s a little bit of an experiment, so no promises on my part. If it proves popular and useful I’ll keep it around. Oh, I have the final say on what jobs go live too, so be forewarned. Think of me as the curator and friendly job board dictator… 🙂

Make sure you grab the news feed, so you don’t have to keep coming back to see what’s new. Take a look at the tips page – think about how you’ll deal with project scope, as well as how to pay, or be paid.

Real Job Boards Around Africa

Unlike my little project solely focused on technologists, there are some real job boards around the continent that are worth keeping in mind. Here are a couple of them (leave links others that I missed in the comments area):

Kazinow
Find a Job in Africa
Job Space – South Africa
Best Jobs – South Africa
Zebra Jobs
Sama Source – Outsourcing to Africa

Further Thoughts on Outsourcing Tech Work to Africa

It’s an encouraging sign that there are a lot of people interested in finding local African talent. What I’ve found in my travels, and in talking to technologists around the continent, is that though there are more devs and designers each year, the number of top quality ones available for work are few.

One cautionary piece of advice though… and it pains me to say this. A few of the African developers that I have come across are not time-conscious and they can come across like their client/project is not as important to them as you would find in their counterparts in the West. Of course, this means if you are timely and fulfill your responsibilities you will find clients lined up 10 deep to get to you – you’re a rare commodity.

African developers are quickly going to learn that they’re on the global stage now, and there’s nothing stopping their clients from switching to someone more reliable, even if it’s a country or continent away.

The good news is that of the many devs I’ve met, many are as good as any you’ll find anywhere else in the world. A few of them are on par with the best I’ve come across anywhere.

A related initiative

There is also an initiative called Coded in Country focused on getting programming work done within the countries that the applications and products are meant for. Keep an eye on it, and pitch in as/where you can.

Barcamp Africa Finds a New (virtual) Home

July 6, 2009 / HASH / 3 Comments

A couple years ago, the first Barcamp unconferences started to show up around Africa. These loosely organized events end up having a large impact on the local grassroots tech scene and blogosphere. The open and unstructured format ends up fitting the African style of community and discussion around ideas and projects that just isn’t found in normal conferences.

The first “Barcamp Africa“, however, was a little different than the normal local events. It was put together by individuals in the US (at the Google office in California), some of whom were diaspora, and others who had a deep interest in the continent.

That was a year ago, and now the good people behind Maneno (a blogging platform made for Africa) have taken over the hosting of content around Barcamp’s that take place in Africa or that have an African focus. Beyond that, they have created a simple way for those putting on new Barcamp’s to setup an online home for it.

“The primary objective of the new BarCamp Africa hub is to encourage a continuous stream of participant driven content from African barcamps before, during, as well as after the events take place. Barcamp Africa allows each barcamp to have a simple, hosted, lightweight site specific to their event with a custom url. As an example, check out the recent barcamp’s in http://barcampafrica.com/swaziland, http://barcampafrica.com/madagascar, or the upcoming http://barcampafrica.com/abidjan. Stories published on this site as well as others on the platform aggregate to the main BarcampAfrica.com page (as well as the Maneno home page) and are exposed to the larger audience of barcampers all over Africa.”

As someone who has helped put on a couple Barcamps, I’ve found that there are really two components. First is the simple organization, which self-organizes best around a wiki – specifically the Barcamp.org wiki. Second, is the communication to everyone else around the community of the upcoming event, done best with a dedicated blog/website.

This second area, communication, is where the greatest value for organizers will be found with the new Maneno hosting for Barcamp Africa. It will be with the those who simply want to setup a site that will get them good, dedicated exposure and allow multiple people to write on it, with updates on location, place, attendees and initiatives arising out of it.

For those who haven’t tried it, Maneno has an incredibly fast loading blogging platform, specifially designed for low bandwidth areas in Africa. On top of that, it is available in local African languages that have traditionally had little web presence. Articles can be easily translated between multiple languages and sit atop one another to overcome the linguistic divide facilitating open communication between the different communities.

If you’re interested in upcoming Barcamps around Africa, check out the Barcamp Africa calendar.

Traffic Updates by SMS in Nigeria

July 5, 2009 / HASH / 15 Comments

eNowNow is a service in Nigeria where anyone with a mobile phone can sign up to receive updates on traffic conditions in different areas around Lagos.

How it Works

Armed with a mobile phone, a team of 4-6 motorcyclists ride to different, pre-designate parts of the city. They take pictures of the current traffic conditions and MMS that image to the central office. That image is then geolocated and given a score of “slow”, “moving” or “free”. Anyone who has signed up for SMS or email alerts is then sent a message with the traffic update.

Challenges

I asked Simon, one of the people putting the service into action, what some of their challenges are. His reply:

“Collecting information in this way, although not that technical (lots of people have said why not use stationary webcams it would be technically superior), is turning out to be more difficult than we expected. Finding people who can grasp the concept behind the service, ride well through the crazy Lagos traffic, and are reliable has been tricky, added to that we’ve had lots of issues around harassment and even arrests from the police (many police officers apparently believe you need special police permission to take photos of traffic) and just recently the weather has been in our way as the rainy season has just started in Lagos making operations more difficult and a few phones have been dropped in puddles! “

The business side

eNowNow doesn’t see much value in charging premium SMS rates for their services. They believe margins are low, and they don’t think the uptake would be high enough amongst their target market to make it work. Instead, they have plans to subsidize the service with revenues from licensing traffic information to Sat Nav providers and logistics companies.

“In Nigeria the networks will take anything between 40 and 75% of a premium SMS’s cost to a subscriber for themselves (pull or push) leaving you a tiny margin for profitability and driving the industry standard (and therefore what the networks will allow you) per SMS cost higher. Most people think that traffic only affects those in cars and they can therefore afford to pay for a service, but most of Lagos’ population aren’t in that bracket and those on public transport still have choices about which buses they take, which routes and what time they leave work.”

Thoughts and ideas

Maybe it’s because I’m a motorcycle fan, or maybe it’s because I have a deeply ingrained detestation for being stuck in traffic in Africa’s mega cities, but this application hits the sweet spot for me. I’ve been wanting just this type of thing in Nairobi for a long time…

One additional idea, to make this even more dynamic, and spread it over the whole city is to create a way for ordinary drivers to text into the system when they come across a new or growing traffic problem. I imagine that Lagos has areas with traffic that is not on the pre-designated points that eNowNow operates in currently.

This is a classic locally grown tech initiative, and I hope that they can pull it off. If so, it can definitely be replicated in other major metro markets across the continent.