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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.]

What Twitter’s Global Failure Means for Africa

August 14, 2008 / HASH / 55 Comments

Biz Stone let the world know that Twitter’s SMS service is no longer active in Africa – or anywhere outside of the US, Canada and India. To most people in Africa this means absolutely nothing, as the penetration rate for the service never moved beyond the few fringe users amongst the technology elite.

Why this is Important

I’m guessing that at least half of this blog’s readers are wondering why they should even care about this news. After all, it sounds like some new trendy mobile/web app has failed to expand outside of North America – how is that news for Africa?

Twitter represents a change in communication. By acting as a global gateway for updates via SMS (or the web), that then updates all of your followers, Twitter succeeded in breaking ground in one-to-many messaging. There have been a couple times over the past year where Twitter was used in Africa to get news out that wasn’t possible in any other format.

Two examples come to mind, specifically addressing humanitarian uses; first, there’s the case of it being used in Egypt to help a jailed user, and second was when Juliana used it during the Kenyan post-election violence to update about events in Western Kenya in lieu of a blog post.

Soyapi wrote a post a couple months back talking about the potential for Twitter in Africa. In areas like Africa where mobile phone penetration far outstrips internet penetration, Twitter ends up being an incredibly good way to update friends, family – or in the case of businesses and government, the general public – about things that are happening.

“Realizing that a lot of people in the developing world have migrated from their home villages to cities both within and outside their countries and continents, they still need to some updates about the goings-on in their home towns.”

What’s Next?

In our globally connected world, if your service can’t cover the globe, then you need to open it up for communication between similar services. What we really need is a platform that allows Twitter-like applications to “talk” to each other globally. If I set up a similar platform in West Africa then there should be a way for Twitter users in the US to also accept my updates. Closed gardens in this case create single points of failure. (I’m interested in the less restrictive Identi.ca platform.)

This global contraction by Twitter creates opportunities for others. Jaiku, recently purchased by Google, now has the ability to grow deeper into other regional markets. And, if nothing else, Twitter has done us all a favor by launching a global pilot project that proves out the usefulness of this type of service. Launching country- or region-specific clones of this same type of service is now a real option.

Africa.Alltop.com – A Little Backstory

August 10, 2008 / HASH / 10 Comments

A couple weeks ago Ellen Petry Leanse and Kaushal Jhalla announced that they wanted to put on a Barcamp Africa for afrophiles living in the San Francisco area. They’re both good friends of Ushahidi and we liked the idea, so David and I jumped in where we could (David created the logo). Ellen is also happens to be very well connected in the Bay area, she used to work as an Apple evangelist back in the day alongside Guy Kawasaki, and was directly involved in the success Ribbit has seen lately.

Due to that connection with Guy Kawasaki, the next thing I knew I was being asked for a list of potential blogs and news services to be a part of a new Africa category on Alltop.com – Guy Kawasaki’s news aggregation site. Being a technology blogger first, most of my contributions were in that field. Many of them taken directly from my RSS feed reader, as there hasn’t been a blogroll here in years (due to a glitch in my sidebar that I never fixed…).

Few other people I know had access to, or cared enough, about Africa to get Guy to create the new Africa.Alltop.com. However, Ellen has a strong desire to see increased innovation and change happen, and she is particularly well connected and knowledgeable in technology. Her connection to Africa was solidified as she and her son were caught in Western Kenya during the post-election violence in Kenya earlier this year (an amazing story that I hope everyone gets to read sometime). She comes directly out of Malcolm Gladwell’s “Tipping Point“, I’m just not sure which category she fits in yet.

I’ll be interested in seeing how the list on Alltop grows and morphs over time. For the time being I’ll use it as a supplement for my daily Africa news. I’m just happy that African news and bloggers are gaining additional attention outside of the traditional African blog echo chamber.

If you think there is a good pan-African blog that was missed, or just a really good African blog with a wide readership, make sure you suggest it.

Sidenote

As is increasingly true, the best place to follow each of these individuals/events is on Twitter at:

Twitter.com/chep2m – Ellen
Twitter.com/ksjhalla – Kaushal
Twitter.com/guykawasaki – Guy
Twitter.com/barcampafrica – Barcamp Africa

Mobile Broadband Internet in Africa

August 7, 2008 / HASH / 5 Comments

The Africa Report’s quarterly magazine has come out, this time with a report on mobile phones, internet penetration, BPO zones and mobile banking. If you’re not subscribed to this quarterly magazine yet, you should – it’s available in almost every country. Personally speaking, it’s one of only three magazines I subscribe to (the others are MAKE and Technology Review).

“The division between the ICT â€˜havesâ€™ and â€˜have-notsâ€™ now runs through the heart of the continent, geographically and generationally. While young urban Kenyans and Nigerians feel at home messaging one another on social-networking sites, the elders in the rural landlocked hinterlands have yet to send an email, and many have never made a phone call. Tunisia and Morocco compete furiously with one another in the business process outsourcing (BPO) market for francophone call centres, but most businesses in the Sahel have never heard of doing their accounts on Excel spreadsheets.

Mobile Broadband Internet in Africa

While it’s good to talk about mobile phone penetration, I was a lot more interested in seeing the discussion going on around mobile broadband internet and how that is the next big move in Africa for the operators. Passing data, not just voice, is the battleground of the future in Africa – and all the carriers are fighting to position themselves to win.

I saw this happening in my most recent trip to Kenya where the local ISPs are very much aware of their dongle-toting SIM card competition (see image below) found in Safaricom and Celtel. As voice services begin to erode for mobile carriers in Africa, they have to find new ways to compete. Of course, this means more and increasingly cheaper options for consumers around the continent.

With new carriers still entering into the fray, older ones having to change their business strategies, and ISPs who are also getting better international bandwidth connections the real battle for the internet in Africa is just beginning. It’s very much of a “wild west” atmosphere with huge stakes at both the country and regional levels.

[download the extract of this article here, a 772Kb PDF)

An Opportunity to Make Real Money in Africa

August 5, 2008 / HASH / 16 Comments

Just today Google has shown that they are willing to invest in African mobile phone businesses. Does Google’s purchase of an equity stake in Mobile Planet mean the big web/mobile money will start flowing throughout Africa? Not necessarily, but it made me think of a conversation that I tend to have a lot in my travels.

The topic of conversation usually turns to this; what type of web or mobile application can you build to make some serious money in Africa? Though there are many answers to that question, as I believe there are many options for successful web and mobile companies in Africa, there are only a few that I think of as “sure things”.

Any entrepreneur is looking to either a) create a company with solid cash flow and grow it, or b) create a solid company with value and then sell it (or have an IPO). On the web that takes some well-known paths, and the most common is option “b” where the entrepreneur’s sell their company to a larger web entity (Amazon, Google, eBay, Nokia…etc).

A “Sure Thing” Formula

Create a Jabber-based chat application that works on the mobile phone and the web, grow it to a 1-2 million users within a region, sell to Google.

Why does this work?
You build your chat application with Jabber since it can interface with Google’s GTalk. Jabber is free, and also happens to be the what a couple other major applications are built on (see South Africa’s Mxit). Google is trying to grow in Africa, and I assume would be extremely happy to pay a very healthy amount of money to acquire an application with millions of active users that is built on the same protocol as their own chat system.

Challenges

The formula for this particular idea is built on two premises. First, that you can actually get a couple million users within an African region using your chat application. Second, that Google wants more users on their platform(s).

The first challenge is born from the fact most mobile phone users in Africa don’t use data enabled phones, so they can’t run a Jabber application on their phone. Mxit’s answer to this in South Africa was to show that for 10% of the cost of a normal SMS, you could send a message through their system (which happens to be a highly ~~bastardized~~ customized Jabber app). Your goal is to get people who don’t have a data enabled phone to upgrade to one.

The second challenge is beyond your control. You’ll never know if Google wants to buy you out until they come knocking. However, if let’s just say you shouldn’t have to many problems monetizing a system that has 1-2 million users on it anyway…

Your goals to overcome these challenges is found in tapping into communities and spreading your app virally to gain critical mass with speed. Once it spreads, the first application like this to reach a decent amount of saturation will be the winner, even if it has some faults (see Twitter).

Opportunities

Though chat is the core of your application, that is both web and mobile phone accessible, it’s not the only value added service that you can provide. With some creativity, you can add services that allow more people to tap into, including locally relevant events, news, marketplaces, personals, jobs, etc…

On top of these services, you’ve got the advantage of building on an open source platform that other services use as their core.

Lastly, and most importantly. If you were to reach even 500,000 users you would have an incredibly viable opportunity for advertising revenue. The ability to target specific advertisements, or sponsorships, through the platform make it a marketers dream. Basically, you might not need, nor want, a buy out after all.

In Summary

Is it really a “sure thing”? No, every business move has inherent risk and depends on execution of the strategy.

Is it a good basic idea that could be built into a real product with a solid exit strategy? Yes, undoubtedly so.

We’ve already seen the booming success of Mxit in South Africa. There’s no reason to believe that you couldn’t have a margin of that same success in East, West or North Africa with the same type of service. If you build it with an end-goal of Google integration in it at the end, you also set yourself up for a real possibility of a buy out.

2007 African Mobile Phone Statistics

August 1, 2008 / HASH / 20 Comments

Africa Telcom News has released a free report, called the African Mobile Factbook, that gives all of the major numbers on subscribers, penetration rates, profitability and growth potential for every African carrier and country. As anyone who is tries to do research in this space knows, it can be difficult to get some of these mobile phone statistics for Africa, so this is a welcome source for information.

Interesting Facts

Nigeria, South Africa and Egypt are the fastest growing markets
Africa has become the fastest growing mobile market in the world with mobile penetration in the region ranging from 100% to 30%
Pre-paid subscriptions account for nearly 95 percent of total mobile subscriptions in the region
Most of the mobile operators are home-grown. In 2005, the continentâ€™s seven largest investors controlled 53% of the African mobile market
Across most of Africa, SMS is likely to be the only non-voice value-added service to gain mass market popularity in the immediate future
East Africans pay taxes of between 25% and 30% on mobile phone services, compared with an average of 17% across Africa
African states with less than 600,000 subscribers and includes Burundi, Cape Verde, Central African Republic, Comoros (Union of the), Djibouti, Equitorial Guinea, Eritrea, Gambia (The), Lesotho, Liberia, Mayotte, Sao Tome and Principe, Seychelles, Somalia, Swaziland and Rwanda.

Subscriber Numbers and Penetration Rates

At the end of 2007 there were 280.7 million mobile phone subscribers in Africa, representing a penetration rate of 30.4%. The chart below shows the historical numbers up until 2007, with projected growth and penetration rates through 2012.

Even more interesting, when you look at the major African markets, is to see the huge growth potential for areas that are already very profitable. As can be seen Nigeria, Kenya and Egypt have the greatest growth potential.

Africa’s Mobile Phone Operators (carriers)

There are (or will be) a staggering 11 mobile phone operators in Nigeria, with 4 in Kenya and South Africa, and 3 in egypt and Morocco.

“MTN dominates the African market with over 73.9 million subscribers in the region as of 4Q 2007 followed by Vodacom (33.4 million), Orascom (32.4 million), Zain (30.6 million) and Orange (27.7 million), respectively.”

Size doesn’t mean everything though, Millicom has the highest growth in revenues, and Orascom has the highest EBITDA margin, primarily due to its strategy of investing in the emerging mobile markets.

The chart below shows five of the leading mobile network operators in Africa in terms of their subscriber base (size of the bubble), revenue growth rate and EBITDA margin for the latest completed financial year.

In Summary

The growth rate in Africa over the last couple of years has been phenomenal, and will likely continue for the next 3-5 years. Major drivers of increased growth include:

Subsidization of handsets
Pre-paid offerings
Continued liberalization of the telcom sector
Low penetration rates
Expected uptake of 3G services

Growth inhibitors include:

Taxation – especially in East Africa
Low income across the continent hampers growth
Widespread illiteracy decreases the growth of value added services, even SMS
Unreliable electricity supplies
Corruption

I’m curious to see the uptake of both data services (3G and EDGE) as well as the increased number of low-cost handsets. Just yesterday I read a report of a Malaysian company setting up a mobile phone manufacturing plant in Mozambique, so there very well might be some super low-end phones available soon.

The DIY Wireless Mesh Guide for Africa

July 31, 2008 / HASH / 9 Comments

Spurred on by a question from a reader about successful implementation of wireless mesh networks in Africa, I started to do a little digging. The appeal of wireless meshes is especially high in very remote and unconnected areas of Africa, primarily because it allows simple (though limited) connectivity where it wasn’t available before.

A good example of a deployment in Africa, and the reasons behind it, is Wireless Africa’s Mpumulanga deployment in South Africa. Here they answer, “what problem is being addressed?“:

“The main thrust is to connect the clinic to its community hospice and thus allow them to extend their computer facilities to the hospice (practise management software and statistics gathering). This is most easily achieved through a wireless network and more specifically a mesh because of the terrain.

A mesh network requires a number of nodes in areas not owned by the clinic but that are part of the commuity: schools and farmers. The main thrust of the research question is to implement the network in such a way that the firstly the clinic and secondly the community have taken ownership of the network. That they have created systems that ensure that the infrastructure is maintained and expanded by the users of the network.”

A DIY Wireless Mesh Guide (3.2Mb PDF) based on Freifunk was put out by Wireless Africa late last year.

Looking for More Success Stories

I’m still looking for cases of successful wireless mesh networks in Africa. If you have heard of one, please comment below, or use the contact form.

I realize that there have been some larger, industrial strength, deployments by the likes of KDN in Kenya with their Butterfly Network (though I haven’t heard to many stories of people actually getting online with it). But what I’m more interested in right now is examples of use in the more rural areas of Africa.

More Resources:

Wireless Lab Website
Open Mesh – open source mesh
Meraki Mesh – business solution
Mesh Dynamics
Wire.Less.DK
Older, but good, conversation on O’Reilly Net
MIT’s Roofnet