Why Investors, Philanthropists, and the Diaspora Fail at African Business
Investors Don’t Get African Opportunities – here’s why. The Business of VCs Very quietly, over the past few weeks the word ‘bubble’ has crept back into the English language as it relates to the investment/silicon valley/tech scene. This is because there have been some staggering valuations, startling exits, and incredible hype for companies that seem … Read more
…to Redistribute the Future
Last week at Tech4Africa in Johannesburg I gave a short talk. It was meant to be much longer but I got confused on how much time I had, so apologies to the T4A people. Anyways, the topic of the presentation was “The 5 Most Disruptive Innovations I’ve Seen” and it discusses industries and concepts which … Read more
As We Enter our 4th Year…
In 2008, when I started about blogging about African technology, I had no idea where it would take me. I was just hoping to help draw attention to a number of inspiring stories and individuals I was learning about around the continent. Eventually, I was able to scrape up enough of my own meager funds … Read more
ccTLDs of Africa without Egypt [Infographic]
In this image, the country code top level domains of Africa are organized by geoposition. The top countries are scaled to reflect the number of millions of internet users in those countries. Top Countries (by millions of users): (1) Egypt (2) Nigeria (3) Morocco (4) South Africa (5) Sudan (6) Algeria (7) Kenya (8) Tunisia … Read more
Appfrica in 2011
This blog has been uncharacteristically quiet over the past few months. Not without reason, I’ve been all over the world running SwiftRiver for Ushahidi, getting married, relocating to Washington, D.C., and with projects like Hive Colab and Apps4Africa. 2010 was a really good year for everything but it didn’t come without it’s challenges and hurdles. … Read more
Mobile Gutenberg, Banking Papacy
“The mobile phone is like the printing press, so who’s the Church?” – Emrys Schoemaker This afternoon I had the pleasure of having lunch with Emrys Schoemaker who used the above metaphor to compare the mobile phone revolution in developing countries with that of the printing revolution in 15th century Europe spurred by the Gutenberg … Read more
Great African Singularities
The singularity is defined by futurist Ray Kurzweil as being the point at which technological advancement exceeds human capacity to control and fully understand it. It’s the point where artificial intelligence and replication converge and machines can strategically produce other machines without human direction. Movies like TERMINATOR and THE MATRIX are all about the horrible … Read more
On Love and Hate for 160 characters
Is the growing skepticism on SMS warranted? One of the most rewarding aspects of running this company has been our International Fellows Program which invites developers from all over the world to Uganda to work alongside our staff as peers. The following post was written by one of our recent Fellows, Oliver Christopher Kaigwa Haas … Read more
Alternative Models for OLPC?
At his Africa 3.0 panel at this year’s South By South West Project Diaspora’s Teddy Ruge critiqued the role the One Laptop Per Child Project has played in developing countries.
The Open Source Embargo
Or “Separate but Equal hits the Open Source Community”. I wrote a blog post a while back about location based profiling on the web. Many websites do it, particularly television and movie sites and financially sensitive websites. The reasoning I can often gather from looking at the terms of service and other language is that … Read more
