White African

• A Mobile Payment Trifecta in Kenya

  Posted: July 28, 2010, 12:20 am by HASH

  Kenya is quickly gaining a competitive advantage in the mobile payments space. Led by mobile operator giant Safaricom with their Mpesa product, the market locally sees huge value in mobile money transactions. Add to that a regulatory system that is relaxed enough for innovation to be encouraged, and you have a great space for interesting things to happen.

  Pay.Zunguka

  The team at Symbiotic always have more than one iron in the fire. I was surprised by their most recent release of a new product called Pay.Zunguka last week. Simply put, it’s a payment gateway and aggregator, allowing merchants, developers and content providers a way to monetize their work with the public.

  There are two sources of inspiration in Pay.Zunguka (guys, we need to talk about names at some point…), that is the ability for people to utilize international online payment methods like PayPal and Google Checkout, but more importantly that users here in Kenya can do it all without a credit card, only using their phones. That’s a big deal, and it’s a nod towards recognizing that credit cards aren’t necessary, we can bypass that mess.

  Mbugua Njihia, CEO of Symbiotic, tells me that their plan is to first integrate with content providers and create an easy-to-use micropayment space, charging 3% per transaction. This will be followed by a partnership campaign to work with larger organizations who don’t have an efficient payment platform for consumers.

  PesaPal

  PesaPal I’ve written about before. It’s a mobile payment gateway as well, but one with a specific focus online. Liko and team have made great headway recently, but not just in the technology, which is critical. They’ve made headway in some other important areas, funding and marketing.

  We’ve talked about the need for local investors to buy into local technology startups. When that doesn’t happen, the international ones swoop in and take advantage of local investor myopia. In this case, PesaPal is receiving a healthy seed capital investment for scaling and marketing. With cash flow happening right now, it’s a good time to invest, and I’m glad to see someone doing so with this team.

  I talked to Liko yesterday about this. Their strategy has shifted somewhat since last year, instead of just focusing on web merchants, the PesaPal team is working on relationships with educational institutions and educational book suppliers to make parents lives easier when their child starts the school year. The parent can now pay their child’s school fees using Mpesa or Zap, and then are directly linked to the list of that year’s books with the option to buy them too, and have them delivered to the school for their child’s first day. Brilliant!

  This is the kind of fresh thinking that is great to see coming from tech startups: they’re not thinking or selling the tech, they’re selling a solution to a problem.

  Zynde

  Zynde is a new player in the space, but you’ll start to see a pattern here when you jump over to their website. Because none of the large companies are addressing the very real need for agnostic payment gateways the market is filling in that gap for them.

  A quick email chat with David Kagiri of Zynde gave me more insight into their focus behind the service:

  “My main driver was that new technologies existed that could enable me deliver cost effective solutions. After interaction with owners of small businesses I realized that most don’t keep track of their business finances and the cost of the available off shelf software that would help them with that was beyond their reach. I came up with a simple solution that uses the SaaS (software as a service) model so that I could deliver cost-effective solutions to them and an API that will enable creative developers to extend it to multiple mobile platforms and reach the masses.”

  Zynde will have to prove themselves in what is quickly turning out to be a highly competitive space with competent players.

• Maker Faire Africa 2010: Nairobi

  Posted: July 22, 2010, 1:27 am by HASH

  We’re just a month away from one of my favorite events of the year: Maker Faire Africa! It’s where we bring inventors, innovators and ingenious designers and artists into one place. Last year we did it in Ghana, this year it’s in Kenya on August the 27th to 28th. Submit your project here!

  “The aim of a Maker Faire-like event is to create a space on the continent where Afrigadget-type innovations, inventions and initiatives can be sought, identified, brought to life, supported, amplified and propagated.”

  The aim is to identify, spur and support local innovation. At the same time, Maker Faire Africa would seek to imbue creative types in science and technology with an appreciation of fabrication and by default manufacturing. The long-term interest here is to cultivate an endogenous manufacturing base that supplies innovative products in response to market needs.

  Projects, Sponsors and Links

  ‘Match a Maker’ was started last year, and it was such a big success that we’re doing it again this year. It’s done in order to link people up who could help each other with technical advice, contacts and business advice.

  There will be a business corner for entrepreneurs to get help from local experts, a time devoted to kids experimenting with technology, and talks by local and international experts on everything from manufacturing to scaling your business.

  Workshops

  • ‘Think Solar’ : Solar technology for young people
  • ‘Crafting peace’ : Hand crafts for children
  • ‘Hack your mobile’ all ages

  A BIG thanks to Freedom to Create, Butterflyworks and ASME for sponsoring this year’s event!

  Keep up to date on the Maker Faire Africa:
  Blog
  Twitter: @makerfairafrica
  Flickr Group

• Kenya’s Web Design Problem

  Posted: July 21, 2010, 12:17 pm by HASH

  "The African Scifi factory is a highend production facility located in Thika-Kenya, dedicated to re-establishing popular African science and fiction narrative using animation ..."

  The African Scifi Factory in Thika, Kenya sounds like a great place. It looks like one too, their site looks pretty good. However, no one will ever hear of them or find them online through a search engine. That text above, it’s their meta name=”Description” tag, and it’s about the only thing that Google or any other search engine can see about them. They’re virtually invisible to the web.

  It’s 2010 and we still have people designing websites in pure images (as above) or Flash. It doesn’t make sense. Why the need to hamstring yourself, your business and your clients by not designing an XHTML site?

  The African Scifi Factory isn’t the only one, I’m just using their site as an example. We actually have designers being trained today who only learn how to use Flash. We have others who still don’t know how to handcode HTML and CSS. I still see CVs and resumes from “serious” designers who use Dreamweaver to create websites.

  There are no borders on the web

  We all need to realize that we live in a global ecosystem, especially online. There are no borders in this space.

  If you’re a web designer who does crappy XHTML and CSS, then know that you’re becoming less relevant with every day that you don’t learn your trade better and update your skills. Kids in the Ukraine, Indonesia and elsewhere are eating your lunch. I can Google a PSD to HTML business in 5 seconds, take the top result, and have my designs put into excellent XHTML/CSS for as little as $45. Why should I use your services? What do you offer that’s so much better?

  You’re not a quality web designer if you can only put together a fancy looking Photoshop file, that makes you a designer. A web designer needs to know how the HTML and CSS work, understand user-interaction and usability of the functions in the design and be able to create bulletproof markup.

  Design and Coding

  Interestingly enough, the programming community in Africa seems to be better off than the web design community. There seems to be a lot more quality programmers per capita than there are quality web designers per capita.

  Why?

  What will it take for us to take our web design skills as seriously as our programming skills?

  [Update: African Scifi Site fixed by local Kenyan web designer]

  A young designer by the name of Martin Kariuki decided to take the specific example of African SciFi Factory into his own hands after this blog post, and re-created the whole site in HTML. See his blog post and work on this here.

  Great job by Martin for doing this! Impressive initiative and a nod to the goodwill in this community.

• Links from Mobile Africa

  Posted: July 20, 2010, 8:56 pm by HASH

  Mobile Subscriber Growth in Africa

  A new report shows that Africa has 12% of the new mobile subscribers in the world, adding 20.1 million in Q1 2010. That’s a sizable amount. What’s actually more interesting to me is that they’re saying that the continent now has 47% penetration, which means that there’s a lot of growth yet to be had as compared to the rest of the world.

  [One of these days I'll have the £400 to purchase and really dig into these reports...]

  Street hackers and the Neighbourhood App Store

  Jan Chipchase gives us some background on how the mobile phone street-hacker culture originates:

  “I like to think of it as a neighbourhood app store – and in many ways it’s the edges of the internet, where entrepreneurs are taking content online and offering it to local, offline and/or technologically illiterate customers. Also these corner shop app stores can be content editors for their community: they filter content they think their customers like, but they also guide what their customers might like as well.”

  Nokia battles the Chinese

  As David put it, “Nokia lost the high end to iPhone/Android/Blackberry, now battling China’s cheap phones on the low end. Things not looking good.” (link)

  “For instance, it sold 432 million devices in 2009, or more than its top three competitors combined, however, its average selling price for all models has plummeted 44 percent in the past five years to 62 euros.”

• TED Thoughts: Where Gaming is Taking Us

  Posted: July 18, 2010, 8:52 pm by HASH

  TED is the type of conference where you’re drinking from the fire hose and, with the 18-minute talks marching onward every few minutes, you have little time to reflect on what you’ve heard before you’re onto the next. It’s been two days now, much of it spent in travel, reading and reflection and I’m starting to string a couple of thoughts together that I find at the very least interesting. At the most disturbing.

  On the technology side, there were three talks that made me sit back and consider their repercussions, especially as I think of their tracks vectoring in on each other.

  • Peter Molyneux and his demo of Microsoft’s new “virtual friend” Milo. (Think Skynet)
  • Neil Gershenfeld‘s talk on building and self-growing software and hardware. (Think Cylons)
  • Tan Le’s demo of the Emotiv mind-control device. (Think the Matrix)

  It’s a pretty interesting time that we live in; where giant databases are learning about us by applying Myers-Briggs testing to millions of people through a game, where both software and hardware can self-replicate, and where you can control virtual actions and physical items with your mind.

  Gaming

  I’ve been playing computer games since I was about 8 years old, when a friend in Nairobi got a Commodore-64 and I learned how to use those dastardly cassette tapes to bring fantastical new realities to life. What happens when a gaming generation looks at the tools and devices being built? I don’t think any of us know quite yet, but sometimes, in the minds of sci-fi writers that we see a future that could be.

  On the flight back I read the book Daemon, by Daniel Suarez. It’s a mixture of hacker and gaming culture set in a fantasy world of techno-pessimism and a doomsday scenario that will get a geeks blood flowing. Well worth the read, a perfect airplane book.

  Now I’m on to Fun, Inc, a book about “gaming being the 21st century’s most serious business”. It’s a $40+ billion dollar industry, and it’s not slowing down. Virtual worlds and currency are here to stay.

  In Milo, I saw what looked like a fairly unimpressive game, but one with a very impressive gaming and AI-training engine. It’s next iteration will be significant indeed.

  I talked to Tan Le about the Emotiv device and how I thought that her ideas of it being used for practical purposes like closing shades and turning on lights, though sounding less juvenile, would likely be overshadowed by its use in the gaming world. In fact, I can’t wait to see the first big gaming companies using the Emotiv SDK to create new user interactions, HUDs and options in popular games.

  All of these vectors of technology are, at once, both exciting and scary. I don’t know where gaming is taking us. What I can’t help but think is that gaming, and possibly the culture behind it, will be the vehicle that drives mainstream technology use and growth of the talks and demos that I saw at TED.

• Ethan Zuckerman: beyond the wisdom of the flock

  Posted: July 14, 2010, 11:59 am by HASH

  [Read Ethan's notes]

  Ethan Zuckerman is giving his first TED talk today in Oxford. He’s a long-time friend, a well-known blogger, tech entrepreneur, thinker and visionary. For the last few years he’s been a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Democracy at Harvard. He’s the founder of Global Voices, and one of the best real-time bloggers in the world.

  Ethan starts off talking about football, the world cup and Galvao birds and his confusion around this meme coming alive. He also learned that this is a prank, relating to Lady Gaga and also a leading commenter (Carlos Eduardo) for football. The lesson you can take from this, is that you cannot go wrong as long as you ask people to be activists online by only tweeting a phrase.

  What happens on the social network, that you choose to interact with the people you want to. Therefore, most people don’t realize how many people of different demographics are online doing things as well. Ethan brings up the fact that 24% of Twitter users are African-American.

  The prediction of the past decade were that there was a utopian vision for the future online. He brings up Negroponte’s “Being Digital” book.

  It turns out that in many cases, atoms are much more mobile than bits.

  We look at the infrastructure of visualization. From a macro-level view, it looks like everything is flat and connected. However, when you look at what actually happens, you realize it’s not all what it seems. There’s a virtual sky-bridge between London and New York, but not Africa.

  International news is another area, one that Ethan is very interested in, where we see that the amount of international news in the US is less than any time in the past. It turns out that new media isn’t necessarily helping us that much. He shows a map of the total number of Wikipedia articles that have been geocoded. In the UK you can pick up a newspaper and read news from everywhere in the world. You probably won’t. You’ll read your own.

  Imaginary Cosmopolitanism – we have the ability to see and read about things happening all over the world, and the infrastructure to do it, but we don’t.

  Global Voices is his project to bring together news from all over the world using bloggers from those areas. Raising Voices is a program run by GV to get more people working on social media, especially blogging. Ethan brings up Foko in Madagascar as an example.

  Global Voices is also about translation in these other countries. He brings up Yeeyan in China who pick articles every day and translates them into Chinese (due to the horrible news coverage). He asks, if there is Yeeyan for Chinese, where is the group translating from Chinese to English?

  “The wisdom of the flock” – congregating around news with people who are probably very similar to you. Skilled human curators are able to do this, they are virtual DJs who bring together information and news that push people outside of their norm.

  AfriGadget image brought up. He talks about my work around blogging in Africa and that I’m a bridge figure (blogged before by Ethan). The bridge figures are the way the world will get wider on the web.

  Xenophiles are different, they’re people interested in areas of the world that their normal demographic isn’t. They then visit and translate that world to others.

  We have to figure out how to re-wire the systems that we have.

• A Question of Culture

  Posted: July 12, 2010, 4:51 am by HASH

  [Caveat: I am no philosopher, nor have I done any research on this. These are just a few meandering thoughts and broad generalizations brought on by boredom while riding the London to Oxford train.]

  The biggest difference between Africans and Westerners might be in how we define value.

  A Westerner sees a tree and loves it for it’s aesthetic beauty.
  An African sees a tree and loves it for it’s practical uses; for shade, or how much it can be sold for.

  This comes out in small and large ways. Many times the differences and definitions for why we do things differently are difficult to notice, they’re nuanced, leaving only a vague sense of confusion of why a certain decision was reached by a person from the other culture. At other times the cultures stand gawking at one another wondering which planet the other came from.

  This isn’t to say that Westerners can’t see practical uses or that Africans are unable to appreciate aesthetics. No, it means that a different starting point on decision making can create a wide number of outcomes, many of them widely divergent to our own cultural world view.

• Being in Africa Makes You Untrustworthy

  Posted: July 5, 2010, 12:49 am by HASH

  I haven’t been able to use PayPal for two months. I just got profiled for extra security measures on Facebook. I can’t make certain purchases from Africa. Few organizations ship goods to me here.

  Let’s be honest; living in Africa, or being African, gives you a certain unwelcome aroma in the eyes of global corporations. Frankly, we’re just not trustworthy.

  The Africa trust problem

  This isn’t new to any of us who live, or spend a great deal of time, in Africa. You’re blacklisted, given extra screening, and generally treated like a second-rate human. You’re not trusted, and you’re not worth the time to figure out if you can be trusted.

  Frankly, as a total continent-wide user base, we just don’t make enough of a blip on the radar to be worth their time. There’s not enough money here in their minds, there is lower-hanging fruit elsewhere with a lot more spending history – and therefore power.

  Does it make it right? No. Do my own stories of wrongs and misbehavior matter? No.

  Jon Gosier states it well when reflecting on his blacklisting by PayPal (one of the very worst company offenders):

  “Once again, the message perpetuated here is to be cautious when dealing with Africans, Africa or anything you suspect of being related to the aforementioned.”

  A closer look at African cyber crime

  
  From the Internet Crimes Complaints Centre (IC3) 2009 Annual Report [PDF download]

  Nigeria has a significant 8%, but Ghana, South Africa and Cameroon all come in at a measly 0.7%. How in the world do Africans get so much worse treatment for so little compared to the others? There’s no doubt that one country in a continent of 52 countries has a problem – we all get punished for it.

  Here are some more interesting statistics, according to the Consumer Fraud Reporting statistics for 2009:

  “The majority of reported perpetrators (66.1%) were from the United States; however, a significant number of perpetrators where also located in the United Kingdom , Nigeria , Canada , China, and South Africa.”

  So, there are two strong Africa contenders for fraud, but it’s amazing how much more hell internet consumers in African nations (outside of Nigeria and South Africa even!) have to go through in comparison to their much more cybercrime-ridden finalists like the US, Canada and the UK…

  Texas in Africa puts this well after a recent foray into this space with Delta:

  “it also reflects knee-jerk prejudice and the willingness to write off an entire continent of people as liars and cheaters. The consequences of this attitude are far reaching”

  Too true, and there are only two ways that this might change:

  First, we in Africa come up with our own payment and business solutions that work here first, and then interact with other global systems.

  Second, the global corporates wake up and realize that there is quite a bit of spending power and money to be made in Africa, just like the mobile operators found out in the 90′s.

Blah blah blah

Fish cakes

Alas a fish cake.

Yet more fish cakes

Guess what ... yeah ... fish cakes.

The end of the fish cakes