Author: Tech4Africa

HTML 5, the darling of the Open Web

By: Heidi Schneigansz

The Tech stream of day 2 of Tech4Africa kicked off with a mind-expanding session about the one thing on everyone’s lips (and some people’s t-shirts); HTML5. The new messiah of markup languages was described by MC, Toby Shapshak, as; ‘a handy thing with which to build the Internet”.

Our speaker was Robert Nyman, who works with Mozilla in Sweden. Mozilla are the champions of the open web and have recently launched innovations like BrowserID, a single sign-on that will work on all modern browsers, including recent versions of IE, and on mobile browsers.

Despite the fact that I’m more of a ‘mouth’ than a coder, Nyman managed to teach even me more about HTML5. He explained that it is spilt into:

1. Semantics
In this version of markup, the tags are more specific, simplifying code and cutting out elements which are not needed to streamline the way browsers render pages.
HTML5 aims to become the ‘one language to rule them all’ by offering standard code for common elements that previously relied on complicated Javascript, things like sliders, calendars etc.

HTML5, at it’s core, is making the web easier and faster.

If you want to know more, go to http://HTML5doctor.com, it lists all the elements within the specification.

2. APIs
According to Nyman, there are over 100 specifications already, and growing by the second.

It was at this point of the presentation that my brain started short-circuiting. Nyman is just too smart. So, I Googled it. Wikipedia says some of the APIs available are:

  • The canvas element for immediate mode 2D drawing
  • Timed media playback
  • Offline storage database (offline web applications)
  • Document editing
  • Drag-and-drop
  • Cross-document messaging
  • Browser history management
  • MIME type and protocol handler registration
  • Microdata

Since HTML5 is the new darling of the web, there are already hundreds of thousands of resources online. So, who should you trust? According to Nyman, these are the ‘daddies’ of sites to learn about HTML5:

http://www.quirksmode.org/html5/inputs.html
http://wufoo.com/html5

And for the lovers of Flash? Well, don’t worry, you’re not dinosaurs, doomed to extinction just yet. Nyman explains that HTML5 supporters who say “Flash must die!” are shortsighted, we should look to Flash for inspiration, rather thinking that one technology should replace each other.

Despite the fact that the session made me feel a bit stupid, it inspired me and made me think about the possibilities HTML5 offers. I almost want to tell all the devs I work with to rebuild all our sites in it. I must remember the words of Nyman though; “HTML5 is about being pragmatic, about building on top of the things we already have, rather than reinventing the wheel over and over again‚ what’s important is that you dare to do anything, failing is OK.“

Where are all the young black tech entrepreneurs in South Africa?

By Mongezi Mtati


Disclaimer: This is by no means a racial post, or one that separates people in the tech space by race. There are quite a lot of innovative products that are built in Africa for the African context and Tech 4 Africa is proof thereof.

But it is

While having a chat with one of the delegates at Tech 4 Africa, after the start-ups pitched for the $5000 grand prize, it became evident that we do not know many black tech entrepreneurs. Both of us attend a fair number of events, at least we think do, and are quite active in the social web. We hardly ever see young black entrepreneurs building useful platforms.

Is it access?

During the conversation, one of the possibilities we considered was access to events and platforms. As I said earlier, we both use and met on the social web, which minimizes the lack of access to information. Most of the people we met at Tech 4 Africa and other social technology events; we met through Twitter and Facebook.

One of the things cited was lack of education, where the assumption is that most enterprising South African minds do not study technology. In most instances, when we read articles about technologists, the same people are mentioned. When we spoke with Lebogang Nkoane, it turned out that we only know two people.

The burning questions

There is a possibility that most black South African technologists and developers work at blue chip companies and never attend community events. Do they?

We also thought that there aren’t enough communities that expose emerging local talent and those minds go unnoticed. Is this the case? If so, why don’t we at least hear about them?

We may be networking within closed groups that allow only the people we know to flourish. Should that be the case, how do we find out what is happening outside our immediate network?

Do you know some emerging start-ups that are new and promising? It would be interesting to see what the possibilities are, and how they intend to positively change the local and African technology landscape.

It may just be lack of information, in which case I would really like to hear your thoughts.

Samsung pitches ignite Tech4Africa

By: Roger Hislop

Last session for the day, a bunch of start-ups pitched their businesses, some looking for funding, some looking for audience, and some just happy to get some gongs.

Each start-up gave a few minutes pitch, took a couple of questions, and then people voted on Twitter with a hashtag #ignite #t4a, and a panel evaluated and then picked a winner.

In order of appearance, the pitches were:

Snapbill

Online billing system to allow companies to sell online without needing e-commerce – or to handle their billing and invoicing online. The company is already selling to a global base, has customers all over the world in all tax jurisdictions and in all currencies. They’re looking to kick their growth up a notch, so are investing R1m of their capital and looking for a couple of mill funding.

Lessfuss

This is an online assistant to answer your questions, or find you a service at R30-R50 a pop. There’s a number of these kind of concierge services. Lessfuss recons their differentiator in that they understand South African stuff (who is Telkom, what is “just now”), unlike, say, India-based services. They’re also building a useful database of questions and replies. It’s a kind of PA service, limited to a task that takes ½ hour or so that you can do on telephone or Google. Agents work through a software platform they’ve built, from home.

10layer

Publishing and the Internet have not reached each other. Traditional content management systems don’t do a great job – don’t really suit the publishing game. They’re currently providing a platform for M&G, Daily Maverick and another unnamed company. Systems like Drupal are too stretched, don’t work brilliantly for niches like online publishing. The pitch worked great for me as a publishing guy – people from outside the industry were a bit baffled by what it is they do. Trust me – publishing is a bloody tricky game, offline or on, and newsrooms and production teams need all the help they can get. Very niche.

Plotmyride

This very neat system to allow you to plot a cycle race (or whatever kind of ‘travelling’, such as sailing, etc) in real time. This allows support people at the end of a bicycle race, for example, to see how you doing. It’s also historical: how you performed, fellow riders, clubs, etc. It also makes it easy to share your riding experience via social media. It is a very slick-looking product (waterproof, rugged unit with GPS and GPRS radio). Updates happen in real-time, you don’t need to upload later. It also has features such as crash detection to alert someone to an accident. In addition, it pushes to and from other devices – so you can stay in touch with teammates throughout an event. Sure, smartphones can kinda do this, but are not ruggedised. A big opportunity is to be able to have an entire event – tracked in real time for anyone to see the field as it progresses.

FeedbackRocket

Usefulness vs. Confidentiality – a 360 review in Human Resources process gets a bit useless because anonymity stops a manager knowing useful stuff about someone with a problem, but without anonymity no one opens their mouth. FeedbackRocket acts as a proxy to allow conversations through a ‘virtual confessional screen’. It can also interrogate data, for example to allow you to look at people who “disagree” in a sample to find out what their problem is. The company is also looking at using the system for anti-bullying measures, and tying up with something like GetAGreatBoss.com. Built by an actuary, it also kicks in lots of analytics and other clever stuff.

iSign.pro

Do deals faster by reducing contract processing time. iSign manages contracts signing, archiving and auto-review. Primary market is SMBs – these have lots of employment contracts, mobile phone contracts, etc. The joke the pitcher gave is that 21,000 registered attorneys must be doing something… iSign is faster, cheaper, greener by reducing the time delays and admin. The product will be sold through Incredible Connection, and also have a strong viral thread (every customer will essentially bring in a new customer), and there is a built-in affiliate deal for customers (anyone they bring in gives them back a small cut).

Mobiflock

Someone think of the children. Mobiflock is for making smartphones safer for the children. It stops kids accessing inappropriate/unacceptable content, or even limiting hours of use. They are adding features like geo-fencing (alert if outside area). From the control panel parents can see what kids are browsing and the messages they are exchanging (with AI to look for grooming), with logs of where the phone’s been. A timetable function lets parents limit use to a particular time of day. The business is privately funded, but it’s looking for exposure and users.

Realtimewine

75% of wine are purchased through supermarkets in South Africa, with 4,200 independent wine producers. The funny things is that all these guys are trying to reach the wine snobs. Wine review apps (like Platters) are full of bloody meaningless wine snob drivel that says little of value to the normal wine drinker. And that’s where realtimewine comes in. They have writers, and one in four reviews are user generated. Since most supermarkets are ludicrously unsuited to choosing wines, this app should be a winner (especially if you’re trying to choose something nice for a dinner party) So: scan your wine, or enter the name. You’ll get the community’s vote, as well as that of “favourite” top reviewers. And then it can add incentives: Golden Tickets that can give you free stuff, like discounts. They are also looking at sales online, plus a wine of the month type thing (chosen by your friends). And they can sell consumption details to retailers. A whole lot of revenue streams.

Stay tuned, winners to be announced tomorrow.

Don’t fake it ‘til you make it, hack it ‘til you crack it

By: Roger Hislop

Herman Chinery-Hesse is a funny guy that spins a great yarn. They call him the Bill Gates of Africa, but he’s more like Frank Opperman’s Chris Karedes character in the old TV show “The Big Time” – always scheming, pulling off one mad adventure after the other. Unlike Chris Karedes, who, to be frank, was a bit of a dodgy loser, Chinery-Hesse is going from strength to strength in West Africa, with his mixture of tech savvy, street smarts, fearless entrepreneurialism and the ability to smell out a good business opportunity.

Like Karedes, he looks for the unconventional approach, the WTF, the thing that no-one else thought of. And if he has to cut corners and pull a couple of fast ones, then so be it. As Chinery-Hesse says: “sometimes you have to gangster it”.

He is a massive believer in Cloud (or as we used to call them, “Internet-based systems”). In Africa we have power failures, we have unreliable communications systems – a recipe, you’d think, for needing on-site systems with generators – except that the complexity and cost of this is even a bigger problem. In the last few years, telecoms systems across the continent have improved thanks to massive investment. At the same time the developed world is up to its neck in massive, reliable, scaleable hosting services that can now be easily accessed from almost anywhere in Africa. Together, and you have a recipe for tech growth.

Use the West’s tech infrastructure to build Africa

There is a clear subtext in all this – the West has spent generations abusing and taking advantage of Africa, but smart African technologists are using this Western technology to build solutions that work brilliantly for African market needs.

Chinery-Hesse started his tech career in Ghana after spending time studying and working in the US and UK – a serendipitous encounter at a travel agency saw the launch of a software business, first picking up a whole lot more travel agency business, and then extending into point of sale systems. He is blunt about the reasons for his initial success – the bigger international companies in Ghana needed software systems, but were unable to use the high-tech Internet connected systems of their international parent organisations. This allowed SOFTtribe to grow to 90-odd people over three or four years, spreading into Nigeria.

Then, the Internet came, and the cash cow dried up for his on-site software systems – and there was no other local market for it.

So before the Cloud was called the Cloud, Chinery-Hesse was already moving to a hosted model where he could profitably provide software services to mom’n’pop operations.

He was also looking at the next big thing to get him into The Big Time. And this was a payments system/online shopping system with a new company called Blackstar to act as an Amazon for Africa.

Opportunity knocks

This was taking years – setting up payments systems, working out the mechanics of cross border transactions and other complexities. So while this was going on, an opportunity arose for a payments card – rather like the “Oyster Card” system used in London – but rather than complex chip-card designs, they went for a basic barcoded system (he used to do point of sale, remember, so PoS barcode scanners were old hat).

This was the start of a radical new direction – the payments card was set up as a quick hit to use at a trade show – but could be utilised for a host of other events and uses, from music gigs to on-the-fly household and vehicle insurance.

These projects are where the “hack it ‘til you crack it” and “gangster it” come in.

The solution was hacked together using bits and pieces of technologies, and implemented by the seat of the pants and a couple of favours from old contacts.

“We didn’t have money to make big marketing splash, we had to gangster it,” he says (a term that has now taken on a life of it’s own at Tech4Africa). In one deal, he cut a TV company into a card system to get the much-needed publicity. In another, he had an old friend that ran a logistics business give him zero-rating to get volume discounts from the air cargo operator.

He’s all about these kind of relationships of convenience – if you need to get into the market in a nearby country, you need to make some deals with local businesspeople. “As a pan-Africanist, this is what I believe – that if we can unite across businesses in Africa, borders become irrelevant.”

This combination of local deals and the Cloud is critical to success in African markets for him – the ability to count on multi-billion dollar highly reliable telecoms and server systems, but through a business model that allows him to talk to the bottom of the pyramid with products they can afford.

Go where only Africans want to go

He is also vastly sceptical of the large international companies, especially in IT services, being able to make any real difference in Africa, or even really crack this market.

“Sometimes it takes an African to do it, to go in the bush, speak in local language, make the deal,” he says – it’s time consuming, needs local knowledge, and requires patience. Something Western companies are not great with.

That is the last great take-home from his talk – that you don’t need to do things perfectly in Africa, and you don’t need to worry about ‘best practice’ and ‘international standards’, as often no-one else on this continent is doing this kind of stuff yet. In a hyper-competitive market you have both the luxury and the burden of chasing perfection. Africa is largely still a tech green field, you just need to act, act quickly, and get it to work. And where possible, use the West’s tech infrastructure to give you a leg up.

Build and sell for Africa: Snapshot of Herman Chinery-Hesse’s talk

By: Mongezi Mtati

Ghanaian entrepreneur, who I can easily call one of Africa’s leading minds in technology and business, Herman Chinery-Hesse blew away the Tech 4 Africa audience. Unlike most conference speakers, Herman Chinery-Hesse entered with a piece of paper as his talk and described it as doing things African-style.

Apart from known as Africa’s Bill Gates, Herman Chinery-Hesse co-founded, among others,  SOFTtribe limited, one of Africa’s leading software houses. He has built and developed technology startups and does so for the African context. He asserts that African entrepreneurs should build for the market and build partnerships with companies that offer services to compliment theirs.

Here are some are key points from his talk:

  • With the rise of the web, they had to reinvent themselves.

He described that the rise of the web led to how software can be managed remotely, without selling and managing it for different branches.

  • The average African had no way to sell products to customers abroad, they built a product that acts as an international shopping mall.
  • The root of Africa’s poverty lies in the inability to sell their products to international customers.
  • Selling products in Africa requires that you also package them for Africa.

Most large companies develop solutions that do not meet Africa’s needs, and in most instances, African businesses are small and want a solution that suits them.

  • When you have the technology, rolling it out makes borders irrelevant.
  • Building for the African, or any, market requires experimentation and adapting to what the market wants.
  • It is no longer about programming, but the model you build around products.
  • It is no longer about the tech, it is now about what people want to buy. They are not techies.

Questions from the audience:

  1. In your view, what are some of the most important reasons to use the cloud in Africa?
    1. Europe and U.S don’t have power failures, Africa does.
    2. Bandwidth limitations.
  1. Would you sell your African company to a non-African buyers?
    1. Yes, but we want Africa to own the majority.

Herman Chinery-Hesse cited a lot of very relevant reasons and needs that can only be solved with African technology solutions.

What are your thoughts on where Africa can contextualise technology?

Keynote: The African Bill Gates leaves Tech4Africa speechless

By: Heidi Schneigansz

Herman Chinery-Hesse has a remarkable story. He is one of those people that makes you feel like you can do anything with nothing. That’s because Herman believes in African Style Solutions for uniquely African problems. Europe and American don’t have power failures and bandwidth problems, so Africans can’t copy First World solutions and expect them to work here.

After returning to Ghana from America, a young Herman thought he was going to go into manufacturing. The problem was, the only asset he had was an old PC. He had no capital, no connections and no infrastructure to build a factory. However, he soon realised that his PC “was a factory, it could manufacture software.”

Herman started SOFTribe in 1991 after a bet with friends when out at a nightclub that he could get a job in unemployment-riddled Ghana within three days. That Monday, he was building software for a travel agency; in front of the client, on the one computer they had in the building. Soon, SOFTribe was the biggest IT Company in Ghana and quickly expanded into other countries.

It wasn’t all smooth sailing though, the advent of the Internet nearly closed him down. His clients were insisting on central web-based software, dictated by their European Head Offices, so SOFTribe had to reinvent themselves. They knew that the majority of the economic growth was coming from SMEs, so Herman started BlackStarLine, a company that incubated a revolutionary eCommerce platform. ShopAfrica53 is a virtual shopping mall, allowing vendors a space to sell their products on a global scale. But the really special thing about ShopAfrica53 is the fact that it plans to push intra-Africa trade, selling African goods to Africans who do not necessarily have access to large malls.

However, the platform is a labour of love that has taken years to perfect, so Herman had to roll out interim products that would keep his business alive. One such product line was barcoded cards that allowed delegates access into one of Ghana’s largest trade shows, which meant the show made profit on entry for the first time ever, over 500%! It wasn’t long before the cards were being used for concerts, conference and shows all over Africa.

That was just the beginning. BSL’s next innovation was ‘Quickie’, instant ‘on-demand’ insurance through scratch cards and the cell networks, which allow you to SMS a code to switch your policy on and off. This sort of technology would never work in the developed world but revolutionises insurance in Africa.

When asked his secret, Herman says “I used to be a techie but these days, I like to think like an end user. Business is not just a programmer’s game. You should always look at the client experience, or your products will fail.”

The audience was spellbound and I left the room inspired and proud to be an African.  Herman says it best: “The African unity that I see isn’t just a philosophy, it unites with business… remember, borders become irrelevant in the Cloud.”

March of the UX Designers

By: Roger Hislop

Anyone who was at Tech4Africa in 2010 will remember ClearLeft’s Andy Budd and his awesome presentation on user experience design. He drew the parallels between a great retail store and a great website design, and how this often fails by designers having the wrong departure point. His colleagues Cennydd (pronounced Kenneth if you were wondering) Bowles and James Box took to the Tech4Africa stage again this year, talking to a packed room.

These two tag-teamed each other, talking about UX design, but focusing less on the gee-whiz concepts and more on process and techniques.

They started with the old UX ra-ra – UX is now all-important, the most successful products of today have been designed with superior user experiences: the age of competing on features is over. It’s user experience, user experience, user experience.

They then traced the path of UX design from the very first computers – from ENIAC and the old punch-card machines. In this world, operators had to learn the language of the machine. As computers have got more powerful and the interface can be abstracted, controls are no longer mapped to the guts of the device.

Now, it’s about huggable technology. In books like The Brand Gap we can see that these are concepts marketers have understood for a long time: commercial success comes from bridging the distance between expectations and experience, between assumption and real life. This is the role of the modern UX pro.

In UX the thinking and discipline has become clearer and more formalised, with a hierarchy of needs that moves from the task-led beginnings, starting with something being functional, then useful, then reliable, then usable, then convenient, then pleasurable, and finally meaningful. The end-goal being to address the experience, not what the user may have wanted to achieve.

Bowles talked about experience design as a profession – one which is described by this umbrella term that stretches over a range of disciplines from info architecture, to research, to usability studies and more.

The key to good user experience design, said the Clearleft twosome, is that it’s not a checkbox to be ticked, it needs to be integrated into every part of the process right from initial product strategy to final release. It’s becoming a clear discipline, with career paths and levels of seniority as companies start to build UX into their business structures.

The presentation looked at a four-step process:

Step 1: Design research

Begin with a pause… understand the people who will use it. This part can easily lead to an immediate taking of the wrong tack. Design research is not about listening to a wish list of features from user focus groups and feedback forms. They most vital part is understanding user behaviours, their problems, how they conceive of and understand these problems – and how can we (as UX professionals) solve them.

Their key tips were:

–       Not look at market research as core, rather design research around quite specific, personal, and one-on-one interactions with possible users.

–       Conduct ‘expert reviews’ – using experienced pros that evaluate against tested design principles (made for humans, forgiving, accessible, self evident, predictable, efficient, trustworthy), and doing competitive analysis (the risk here is significant, to get hung up on what competitors are doing and everyone chase their tails, not innovating)

–       Look at analytics closely – although again they warn against getting hung up on analytics just because it’s ‘hard data’. Analytics tells you WHAT people are doing, not WHY. It’s important when studying analytics to talk to people what they were doing (maybe they took a path to a page because they couldn’t find another way, not because they preferred it!)

Research methods recommended

–       Interviews (one-on-one)

–       Focus groups (as usual with focus groups beware of danger of groupthink, or a dominant individual driving the discussion)

–       Questionnaires

–       Diary studies (where people record their interactions with a system over a period)

–       The quick and dirty corridor tests (stick your head out the office, grab someone walking down the corridor and stick them in front of your new design, and watch them use it)

Once you’ve done your research, you need to produce some outputs – normally a report. The speakers were quite anti the normal practice of producing a couple of slides with some nice charts of the numbers, as this is often not useful when resolving design disagreements.

They suggest rather using a persona (a fictitious user that represents a user group). It’s a lot easier to design for a person than for a heap of data, they say, and each persona acts as a common reference point that is clear and intuitive.

Reports can include the personas, and they maybe even extend into comics and storyboards that show how the personas would integrate your system with their life – the idea is to build insights into a broad view of the user behaviour.

Step 2: Generate Ideas

Once this research has been done, it’s time to generate ideas.

You’re all excited, you have lots of information, and even understand your users. The temptation is to jump in and start to design right away.

No, say Bowles and Box. As in the classic tome on chess strategy, “when you see a good move, look for a better one”. You need to explore the possibility space. At this point you can throw many ideas at the wall to see what sticks – risks are low, nothing to change, nothing to hold on to.

If you jump in and start designing immediately, there is a temptation to fixate on obvious solutions.

To generate ideas, there are some conceptual tools that can help. Two good classic books in this area are the advertising industry standby, “A Technique For Producing Ideas” by James Young, and Edward de Bono’s “Six Thinking Hats”.

They are big fans of sketching – taking a koki pen and piece of paper and scribbling down ideas and layouts. It’s quick and easy, says Box, and importantly you don’t get attached to them.

Sketches can also be posted up onto a sketch board – basically a big board with rough maps, sketches and mock-ups pinned up and arranged in some kind of rough order. Sketch boards encourages stand-up communication – trying to resolve design disputes via email is often a giant, slow fail. The other advantages of sketch boards in the ideas generation phase is that they are clearly not finished, so it invites input.

Step 3: Detailed design

Historical UX designers and visual designers worked separately. In modern development this is increasingly seeing this as undesirable – with famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s adage, “You can fix it on the drawing board with an eraser, or onsite with a sledgehammer”.

This is where all the work is turned into something concrete, the dreaded ‘deliverables’, the risk that management pressure and corporate culture can fetishize these deliverables into an orgy of reports and planning.

Some of the types of deliverables include logic maps, site maps, storyboards (which are better for a more interactive site), and wire frames – although these make it difficult to capture something really interactive, so instead you may need a prototype.

For very top-down design management, there would also need to be a functional spec – great to keep middle managers and procurement departments happy, but in trying to describe how every function works they often end up being milestones that document the chasing of a moving target.

Step 4: Testing and iteration

Finally: get feedback, and test the ideas on a real site. Say the UXtabulous twosome, “You need to accept that first attempt will not be right.” There is certain emotional baggage around this that you need to keep an eye out for: Egoless vs Genius design. A bad designer will cling to concepts too long, especially if they think they’re genius.

An example of truly successful Genius design that’s often held up is Apple – although, says Box, the genius is probably more that they’re just really good at making sure we didn’t hear about all the design iteration.

Usability testing should include all stakeholders – and a structured critique is often missing from design process. This means user feedback, analytics, and even A/B testing. A risk in formalising testing in a clumsy way is codifying incorrect assumptions simply to be able to check the “tested” box.

You can compare Summative vs. Formative testing. In Summative testing you answer the question “does this work”. If the answer is no, there may be pressure to ignore or misinterpret this testing, as the cost of changes at the end is quite high. Compare this to the Formative testing, where you “test early, test often” to inform the design process.

The presentation touched briefly on some testing software, such as Clearleft’s own cheap’n’chearful Silverback, or something like Morae.

Their final bit of advice is to look to improve, not perfect, in the testing stage. Perfection is not possible, and this is the real world.

Where is UX design heading?

To wrap up, the two talked about where UX design is heading. There is a (somewhat debatable) quote that “Our medium is not technology, it’s behaviour”. More interesting was the concept that “behaviour is a function of a person AND his/her environment”, that how someone acts changes with context.

There is interesting work being done in choice architecture – it has become clear that decisions can be deeply influenced by the choices that we are presented with, and how they are presented. A lot of the work UX people do is around changing behaviour, which requires understanding the psychology of users.

A final nugget of wisdom is that good design is less about UX tactics, and more about what we can do to make their lives better. In the modern world this means there is a growing focus on cross-channel UX, where there may be a native mobile app, a mobi site and a full site, all performing slightly different functions for the user.  The modern UX designer has to make sure these are all consistent, but make the best use of each device – and also synch with real world stuff like the physical presence (retail stores, etc).