Category: African tech

Introducing the Random Hack of Kindness (RHoK)

tl;dr:

We think that Hackathons in Africa are enjoying mixed results:
There are opportunities which are being missed by focusing on the wrong problems.
There are lack of skills around Shipping Product.
There are also skills gaps around determining the business case of projects / problems etc.

There are of course exceptions to this, thankfully (!), but by and large we’re thinking that by focusing on workplace relevant skills, and problems which can product viable businesses, a Hackathon could have more long term value to the people who participate.

We don’t think that it’s our place to take sides on specific Technologies, and we don’t really want to replicate what other people are already doing.

Which is why the Tech4Africa Hackathons moving forward will do 4 things only:

  1. Focus on one utility problem which is local & relevant
  2. Include collaboration technology and business case skills transfer for everyone
  3. Focus on User Experience – this is the key driver for adoption and is largely ignored
  4. Result in Shipping an MVP Proof of Concept

Background:

Maslow's Heirarchy of Needs
Maslow’s Heirarchy of Needs
Internet Heirarchy
Internet Heirarchy

We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what the opportunities are in Africa right now, and what’s clear is that it’s not going to play out the same way it has in the “developed” world until now.  The reason is that when you look at the building blocks of the internet, there are clear un-met challenges which make those opportunities both different and harder.

When you dissect the landscape using Maslow as your reference point, and then you overlay that with the mobile market data, we think that the major differentiation will be:

  1. most everything is going to happen on a mobile device rather than on a desktop PC;
  2. whilst the rest of the “developed” world is focusing on top of the pyramid problems around self-actualisation, creativity, problem solving, authenticity and spontaneity (as memes for products), the African market still has pretty much all the layers of the pyramid left as opportunities, with the bottom of the pyramid still largely untapped.

When you dissect the opportunities at the bottom of the pyramid, you’ll find that they are primarily “utility” problems which exist in the lives of people everywhere, every day, in all markets.

For example: most diagrams will show “internet” or “wifi” as the base of the pyramid, and as such is probably the biggest opportunity (which is why the Telcos are so dominant in people’s lives).

Maslow in the Internet Age.
Maslow in the Internet Age.

So this is what has led to our mantra of:

Want to build big tech product for Africa?

  1. Focus on product with daily value for user. This is the utility & viability part.
  2. Mobile first. This is the market demographic & adoption part.
  3. Make it easy to share. This is the common sense part.
  4. Make sure cash-flow has you in it. This is the “Don’t waste your time” part.

So, when you unpack this, we see examples (these are simple ones) coming out of:

  • Education: I want to add to or complete my education
  • Transport: I want to be somewhere on time / I need to inform my employer / I need a lift
  • Utilities: I want water / gas / electricity / housing
  • Personal finance: I want to make a payment / I want to send money to my family who live far away
  • Employment: I want to work to earn an income / I have jobs to offer
  • Information: I want to know what is going on around me
  • Family: Where are my family? Are they safe?

When applied to communities and devices (Internet of Things), some examples could be around:

  • Medical devices which are designed for low-resource hospitals
  • Infant phototherapy / General health issues
  • Smoke alerts
  • Air quality
  • Using 3G to connect communities and make them aware (using something like BRCK – https://www.brck.com/)
  • Tablet devices pre-configured for education and learning
  • Community security via drones
  • Smart metering applications (eg: energy usage)
  • Community / family communication (single button modes, not Group chat)

So we’re not going to be encouraging an “Uber / Facebook / LinkedIn / Buzzfeed / Slack etc for Africa” – what’s the point?

Solutions:

Maslow's Heirarchy of Software Development
Maslow’s Heirarchy of Software Development

So, instead of following the usual Hackathon experience you can find anywhere, our approach moving forward will be different:

  1. We’re going to give clear direction on a product that could become a business.
  2. The RHOK will focus on problems which occur in everyday life (this is where the business value is).
  3. It will solve something which will mean people will talk about it (because it has given them value).
  4. There will be a reasonable vision of adding transactions for cash flow, although this won’t be the focus for the RHOK itself.
  5. Everyone will work together as a team.
  6. The development focus will be on executing for mobile devices.
  7. We WILL ship an MVP product in 2 days.
  8. All skills learnt over the two days will transfer to the workplace.

And instead of focussing on the usual set of development skills (or taking sides on what stack to focus on), we’re going to focus on skills which enable collaboration in teams and shipping code and realising something beyond the Hackathon:

  • GIT (source control)
  • Continuous Integration (CI – easy stress free deployments)
  • App architecture (essential for teamwork)
  • App business case (just, essential)

We’ve engaged with Microsoft who have the vision to believe in what we’re doing, and they are going to help with:

  • Cloud servers on  Azure – The machines will be small but adequate, and limited to the Hackathons.
  • Cloud training help, eg: how to build machines running Linux/Win/MySQL,IoT, etc on Azure.
  • Free online training via Microsoft Virtual Academy.

Execution:

For anyone attending, this is roughly what to expect:

  • We will announce the problem / focus area of the Hackathon
  • This will more than likely be a single page, Minimum Viable Product (MVP) approach
  • Explain what viable use & business cases mean
  • Group everyone into teams of logical skill sets
  • Go through application architecture & needs
  • Assign responsibilities
  • Push first code to Github
  • Setup servers to push & pull code
  • Review progress every 3 to 4 hours
  • Setup a booth to record teamwork & results for everyone to see

And the rewards will be:

  1. At the RHoK:
    1. Learn new skills
    2. Learn how to ship  a product in 2 days
    3. Meet new people
  2. Present at Tech4Africa Day 2
  3. From Microsoft:
    1. BizSpark / Azure offers
    2. Demo of Azure Cloud setup for learning
    3. Small Azure instances to attendees who participate in the RHOK.
    4. Free training vouchers for their Virtual Training Academy

Summary:

We’re really excited by what this will produce, and we’re looking forward to rolling this out across all of the cities we go to.  See you there!

Africa: It’s time to rise

I can remember what it was like as a young “digital” person in Johannesburg in 2000. The internet was exploding on the other side of the world, and (South) Africa was an afterthought (and still is for many), over and above being a small market. There were various attempts at exciting things, much like all over the world, but most of them fizzled and died, and that no-mans land between 2004 – 2009 was a worrying time.

Looking at the industry now, things are looking very different. Now has never been a better time for innovation, disruption, and growth.

If you’re in Africa, and if you don’t already know, you should know that there are circa 800m mobile SIM cards in Africa, which dwarfs the rather paltry 250m odd desktop PC’s.

And unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’d also know that the cost of mobile smartphones is just about at that inflection point where it becomes affordable for the majority of the mass market.

On top of that, it’s never been cheaper to start, test, and re-iterate an idea. Crisis, I remember the days of buying in $100k email servers just to send email! Imagine what you could do with $100k today?

For anyone reading this now, those three ingredients mean that for the first time in Internet history, we’re going to see a tidal wave of consumer technology and service adoption in Africa, on mobile devices, which I believe will dwarf the early oughts’.

If we’re really lucky, it will bring with it a surge in economic, social and political change too.

I say really lucky because for the economic, social and political change to take root, the benefits of this disruption need to be realized by people who are local and who keep those benefits local. If all the benefits are gained by people who are based overseas, then that trickle down, knock-on effect you see in other parts of the world, won’t happen. I know which one I want…

So we believe that there’s going to be 3 to 5 year window where local knowledge, local networks, local people and local expertise will play a significant factor in success.  So where will you be when this happens?

After that, and like any other emerging market which is seen as a growth opportunity, that local experience and knowledge will be bought in or acquired, and then the opportunities will get harder and harder, and require more capital.

So if you’re involved in tech today, then now is the time to show yourself, to launch your product, to find that co-founder, to hustle those first deals, to look for that growth, to seize the moment.

There hasn’t been a better time in history, and there likely never will be again.

As for Tech4Africa, we’re going to do four things:

  1. Be more aggressive about the opportunities we see as important for us.
  2. Be more vocal about our opinions.
  3. Continue to focus on catalysing the ecosystem through relevance, leadership, authentic content, and connecting people and ideas.
  4. Roll out our model and platform throughout Africa, focusing on local tech innovation, startups and entrepreneurs.

And whilst doing that, we’re going to remain open to help and collaboration from anyone.

There hasn’t been a better time in history, and there likely never will be again.

Hack is not a four letter word

When Tech4Africa started, our hypotheses was that the tech ecosystem in (South) Africa was missing a few vital parts.  We set out to bring a broader perspective to folks living and working in what looked from the outside like a self congratulating bubble.

The overwhelming learning in the 4 years we’ve been working on this is that the landscape for techies / developers in Africa provides pretty poor opportunity for the talented person looking to really push themselves.  In cities like London / Tel Aviv / New York / Boston / Berlin / Talinn / Austin and of course The Valley, the hiring market is so desperately in demand of technical skill and thus skewed to the developer, that the good ones are able to command great salaries AND work on the most interesting stuff in technology.

In Africa however the landscape looks different – although good developers are able to find jobs because the market is equally in demand for skills, the scope and range of work (call it interestingness) is for the most part very different.  I won’t go into this in more detail because this is not the topic of this post, but what is important is that 80% of the developer conversations we have are around one central theme -> “I don’t get to do fun stuff at work” or “I don’t know what fun stuff to do“.

So we started the idea of a developer day at Tech4Africa (which I’m happy to say we only partly executed on last year, and will do better at this year) for developers to learn about more fun stuff, and then our Hackathons which happen during the year, for developers to do more fun stuff.

We subscribe to the notion that a Hackathon is “an appropriate application of ingenuity“, rather than anything subversive or nefarious.  This is 2013 people, most of the most famous and recent success stories you could think of started out or resulted from a couple of engineers hacking a problem (think Mark Zuckerberg hacking together Facemash in Harvard, Daniel Ek working on the first iterations of Spotify), and “hack” is no longer a four letter word people need to be worried about.

And so, without going into too much philosophical detail, this is what we believe our Hackathons should and shouldn’t be about:

Hackathons should:

  1. encourage fun, mirth and expression
  2. push open source thinking, active collaboration, problem solving
  3. be about new technologies, new approaches to solving difficult problems, and applying ingenuity
  4. welcome and involve anyone in the community / ecosystem
  5. be free to attend

Moving forward, we’re only going to work with partners and people on Hackathons that fulfull the four objectives above, and most importantly which build the ecosystem.

By building the ecosystem we teach younger developers to become better and more capable, we give non-technical people exposure to the way technical people think, we expose developers to new, exciting, different technologies which allow them to solve problems in different ways, and most importantly we build an ecosystem which is positive, fun and challenging.

For us the benefits of this are obvious and sorely needed in the African tech ecosystem, and we hope you’ll share that view with us.
If not, c’est la vie!

Your thoughts and comments welcome.

Why And How We Risked It All

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKqevnV_39I&w=560&h=315]

Part 2        Part 3

Many of us have worked for companies we didn’t like and did jobs we didn’t enjoy. But have we done anything to turn this around? Gareth Knight and Vinny Lingham shares their journey of starting their own business so they can work on things they were truly passionate about. But this has not been an easy journey for either of them and this talk covers the challenges they faced and sacrifices they had to make to turn their ideas into valuable products. But what is most important is that the speech covers how to go about coping with those challenges learn from their mistakes they made so that younger entrepreneurs can avoid them.

iMaverick: The technology & architecture of freedom – Tech4Africa 2011

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAxmaWVmFSo&w=560&h=315]

 

Access to information shouldn’t just be restricted to insiders, experts and politicians. And the challenge is not how to conceal information but how to make information readily available for everyone. For African technology to prosper we need a political and economical environment that is conducive to business. But none of this is possible without a free and independent media. Core issue being Transparency within the internet age; transparency is critical to promoting democracy and citizen’s right empowering them in particular.  iMaverick, the founders of Africa’s first daily tablet talks about how the current political and economical situation relates to the prosperity and freedom of media & technology within Africa. Is securing the functionality of the net and protecting the integrity of its user alone enough to achieve this?