Tag: Africa

Content, conversation, community – Social media is about people

News from the conference room: this is a series of blog posts in which blogging experts briefly review key Tech4Africa 2010 talks and panels from Day 1 and 2.

Day 2

Social media is about being genuine. The buzz of “social media” has created a pool of people calling themselves social media gurus, experts, mavens, you name it. This frenzy and popularity, still largely in the IT bubble (and where it spills over) creates a layered conversation of buzz words that ultimately alienates people. Since social media is all about relationship and human connectivity, you need to be genuine so that people have something to connect with. Otherwise, you won’t attract many new clients or retain old ones.

Vibrant discussion in the Tech4Africa session crowdsourced the following best practices for companies wanting to be in the social media space (with thanks to Andy Hadfield on stage):

1) Listen first.
2) Don’t have shit products.
3) Focus on – Content. Collaboration. Community.
4) You can’t win every battle. Shake off the failures and learn from them.
5) Understand content, conversations, campaigns.
6) Understand your customers. Some want to buy. Some want to complain.
Some want to engage.

People have, rather obviously, been communicating since the beginning of time. We have given it a new name because we’ve gotten excited about how technology crosses old boundaries and allows us to talk to anyone, anywhere, anytime (provided they’re in the same online community that is).
The only new thing about communication is the technology involved.

Social media is about relationship, about people, about community. Online communities using social media to engage are just doing what humans have been doing for years – forming bonds with one another. The technology itself is almost irrelevant. It’s about how we talk to each other. “Social media just allows people to do what they would have done in the stone age if they had the Internet” (@afairweather).

For brands trying to work in this space they need to constantly remind themselves that social media is about people and about building relationship. That means portraying themselves as a human, not as a marketing brand.

Tips for how to behave online that came from the discussions:

* Be who you are.
* You don’t need to invent conversations – make a good product, put it out there and the buzz will happen if people like it.
* Live your brand.
* Don’t make the mistake of using marketing concepts to think about issues that are actually about people.

Rather than feeling forced onto platforms like Twitter and Facebook because “we should be there”, brands should be focusing on good quality content that creates conversation, and that results in a shared sense of community.

Samantha Fleming
http://afrosocialmedia.wordpress.com/
@afrosocialmedia

The Red Flag is Up, Stop the Race

News from the conference room: this is a series of blog posts in which blogging experts briefly review key Tech4Africa 2010 talks and panels from Day 1 and 2.

Day 2

Many, if not most, large brands, especially non-consumer brands, should stay the hell away from Twitter and Facebook. In fact, says corporate digital guru Andy Hadfield, even commodity consumer brands like banks and cellphone companies should consider _not_ ‘joining the conversation’ on Facebook or Twitter. Because it’s not really a conversation. Conversations are between a person and a person, not between a person and an abstract organisational construct.

We’re clearly in a trough of disillusionment, those many of us in the social media industry who spent the past few years being very excited about the immense possibilities and unknowable future impact. We’re now stepping back, aghast at the monster we have created that is racing off in lots of directions: many pointless, some actively harmful to the online community we have a loyalty to.

Today, World+Dog is doing social media. It’s not that hard to set up social media sites, and the business of providing ‘social media solutions’ has exploded. R15k to set up a Facebook page for some sucker^h^h^h^h innovative and authentic company.

Those who’ve been doing it for a long time are putting up red flags. How about NOT doing it, they say?

Having a Facebook page is a panacea for nothing, commented Alistair Fairweather from M&G.

The bottom line is that people don’t love brands. They may love the product that a brand produces. They may simply use a brand’s product because the brand hasn’t pissed them off enough yet to move to a competitor.

The nub of the matter for the panel, after half an hour of fairly intense discussion and even argumentative tub-thumping, is that there is a fundamental contradiction that cannot be resolved as long as the marketing department is the start and the end of corporates involvement in social media. Mostly, so-called conversations online have little bearing on the product, on the customer support, on the supply chain, on the real world.

Basically, most of the top social media people in SA are honest, realistic, and well-intentioned. They are struggling to look a customer in the eye, knowing that the company makes a crap product and delivers half-baked service, but that wants to be ‘authentic and engaged’ online.

Social media is about conversations that people honestly care about. No care, no conversation. No honesty, no conversation.

Is this the SA social media industry putting the brakes on the hype, looking to inject some realism before too many brands do too many ill-considered, expensive and futile online campaigns? Before brand managers get so burned that it wreaks major damage the industry that is trying to sell them the snake oil?

Let’s hope so.

Roger Hislop
www.sentientbeing.co.za
@d0dja

Advice for entrepreneurs

News from the conference room: this is a series of blog posts in which blogging experts briefly review key Tech4Africa 2010 talks and panels from Day 1 and 2.

Day 2

Marcel Klaassen, from FNB, in his opening remarks of Day 2, gave participants at Tech4Africa four crucial pieces of advice for new entrepreneurs in South Africa:

1) “Smurf it up” – Focus on your passion! Because of the way the world has flattened, you can do what you’re passionate about. You’ll probably find an audience for it, and you’ll probably be able to monetise it.

2) Appreciate business fundamentals but don’t be restricted by them. Embrace the business model, but keep it simple.

3) Be patient. Inevitably you are the curve. Not just ahead of the curve, you are creating a completely new curve. Decide where you are in the cycle. Are you the bus? Or are you the person helping people onto the bus?

4) Quote from Adrian Gore (Founder of Discovery). Being an entrepreneur is like jumping out of an aeroplane with a box of silkworms instead of a parachute, and praying that they are overachieving silkworms!

Samantha Fleming
http://afrosocialmedia.wordpress.com/
@afrosocialmedia

The knowledge economy is the kitchen of ideas

News from the conference room: this is a series of blog posts in which blogging experts briefly review key Tech4Africa 2010 talks and panels from Day 1 and 2.

Day 1

Curry paste? … what on earth does curry paste have to do with the knowledge economy? Steve Song says the knowledge economy is like the “kitchen of ideas”. If you don’t have access to the recipe, you waste time making it all up from scratch. But if you do have access to the recipe, then you can tinker, add value, make something totally delicious and explore what it would taste like if you … added more coriander?
Essentially (and with apologies to Isaac Newton), you can stand on the shoulders of giants.
Steve maintains that when the costs of accessing telephony are driven down, it opens up space for a “torrent of innovation”. Give people the basics and set their genius free!

At the presentation of Tech4Africa entitled “Three pieces of kit for a neighbourhood network”, Steve (Telecommunications Fellow for Shuttleworth Foundation) spoke about an initiative called the mesh potato, named for a lovely, obscure sort of connection between the acronyms POTS (plain old telephone system) and ATA (analog telephone adapter) … and possibly some late night Spanish patata bravas?

The mesh potato is an Open Hardware project to create wireless telephony, designed to address the needs of developing countries. In Africa, where most people spend vast amounts of disposable income (in some cases more than 50%) on telecommunications, the cost of access is a substantial barrier to innovation. The mesh potato is designed to eradicate that barrier and give people the freedom to explore creatively without worrying about how much it’s going to cost them. With the mesh potato, people in a village can talk to one another, or connect into a broader network, at minimal cost. Where this will take us, only the future can tell.

In a world where the only certainty is unpredictability and no-one knows what the next big thing is, the question is how to cope in an environment that you can’t plan for? Trial and error is the new planning. Steve advises that you need to take an evolutionary, organic approach. Success survives – and the only way to plan for this is to develop tools that facilitate everyone being a creator.

Mobile networks in South Africa today are making the same mistake that commercial Internet providers in the USA (such as compuserve, MSN and others) made 15 years ago,
when customized internet services were just developing. Their revenue model is based on walled gardens, which automatically restricts innovation. Steve advocates for paradigm shift to an open approach, giving cheap access to telephony, which opens the door to local innovation and problem solving for community problems.

The range of the mesh potato is currently around 400m (although this can be extended through ‘scaffolding’). In South Africa it is legal to use these networks as long as you’re not charging customers. However, if you want to run a commercial service you would need to apply for a license.

Mobile phones haven’t yet fulfilled their potential in the knowledge economy. That change is coming, but it needs to happen faster. The mesh potato will go a long way towards making that happen because it provides, at low cost, the opportunity for people to build their own telephone networks and take it from there.

(The mesh potato is on sale from next month – buy one online from the village telco. It’s designed to survive the weather (and dummies who might not know what cables to stick where), so you can stick one outside your house (UV and weather resistant) and get connected.
Also, the Village Telco is looking for volunteers, partners, investors –contact Steve if you are interested – www.twitter.com/stevesong).

Find out more about the mesh potato on this podcast with Steve Song.

Samantha Fleming
http://www.shuttleworthfoundation.org/
@afrosocialmedia

Ushahidi: packing a powerful (and honest) punch

News from the conference room: this is a series of blog posts in which blogging experts briefly review key Tech4Africa 2010 talks and panels from Day 1 and 2.

Day 1

Who hasn’t heard about Ushahidi? That was the first question posed by Erik Hersman today. Astoundingly, about 30% of the crowd raised their hands. My first thought was sheer disbelief – They don’t know about Ushahidi? Where have they been?

I raised my eyebrows at Steve Vosloo who said – perhaps they’re mostly commercial companies; that’s why they don’t know anything about this small nonprofit that packs a powerful punch. The great thing is that after today’s session, a whole lot more people now know about Ushahidi – which, when you do learn more about it, is truly an incredible application.

Ushahidi defines itself as a small organization that dislikes hierarchy and being told what they can’t do, they question everything, embrace innovative thinking and take risks boldly. Their guiding values are openness, innovation, community.

When Ushahidi started, it went from concept to launch in a week. After the Kenyan elections on 27th December 2007, violence broke out in Kenyan communities unhappy about election results. A Kenyan blogger wrote “For the reconciliation process to occur at the local level, the truth of what
happened will first have to come out”. And that began a creative process among friends and colleagues that saw the launch of Ushahidi on the 9th January 2008. The Ushahidi Platform allows anyone to gather distributed data via SMS, email or web and visualize it on a map or timeline.

From their successes, Erik shared some of what they learned in the process of setting it up:

* Keep focused (make ruthless, brutal decisions if you have to)
* Release early
* Do it yourself
* Community = success (if you can’t harness the community you won’t have success)
* Don’t wait for money, just do it

Erik hastened to add – remember that technology is only a tool. Some of Ushahidi’s biggest learning has come from failures – and they are open and willing to share this learning. Often we learn more from other
people’s mistakes than their achievements.

They learned that there’s a difference between building technology, and deploying technology. Experience taught them that building the technology itself is only about 10% of the issue – the other 90% is about building the community and messaging around the technology.

From their failures, they learned the following lessons:
* Own your failures
* Listen
* Fix your mistakes – and quickly
* Think differently but stay true to the spirit of your organization or community.

Erik’s overarching message was to remember these three things:

Technology does help in overcoming inefficiencies, but it takes people to make it happen.
More people need to ask the hard questions that challenge the status quo.
Africans can build world class software and we should expect nothing less.

Ushahidi – if you haven’t heard about it yet, check it out. And watch this space, this is just the beginning of what crowdsourcing information can do in Africa.

Samantha Fleming
http://tech4africa.com/speakers/#erikhersman
@afrosocialmedia

Scale to get big

News from the conference room: this is a series of blog posts in which blogging experts briefly review key Tech4Africa 2010 talks and panels from Day 1 and 2.

Day 1

It’s going to be a flood of data as more people connect more often with their mobiles. Says Joe Stump (co-founder of SimpleGeo, previously main dev bod at Digg): “Each smartphone has six-plus sensors, and it’s not long before they add barometers and temperature sensors and more. Data production is following Moore’s Law.”

He did a simple calculation, working out what happens if you were to tag the phones (just time and location) once every minute for the 500 million Facebook users.
Just this little addition would add 37.2GB of data every minute to the piles that already need to be crunched.
He asks: “How are we going to store, scale and serve this mess?”
His main point is: scaling != performance.
Performance is more about i/o, and not so much in your choice of language. Choose Ruby, choose php, it makes little total impact to large-scale systems, he insists.
Mostly, scaling is a specialisation.
“The more traffic you get, the more specialised your infrastructure needs to be,” he says. The key is automation – bits should be able to be called or started or attached automatically. Use the cloud, but treat everything in the cloud as ephemeral. It can and will just disappear. Expect it.

He discussed the two approaches to scaling – namely out, and up.
If you scale out, you spread load across lots of boxes. If you scale up you get a bigger, faster box. Less complex infrastructure, but a really powerful box can cost millions of bucks – only workable if your service is making big money already.

Other gems of wisdom:
* Partition your data from the very beginning
* Make use of queues – very important part of consistency of user experience.
* Caching is critical – especially in supporting queues. Write a record to cache while it’s processed by queue so that user experience stays OK.

These are lessons learned from long years worrying about things like: how do you handle objects such as the front page story on Digg when it’s getting millions of hits?
His other key advice is about people:
“It takes a lot of people to build, scale and maintain infrastructure – you will grow from one or two to 15 or more.” The human management issues become tricky here: “The first two or three devs on board are going to question every decision management makes.”
A good thought: “Look for a trait in developers: laziness. You want someone who looks for a quicker, better way.”

As your site (and dev team) grows, he advises looking to lower barriers to entry for more junior devs. “Get your codebase to a position where you don’t need to hire a Jedi. Jedis are rare. Jedis are expensive.”
He recommends breaking teams up. 4-6 people work well, at 8 it starts breaking. Get a Jedi, and make them the team leader. Note: team leader, not manager. They should act more like a sports team’s captain. Create frameworks (authentication, error handling) to lower barriers to entry as new coders come on.
And use code repositories. Full stop.

He is very passionate about promote ownership in the codebase, so that individuals work on three of four areas and have responsibility for them.
“As you scale and your code bases grow, from 50,000 lines of code to 400,000 lines, no-one can be effective across the whole base,” he says.
Before you start, design the software – don’t just start coding. He is a big fan of stubbing out the API on a whiteboard.

When it comes to testing – automation is good, and use several methods. If you fix something, make sure you run a test on the old version and make sure it fails it. Apply patch, and make sure it now passes.
Documentation. Build time into your planning for documentation. Even if old and stale it adds historical context, maybe helping you understand later why you made a particular decision.
Do peer reviews. “I’ve never sat in on any peer review and didn’t see at least one show-stopping bug.”

There are a number of ways to scale up using powerful technologies. “When I left Digg we were handling 37,000 requests a second,” he says. Now at SimpleGeo, he runs 15 nodes in one Cassandra cluster, 12 nodes in other cluster.
The numbers will go up (if you are even remotely successful). The technology is getting faster and faster, handling volumes that would have been unthinkable before. “You can get 1500 writes a second on a decent SQL box. A couple of years ago if you asked me if I’d need that, I would have laughed,” says Stump. Right now he is putting 5,000 to 7,000 writes/sec on a Cassandra cluster.

Most South African web developers, even those working for the relative giants like news24.com see only a fraction of these volumes – but one thing is sure. Africa is developing its Internet community fast – it won’t be long before servers talking to thousands of users are talking to millions.

Roger Hislop
www.sentientbeing.co.za
@d0dja

Boiling the Ocean

News from the conference room: this is a series of blog posts in which blogging experts briefly review key Tech4Africa 2010 talks and panels from Day 1 and 2.

Day 1

During his talk “Boiling The Ocean: how a VoIP mobile business is changing the shape of the Mobile Industry” on how Internet Solutions has progressed since he was asked to start it up and take on the main Mobile Providers, Justin Spratt delved into just a few of the obstacles that he had to overcome in making that happen.

It all came about from them wanting to scratch the itch of mobile costs being too high in SA. With variable costs being around 5c per minute and charges around R2 they saw a clear gap to fill. Deciding to do this through VOIP over an enterprises existing WiFi network, they were able to come up with a very viable solution. In order to do this their requirements were to start with extremely talented people, strive for technical excellence (“Nobody does it better than us” – JS) and making sure that the leadership was given a long enough leash to be able to adapt quickly and effectively.

When it came to building the business, creating the core technology was easy. Their first version vastly outperformed the mobile operators. One of the biggest issues was the diversity of Mobile OS. With Blackberry not opening their API and Nokia having 3 OS versions – each not upgradable, this was no easy feat. [On a side not he made a prediction that Blackberry will be in serious decline in the next few years… This is because the customer is not the center of their development. Also that Android will soon overtake the iPhone due to its openness.] With Microsoft being years behind the game they have chosen to focus on writing software for Android, iPhone and Blackberry only.

When looking at moving the main routing through a central place they originally looked in India but soon moved to Israel because of the language barrier.

Deciding to run on a model where companies only pay for what they use and IS covers the setup cost they have managed to bring their prices down, starting at 50c per minute.

As Take-Aways Justin left us with 3 words: Usability, Adapt and Love. For him these were the most important ingredients in their success. Creating the customer at the center of their development was absolutely critical as well as being adaptable as situations and roll-outs differ. Love was needed to be inherent in the product and that “People want to see caring in your eyes”…

For more details, find Justin Spratt’s presentation slides here.

Roger Norton
www.rogernorton.net
@rogernort