Tag: Development

The entrepreneur, an agent of change in the emerging markets?

The first edition of Tech4Africa last August proved to be one of the largest gatherings in Africa of international and local bright technologists, business people and entrepreneurs. One in that bunch was Bright Simons, the founder of mPedrigree.com, who sat on the panel “Mobile content for grownups, being clever with the simple”.

Simons, a young Ghanaian, embodies the figure of the entrepreneur of the emerging markets, as The Economist labelled him in its recent article “The other demographic dividend”. According to the influential magazine, this kind
of entrepreneur has an impressive ability to identify gaps in markets. This is something Simons has shown to have had. His development, mPedrigree, came up with an innovative solution for dealing with the epidemic of counterfeit drugs using the mobile phone. The service helps people to ensure that the medicines they are buying are legitimate and safe.

In his interview “Bright hope for continental scourge” for ITWeb, Simons recognizes that “I felt I could do something more than just write about the issue”. A massive tragedy in Nigeria related to fake drugs that killed 90 children and the daunting statistics about Africa’s plague of counterfeit drugs prompted him into action. From the drugs that find their way onto the market, 30% are illegitimate. And according to the UN, at least half of the anti-malaria tablets that are sold in Africa are counterfeit, meaning a business of about $438 million a year. Simons added that: “A 2001 Interpol research conducted in Lagos, Nigeria showed that 80% of all the medicines on sale were counterfeit.”

With his endeavour to transform lives, he bootstrapped the mPedigree system, which is very accessible and easy to use. Manufacturers place an unique code on the medicine label, which the consumers have to SMS to see whether the medicine is safe. Consumers are responded to with a simple “yes” or “no”, assuring whether the medicine is good for consumption or not. This is in effect a great consumer experience, simple and easy, but it wasn’t that way for Simons to implement it. In the interesting article “Innovative Mobile Phone Strategies in the Developing World“, Simons stressed that “when you develop new technologies, you are not trying to change the consumer; you are trying to change the manufacturer to serve the consumer”.

The raising figure of the entrepreneur in the emerging markets as an agent of change is backed up by academic research, as the article in The Economist points out. Demographers have often noted that most of the emerging world will stay young while the rich world ages. Among other benefits brought by this factor, this will be favourable due to the boost of a more entrepreneurial business culture. This is being reinforced by two big changes in the emerging world:

1- The information-technology revolution: Many consumers in emerging markets are much more likely to access the Internet via mobile devices rather than PCs. “That gives local entrepreneurs an advantage”, says Rob Salkowitz, the author of “Young World Rising”, meaning that Africans can build companies around coming technology, while their Western peers first have to transform old systems and mindsets to do it.

2- Pro-entrepreneurial revolution: Global institutions such as the World Bank and the World Economic Forum as well as several big companies have helped to popularise entrepreneurialism.

These facts may show that Bright Simons, as many other successful African social entrepreneurs, could be in fact representatives of a new leadership scenario in the emerging markets, which drives change and promotes transparency by connecting people and organizations via communications technologies. If this is true for the whole of Africa, it has to be proved, but cases like Simons’ clearly show that technology and entrepreneurship can be a solution to fight some of the toughest plagues that hit the continent: political and economic inefficiencies.

Do you think entrepreneurialism could be an agent of change for Africa?

Location Scaling and Herding Cats

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

Joe Stump (SimpleGeo) on scaling a business and handling developers.

The masses of data created in web 2.0 has started following Moore’s Law (according to Sergy Brin) and with this increase in data as well as real time tracking it the overload of information becomes a supply and demand problem. The more data you have, the less the data is worth.

There is a big drive for location based information, however the value of this information decreases drastically over distance and time. The relevance of this information depends on: What the information is; Who it is about and What information is Virtually nearby or relevent. With the large adoption of services like FourSquare and MyTown it becomes evident that this gaming style of applications providing relevant location based information are becoming very popular. [As a side fact, more people visit MyTown per day than the total number of people who have accessed FourSquare since its inception.] At the end of the day users are looking for relevant information that can enhance their current experience.

Moving onto online scaling, Joe stressed the necessity of automation with the cloud as well as separating data into partitions from the beginning being a must. An important question that needs to be answered is whether to scale Up or Out. Out is normally better when you are on a budget and expand by getting lots of basic storage; whereas Up would be investing in high-end servers that are generally very costly. The specific language that you use is more based on the application and are not really a factor when scaling.

Another crutial point is having set standards and conventions from the beginning is critical for continuity throughout the business. It lowers the barriers of entry for new team members and makes the different components work together more smoothly, as well as helping if you want to publicize code at a later date. (This became an issue at Digg) Providing this continuity was best done through regular communication between the teams and Joe is an advocate for the SCRUM model to ensure constant communication. Testing was also a must, with different components being tested automatically and peer reviewed before being uploaded. He also believes in a “Swiss Cheese” style of coding which leaves holes in the code to be filled up later.

Dealing with developers can often be a tricky task – mostly due to their passion and personality type. As the core generators of online services they need to be carefully lead through expansion and given enough freedom to work their magic.

Roger Norton
www.rogernorton.net
@rogernort

Beyond growth pains

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

Beyond growth pains: A Q & A session with some of the global movers of Web 2.0

The social media we have come to know and love has very few prominent players. For growth in that market and developing your platform to giant proportions – with users other than close relatives and distant cousins. Who, better than the whizzes themselves to tell us how?

I sat in on a Q & A session with panelists from Twitter, Yahoo!, Mozilla Foundation and Simplegeo. Boy won’t you be glad I did because below are some of the things they covered.

Q: “What has been your hardest challenge, in your career, and how did you overcome it?”

A: (Joe Stump – Simplegeo) “Finding people I can bounce ideas off of, who have similar challenges at the same level in their growth“

A: (John Resig – Clear Left) “Understanding that the startup life wasn’t for me. It became most rewarding with a community.”

Q: “Is moving away from a small company and going corporate, the death of creativity?”

A: (Dustin Diaz – Twitter) “Twitter is always flowing with ideas. We all have different ideas and the constant challenge is to ways to implement the thinking of different people.”

Aside: Joe Stump had something relevant to say, which was unrelated to the question but makes sense to put here. “My number one rule is to hire people on the assumption that they great and potentially smarter than me.”

Q: “Are we creating a digital divide through building products that highly sophisticated and require more and more bandwidth?”

A: (John Resig – Clear Left) “There is a mobile digital divide that I’m realizing, most things now being developed android phones and the iPhone.”
The panelists earlier noted that the computer as we now use it is moving away from the need of an Operating System. The panelists assert that they spend less time using some of the functionality they once needed Operating Systems for. More people with team members that work remotely use Google Docs and other web based equivalents.

Some questions also came from delegates and this one in particular by Toby Shapshak I found really worth sharing.

Q: “With the browser becoming bigger and essentially what the internet is becoming, how do you fit that into mobile phones for use on cellphone screens?”

A: (Jonathan Snook – Yahoo!) “Get to the core of what you are trying to build and deliver that to your user. Essentially, products developed for the web have to be delivered differently for mobile phones.”

The session was quite eye-opening considering that while developing a product you also have to think of the business element related to the product.

Mongezi Mtati
http://www.mongezimtati.co.za/
@Mongezi

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

When Developers Get Antsy

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 not often in SA that you get to hear a group of developers chew the fat. Well, you get it all the time. But not these developers. Tech4Africa 2010 offered an “Intimate Q&A” panel with Andy Budd (Clear Left), Dustin Diaz (Twitter, previously Google/Gmail), Joe Stump (SimplyGeo, previously Digg), John Resig (Mozilla Foundation (jQuery), Jonathan Snook (Yahoo!). These are guys that are at the coalface of the biggest, most successful Web development projects in the world.

It was a lively, and very funny discussion. First up were some general words of wisdom from Joe Stump, developer extraordinaire (see separate post on his presentation on scaling Web environments to global audience). He’s from the Valley… and he says his greatest asset there is his network. Many great developers, many great companies, many great brains, all sharing information and supporting others. Being commercial competitors doesn’t mean technology people shouldn’t help each other. Developers in Africa should build their networks, build their connections, and don’t be shy to ask for help and to share. Right. Enough serious stuff.

Some great quotable quotes:

* Can we ban the use of the word “Cloud”? Can we maybe use the word “Internet”?

* Question: Are frameworks stopping people investigating the depths of jscript? Answer: No-one wants to investigate the depths of jscript.

* Question: Will Flash be killed by HTML5?
Answer 1: Flash is the Cobol of the Internet.
Answer 2: It won’t go away for a long time, particularly for video.

* There are so many security holes in Flash, and people are driving buses through them.

* We’re getting clients saying, “Can you HTML5 our site?” and I think, “What the hell are you talking about?”

* The website is not the service, its just a gateway to the service.

* In the future, the browser is going to have more direct access to the hardware. The browser will become the OS, with more power and features.
(Ed’s note: What happens when the browser is so powerful and hardware-connected it will replace the OS. Will we then need a small, lightweight browser in the big fat OS-browser?)

* To go global you have to work on a baseline User Interface – don’t just develop for latest browsers, computers and phones.

Roger Hislop
www.sentientbeing.co.za
@d0dja

Let’s talk development at Tech4Africa

The countdown has begun, and with less than 2 weeks till the most diverse and unique conference in South African tech history kicks off, all the last minutes plans are being put into place. We can’t wait for the doors to open and introduce you to some of the most prolific speakers from both South Africa as well as internationally.

A big focus at Tech4Africa will be focused on development and how local startups can benefit from learning from some of the best Developers from the biggest platforms around the world. Guys like Dustin Diaz from Twitter &  John Resig from Mozilla are just some of the big names to join us at Tech4Africa.

Jonathan Snook from Yahoo will be looking at how iPhone & Android development are growing rapidly, and how you can create the perfect and usable app. Jonathan comes from a long history of web development and developing apps, and will no doubt share his fantastic knowledge on these topics.

Another session not to miss is by Andy Budd, who is an interaction designer and web standards developer from Brighton, England. Andy leads the user experience team at Clearleft, and will be hosting a session called “Ignore User Experience at your peril”. User experience is essential when developing a new product, and Andy will take us through the steps to ensure it is done 100% correctly.

With Twitter growing daily in leaps in bounds, Lead User interface engineer, Dustin Diaz, will be sharing his tips & tricks when developing with Javascript. In his session called “Unobtrusive interfaces with js” will assist developers in ensuring user interfaces are are always rich & engaging.

Another Javascript ninja, John Resig, will be presenting a session called “6 secrets to becoming a jQuery ninja”, in which John will be showing you the tricks of the trade on how to become the ultimate jQuery ninja. John comes with a wealth of jQuery knowledge is the lead developer of the jQuery Javascript library.

If there is one session you do NOT want to miss at Tech4Africa, it will be the Q&A session with all these guys, joined by Joe Stump from SimpleGeo. Andy Budd, Dustin Diaz, John Resig, Jonathan Snook & Joe Stump will all join in a 1 hour Q&A session panel, where they will be answering your questions as well as answering an interesting question – “What was your hardest challenge, and how did you overcome it?” Be sure to join the guys on the Thursday at 11:00

It’s not only the international chaps who will be sharing their experiences with you, we have a fantastic South African panel called “Ideas are cheap, execution is everything. Live to bootstrap.”
The panel will be headed up by Brett Haggard who is joined by Barbara Mallinson from Obami, Eve Dmchowska from Crowdfund,  our very own Gareth Knight from Technovated & Andy Higgins from BidorBuy. The panel will look at how South Africans need to bootstrap their product and without losing perspective or faith.

Last but not least we will also be hosting Erik Hersman who was the man behind the ever popular African open source project Ushahidi, which allows users to crowd source crisis information to be sent via mobile. Erik will share his story on how Ushahidi has grown into the international success it is today.

With a lineup like this, you cannot afford to miss Tech4Africa this year. If you have not registered your place yet, we suggest you do so ASAP. Places are running out fast, this is one conference you do NOT want to miss out on !