Tag: Web

5 reasons why Tech4Africa 2011 is the technology event of the year

As we start the second half of 2011, the technology landscape is changing at such a pace that the need to be current and timely is greater than ever.  It’s clear that mobile reach will be far greater than the PC, and that apps will be the deciding factor for the market winning device or platform.

It’s not quite the hysteria of 1999, but we are starting to reach a tipping point where most of the worlds population that could be online, are.  Perhaps more importantly, the benefit of this connectedness is felt even more in Africa where people who did not have a voice, now do.  With that as the foundational plumbing, the usefulness and immediacy of mobile will drive more and more people to consume services, utilise data, and engage socially, which then drives demand for cloud based services accessible anywhere and on any device.

Building on the success of Tech4Africa 2010, we’re back in October 2011, and even better! Our themes for this year are Mobile, Social and Cloud, and through listening to great feedback from the 2010 event, our schedule has changed somewhat to focus on fewer talks with deeper content, and expanded to include relevant events for the African tech industry. These are the highlights that make Tech4Africa 2011 the technology event of the year:

1 – Featuring Josh Spear and Herman Chinery-Hesse as keynote speakers, plus 8 more great international speakers.

2 – African speakers who are experts in their fields will share their experiences about developing tech businesses in Africa.

3 – The Trade Show runs through the duration of the conference, and is an ideal opportunity for African technology businesses to showcase their products and/or services in an environment of buyers, decision makers, journalists, tweeters, bloggers and potential recruits.

4 – Ignite is a startup competition, aimed at giving exposure to the hottest new startups, while introducing them to prospective investors, customers and the media.

5 – Presented to a single winner, the Innovation Award encourages innovation for solving uniquely African problems, whilst also encouraging global thinking.  The Award recognises that innovation can be entrepreneurial, as well as intrapreneurial, and so is open to anyone or any company.

It’s through these initiatives and more in the coming years, that we’re delivering on our objectives of Engage, Inspire, Enable, and Innovate. We hope that you can join us at the technology event of the year, running for two full days on the 27th & 28th October, at The Forum, in Bryanston, Johannesburg. To avoid disappointment, book your ticket now.

We’d love to follow you on Twitter too!  We’re @t4a

Africa: problem or opportunity?

In his article “Why does being in Africa make you untrustworthy?“, Erik Hersman points out to the fact that Africans are generally suspects by default to the eyes of global corporations, which often put the continent off their radar.

Africa could be a continent of contrasts, but with lots of potentiality too. If only the world stopped making easy generalizations and looked closer to realize that.

One of the key factors for any business is to assess and be real about the context and the market in which operates. Thus, more accurate solutions can be provided to address specific needs, what improves the chance of success. If the context is problematic, that means there are needs to be fulfilled, and therefore that could be seen as an opportunity.

Tech4Africa_Ushahidi_Conference_Technology_AfricaAn example of this could be Hersman’s own enterprise, Ushahidi, a website that was initially developed to map reports of violence in Kenya after the post-election fallout at the beginning of 2008, and which now it has become a platform with global reach.

Ushahidi is a world-class technology service, but owes its roots to providing a solution to the very African need of transparency, which turns out to be a global issue.
The organization’s technology is open source, and it is often used by Internet writer Clay Shirky as an example of a successful crowdsourcing movement.

Other entrepreneurs and businesses are also working to provide services tied up to specific regional socio-cultural and economic facts, as were seen at Tech4Africa 2010. Services like PesaPal (a mobile payments company in Nairobi, Kenya) or mPedigree (allows consumers to verify with a free text message if their medicines are safe), are proving to be on the right track when addressing local needs via the most used and available technology in their target markets.

Many other startup services in Africa are choosing to use SMS as their trading platform, among other things, due to the scarce Internet connectivity and the broader use of the cell phone in many areas of the continent. And companies are focusing on that too, such is the case of Zain Nigeria, which is offering its customers access to Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo via SMS.

Nevertheless, whether focused on local, regional or global needs, African technology startups and companies must build their products based on the highest standards, and for that it’s important to keep in touch with the world’s latest developments and practices, if the continent wants to get into the world’s radar and export its innovative products or play globally.

All in all, one of the ways to bootstrap Africa to the spotlight might be what the aforementioned African organizations are already doing; which is, as Erik Hersman put it in his article: “to come up with our own business solutions that work here first, and then interact with other global systems.”

Do you agree this could be a solution? Should Africans see the problems or the opportunities?

Photo courtesy of @whiteafrican via Flickr/Creative Commons

Tech4Africa: The PanAfrican Perspective

“Until lions have their own historians, tales of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.” ~ African Proverb

That proverb has been used to sum up the continent’s state (or fate) for a long time. And what’s become more apparent is that in some cases, you need to point out which Africa you are referring to, South Africa or the rest of Africa. Given that we’re now seeing the kind of innovative web & technology startups coming from Nigeria and Kenya, the Tech4Africa conference put a lot into perspective.

South Africa has always been one of the main doors into the continent. A leading economy no doubt with a vibrant entrepreneurial space with the likes of Naspers showing how powerful an emerging market this is. However, even as the crown jewel of the continent, with we’re beginning to see a balance play out with the South, East & West shifting as each develops not on a linear path, one after the other, but each on its own tangent, converging and diverging with time.

Take Kenya for instance, who recently trumped South Africa in broadband thanks to services like Wananchi Online & Cisco’s Zuku which brings fiber-to-the-home and an uncapped service of 1 MBps as well as 100 television channels. Crisis mapping and visualisation platform Ushahidi was the centre of attention at Tech4Africa, from cofounder Erik Hersman sharing their missteps, challenges and shortfalls in “failing spectacularly.” Even to mentions from Clay Shirky at Tech4Africa and his most recent TED Talk where he shares how it began, and how it fits in with his thoughts on collaboration and cognitive surplus. Or in West Africa, where Bright Simons and mPedigree are changing the pharmaceutical landscape by allowing consumers to verify via SMS the authenticity and safety of their medicines.

Leila Janah, keynote speaker at T4A, spoke about her non-profit Samasource, who’ve created a network of 800 women, youth and refugees across the world in developing countries and empowering them with digital work and resources to make better livelihoods. Her keynote showed the scale, reach and impact of Samasource’s efforts as well as their plans and challenges. It’s certainly clear that East and West Africa are learning from South Africa and now more than ever, the continent’s developing three pillars to build on.

Any pan African approach will present very unique challenges in comparison with what works in South Africa and Tech4Africa’s ability to share between tried and tested practice in the Southern part of Africa, with input from The East and West and an international perspective is what differentiated it for me.

Whether it was debating approaches for the mobile marketing arena shared or the insightful tips and tricks behind the proposed redesign of Payfine.co.za or Andy Budd’s entire session at that. The value in creating simple, relevant user experiences may inadvertently not be at the top of many priority lists across the continent but from what the principles behind it are, what they unlock can be the difference between success and failure. We can expect that with time, these user experience and interaction principles will adapt and be tailored to fit the African context in new ways.

The inspiration and vision to shift perceptions about Africa and those in Africans about the possibilities for great things when it comes to technology are what struck me about Gareth and his remarkable team. Gareth Knight, the man who returned to South Africa bearing the Tech4Africa vision has been the one brave enough to take the first step. And if one African proverb proves true then as Gareth leads this generation to plant the seeds, we’ll wait to how the next generation of Africans use the shade.

It was certainly an honour to witness this beginning.

Mark Kaigwa
http://ukwelii.wordpress.com
@mkaigwa

It’s the Storefront, Stupid

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

Andy Budd has done some great work on a bunch of major sites, from BBC on down. He’s a user interface and usability guru.

He started his talk putting the value pyramid into a usability context. If you take a business that provides a commodity (coffee bean), then a product (packaged coffee), then a service-backed offering (coffee shop), then a complete experience (coffee shop with baristas and sexy acid jazz piped music), you’ll normally increase profit at every point. (Ed: gross profit, what happens when you factor the cost of all the premium customer support staff and beautiful designer stuff is another story).

But in a Web paradigm, moving from a ‘commodity’ web service to an ‘experience’ for users is a critical and necessary step for long term success, because if you can do a basic site, so can a hundred other people.

Budd had an interesting pyramid on product/service maturity, particularly relevant to creators of Web service: first functional, then useful, then usable, then delightful, then meaningful. As in, people would hate to live without it.

And key to this is great user experience. Not the technology. Not the cleverness of the site. Not the number of features. The user experience. Think Apple. (Sorry, they’re the obvious standard.)

These are his main points when designing sites for usability:

Think of your Website as a shopfront – and think about it in the same way as Mary Queen of Shops (the TV show).

* First impressions count
* Shop window must communicate your purpose and intent
* ‘Desire lines’ drive people deeper into the store (cute, clever, creative things that pull people in further)
* What is your advisor and your guide to visitors? (think hotel concierge)
* Look at video tours to make your users experts quickly… show people around
* Have a gimmick that makes it fun
* Be helpful
* Keep things simple, and focus
* Reduce the number of options available
* Use sensible defaults
* Wow your users with exciters and delighters (think of the little chocolates left on the pillow at hotels)

In terms of feature planning:
* As a startup create a minimum viable product
* Do one thing and one thing well

In service:
* Provide exceptional service
* Be there when things go wrong – great things can happen at the intersection of customers and the business at the point where things go wrong

Of course, the problem in SA is our business culture is not usually one of excellence, of constant improvement. It will be a hard job for Web design teams to convince management once the site is finished to spend another million bucks on usability testing, user experience research, tweaking, trying different things. They’ll probably say, “The site is up. It works. Piss off.”

Budd’s suggestion is for the Web team to sit with the marketing team (the most likely allies in building usability) to help create a business case to take to management.

Good luck with that.

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

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

Leila C. Janah inspires delegates to change the world

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

The keynote speaker for the first day of Tech4Africa 2010 was Leila Chirayath Janah from Samasource, a woman that every one of us should aspire to be like. She gave up a life in America to come to Africa to teach.

Out of this she founded Samasource, which allows people living in poverty to cross the digital divide. Leila surprised the audience with some astounding stats on education and literacy levels in Africa, which are higher than we all think. The real problem is lack of work, unemployment drives young people to join terrorist organisations in droves because it is the only way to earn money to feed their families.

Local trade and crafts does not make an impact on the poor either. Products made by poor people are often only bought by locals or a few tourists, making a maximum of $1 a day for the sellers.

Conversely, most corporations do not make products that are affordable for the majority of the 3rd world citizens. In Leila’s words, ‘we must engage the bottom of the pyramid if we are to eradicate poverty‘.

Samasource’s mission is to connect poor people to work via the internet, it builds tools to allow their customers to work with them without outsourcing to a large company.

According to Leila, “the Internet is not just an information superhighway, its a work superhighway”, we can use the tools and connectivity the internet provides to make a real difference to global unemployment.

Samasource’s key value proposition is the ‘virtual assembly lines’, where companies give work on a per task basis. This allows people to work from local centers and internet cafes, eliminating the need to travel long distances to big cities to find work.

The system, and Leila herself, is inspiring and taught every delegate at Tech4Africa today that we can use the internet to make a difference and we don’t have to be rich or famous to do it. We can only hope that local initiatives like Heather Ford’s ‘GeekRetreat’ can follow in Leila’s footsteps and we, as South African Geeks, can begin to bridge the gap between the connected and the rest.

Heidi Schneigansz
http://snowgoose.co.za
@snowgoosesa