Startup Weekend Lagos Is On

The hall is large, the teams are clustered in different parts of empty space quietly working on their products. The quietness belies the intensity with which the teams are working. You can’t really tell at first glance what is going on. No company brand banners litter the room. No customer t-shirts worn by the participants. Nothing really shows that out of this room, out of this weekend could come Nigeria’s next internet phenomenon. This is Startup Weekend Lagos .

March of the Androids

Early last year when the iPad arrived on the scene, my African iPad series imagined what an Africa-specific tablet would be like and concluded with a concept of a tablet that ran on Google’s mobile OS, Android. Now, in January 2011, three Android tablets are prominent right now in the Nigerian market. The Samsung Galaxy Tab, the Starcomms MyPad and Encipher Group’s Inye.

2011: Rise of the Nigerian Internet

Today is January 1, 2011. For the last 3 weeks, most of the blogs and online publications I read have been reviewing 2010, making predictions for 2011 or both. Webtrends Nigeria’s Sheriff Shittu even asked several of us in the Twittersphere what our predictions were.

Looking at my end of year posts at the end of 2009, I realise that I didn’t do a review of predictions, instead I did a wish list. Sadly most of those items are still not fulfilled. Not yet. No stable electricity, no real eGovernment and the election preparations are just beginning to ramp up. Having said that, many of them were always going to be multi-year things anyway so I definitely do hold out hope to see them to pass. Most importantly, I should actively participate in helping them come to pass and in 2011 I plan to play my role. I hope you’ll play yours.

My First Interview – Answering Questions About the “Afrislate”

A couple of months ago, I wrote a 3 part series called the “African iPad”. In it I described the features of a hypothetical African tablet device based on the design principles of the Apple iPad. After that, I mentally told myself that I was not going to spend anymore time writing about the iPad, slates, or tablets – at least not for a good long while. However, in not-as-far-as-it-once-was China, someone read the series and had a few questions of their own.

Debating the African Internet Industry with Kachwanya

A couple of weeks ago I posted my response to a conversation that started on Techmasai as a blog post. I called it “Clone Wars: The Prelude”. The gentleman who started the conversation brought the discussion over here by posting a response to it. I tried to reply his comments, but the commenting system said my reply was too long. So I decided to make it a blog post again. The commentator, a Kenyan blogger and software consultant who maintains a very nice looking blog over at www.kachwanya.com, wrote his thoughts:

Clone Wars – The Prelude.

I have been thinking of doing a series for sometime now that I was going to call “Clone Wars” in which I was going to discuss Nigerian sites that are copies of international sites and look at the pros and cons of that approach to internet commerce. It was a series I was going to treat with a lot of care because while my initial thinking was that cloning wasn’t a good idea or something that I respected, I have since rethought that perspective I realised that there is actually a lot of potential and validity to cloning if handled well.

Well, about a week ago, Techmasai (Munashe Gumbonzvanda) wrote a post entitled “Opinion Piece: An Experiment To Utilize Mostly African Social Media Platforms” in which he said he was going to stop using non-African internet tools where possible as an experiment and to “focus and engage our primary audience more openly and regularly.”

I wrote a comment on that post:

“I'd like to see how your experiment plays out. How do you measure it as a success or not a success? It's not an experiment if there isn't something you measure and results you can share. May take on using African social media is that they have to give me something more than the competition. In other words they have to give me more value the others. So for instance with twitter, I can log on to disqus with my twitter account to post this. I can't with gistcaster. In such I pay the highest compliment to our local entrepreneurs by holding them to the same standard I would the international equivalent. They have to provide me at least as much value as their better known competition or they have to give me something compelling that the others can't. No one international gives me what www.1spotsearch.com gives me for instance, on the other none of our pan-African social networks gives me what I get from say facebook. In summary, I need differentiation from any web app from me to use it, whereever it comes from.”

Elevating The Internet Industry: 3 Things We Need

Last week, we had the East/West Twitter Chat with Internet entrepreneurs from different parts of Africa and the Diaspora. You can find the transcript here, starting from the “2:01 PM” mark. The intense 90 minute session may not have quite fulfilled its mission, but it did provide valuable lessons. One of them is the lack of, and great need for, greater community among Africa's technology practitioners - whatever regional scope they may choose to exist in. Kenya has the iHub. Conferences and Unconferences are events where for a few brief moments like-minded individuals gather and share ideas and make connections. There are a few tenuous connections revolving around a few blogs and Twitter connections. This is not enough. I believe we need to put 3 things in place to strengthen what we are building.

Take A Bow

In two days an event I helped orchestrate, or at the least planted the seed for, will take place where African Technology Entrepreneurs from the east and west coasts will compare notes about what makes them who they are. These are men and women who have committed themselves, for many reasons, to make the internet the tool they will use to change their individual fortunes or those of their societies, and in some cases both.

They do this in the face of great difficulty. In Nigeria we simply do not have electricity. Individual access to the internet is ridiculously expensive. let’s not even get started on the political issues. The folks on other side of the continent have their own equally daunting challenges. Still they have determined to make this their canvas for creativity and their marketplace for prosperity.

Despite the difficulties, these visionaries strive on to make their mark on the world. As a blogger, I have the really easy part. I look at what other people are doing and say things like “you should have done it this way” or “you should do this instead of that” or even “what a stupid idea that was”. I can make broad sweeping pronouncements from the comfort of my keyboard. I can chronicle in a few thousand words what people lived and suffered through. It is dead easy to be just like every armchair Arsenal fan declaring what he would have done in Wengar’s shoes. I am not one of those spending sleepless nights pounding away at lines of code that don’t compile right until weeks of inspection show that the problem was using “0” instead of “O” in the 3795th line of the 97th class specification. Tough as my corporate IT job can be, I can only imagine the challenges of driving traffic to a great digital product that no one knows or cares about that comes up as the one million, three hundred and fifty-five thousand, nine hundred and sixty-second search result – and that’s after you’ve applied every search engine optimisation principle you can find. Then some bozo like me comes along and says it’s just another Facebook clone.

Which is why I write this piece to celebrate you guys. I and others like me will continue to write, both promoting and pummelling your work because, well it needs to be done. You need to be challenged to do better. To stretch your selves. To do more. We need to write to chronicle your challenges, to highlight your victories and record your errors for all to see and learn from. For in recording, we help give perspective to your works and in our own ways shape the future.

So, before I continue with that mission, I pause to celebrate your industry, your ingenuity and your tenacity. I think you guys are doing a tremendous work and I believe, Nigeria, Africa and the world as a whole will benefit from what you do. Some of you will even smile to the bank. So what if the ISP fouls up and the hard drive crashes, or you delete all your content because you slept off on your keyboard or just before you launched someone releases the exact same product? You’ll figure out a way to make it happen. You already have.

So, the Internet Entrepreneurs of Africa, all rise. Step forward. Take a bow.

Dej.

Image courtesy of shaggy359 at flickr.com.

Internet Business Cultures in Africa: East + West - ICTworks Twitter Chat

It’s official, the “East Helping West Helping East” discussion is taking place on 22nd of April. The actual title is less colourful, but more to the point. “Internet Business Cultures in Africa: East + West”. Find below, verbatim, the release from ICT Works:

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Last month, we had an amazing Skype Chat on Nigerian Internet Business Opportunities - over 40 entrepreneurs and netcitizens joined in a lively debate on new business models and enabling factors to bring Nigeria to the forefront of online business innovation.

But what about East Africa? Kenya surely has the same level of Internet-based buzz as Nigeria. And Uganda isn't far behind. So this brings forth a few questions we should examine:

1. How might Internet business opportunity and entrepreneurship be different in East Africa versus West Africa?
2. What could each region learn from the other?
3. And what can we do now to improve cross-Africa collaboration?

These are the questions we'll discuss in the next ICTworks Twitter Chat - a freewheeling conversation around our central questions on the Twitter platform.

We'll start at 14:00 GMT (your timezone) on April 22nd with introductions, then move into the discussion, using the#ICT4D hashtag in Twitter. Be sure to RSVP here.

• Handy Re-Tweet
  :Internet Business: East + West Africa -
  #ICT4D Tweet Chat 4/22 @ 14:00GMT -
  RSVP: http://bit.ly/april-chat

Our hope is to learn from each other and find ways we can increase Internet business opportunity and entrepreneurship across Africa.

---

So Register for the event and join the discussion this Thursday.

Dej.

East Helping West Helping East Helping West Helping… Well, You Get the Idea

Some weeks ago, Wayan Vota caused quite a stir when he wrote a post alleging that the Kenyan internet industry was better than the Nigerian internet industry. Quite a number of Nigerians weighed in on the blog and it resulted in a slew of comments and rejoinders (the Kenyans stayed out of the discussion for some reason). I suggested to Wayan then that we have a debate between the Nigerian and Kenyan industries to compare and contrast what made them what they were. Instead we ended up doing the highly productive discussion about the internet business opportunities available in Nigeria. The transcript of that discussion is here and my thoughts on it are here.

I added a bit of humour to my post reminding Wayan that he still owed me a debate between East African Internet entrepreneurs and West African Internet entrepreneurs. I believe there are interesting differences between what is happening in Nigeria and Kenya that are worth discussing. Kenyans seem to have solutions with a heavy focus on empowerment and socio-economic accessibility, while over here we seem to keep a very keen eye on the global trends and can rapidly iterate local versions of global solutions in a way that fits how our people do things.

This time Wayan agreed with the idea of a discussion and like the previous session we plan to do something at the end of this month (April, 2010). However, it has to be a meaningful discussion, not a bunch of African lions roaring superiority over each other. We came up with the following topic that we believe will be valuable to both sides and can help foster new and fruitful relationships: “The evolution of start-ups culture in Africa: how the East differs from the West and what we can learn from each other”.

We hope to get a group of entrepreneurs from both sides of Africa talking about their experiences and passing on learning points. We hope that out of this will come partnerships that will benefit Africa and the internet as a whole. While much of the thinking and discussion leading up to this has focused on Nigeria and Kenya, we do not plan to exclude internet business people from other parts of the continent and extend an invitation to all to participate.

I had to write this post before the details were worked out because one of the Kenyans that I invited, Joshua Wanyama of Afrinnovator, was cautious about participating without more information about what the purpose is. To reiterate, the purpose is getting African internet business people talking about the way things work in their societies in a way that will give everyone ideas, draw solutions to some of the pain points and cause an exchange of contact information that could result in a lot more coast to coast commerce and friendships.

I, Wayan, Possicon of WebTrends Nigeria, and others will share word on time, date, and forum once we have all that worked out. If you are interested, particularly if you are from outside Nigeria, please give me shout on Twitter at www.twitter.com/the_dej.

Dej.

Map courtesy of www.yourchildlearns.com. The interactive learning maps on the site are great for your kids to try out.

No Limits: Nigerian Internet Business is Only Beginning (and I don’t mean 419)

  Last week, on the 26th of March, I was privileged to be part of an open discussion on Nigerian Internet Business Opportunities hosted on Skype Public Chat by Wayan Vota of ICTWorks.org. Don’t be fooled by my being one of the headliners (noted internet expert ???), I was certainly the least of the cast of participants in the discussion. I’m just a blogger while most of the people in the “room” were entrepreneurs, developers, designers, and ICT4D (information and communication technology for development) professionals. There was quite a bit of valuable material from this session to fuel discussions for some time to come. I expect to have several posts that feed off that session. I have included the link to the transcript of the discussion here.

The conversation was really multiple streams and recapping it as such just won’t work. The only way I can think to do this is to list what I consider the high points and try and treat different ones in greater depth in my future writings. So, in no particularly coherent order, here goes…

• Like in so many other areas, there is no limit to the opportunity for creative and successful internet-oriented, internet-hosted and social development-focused internet business in Nigeria.
• There is quite a bit of narrowness in the way we look at the internet as a business environment in Nigeria. In addition to building our own solutions that face our own Nigerian society, we can outsource design and development skills internationally for a living wage. You could be here in Nigeria and earn Euros and dollars with your PHP skill sets. We need to look beyond what we have seen people do here in Nigeria and explore what other people all over the world are doing such as developing solutions for devices like the iPhone and Blackberry.
• Like the Alaba traders collaborate to get you that shoe from their warehouse (also known as the guy down the road’s shop), internet entrepreneurs need to collaborate in sharing talent, ideas and lending support to each other in order to make a challenging task easier.
• In order to take ourselves to the heights we can attain, we need to take the long view on this industry. Instant monetisation should not be a target as it will not build a business that can stand the test of time.
• The Nigerian internet entrepreneur needs to focus on identifying real problems that can be solved with ICT, solve those and expect to see the cash come in down the road. We really have more important needs to address than creating pure web offerings (“frothware”) that do not enhance us developmentally, economically, culturally or politically.
• We need to partner with thinkers and doers all over the world including Nigerians in the Diaspora, expatriates invested in seeing development in Africa and local people on the ground already addressing real world problems and determine how we can make them more effective with ICT.
• ICT is only one component of an arsenal that needs to be brought to bear on our myriad problems in Africa. In my role in corporate IT, I am constantly reminded that IT’s only value is in what it can do in solving real world problems. We must never think that ICT is a silver bullet that slay all demons. At it’s core, ICT’s role is to help us communicate, help us capture and store data, and help us transform data into information usable for decision-making.
• Those of us passionate about IT need to help as many people as we can become capable of creating things using the technologies we love.
• The technically minded types among us can look beyond ICT to other technical challenges such as cheap and sustainable electricity provision, healthcare innovations, agriculture, and many more.
• We need to match technologists with business experts in order to get the best of both skill-sets.
• There are multiple tiers to the technology possibilities. As much as the Web is the richest, we should not ignore SMS, voice and low-bandwidth optimised internet solutions.
• Rather than building things from scratch we should take advantage of existing platforms, code libraries and APIs in order to extend existing functionality.
• Indeed we need schools and incubation programs to better prepare our young people (and the not-so young) to take bright ideas and turn them into viable real world solutions.
• While governments are a significant factor (even if it is only so we can duck when we see them coming doing the road) in providing some amount of infrastructure and regulation, and providing a stable polity, we cannot wait on them to provide anything and must embark on our missions, whatever they are as if the obstacles will melt away at approach.
• When we do come face to face with those obstacles, right there is a business opportunity for us or someone else to solve.

There are a lot of very smart technologists out there that are ethnologically, socially, economically and emotionally invested in Nigeria. In the one hour or so that I spent chatting with them I was impressed with the talent in the room and convinced that if more people like this are brought together more often and in ways that we can work on things together, we can make all the difference in the world.

@wayan: you still owe me a knockdown, drag out debate on the East Coast versus West Coast start-ups thing.

Dej.

An African iPad Part 3: Envisioning the Afrislate

This was going to be the article in which I tied together the concepts I had put forward in parts one and two of this series. I would have put to rest a line of thought that started when I realised that the iPad did not need to live up to the hype. I was going to go into some detail about the Android ecosystem that, at least for now, makes it the best platform to be the operating system for an African iPad. I was going to talk about the openness, that would let us modify its internals to suit our uniquely African requirements. I would have envisioned development shops opening up in every computer science students’ dorm room churning out simple yet amazing apps for the thing. I would have enthused about the ability to either download apps from everywhere, or develop a specific library (an app store) of apps targeted at some specialised group such as students, farmers or doctors. I was going to let my imagination fly to imagine a continent wide effective (finally) mobile/online micropayment system driven by the platform.

I was going to celebrate how the Android allowed for multi-tasking, access to the full hardware and allowed for a common file storage space accessible to any apps that needed that access. The fact that you could make it access any and every common tech standard out there from Adobe Flash to JAVA. The fact that you didn’t need to pay any licensing fees to anyone to use it. I was going to declare it a platform limited only by the imagination.

Then I was going to veer over into the hardware story. I would have traced the history of computing hardware in Africa and Nigeria in particular. I would have talked about the whole importation thing. The dumping of used and trashy, toxic hardware in Nigeria. Then I would have talked about Omatek, Zinox, Veda and even Anabel Mobile, as companies that are have transitioned from importation, backroom system assembly to local system factories (no different from the Dells of this world). Hardware businesses focused on a Nigerian device experience. I would have speculated on what it would take them to actually design and build their own tablet systems. I would have then held up the JooJoo which started it’s life as Michael Arrington’s CrunchPad as a demonstration of prototyping a forward thinking device without multimillion dollar R&D. This would have shown that it doesn’t take a lot to put it together – even if initially we would have gone to the Chinese to actually build it. Then I would have looked at the cost component and examined iSuppli’s analysis of how relatively cheaply Apple is building the iPad and argued that we could have brought ours in at costs close to the XO laptop’s.

Finally, I would have rounded up with a summary of recommended specs for the device and a challenge to someone, somewhere to go out and build the dream device. However, there’s no point in writing any of that anymore. You see, someone already went and built the thing.

OK, so it isn’t really the African iPad, but a few days ago, German company called Neophonie unveiled a new product called, wait for it, the WePad.

This device is spec-for-spec better than the iPad. TechCrunch put them side by side:

	WePad	iPad
Display	11.6-inch (1,366 x 768 pixels)	9.7-inch (1,024 x 768 pixels)
Processor	1,66 GHz Intel Atom N450 Pineview-M	1,0 GHz Apple A4
Memory	16 GB NAND Flash (optional 32 GB internal + 32 GB SDcard)	16 / 32 / 64 GB
Webcam	1,3 Megapixel	None
Ports	2 USB ports, card reader, audio out, SIM card slot, multi pin connector	Apple connector for camera or card reader as peripherals
Flash / Adobe AIR	Yes / Yes	No / No
App Store	WePad AppStore + Google Android Marketplace	iTunes App Store
Multitasking	Yes	Restricted, allowed only for Apple apps
Battery life	6 hours	10 hours
eBook format	All open standards	Proprietary Apple format from iBooks store
Wireless connect	Bluetooth 2.1, WiFi N, 3G optional	Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR, WiFi N, 3G optional
Body	Magnesium-Aluminium	Aluminium
Size	288 x 190 x 13 mm	242.8 x 189.7 x 13,4 mm
Weight	800 g (850 g with 3G)	680 g

Now there are lots of Android-based tablet devices rumoured and actually under development, and one should not rule out of the utility of the more conventional convertible tablet laptop form factor, but this device embodies what the African iPad really could be. Neophonie created their own custom app store like we should create our own app store while still maintaining links to the Android MarketPlace. They made provision for standard device accessories (USB) like a device for the common man should have. While no pricing has been publically set, it is expected to be significantly cheaper than the the iPad when it launches in April.

The point is, this device, this fabled African iPad, is eminently achievable. The possibilities for an educational and computing renaissance from such a device on the continent are immense. Remember, this is Africa, we leapfrog the bleeding edge of technology. We make commonplace what the more technologically sophisticated societies slowly build up to and have difficulty adapting to. We do not need to hold ourselves to the aged metaphor of keyboard, mouse and window. We can grab the new emerging metaphors that devices like the iPad, Android and Windows Phone 7 Series are, and  reshape them to become what we need right here, in this place, this Africa. Without a doubt, we can and should create… the Afrislate.

Anyone?

Dej.

Regrettably neither of the pictures are mock-ups of an Afrislate. The top is the CrunchPad prototype from TechCrunch and the bottom is the WePad. 

ICT4D Skype Chat: Nigerian Internet Business Opportunities

Nigeria is a huge nation by any measure. Largest population in Africa, stupendous mobile phone adoption rate and 11 million internet users. The nation is a ripe platform for internet and communication services for transformation in Education, Commerce, Security and other aspects of national development. However, it doesn’t seem to be happening like it should. If anything, other African nations seem to have a better handle on this than we do.
Wayan Vota over at ICTWorks.org lit a bit of a fire when he blogged “Is Kenya beating Nigeria in Internet Business Opportunities?”. We Nigerians never take such things lying down and the debate in the comments section of his blog about his assertion got so heated, we decided to take the discussion live during ICT Works’ monthly ICT4D Chat.
A group of tech experts, bloggers, internet entrepreneurs and industry watchers will be getting together online using Skype Public Chat to tear into the subject of the whys and wherefores of the Nigerian internet industry. The discussions will be about why we are the way we are, the opportunities there are out there and the challenges to overcome.
Hosting the discussion is Wayan Vota and featured Nigerian internet experts and pundits include

• Loy Okezie of StartupsNigeria
• Oladejo Fabolude of Digital Crossings
• Sheriff Shittu O. of WebTrends Nigeria
• Oluniyi David Ajao of Web4Africa

The discussions are wide open for everyone to get a word in so why not join us at the next ICT4D Public Skype Chat:
Nigeria Internet Business Opportunities
ICT4D Skype Public Chat
6pm, Lagos Time, March 26th
(find  in your timezone)
The official press release for the event is right here. So what are you waiting for? Put the ICT4D Skype Chat in your calender now!
 Dej.
The picture of five was shamelessly liberated from www.loyokezie.com who shamelessly used our pictures.

An African iPad Part 2: Why We Must Build Our Own

  Children using their XO Laptops

We should build our own iPad. As I said in part 1, Apple’s business model is not in anyway Africa-friendly. It doesn’t have to be, but it does mean that we either do it Apple’s way or we develop our way. We have consistently seen too many “outsiders” come and try to make us do it their way.

Over the years, Africa has been on the receiving end of various schemes to make computing accessible (read “cheap”) to us. These schemes have taken a variety of forms. First there’s the second hand computer approach. Old and disused computers are cleaned up and brought over here and sold for low prices. One of the biggest downsides is that it ended up as a scheme for businesses in developed countries to get rid of their toxic junk and earn tax credits as well as good PR in the process. Then there’s the scheme that looks for low cost components that ends up building a cheap and subpar computer with minimal memory and a retarded operating system. Even Microsoft got in on the act with a version of Windows XP for sale in developing nations.

Nicholas Negroponte and his One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Project took a different approach. He set out to produce a high-quality, low-cost computer for children in the developing world. What’s interesting about his approach was that rather than looking for a bunch of cheap components, slamming them into a thin plastic casing and dumping Windows 3.1 on the box, his team developed some significant technological advancements in their bid to meet a design goal without compromising on quality. Sure their laptop, named the “XO”, had to compromise on things like storage, memory (which is expandable with USB and SD anyway) and raw processing power, but these “compromises” were made up for with what actually made it into the box.

This device contained technology that made it very readable in bright sunlight. Try that with your MacBook. It could use mains power, could be charged using a hand crank, or even by solar power. It is a convertible tablet device (though not touch-screen) and had extensive battery life. The XO implemented an innovative wireless mesh network technology that boosted connectivity the more computers there were on the network. A whole new operating system interface was developed for this device that focused on the tasks of learning with valuable software delivered by creative minds. Being shock and spill resistant, it could be used by children, those destructive monsters, for up to 5 years and live to tell the tale.

This thing had features in it that high end computers today still don’t have. It spawned competitors like the Intel Classmate PC and had Microsoft trying to figure out how to get Windows on it. Though they didn’t make their target of a hundred dollars per unit, it still came in at under two hundred dollars.

Then the OLPC went and ruined it.

This device is only available by three means. First they made deals with governments and these governments bought and distributed it. I don’t need to say anything about governments and their ability to get things that we want or need into our hands. Second was a scheme where Americans (you know, people with credit cards) could buy two on Amazon.com, one for themselves and one as a gift to a child in a developing nation (and only  once a year at Christmas). The third method? Buy one off someone on eBay. So a high quality device that could change the computing landscape as we know it is made extremely constrained by its distribution model. The OLPC organisation have their reasons for doing this, but it does show that the dreamers of this product are outsiders looking in and trying to define for us how best to get our computing.

Not so the Indians. The “Hole In The Wall” computer project came about from an Indian computer scientist thinking about educating the street kids (think “Slumdog Millionaire”) of India.

Dr. Mitra heads research and development at NIIT, a leading computer software and training company in New Delhi. Just outside his office is a wall that separates his air-conditioned 21st-century office from a slum. Mitra decided to place a high-speed computer in the wall, connect it to the Internet, and watch who, if anyone, might use it. To his delight, curious children were immediately attracted to the strange new machine. "When they said, 'Can we touch it?'" Mitra recalls, "I said, 'It's on your side of the wall.' The rules say whatever is on their side, they can touch, so they touched it."

Within minutes, children figured out how to point and click. By the end of the day they were browsing. "Given access and opportunity," observes O'Connor, "the children quickly taught themselves the rudiments of computer literacy."

One boy in particular, Rajinder, has become a computer whiz and a celebrity in India. "Mainly I go to the Disney site," Rajinder tells FRONTLINE/World, but he also regularly visits news sites and likes to use computer paint tools. His teacher says that Rajinder is a much better student now: "He has become quite bold and expressive. I've got great hopes for this child."

While he didn’t create a new technology, Dr. Mitra did present technology to people who would never have been given the opportunity access to it. His experiment has been replicated in lots of Indian communities improving the quality of education of the affected children. He bridged the divide.

We don’t need to copy Dr. Mitra’s exact experiment, but we do need to copy his method of looking inward to addressing this problem and, in our different African societies, come up with ways to bring technology to our people that results in rapid adoption and a marked increase in applicable education.

One technology that is rapidly becoming ubiquitous across social strata and geographical location is the humble mobile phone. This device has amazing potential. It can and is delivering some of what we need, but its form factor and associated technologies can only go so far. I believe one of the ways get to where we need to be is to borrow a leaf from the OLPC, take the design lessons from the iPad feature set and build our own device. Having said all that, I do not believe we actually have to start from scratch to create an African product that has the design values of the iPad or the XO. The core of any computing product is the operating system and several viable options already exist. One possible operating system option is currently seeing increasing adoption on non-PC form factor devices. This OS is free. Its creators are ready and willing to support its use anywhere we want to put it. We can build any business model we choose around it. One that suits us. It even has Apple running scared.

This operating system is called Android.

To be continued…

Dej.

Picture courtesy of flickr.com

An African iPad: Part 1

Earlier this week, my very first guest blog post was published in Loy Okezie’s blog. It is entitled “Why The iPad Doesn’t Impress And Why It Doesn’t Need To”. One of the reasons it ended up there rather than here was because I sold the idea to Loy before I decided to go full tech here on the Crossings. Having said that, thanks to Loy for letting someone else, me, write in his space. I mention all this because this week here I will still be sort of focused on the iPad.

As I wrote in the article, a lot has been said about Apple’s iconic tablet computer in a wide variety of media and from a huge variety of perspectives. There are extremes of adoration and approbation for the device and it isn’t even on the market yet. The only writer I know of who has written about it with an eye to its possible impact in Africa is TechMasai’s Munashe Gumbonzvanda and I am frankly not surprised. I really cannot imagine that at any point in time during the design and development process did Apple consider the needs of this continent. You and I that might want one (or at the very least are even willing to read its feature set) are the insignificant minority and Cupertino no doubt treated us as such. For the majority, it is another toy for those with more money than sense. It is a toy that is dependent on internet access, the ownership of a credit card, a debit card, or a paypal account, and a large disposable income.

And yet, at the core of the iPad could well be the key to Africa’s crossing the digital divide. Computing as we know it today is tied to the monitor, keyboard, mouse and whatever operating system you use. However you roll, Windows, Linux or MacOS X, the user experience and the learning curve are more or less the same. You have a start menu or launch pad for your applications which appear in boxes called “windows” and you did various things within said windows. Before you can use the computer you first of all have to figure out the pieces of the equipment, then you need to learn the OS, then you need to figure out how most applications work. We tout and celebrate what we call computer literacy and pad our CVs with a list of the versions of Microsoft Office we can use. Then when we finally figure out enough of the interface to be productive, we spent half our time configuring, installing, downloading, protecting and fixing the stupid equipment.

For those of us who work in IT, this is our bread and butter. However for the customers who interface with teams like mine everyday, they are resigned to, but unimpressed with and irritated by the fact that they need us to get their work done. The glory of the iPad and its predecessor the iPod Touch is that it can eliminate 90% of that interference and bring the user that much closer to their goal whether it is to consume content or, despite what many say, to create content. The iPad’s A4-size screen and it’s multi-touch interface are so intuitive that toddlers have figured it out (at least the iPhone). You don’t need expensive training to get people who are terrified of computers to use it. You do minimal configuring to get it working. Even if you are not familiar with the idiom of computing you can get productive very quickly. Perhaps Om Malik can best communicate the sheer sense of potential (even though I disagreed with him on Twitter).

The minute I touched the iPad at the Apple event a few weeks ago, I knew my world and my idea of computing had been transformed, irrevocably and irreversibly. I’m not sure why some of my friends, who have helped me shape my thinking about devices, Antonio Rodriguez for example, are disappointed with this device, whose potential is limited only by one’s imagination.

When I look at the iPad, I see a clean slate to reinvent pretty much how we think of media, information and in fact the whole user experience. Why do we have to think in terms of a keyboard — real or virtual? How can we not be excited about the very idea of a media experience based on touch?

Picture this: an African class room in some rural village somewhere. Each student has an iPad. The classroom material is distributed via Wi-Fi. Assignments are completed and submitted via the same means. The entire school library is available digitally, so no building needs to be dedicated to storing books (and this saves trees). Multimedia content is available on the device to illustrate farming machinery, remote geographies, performance art: audiovisual lessons that are easy to create, easy to disseminate and to review over and over again. They get all this without having a special class where they spend time learning computing instead of learning the things they really want to learn to do that computing has been the eye of the needle that they have to pass through.

Now you may laugh at this pipedream. Even the cheapest iPad at under $500 is expensive. It is a premium device – and the average urban African can’t afford one, never mind his rural cousin. In addition, despite my glowing praise, there are problems with the iPad that still make it less than what we need it to be in Africa. However, and here’s my point, we can have all the benefits and strengths of the iPad without its limitations.

We just have to design, and build, our own.

To be continued…

Dej.

iPad image is copyright Apple inc.

The Deluge Is Here

I work for a pretty large organisation and in order to keep people working, the computers secure, the business compliant with laws and standards (as well as maintain sanity) we have policies in place to guide the use of those computers. The other day, one of the managers noticed that a large number of people were bringing personal laptops to work and expressed concerns. Specifically he was worried that (1) people would be using these computers to take confidential company data away, (2) waste company time browsing the internet on these laptops, and (3) be displaying inappropriate material (so-called NSFW) content on these laptops. He wanted to know what company policies covered this. As a matter of fact, he was hoping we could issue an edict banning people from bringing laptops to work.

My perspective was  (1) you don’t need a laptop to steal company data. 500GB portable hard drives fit into a pocket. (2) People wasting company time is not a function of a particular medium and if you banned laptops, then you should ban blackberries, iPhones and iPods, books, magazines and chitchat. (3) Again banning the device doesn’t kill inappropriate behaviour. Most importantly while we had rules controlling inappropriate use of company computing resources and inappropriate behaviour in general, these were not company computing resources.

I, personally, had noticed this deluge of computers myself and my problem with it was the owners of these computers were engaging my team members to troubleshoot these computers. I had made it clear that they were not to do this during work hours, but every time I see a non-company laptop around the premises, I see it as one more possible source of distraction for my guys. My point is I really am not in favour of people bringing laptops to work (disclosure: I sometimes do, but I can do more with my iPhone than most people can do with their laptops). Be that as it may, this situation is symptomatic of a coming clash between businesses and their workers over technology.

Let me explain. In my company, internet access is extremely tightly controlled. Granting internet access is approved all the way through to top departmental management. There are very good reasons for limiting access. Bandwidth is limited, the rise of social internet sites like Facebook.com has resulted in a lot of misuse (and yes company time wasted), it costs quite a bit to provide this access per head so for each person you give rights to you want to have value for money. So what did the great “disenfranchised” mob do? They got their own computers and signed up for their own internet access contracts. Take that management, I imagine them saying.

The wonderful part of this is that technology is becoming an integral and intensely personal part of people’s lives. When you are comfortable with something it becomes easier for you to respond to it. It helps you come up with interesting ways to use it. This benefits you both in your personal life – and at work. On the other hand, the manager was right, there is a real problem. People are consuming company time and resources on personal use of technology – but you can’t use a blanket ban to handle it. Indeed scientific studies are showing that many of the assumptions about social media usage in the workplace are not true.

In the US, from the 90s onward, technology started in the home and was imported into the office. In the 80s however, people were introduced to technology at work and it eventually crept into the homes. In Nigeria, technology adoption is continuing apace for personal use and in the workplace and the there will be sparks. Organisations are going to have to avoid kneejerk reactions and come up with ways to protect their technology investments, and the hours they are paying people for while not stifling the personal comfort their people are having with the latest and greatest technologies. That personal comfort is exactly what people need so as to let the technology stop being a novel thing, but just another tool that can be used to generate more productive business people.

Consequently, while employees need to be more circumspect about how they use both company tech and personal tech in the office, companies need to take a step back and re-asses how they can harness the enthusiasm people have for personal tech for their benefit.

As a real world example, some companies who provide Blackberry services to their employees will only provision a company provided device. some of their competitors, on the other hand, will let you provide your own device and provide access to company email on it. The first company is completely locked down security-wise, but needs to invest in the cost of the device, the Blackberry service and paying the phone bills. The benefit they gain is complete control over who has access to the Blackberry service, they limit their backend management costs and make sure the people who really need the service get it. The second company avoids the cost of the device, the phone bills and the Blackberry service and only needs to manage the backend and the running cost of connecting these devices to BES (Blackberry Enterprise Server). They still have remote wipe capabilities to remove company data if the device is compromised, but by having more people connecting to BES their management costs are more). Still, this is a win-win for both the company and the employee. The company has people constantly available to get work done wherever Blackberries work, while the employees get the tech toy of they desire for work and pleasure.

Whatever companies do decide to do, the deluge of of personal tech in the workplace is here to stay.

Dej.

Correction: During my “Year One” post last week, I stated that the blog had 990 unique visitors over the last year. The absolute unique visitor count was 544.

The opinions expressed in this blog post are exclusively mine and are not those of my employer.

Photo Courtesy Andrew Simpson at Flickr.com

 

Equipping the Children

Some months ago, we talked about getting game systems for our kids, what would give us the best value in terms of ease of use and family friendliness. We reminisced about how we had fun using decidedly non-technical bits and pieces, and odds and ends. Times have changed. Now play has a very electronic bent with all the associated benefits and all the new risks.

However, while that is about entertainment, education and childhood development equally have taken on an electronic bent. In order to have a leg up in the world we live in today, we absolutely need to have our kids start on computers at an early age. Look at it the same way we look at the utterly essential “3 R’s””: Reading, wRiting and aRithmetic. Many of us nearly drove our parents batty as they tried to get us to string complete words together without misspelling or turning letters back to front. They underwent that self-torture because they realised how the ability to read and write clear correct English (though it could have been any other language) was foundational to academic and life success.

Similarly, we need to give the same kind of energy into raising our children today as “digital natives”. Digital natives are people who grew up with information technology tools and toys. People who grow up this way are quick to grasp and adapt to the rapidly changing pace of technology. They seem to have an intuitive understanding of how they are used and how they can be modified or manipulated to do almost anything. The thing about raising your kid as a digital native is that it will put him or her on a level playing field with other digital natives around the world.

So what do we need to do? First of all get the tyke a computer - and I don’t mean one of those bizarre pretend laptops with the 3 inch LCD screens and blocky graphics. I mean an honest-to-goodness PC (though you could actually do pretty much say similar things about the iPhone/iPod Touch and similar devices). You can get a perfectly adequate one for well under fifty thousand naira. Secondly, we need to get them the right software. The immediate thought that comes to mind is straight-up educational material. While all that is good, the computer is a complete experience for education, entertainment, and communication. In getting software for a system, all this needs to be kept in mind.

Third is an internet connection. At the heart of today’s computer-based society is the internet and all it has to offer. Of course there are risks and we will talk about them one day, but for the most part, with some simple precautions, your kids can be safe on the internet. The internet provides access to a huge volume of material for children that are great to help them grow. Over the next few days, I will point us at some of them.

All these are just tools. Now you have to sit with the kid and help him or her over the learning curve for the system itself, then the learning curves of the various programs and websites that you have validated. After all, the computer is just the tool, the software on top and the internet technologies are the things that are real value. You also need to set clear time boundaries on how long they can use a computer per day. Give them time limited projects and assignments, do the projects with them.

As you continue to do stuff like this, you will be providing your child what is needed to be prepared for the digital world we live in.

Dej.

Image courtesy of Maritime Union of Australia at www.flickr.com

The Great Firewall of Africa.

 

The Great Wall of China is an awesome piece of world history and architecture created in the so-called Middle Kingdom between the 5^th and 16^th centuries BC. This wall stretches for over 8,000 km and was built to protect the nation then from invasion. The “Great Firewall of China“, is a euphemism for the technology the Chinese government has put in place to control what websites (mostly from outside China) their citizens can see. This prevents people in China for accessing what their governments consider to be unacceptable content. They are locked away from the rest of the digital global village seeing only of filtered view of the world. The major international internet services such as Google and Yahoo have also been a part of the Great Firewall by filtering their content as required by the Chinese government.

There is another great firewall. Unlike the Chinese one, this is not imposed by any government and it is not to keep anything from getting in. Rather, it keeps much of a continent locked out. It is not acknowledged, identified or much commented about. However, it is similarly bad for the people encircled by it. It is an insult to their right to access internet resources across the world. I refer to the Great Firewall of Africa.

A couple of years ago, after I got my first debit card, I tried to purchase something online from HP.com. The order failed. Apparently HP doesn’t accept credit or debit cards that are not issued by US banks. Good enough. That is their choice. However, I recently discovered that if you do have a US issued card, and you try to make a purchase from an IP address that is outside the US, (even if the delivery address is in the US), the order will not be successful - and they won’t let you know why. It took a conversation with their support people to discover this. Now this may not be only Africa or Nigeria specific, but anecdotal evidence suggests that other online service providers do explicitly block out Nigeria and other African nations. I work with several Americans and several of them have testified that they cannot access their bank accounts and other personal web services from within Nigeria. The only way they can do their transactions is from the office because their internet connection is routed through the UK and the US.

Services like PayPal provide financial services that make it simple, safe and efficient to move funds and perform transactions on the internet. You can tie a PayPal account to a bank account and efficiently conduct commerce, funds transfers and other services with ease. PayPal is famously not available to Nigerians, - not by IP address, but by any form of indication that you are resident in Nigeria. Their services are simply not available in way that they can be consumed by Nigerians in Nigeria - and they are not the only one. Google Checkout is a system for masking your credit card information and placing orders online. Well Google will happily register my Nigerian issued debit card in their system, but will not let me make Nigeria a shipping destination.

Wikipedia has this to say about the phenomenon called IP banning: “IP banning is also used to limit the syndication of content to a specific region. To achieve this IP-addresses are mapped to the countries they have been assigned to. This has been used to devastating effect most recently to target Nigerian IPs due to the perception that all business emanating from the country is fraudulent. Thus making it extremely difficult for legitimate businesses based in the country to interact with their counterparts in the rest of the world. To make purchases abroad, Nigerians rely on proxy companies to mediate transactions”. While IP blocking or banning is the most blatant form of discrimination, I find what HP is doing more insulting. At least with the banning, I don’t waste time on your website at all. At HP you spend time, do all the ordering, then your payment is rejected.

The reason Wikipedia gives is also the main reason many sites do what they do to us in Nigeria. From one perspective, it’s understandable in the light of the 419 problem. On the other hand, as I asked someone today, if they block access from Nigeria to prevent fraud, what do they do to prevent fraud from inside their own countries where the incidence of fraud is far greater? According to the Internet Fraud, Scam and Crime Statistics - 2009, the following stats about fraud perpetrators hold true:

· 77.4% were male and

· 50% resided in one of the following states: California, New York, Florida, Texas, District of Columbia, and Washington.

· The majority of reported perpetrators (66.1%) were from the United States; however, a significant number of perpetrators where also located in the United Kingdom, Nigeria, Canada, China, and South Africa.

The person I was speaking with had the perspective that all of us suffer from the activities of the fraudsters. Not just in the risk of being defrauded, but from our freedoms being curtailed in order to protect themselves.

Examples abound of this tacit discrimination against us and it’s not just about websites. technologies like the iPhone and the Blackberry limit what applications you can download and install, they determine what music you can buy or stream for free. All based on where you live. The XO, a special notebook designed for the poor children of the world can only be purchased by governments, or by US residents once a year. So as individual Africans we cannot contribute this innovative computing technology to our own communities because One Laptop Per Child did not take our abilities into account.

There is a fundamental disdain being demonstrated for Africans and Nigerians. It may be subtler, but no different from the mentality that thinks we live in trees and don’t wear clothes. It is the same insult that dumps toxic chemicals on our shores. It is the limited mindset that focuses on giving aid to Africa rather than engaging the African entrepreneur in a way that is a real win for all parties. It is a missed economic opportunity, and it is their loss.

As it is, all I have spoken about is ecommerce examples. Who knows what sites there are that hide useful knowledge and information simply because of conceptions (no doubt some are true) about Africans and Nigerians. Information that could be a precious resource to us all.

What should we do about it?

First of all, I think we should scream as loudly as possible. Rather than the Minister of Information complaining about jokes in a Sony advert, the ministers of trade around the continent should be putting pressure on our trading partners across the oceans to make companies remove these unjustified blockades. Nigeria, let’s use our oil as our leverage.

Secondly, we should develop our own home-grown solutions. We are a continent of very smart people. We know our peoples’ needs and interests. We know the terrain better than anyone from outside. We can create products and services for our internet that will rock the world. Let’s do an India on them and make them clamour for our technology expertise. Let’s make them come to us.

Dej.

Image Courtesy of jonhardm at Flickr.com