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White African
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13:50
From: White African
Read This Entry & More At White African
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Build an App in 40 minutes (panel), originally uploaded by whiteafrican.
Ending just now, this group of highly respected web application developers brainstormed ideas and then outlined an application.
It ended up being “Mailr.com” or “MailModel”, an application to help people who get tons of email a day keep track of them and keep their contacts updated on when they might expect an email.
Panelists:
Ryan Carson (FOWA)
Erick Schonfeld (TechCrunch)
Blaine Cook (Twitter)
Kevin Hale (Wufoo)
Leah Culver (Pownce)
Alex Bard (Goowy)
Gary Vaynerchuk (WineLibrary.tv)
Kevin Rose (Digg)
Carlos Garcia (ScrapBlog)
Cal Henderson (Flickr)
Matt Mullenweg (WordPress)
I actually really enjoyed this panel, just for the thoughts and comments bouncing around between these high profile web guys.
 
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9:19
From: White African
Read This Entry & More At White African
The Future of Web Apps (FOWA) has started. Tantek Çelik and Brian Oberkirch are MC’ing the event, and doing a good job. Both are witty and have plenty of credentials to be here talking.
One of the main reasons I decided to attend the Future of Web Apps in Miami today was because of two speakers: Kathy Sierra (of Creating Passionate Users) and Matt Mullenweg (of WordPress).
Kathy Sierra is up now, talking about how the brain, technology and human interaction. I still think she’s one of the top communicators online with her visuals, now I know she’s equally adept offline and in-person. Her visuals in the presentation are quick, interesting and applicable. Lastly, if you’re looking to learn HTML/CSS, she has written the best book I’ve seen on it (book link). It’s a real treat to be here and worth my time and money.
Some Kathy quotes:
“It’s not about the tools we build… it’s NOT about beinga “tool” expert. It’s about what the tools let them DO. People don’t become passionate about the tool, they become passionate about what the tool lets them do.”
“Usability is merely a prereq.”
“What do you help your users kick ass at?”
Matt Mullenweg, the creator of WordPress (what this blog and millions of others are built on), just took the stage. I last heard him talk at the first FOWA conference in San Francisco. Besides being a wunderkid, he comes across as really laid back and down-to-earth.
Listening to Matt talk about scaling large web applications has become suddenly interesting to me, due to my recent thoughts on a global, open-source version of Ushahidi. Those who I’ve had a chance to chat to about this project have heard me spout endlessly about using the “WordPress Model” (more on that some other time).
Some Matt quotes:
“One of the most important items that developers need to do to scale is separate their static from their dynamic content.”
“As the founder, you have to be the most passionate user, because everyone who comes on after you will be less passionate. This means you need to be in the community answering questions and helping solve problems.”
“I recommend you stay away from locking yourself into particular revenue levels (ex: $15 for x level of goodies). With WordPress we’ve set it up like a good buffet where you can just pick up an upgrade from a big group of options. However, that didn’t work perfectly, so we added non-intrusive ads as well.”
Matt just mentioned that it’s actually kind of sad how the CNN political blog that he serves on WordPress.com VIP system still gets less votes that Icanhascheezburger on its worst day… (sad, funny, and I’ve been looking for a reason to link to that site for a while). 
[My Flickr Pictures of FOWA - Pictures by everyone else]
 
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11:37
From: White African
Read This Entry & More At White African
The mobile applications space is getting more attention each day. Ken Banks has written up a good piece, in which he applies the long-tail theory to mobile applications in areas like Africa.
Finally, we’re left with the simple, low-tech, appropriate technology solutions with great opportunities for rapid, hassle-free replicability among grassroots NGOs, represented in green. These projects generally get the lowest level of publicity, if any, since few have an international profile of any kind. Notoriously hard to communicate with, and with little or no money, it’s perhaps no surprise that most of the attention on the long tail is elsewhere.
What Ken is getting at is an important concept, one that too many of us forget as we generally have access to the more powerful phones. Whether it’s dealing with NGO-related initiatives, or traditional business projects, we need to be reminded that creating platforms for the lowest common denominator will have the greatest impact in the shortest amount of time.
Interestingly enough, we see this with an application that is “big” in the West: Twitter. It’s a simple concept based on 140-character SMS messaging and a simple way to share and follow communications by others. Of course, they’ve added additional web and email functionality to it, but the base concept is so simple it’s almost painful.
When we apply these same thoughts to Africa, what do we get? Unfortunately, not that much (yet). The top three that come to mind are Ken Banks with his FrontlineSMS tool for non-profits utilizing basic SMS services, Wizzit a South African mobile banking solution that uses USSD, and Manobi that offers market and trading information for Senegalese farmers.
The good news is that we’re only scratching the surface. I hope that more tech savvy developers will create applications that work at the end of the long-tail, there’s a lot of people just in Africa waiting for better mobile services.
Further resources:
 
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17:02
From: White African
Read This Entry & More At White African
If you get me in a room and we start talking about data, please forgive me if my eyes light up. You see, I confess to a certain amount of data-lust. Primarily because I believe that data is at the core of most great web applications. Secondarily, because I’m enthralled with how to move this data from a list of tables and spreadsheets and make it become real and understandable to anyone at a glance.
I wrote a post about African TLDs (the suffix that country domain names go by) a couple months back. Then, today I came across this visualization in a poster of the world of country TLDs. Simple, interesting and useful.
(You can buy this as a print at HistoryShots.com for $29)
Using graphics to represent data is nothing new, however, doing it well isn’t easy. The moment this became crystal clear to me was when I had the opportunity to listen to the incomparable Jeffrey Veen (before he left Adaptive Path for Google) discuss how to visualize rainfall data - going from database to consumer visualization. The main slides are seen below:
(It’s not nearly as good without his oratory, but you can see the Next Gen slideshow here)
There are now a number of excellent blogs, agencies and consultants who deal with this stuff every day. If you’re as interested in this as I am, you might enjoy these resources:
 
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19:52
From: White African
Read This Entry & More At White African
I didn’t realize how time intensive and draining the first 2 months of 2008 were going to be for me. I’ve been fortunate enough to be invited and attend some fabulous conferences over the last 6 weeks, and though it’s tiring, it’s been well worth it for the discussions and contacts made. There are some seriously smart and gifted people out there, and I’m just glad to meet them and pick their brains for a little while.
The conference rundown:
- Inman Real Estate Connect NY - New York, NY (speaking)
- NAIAS (N. American Int’l Auto Show) - Detroit, Michigan
- DEMO 2008 - Palm Springs, California (speaking)
- Harvard’s Berkman Institute Meeting on Digital Activism - Istanbul, Turkey (speaking)
- Future of Web Apps - Miami, Florida
- SXSW - Austin, Texas (speaking)
Upcoming Conferences
Next week I’ll head down to the Future of Web Apps in Miami. I attended the very first one in the San Francisco area a couple years back, and I have to say it’s the best value for the money spent period. The content, conversations and connections made are just unbeatable for $145.
 The following week I’ll be at SXSW in Austin, Texas as part of the “Africa 2.0: Affecting Change Using Technology” panel lead by G. Kofi Annan. It really looks to be an interesting discussion, with a good mixture of individuals with a wide range of interactive experience on the panel.
If you’re going to be at SXSW, let me know so we can get together.
After SXSW things look to be calming down. The only conference that I really have on my radar is TEDAfrica happening in Cape Town at the end of September. This is probably good, as I’ll finally be able to focus on my projects a little more.
 
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11:37
From: White African
Read This Entry & More At White African
A couple top web tech guys from South Africa (Neville, Stii, Charl) have banded together to create what they call a “Simple Distributed Social Network”, or SDSN. Their concept is simple, create a standardized way for people to own their own profiles, so they’re not tied into (and recreated) on every social website (like Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, MySpace, etc…).
(Read this post by Charl as it gives the best overview of the SDSN project)
The issues that they’re dealing with effect everyone, here’s why. You’ve already created your Facebook/MySpace account, and you just got an invite from a friend for Flickr. Now you have to go recreate your whole profile again just for that service and neither of them share it. It only gets worse the more social websites you start becoming a part of, including your blog, or that niche social website around your favorite hobby.
For instance, everyone knows that WhiteAfrican.com is me, Erik Hersman. Why not use that as an identifier? Just as someone like Scoble could use http://www.twitter.com/scobleizer or his own blog’s URL as the center of his online universe. A URL with enough presence is naturally associated with a person.
If you think about it, the way we’re handling profiles online is a little crazy. Having my profile duplicated multiple locations, for each site, is neither efficient or a good long-term solution. To be honest, a couple other services are trying to tackle some of these same issues (OpenID, Microformats, Google’s OpenSocial, etc…). SDSN compliments these services, from what I can tell, and simplifies it for anyone who has their own website.
As good of an idea as SDSN is, it’s an uphill battle. The big websites have just started to adopt OpenID, after years of pressure, so the guys behind SDSN will need some influential benefactors in order to start pressuring the large sites to use this new simplified standard.
What does this mean for you, the “normal” web user? No much yet, since it’s still in development. However, I’d expect to see more first-moving tech guys playing with it, as well as seeing them create a way for people who don’t have their own websites to take part. Maybe a profile server of some sort.
Regardless of where this project ends up, I’m happy to see this kind of thought leadership coming out of Africa. One thing we do know, this issue will only rise in importance as more and more people start using more than one social website.
Further Reading
Charl has been the best communicator of what the SDSN project is. Here are his posts in chronological order:
[UPDATE: An analogy of sorts…
A simple analogy to show how upside-down this whole profile management scenario is would be to compare it to how you manage your profile offline. You use a centralized profile offline, typically your ID or driver’s license. What if you had to duplicate that each time you went to the airport, bought a gift using a credit card, or any other time you would need to show your ID. It simply wouldn’t make sense.]
 
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9:06
From: White African
Read This Entry & More At White African
Here are some thoughts, tips and tools that I have found useful, and thought other bloggers could benefit from as well:
Allow People to Contact You
Please, make it easy for your readers to contact you personally. They might have stories, pictures or thoughts that could help you out. I’ve seen way to many blogs with no way to contact the author, leaving it up to the reader to spam your comments section. If you don’t want to display your email address, use some type of contact form plugin on your blog.
- Those who are using Blogger (blogspot) or WordPress.com can just activate it within the service.
- If you’re using WordPress on your own site, consider the Enhanced WordPress contact form plugin.
- Want to make your own contact form? I suggest setting it up through Wufoo, it’s brain dead simple and free.
Getting Readers to Come Back
Make it easy for people to follow your writing. Almost every blog has some type of RSS as part of the structure, however you can make it even more user friendly by doing the following:
- Most people don’t know what RSS is or how to use it, so allow readers to signup for updates via email. Personally, I use Feedburner and just activate their tool. Simple and well done.
- WordPress has an incredibly nice little plugin called Subscribe to Comments. This allows anyone who leaves a comment to get pinged with an email when another person does the same (if they so choose). I’ve seen this really reader interactions.
Useful WordPress Plugins
Be proactive and get ready for problems before they happen. Whether your site gets hacked or you’re finding that you’re being overloaded by traffic, here are a couple WordPress plugins that can help:
- WP Cache - for when you’re getting slammed by traffic. Think KenyanPundit.com in the middle of the Kenyan election debacle, or if your story gets on a site like Digg.
- WP Database Backup - I have this setup to auto-save and email me the file each week. This saved me when my hosting service was hacked this last summer.
Anyway, I hope some of this stuff helps, I know it’s helped me over the years.
 
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16:32
From: White African
Read This Entry & More At White African
I just found out that our panel from the DEMO conference is now online. It’s fairly long, about 35 minutes.
We covered some interesting items, but nothing in any great depth. It was a basic “intro to African tech” kind of panel.
Others on stage:
Juliana Rotich of Afromusing, also the environmental editor of Global Voices and contributing editor to AfriGadget.
Mike Stopforth of Afrigator
 
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22:55
From: White African
Read This Entry & More At White African
Remittances (money sent back home from Africans living abroad) back to Africa constitute some big numbers for Africa. About $10 billion gets sent to sub-Saharan Africa. That’s the official number of course, a World Bank report stated that it’s likely double that amount, due to Africans using non-traditional means to send capital back home.
Even though that is only 4-5% of the global remittance market, it is still no small amount of money. In fact, it constitutes a huge opportunity for both the middleman helping to transfer the funds, and the countries receiving the capital inflows. What I’d like to focus in on is the middleman.
Why is the cost for sending money back to Africa so exorbitant? Compared to other developing nations, Africans abroad are being fined for being African. You’ll pay two times as much to send money from the US to Uganda ($20) than you would to Mexico ($10).
Why does it cost so much?
First, volume. The amount of money being sent back to Africa, and the competition to handle those transactions are smaller than they are to places like Mexico, parts of Asia and South America. So, simple economies of scale weigh in to the equation.
 Second, you have to look at the available options for anyone wishing to send money back to their home country in Africa. Ever since the September 11 attacks in the US, there has been a lot more rules and regulations surrounding any type of capital flow, which has made it harder to operate in this field.
The two largest global companies are Western Union and MoneyGram. Bank-to-bank transfers are a less expensive option for some, unfortunately most Africans don’t have a bank account, so that’s not always feasible.
In the past couple of years, we’ve seen voucher-based companies spring up that provide a third option, allowing Africans abroad to buy vouchers over the internet for their families back home. It’s a very interesting field, examples of this include MamaMikes in Kenya and Zimbuyer in Zimbabwe.
Finally, the third way that we’re starting to see money being transferred is through mobile phone credits. WIZZIT and MTN Mobile Moneyin South Africa; M-Pesa in Kenya; Celpay in Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo are leading the charge, and we’re likely to see more innovation in this area soon.
Increasing Competition and African Governments
 The only true way to drive down costs will be increased competition within the African remittance industry. We’re starting to see that with mobile payment options and voucher-based remittances.
What I also expect to see is more African governments finding ways to make this capital inflow easier. We saw this last year when the Kenyan Minister of Finance, Kimunya, came to the US to talk to the Kenyan diaspora.
This is just too much money to have such a high fee places on transfers. It’s large enough that global and local player will continue to compete and drive the costs down over time.
Other Articles and Resources on African Remittances
 
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18:05
From: White African
Read This Entry & More At White African
The last couple days has seen the launch of 3 new websites from established African bloggers and developers. Impressive work to say the least!
I Have No Tribe
A website dedicated to positive discourse on the Kenyan conflict. From the mind of David Kobia, part of Ushahidi and behind the now-closed Mashada forums. David showed it to me on launch as a prototype late last week, it’s amazing to see that it already has poems, thoughts and prayers from Kenyans all over the world.
Don’t tell him, but I think he’s just having fun with his newfound love of map mashups…
Nudjit
 A high-tech gadget blog from some well-established South African bloggers (Justin Hartman, Gregor Rohrig, and Nic Haralambous). I’m a gadget guy, so I’ve already added it to the reader and to AfriGadget’s blogroll.
“The site aims to inform, entertain, and alert South Africans about the gadgets that are available to us. Our gadget reviews don’t just highlight the technical aspects but will also judge how well they work, where one can get them, and if our local technology infrastructure can actually support these electronic toys.”
Kabissa
Kabissa.org has launched their brand spanking new website. Kabissa is a social tool for African civil society organizations. What does that mean? Well, it’s a social networking tool for African organizations focused on social change in Africa.
This is another site created by individuals who are well-respected within the African digital scene, Tobias Eigen and Sokari Ekine.
 
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11:12
From: White African
Read This Entry & More At White African
If you are interested in attending a conference focused on ideas, ingenuity and creativity in Africa, then there is no better choice than the upcoming TEDAfrica conference in Cape Town from Sept. 29 to Oct. 1 of this year. Inspired by TEDGlobal in Tanzania last year, and operated under a license from TED, this is an event to watch.
I don’t know the people behind TEDAfrica, but if it’s anything like what we experienced at TEDGlobal last year, then I’m sure it will be worth every penny spent to attend. They are handing out 50 TEDAfrica Fellowships (fully paid), so make sure you sign up for one of those soon too.
 
Read the complete article at White African
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