Posts Tagged ‘article’
Written on August 15th, 2010 by PricesTechno shouts
This article was written by Leila Janah , the founder and CEO of nonprofit outsourced services firm Samasource . You can watch my recent video interview with Janah here . Also see her recent article The Many Bottom Lines Of Businesses. This week in Johannesburg I had the pleasure of keynoting Tech4Africa , the first major social web conference in South Africa, alongside crowdsourcing guru Clay Shirky . Sub-Saharan Africa is the global economy’s last frontier. The majority of people in Africa live on less than $2 a day, adjusted for purchasing power. It’s not the first place one might expect to host a technology conference. Since I started working in Africa 10 years ago, I’ve seen a steady rise in the number and quality of African technology training centers. Schools like Ghana’s Ashesi University, founded by former Microsoft executive Patrick Awuah, are churning out math, science and engineering talent. Hundreds of developers turned up when Samasource hosted Facebook Developer Garages in Accra, Nairobi, and Kampala in 2008 and 2009. Several technology incubators and co-working spaces have sprung up around the continent – here’s a brief list (Thanks to Erik Hersman, founder of popular crowdsourced mapping platform Ushahidi, for a primer on African tech incubators): – iHub (Nairobi, Kenya) – Appfrica Labs (Kampala, Uganda) – Limbe Labs (Limbe, Cameroon) – Meltwater Entrepreneurial School (Accra, Ghana) – Geekspaces (Johannesburg, South Africa) At Foo Camp this June, I tried to convince Paul Graham to start a Y-Combinator in Nairobi; he chuckled and said he’d rather fund an incubator for less glamorous businesses, like gas stations and plumbers. High-tech innovation that achieves global scale, he argued, tends to flow from developed to emerging markets, not vice versa. The Silicon Valley entrepreneurs I’ve spoken to agree with Paul, and they have a point. In much of Africa, it’s hard enough to find grid power, let alone Wi-Fi. There’s very little infrastructure or capital for new businesses. According to the IMF’s annual Doing Business report, African countries are the most difficult places in the world to launch startups. That hasn’t swayed the entrepreneurs I met at Tech4Africa. Many of them are working on mobile solutions for emerging markets, a segment that now includes roughly four billion people who live on $4 a day or less. Their innovations never have to reach the US or Europe to reach scale. Take, for example, the telecommunications firm Safaricom’s wildly successful mobile money transfer service, Mpesa. Mpesa (“money” in Swahili) has facilitated over $4B in transactions since its launch in late 2007 – and that’s in a country with an adjusted annual per-capita income of under $1,700. Based on the success of Mpesa and a similar service launched by Safaricom rival MTN, Pocit, in South Africa, Pagatech in Nigeria, and PesaPal in Kenya are developing bank- and carrier-independent mobile transfer services. These businesses could facilitate billions of dollars that flow in remittances from urban to rural areas in the developing world each year. Other African startups to watch include Moo.com Co-Founder Stefan Magdalinski’s new gig, Mocality, a mobile phone crowdsourcing platform for verifying local businesses in Nairobi; and Txteagle and Mobenzi, which allow people to complete microtasks on their phones via SMS in Kenya and South Africa, respectively.
Written on August 14th, 2010 by PricesTechno shouts
Picture this. You’re the world’s biggest search engine, and you just became the target of a patent lawsuit that could potentially put your massively successful mobile operating system at risk. Your hardware and carrier partners are keenly watching your response, not to mention the constant government scrutiny you see on a day-to-day basis. So, throwing caution to the wind, you pull out your digital middle finger and delist your opponent entirely from search results, then shoot off an internal memo with the subject line “FREEDOM” and a link to the Braveheart Theme . That’s the story that IPWatchdog published last night, claiming that Google “seemingly tampered with [its] search algorithm and database by eliminating Oracle altogether” from its search engine (okay, there wasn’t anything about an internal memo). Gene Quinn, the article’s author, claims to have confirmed the search issue at 3 PM EST yesterday, stating that it was back to normal a few hours later. Unfortunately, it’s totally bogus. As Giorgio Sironi spells out on his blog, some trickster used a variety of UTF-8 characters (not from the standard English alphabet) to craft the query, which yielded a mere six results. It’s easy to see why someone might mistake this at first glance — I suspect IPWatchdog “confirmed” it by clicking on a link to the misleading query, rather than entering it themselves. However, as far-fetched as all of this may sound, Google has had glitches when it came to searching for competitors. Back when the Palm Pre first made its debut, Google Mobile couldn’t find any results for it. That was pretty clearly a temporary glitch, though, as other queries containing the word “palm”, like “palm tree”, were coming back empty as well. CrunchBase Information Google Oracle Corporation Information provided by CrunchBase
Written on August 11th, 2010 by PricesTechno shouts
We have to admit – European startup Flattr appears to have its act together. The site is smooth, has an active group of beta testers, received positive press and boasts a famous name – Peter Sunde , one of the founders of Pirate Bay . But Flattr is diving after a particularly elusive pearl. So far no one has discovered a sustainable system for collecting micropayments from Web users to support those who make the articles, videos, websites, infographics and other diversions we all love. And many have died trying. Sponsor So why does Flattr think it will do any better? Flattr is basically a “Like” button backed by money. And money talks. Flattr has taken to heart the lessons of its micropayment predecessors, providing a seamless way to pay and being careful not to ask users for too much. But its creators have also been influenced by social bookmarking sites like Digg, Facebook, StumbleUpon, which have been infinitely more successful getting people to use them. Users sign up for a Flattr account and deposit a certain amount each month. As they browse the Web, they will see “Flattr” buttons next to all kinds of content. The company says you can Flattr any “thing” – blog post, blog, video, photo, etc. If a Flattr user likes a thing and the creator of that thing has a Flattr account, the user can click the Flattr button to donate money to the content creator. The number of Flattrs is calculated and displayed, just like Diggs, Tweets and Likes, so Flattr also becomes a measure of how popular a piece of content is. Flattr displays the most popular things on its website. You can donate whatever you want and the money is distributed evenly among all the things you click in a month and Flattr, which gets 10%. Discouragingly, Flattr’s concept is similar to at least two recently folded startups. Contenture (July 2009-January 2010), from the makers of Clicky Analytics , divided user donations across all the sites in its network, on which users could browse ad-free and have access to other premium features. TipJoy (November 2008 – August 2009), a Y Combinator startup, let users decide how much to donate by entering an email address and a “tip,” which was a pledge to pay up once TipJoy tallied their tips into a lump sum. Flattr faces two problems. First, the site will depend on users to submit their own content – not taking credit (and profit) for the content of others. It’s easy to imagine the creator of a song or video having no idea that his or her creation is being monetized via Flattr. Second, users must be ready to voluntarily pay for content they can still get for free. Flattr is in private beta, but the tech news site TechDirt has already signed up to be a guinea pig. This article already has 15 Flattrs. Discuss
Written on August 6th, 2010 by PricesTechno shouts
This is so cool it makes me a little sick to my stomach with excitement. Well, first I should explain. I came across this service called Poligraft in our Tips folder. Tech–> government? Seemed right up my alley. So I’m checking it out. Think of this post as a kind of virtual unboxing. The promises of the service are extremely exciting and important. Let’s find out if it delivers what it promises. “Feed in a news article, blog post or press release, and Poligraft will present you with an enhanced view of the interconnections between the people, organizations and relationships described in the piece.” Sponsor The Best Disinfectant Poligraft, which was developed and administered by the Sunlight Foundation , allows for you to drop in either a URL or a block of text to be parsed for influence. Alternatively, you can drag a bookmarklet you can drag into your toolbar. The service stands atop TransparencyData.com , a repository of influence data. The possibility of this service is one of illuminating hidden relationships and identifying latent patterns. As a first example, I try the last story I wrote for ReadWriteWeb, a story on the use of real-time and mobile technologies in the Kenyan elections . I thought it might answer the question, “Who or what might be influencing this article or the person writing it?” It did not. Now I’ll try Paul Krugman’s op-ed about Paul Ryan in the New York Times. It’s domestic, and it looks like the focus is exclusively domestic with this service. OK. As you can see by the screenshot, Poligraft identifies only the politically charged-elements – names of politicians, organizations and so forth – and provides a way to explore them. Yes. That’s nice, but I was expecting a number of things I didn’t see. I expected the publication and the writer to be included in the exploration of influence. I expected the data visualization to be operational on a much higher level. (A couple of links and a pie chart? I know it’s politics but sheesh.) Also, when I hit the “Learn more” link, I don’t. Instead, I get an “Unhandled Exception” error. Unique Identifiers In a blog post, Sunlight’s Ellen Miller acknowledges some of the service’s limitations, but in a somewhat disingenuous way. “There are knotty problems you’ll find in using it, not the least of which is that without government’s help in establishing a system of unique identifiers for all those who file reports with the government, we still wrestle with lack of name standardization across various filing entities. While we’ve tried hard to sort through that, it’s far from perfect yet.” Well, OK. That does seem to be a long-term taxonomic challenge. But if you can’t click through on a link, it seems rather like complaining about how poorly jet packs function as you wait for a stalled train. There are a few links to examples at the bottom of the Poligraft’s home page, including a story on Politico . Those examples do look pretty good. The “Learn more” links lead to some detailed pages on something called the Influence Explorer , which is relatively more information-rich. But they’re canned examples. Premature Deployment This is a great idea from an important foundation. But it’s a disappointing iteration. It just doesn’t work very well, excepting the canned examples. It goes to show you, as friendly as tech has become compared to years past, it’s still a struggle to get something functional implemented if you don’t have great patience. It’s my feeling that the Sunlight Foundation should have taken longer to work out the kinks on Poligraft. But perhaps you’ve got a different take. If so, we encourage you to register it in the comments. Discuss
Written on July 31st, 2010 by PricesTechno shouts
Earlier this month, I attended OpenWebAsia – South East Asia in Kuala Lumpur/Malaysia, a two-day tech and web industry event that attracted over 350 international attendees. The event shined a spotlight on a market that’s still largely overlooked: a whopping 600 million people live in South East Asia , which boasts a rapidly growing web and mobile population. What follows is a short summary of just a few presentations, panel discussions, and startup demos I witnessed at OpenWebAsia (those with a focus on Asia only). I will update this article with more material once it becomes available (find the agendas for day one and two here and here ). Growing Digital In Asia – An Overview (panel discussion) The event kicked off with a panel discussion between Mohan Belani (Co-founder at mobile gaming company Mobret and former Director at startup community e27 ), Michael F. Smith Jr. (Director of Global Initiatives at Yahoo!), Googler and OpenWebAsia co-founder Chang Kim , and myself. Moderator Preetam Rai had us cover a lot of ground during the 60 minutes, including how: Japan is obsessed with the mobile web (mailing, social networking, mobile gaming etc.) Japan’s mobile web is still growing Korea is starting to embrace web services from overseas Koreans love communicating in groups Smartphones conquer Korea, as opposed to Indonesia where feature phones still rule (and take two SIM cards) South East Asia is positioned in the global web market the region is seeing an explosion in cell phone usage most South East Asian startups are locked up in their home markets those startups can boost their chances of “going global” (use English, adopt UI/UX, focus on making money etc.) Please click here to watch a video of the discussion, which is provided by Satoo.tv (embedding didn’t work, sorry). What’s Happening In China? (presentation) Shanghai-based entrepreneur and blogger Dr. Gang Lu shared some insights on what’s going on in one of the world’s “hottest” web markets right now, namely China (which now has over 420 million web users and 786 million mobile subscribers). Lu’s presentation touches upon a range of peculiarities and current trends in China’s web and mobile market. It’s embedded below: This Week In Asia (panel discussion) Podcast series This Week In Asia ( iTunes link ) recorded its 58th episode live on stage at Open Web Asia. Guests included again Michael F. Smith Jr. , Dr. Bernhard Leong (co-founder at mobile startup Chlkboard and This Week In Asia producer), Brian Wong (ex-Digg business development manager and founder at mobile ad startup Kiip), Daniel Cerventus (web producer and organizer of the event), and again myself (moderated by Kay Chew Lin ). Topics discussed include: India-based mobile ad network Inmobi ‘s global landgrab mobile web usage in Japan Open Web Asia as a very early web industry event in the region pitching and delivery as still underdeveloped skills among South East Asian entrepreneurs Again, please head over to Satoo.tv for a video of the discussion (but you can also listen to it over at This Week In Asia’s homepage in podcast format). Current Challenges In South East Asia’s Tech Scene It’s still very early in the game, it’s already a huge market, and there’s room for massive future growth in South East Asia’s web and mobile industry. But there are still some significant hurdles to overcome, especially if you regard South East Asia as one region. Some hurdles I personally see in South East Asia’s web and mobile market (and on the way to a possible integration) are the: still relatively undeveloped tech ecosystem and its “chicken and egg” problem (depending on the country: big number of copycats, relatively low number of startups, few to almost no VCs firms/angel investors, low salaries for engineers, low propensity of skilled employees to work for startups, fewer people with an entrepreneurial mindset etc.) historically, culturally, and economically diverse markets much lower online spend than in North America or Europe weak exit environment (IPOs, trade sales) political and legal problems in some South East Asian countries (IP protection, bureaucracy for startups, general political instability) massive “brain drain” still low Internet penetration (examples: Indonesia has 12.5% Internet penetration, Vietnam has 25.7%, the Philippines just 24.5%) fragmented mobile landscape underdeveloped online and mobile payment infrastructure (if any) Many of these problems, for example the low Internet penetration, will probably solve themselves in the future. And in fact, local startups, partly financed by local venture capital firms (which do exist), are starting to crop up all over the place. Selection Of Malaysia-Based Web And Mobile Startups Here are some startups that are based in Malaysia, mostly in Kuala Lumpur: Cravecast , an online music startup (their first product, Cravecharts , is a music streaming service) MobileApps.com , which is planned to become a “ global cross-platform mobile app store ” in fall this year Cikgu2U , an e-learning site that allows groups of students to study together online (in Malay) Guppers , a mobile business solution provider with offices in Kuala Lumpur and the US Offgamers , a game payment solution provider with over 300,000 customers worldwide Terato Tech , a mobile startup that develops for iPhone and Android LTT Global , which focuses on the mobile learning and edutainment fields If you want to know more about Malaysia’s web scene, head over to the Entrepreneurs.my blog or follow the Twitter account of Kuala Lumpur-based mover and shaker Daniel Cerventus. For more South East Asia-related information, have a look at the e27 and SGEntrepreneurs blogs or download the This Week In Asia tech podcasts. Credit for the photo on top: Ben Israel
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