Africa

In an age of information abundance, curating meaning is key. Nine months ago that is just what Jon Gosier set out to do as he took over the reins of the SwiftRiver initiative at renown crowd-sourcing activism site, Ushahidi. Recently he announced the Beta release, and unveiled a new website at Swiftly.org. What is SwiftRiver? SwiftRiver Open Beta Announcement. from Ushahidi on Vimeo. “SwiftRiver is an open source intelligence gathering platform for managing realtime streams of data.” Using five different tools in the ...

Steve Song has spent the past two years as a fellow at the Shuttleworth Foundation, looking at ways to lower the costs of communications infrastructures. On Day 1 of the Tech4Africa conference in Johannesburg, he introduced the fruits of his labour to a captive audience, the Mesh Potato, a low cost wireless mesh device that you can also plug into a normal phone to provide cheap and simple connectivity. During his presentation, Song made a passionate plea for lowering the costs ...

Agosta Liko, CEO of PesaPal, relocated to Kenya from the US to start Verviant, a software development company in Nairobi. Three years later, the team at Verviant launched PesaPal with a vision of enabling Kenyans to make online payments. PesaPal is making great strides in bridging the mobile and electronic payment divide in Kenya, and is set to expand to more African countries next year. Mark Kaigwa sat down with the CEO to discuss his perspective on doing business in ...

Kenya is quickly gaining a competitive advantage in the mobile payments space. Led by mobile operator giant Safaricom with their Mpesa product, the market locally sees huge value in mobile money transactions. Add to that a regulatory system that is relaxed enough for innovation to be encouraged, and you have a great space for interesting things to happen. Pay.Zunguka The team at Symbiotic always have more than one iron in the fire. I was surprised by their most recent release of a ...

Kenya is abuzz right now. The outlook for technology and innovation in Africa has never been brighter, and Kenya is positioning itself strategically in anticipation of a wave of groundbreaking web and mobile emerging market products and services. The resources being put into the Kenyan IT sector currently demonstrate how seriously the country is taking the challenge to become Africa’s Innovation hub. The Kenyan Government, through its ICT Board,  recently closed the window for proposals for its $4-million grant towards local content and software ...

Named by Time Magazine as one of 2010's 100 Most Influential People in the World, Matt Berg is the technology director of ChildCount+, a ground-breaking mobile health (mHealth) platform that uses mobile phones to monitor the health of tens of thousands of African children. In between a hectic schedule that sees him flying regularly between Africa and the U.S, Matt spoke to memeburn.com about mHealth, open-source software and what the world can learn from Africa. MB: Childcount+ uses simple, standardised text messages to co-ordinate the ...

I haven’t been able to use PayPal for two months. I just got profiled for extra security measures on Facebook. I can’t make certain purchases from Africa. Few organisations ship goods to me here in Kenya. Let’s be honest; living in Africa, or being African, gives you a certain unwelcome aroma in the eyes of global corporations. Frankly, we’re just not trustworthy. This isn’t new to any of us who live, or spend a great deal of time, in Africa. You’re blacklisted, ...

If you’re in downtown Nairobi before the 4th of August, be sure to pop in to the Barber Q Hair Studio and get yourself a free head massage. The studio is on the 2nd Floor of El-Roi Plaza, close to the Odeon Cinema. This is just one example of the thousands of snippets of information that are at the heart of Mocality, a free-to-list, hyper-local mobile business directory in Nairobi, Kenya. Mocality offers a free business suite of tools to all ...

The vuvuzela has certainly been one of the biggest talking points of the 2010 FIFA World Cup, and has since crossed beyond South Africa's borders into other countries. Even celebrities like Leonardo DiCaprio have been spotted with their lips around the plastic phenomenon. Google Zeitgeist, a service that provides insight into global, national, past and present search trends, has revealed a few surprising findings about what interests us about this World Cup. For example, some of the findings reveal that the ...

The landing of a series of undersea cables is going to solve an infrastructural problem that has long plagued Africa. However, in order for the continent to properly realise the full potential of a global customer base, African technologists need to expose themselves more to the insights and learrnings of the developed world, writes Gareth Knight, the MD of Technovated and founder of the Tech4Africa conference. New international submarine communication cables are starting to ring the continent, bringing with them the ...