In the first part of this article I discussed -- picking up from talks I gave at PopTech and Nokia World 2011 -- "The Idea of Africa" and how Western abstractions of the continent are often mired in the past, and, with examples, how Africa was turning the world upside down because disruptive ideas happen at the edge.Now, I want to look at the Two Big Trends.Trend #1: Adoption by Africans as consumers is increasing Trend #2: Technology costs are decreasingAt ...

Sculptures inspired by fishnets, a bicycle with a built-in record player and furniture from discarded road signs. Or go in search of a Piece of Mind.Well strungAmerican artist Janet Echelman creates large-scale sculptural installations using age-old net-weaving techniques she learnt from fishermen in India.The installations are either hand-woven or machine-woven, depending on the requirements of the specific project. The sculptures are often suspended between buildings where they interact with the wind and sunlight in an almost magical ...

Nintendo’s US$925 million losses are staggering, with the Kyoto videogame company blaming a lack of stellar titles and an ever-climbing Yen. For Nintendo, this is a full-year loss and for any other company would surely be a nail in its coffin.Nintendo issued a statement preceding the sales report. “Profits suffered due to re-evaluation of assets in foreign currencies, exchange losses totalling 52.4-billion yen (US$711 million) occurred”.Read more at Gearburn.com

The endless war between Apple and Android has seen a decisive victory, for the Android app store at least. In the second quarter of 2011, more Android apps were downloaded than iPhone apps, according to a recent report.ABI researcher, Lim Shiyang said, "Android's open source strategy is the main factor for its success. Being a free platform has expanded the Android device install base, which in turn has driven growth in the number of third party multi-platform and mobile operator ...

For gamers, the dry season is over. The time leading up to just before Christmas is usually filled with triple-A titles and 2011 is no exception. In no particular order, the following games will be played on consoles across the globe this holiday season.Rage, available for multiple systems is many years in the making and comes from the same stable asDoom and Quake. Id Software has created a startling version of our world, only one set years after a nuclear apocalypse. Rage is currently ...

We're in the age of the petabyte, exabyte and zettabyte. We're being overwhelmed with information, and we don't know what to do about it.There has been a data explosion in the internet age, brought about by the digital era where entry barriers have been lowered, allowing the masses to publish, to tweet, to build open source applications. The age of automation has also resulted in information generated by computers on an automated basis.Former Google CEO Eric Shmidt says that ...

Africa is lagging in technological innovation says TED Fellow, Ndubuisi Ekekwe. The continent's obsession with consuming technology has left it lagging as a technological creator.Ekekwe emphasises five things that can pull Africa from a "technological downstream to a technological upstream" at this year's Tech4Africa conference. He calls on all African technological enthusiasts to "Think. Invent, Redesign Africa". This is how he proposes going about this redesign:The right ecosystem Ekekwe believes that Africa needs an ecosystem for ...

Emerging markets media giant Naspers is set to discontinue a number of African ecommerce platforms. In a brief statement on dealfish.co.ke, the company's investment arm MIH said it would be closing down Kalahari Kenya and Nigeria.According to the statement, the decision was made because "the performance of the service has been below expectation since launch and reaching profitability was not a reasonable near-term prospect".MIH launched online retail services in Kenya and Nigeria under the Kalahari brand in October ...

As far back as the days of ENIAC and old-school IBM punch-card computers, users have been trained to adapt their experience to the capabilities of the computing devices available to them. And, as we all know, there has been a 30-year evolution of usability and functionality that has been working towards the clear goal of making every aspect of the tech experience easier. Whether it be a device, an operating system, a web-site, or a dozen of the every-day amenities ...

Death is the default for startups, reckons Amazon Web Services Technology Evangelist Simone Brunozzi. Apart from having a really cool Twitter handle @Simon, Brunozzi has founded a few startups himself, so speaks with some authority.Speaking at a Tech4Africa conference in Johannesburg he mentioned that there was quite a bit of confusion at what constituted a "startup". He emphasised that most new businesses in the world were actually not startups, but were "service companies".I guess they like to call themselves "startups" ...