As the co-founder of SOFTtribe limited, one of the leading software houses in West Africa, Herman Chinery-Hesse has been described by the BBC as "Africa's Bill Gates". Chinery-Hesse is known for designing software that is "tropically tolerant" in that it takes into consideration Africa's specific environmental, political and societal challenges.In a recent interview with the BBC, Chinery-Hesse said: "I think that there is so much opportunity in Africa, there is so much underdevelopment, there is so much that hasn't been ...

Writing the subject line is often the last and most hurried step before sending an email, when it should actually be the other way around. These are very much a mission-critical element of your communications strategy that you shouldn't leave until deadlines are looming. In fact, those first few characters are the doorstep to your emailing success; since it’s all you have to catch the attention of your reader, entice them to open your message and take action.As you plan ...

As one of the youngest and most influential marketing strategists in the world, Josh Spear owns Undercurrent, a New York-based consultancy that applies a digital worldview to the challenges and ambitions of complex corporate organisations.Nominated as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum, Spear serves on the Global Agenda Council on Marketing and Branding. He has been an active participant in the World Economic Forum in Davos since 2008. Most recently, he has been advising Millennium Promise, ...

In business white space is defined as a place, "...where rules are vague, authority is fuzzy, budgets are non existent, and strategy is unclear..." It's the space between the organisational chart, where the real innovation happens.It's also a great definition for what we see in Africa, and it's one reason why it's one of the most exciting places to be a technology entrepreneur today.Recently, I gave with a talk at PopTech where I talked about "The Idea of Africa" ...

BlackBerry manufacturer RIM has decided to delay the release of an update to its PlayBook OS until further notice.In a blog post, senior VP of the PlayBook tablets, David Smith said:As much as we'd love to have it in your hands today, we've made the difficult decision to wait to launch BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0 until we are confident we have met the expectations of our developers, enterprise customers and end-users. For the enterprise, we're addressing many barriers to ...

No longer the forgotten step-child of South African internet activity, a study by Fuseware and World Wide Worx has found that along with e-mail, news, and banking, South Africans have now also embraced social media as a core pillar of their internet activity.The study, titled South African Social Media Landscape 2011 as Memeburn has previously reported, found that MXit and Facebook lead the way in user numbers.When it comes to growth, Twitter and BlackBerry's instant messaging service -- which also ...

Finnish communications giant Nokia has unveiled what it calls the "first real" Windows phone. The Lumia 800, it says, is designed entirely around the Windows Phone operating system.Addressing the audience at Nokia World 2011, currently underway in London, Nokia’s Kevin Shields called the phone "a beauty on the outside and beast on the inside".The Lumia 800 borrows heavily from the design of the Nokia N9. Its insides are held together by a single piece, injection moulded polycarbonate ...

While much of the attention from the opening keynote at Nokia World 2011 was focussed on the Lumia 800, the Finnish communications giant also announced that it intends targeting the "next billion" internet users.Nokia CEO, Stephen Elop said he believed that "for many people, their mobile phone will be their first connection with the internet".“Our focus, particularly in emerging markets, is to bridge the digital divide,” Elop said.One way in which it aims to do this is by connecting ...

A leading figure in the British user experience community, Cennydd Bowles is a user experience designer and writer based in Brighton, England. He works in design and strategy at Clearleft, a UK-based design agency well-known as a leader in user experience, and his book, Undercover User Experience Design, written with colleague James Box, has been acclaimed as "a must-have for your bookshelf".In a recent blog post Bowles wrote:Design is inherently less predictable than most other product fields, since it ...

Dear everyone. Please stop using QR codes. Stop putting them on your billboards. Your posters. Your magazines. Your flyers. Your websites. Just stop. Until you sit down and think about it a lot more carefully. Thank you.It’s a funny thing when people get hold of a new technology. As people prone to hyperbole, we start shouting from the rooftops how this new thing is going to "revolutionise" (our favourite word) the way people communicate. With QR codes, we’re nattering on ...