Praekelt’s project concerns the metaphorically powerless (poor and youth), while Lacour’s deals with the actually powerless (people’s whose pre-paid electricity supply was cut).
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Praekelt is the man behind the Praekelt Foundation, a philanthropic organisation that aims to help people in emerging markets, using mobile technology. His current big project is Young Africa Live. This is a mobi-based social network and information platform to reach out to young people who have — or could contract — HIV.
Lacour is from Powertime, a South African-based company whose goal is getting power to people more easily. Little known fact: South Africa is a world leader in prepaid technology and provides an example to other emerging markets.
The country has 10-million prepaid electricity consumers, with 250 000 new prepaid users per year. This translates into R800-million every month transacted. This is one of those African solutions for an African (and increasingly global problem)… letting people pay for a commodity as they need it, without the debt risk and management overhead of post-paid systems.
Here are ten gems of wisdom gleaned from both following their talks at the prominent Tech4Africa conference in Johannesburg.
- The battle for communication in Africa is won and done. One billion people, 600-million phones. They can be reached. All you need to do now is build the service.
- Some audiences in Africa will never use a desktop. Systems for them will have to be designed from the ground up to be usable on mobile phone.
- Your audience may be very concerned about the cost of accessing the service or sending messages — Some audiences don’t, for some it’ll be a deal-breaker.
- Online you have to worry about latency – If the site is slow, your user uptake will suffer.
- For social-network focussed services, having a balance between male and female makes a very big difference (i.e. you need to know who your users are).
- Users don’t want to use their real names online when talking about sensitive topics.
- Try be as One Click as possible — Go for App Store approach. This means storing credit card details in a PCI-compliant vault, single sign-on, etc, to minimise actions from the users.
- Give value beyond convenience — Make it easy to use (super-critical), but have additional functions.
- Think carefully about your go-to-market strategy — If you are developing an app, choose which handsets to serve first: look at size of the market, but also size of spend (in Powertime’s case, iPhone was not the biggest number of users, but definitely the biggest spenders).
- Mobile people like apps — If they can have them, they’ll use them in preference.
Image: Afripol
