While El Dorado is something for storybooks and popular mythology, I know the actuality of it all too well having grown up in California with Gold Rush history all around me as a child (my home town is called, 'gold town'.) Much is made about the wealth that flowed through Northern California during the mid-19th century, but rarely is the dirtiness of that period ever covered with people working in terrible conditions, catching all manner of diseases, often dying, and all to have the actual wealth go to an elite few with the connections. We've repeated this story in a number of ways over the past 150 years...
I mention this because of the title of this article, L’Afrique, nouvel eldorado des télécommunications (Africa, the new El Dorado of Telecommunication.) The article talks a great deal about the developments in the industry and the growth, but doesn't actually follow up on what is a very catchy title in that while the mobile phone growth in Sub-Saharan Africa is tremendous, it's illusory at best. This growth is being painted in such a good light at the moment, because a great many worldwide companies see a gigantic market there. This is definitely true, but what happens when the growth slows down? Yeah, I know, the slow down is years and years away given that there are a billion people there, but still, it's not as far away as you may think.
At best, a great deal of the adoption is coming about because service, coverage, and prices are sub-par. I think that everyone I've ever met in Sub-Saharan Africa has two if not more phones. One is for talking. One is for texting. Maybe one is for another region if they go there often. This isn't growth, it's people dealing with less than adequate service. Up until about 10 years ago, people in a lot of the US had to do the same as the coverage just wasn't "there" yet. And 150 years ago, miners in California bought multiple claims for when their current one ran out. You hedge you bets and when that translates to numbers, it looks impressive. But, you probably own more than one pair of shoes and always need new ones. You're really only wearing one at a time, so is there really huge possible growth in the shoe industry? Nope.
Yes, there is innovation, like this MTN address book function that Elia tipped me off to and is quite cool. But, I've seen this type of thing before. It was in the 1990's in the US and Europe. Innovation in mobile technology was awesome then. Every couple of months, something groundbreaking would come out from a network provider (not a handset maker mind you) and then they'd all flock to copy it. It was a wondrous time to play with mobile technology, but it's gone as flat as the growth rates in these regions.
I'm just saying that El Dorado was never found. The gold mines of Northern California dried up. A lot of things have happened along the way, but the one thing we know is that growth rates are finite. What happens when the growth flattens out or once numerous networks have swallowed each other? There's conflict in Eastern Congo for the materials that are fueling all this growth. What about that? What if the exports were to stop as they're systematically inhumane?
I know that a lot of my fellow tech bloggers will point to all that's coming about because of the mobile penetration and that the mobile phone is the computer in Africa (although my African friends with computers might disagree), but there is a day very soon where things will flatline and a lot of folks will be left in the lurch. Competition will dry up. Innovation will fall off. Prices will go up and then what?
Instead of constantly talking about growth (especially as if it's going to go on forever), maybe we should be paying a great deal more attention to what's happening at the top and on the sides of this new El Technorado and see that it really isn't all that it's being purported to be. Only then we can maybe talk about what's sustainable in the industry.
Across the street from my apartment, a guy was taking a break from his job two days ago. A woman came along, got in an argument with him, and stabbed him to death. Because I live in San Francisco, there will and has been media coverage of this, but it will soon be forgotten as the balance of coverage favors shots of the Golden Gate Bridge as opposed to the evils that lurk in the city although you can easily find them without really having to look all that hard.
As this event passes and this poor fellow is laid to rest, you won't see a continuous stream of photos showing the bad shades (prostitution, drug addicts, homeless) of a delightful town. It's the complete inverse with a shot like this one from Liberia. I have seen photos of children like this thousands of times before and they are something that I do not give thanks for today. That shot is not a good photo, but it is a shocking photo, if you haven't seen it before. All it does is to further the perception that most people in North America and Europe have of Africa.
Today is Thanksgiving in the US and as I grew up there, it's customary to state all that you are thankful for today. At this moment, in the context of this article, I am thankful for connectivity. I know it sounds like a strange thing to say, but it's a fact that while it allows for images and articles on Africa that continually portray it in a bad light to circulate, there is also the opportunity to see another side. We can turn the camera around 180 degrees and see what there is beyond the scope of what has been captured; the innovation, culture, history, food, music, and life that thrives in Africa. But most importantly, Africans can actually talk about Africa.
I am thankful for all who chose to take this path and show this when all of you know how much less resistance there is on the path that has you taking photos of children in the street to accomplish lord knows what at this point. Let us hope these efforts that move slowly now gain momentum with time. And in time, perhaps we will all be able to thankful that perceptions will have changed.
Google has really been busy on the language side of things lately. This wouldn't be news to anyone except translators and multilingual folks except for the fact that they introduced more African languages to their mix of available languages for translation and so it's suddenly become a good deal more important for Africa as it is boosting cross-communication abilities on many fronts.
First off is the new Google Translate. I use this system quite often, so I noticed right away when they made the switchover a couple of days ago. There were some bumps in the transition which I'm assuming were due to the work being done at off peak hours in the US, but very much on peak hours for those of us on UTC or UTC+1.
In general, I like the new format. It's definitely snappier overall for quick translations. What I don't like is that it's quite heavily AJAX driven (as are most things these days) and I'm curious as to how well it would perform in a low bandwidth setting. I'm hoping that someone can give that a go as try as I might to throttle my connection, I can't seem to get it to downscale to to point where I feel is properly representative of a low bandwidth connection.
Something that's also rather new is the speaking voice for English target translations. This is really quite important as the English alphabet is complete garbage when it comes to writing how the language is spoken and I'm sure that non-English speakers will get no end of enjoyment out of wondering how on earth through, threw, and thru all sound the same. What would be nice is that in addition to the Roman alphabet transliteration for languages like Chinese is if they did this for English as well...
Oh course the big news in translation land are the automatic captions for YouTube. These are huge and quite frankly, it's about time that a major video platform finally added in some proper subcaptioning abilities. Sadly, it will probably mean the death of dotSUB which is a platform that I like to varying degrees, but it's easy to understand why people were lax to add in subtitles as it was a great deal of work to create and then translate the text. Google takes the approach of "machine bash in to shape. human refine. everyone love." and I think that it will work quite well overall. Obviously once they fully deploy the system and people start to use it more, we'll see it refined a great deal. But it's good that Google's YouTube brand has finally started making good use of the Google abilities such as machine translation.
My only wish is that Vimeo would do something similar and maybe because of this, they will. Honestly, they should just buy out dotSUB or something to that effect. Their interface, video quality, and overall ease of use if vastly superior to YouTube with YouTube being kinda like a Spanish croissant in that it's okay overall, but once you dig in to it, it kinda sucks a great deal...
According to this article on the BBC, word has come down that Air Austral has purchased not one, but two of the superjumbo Airbus A380 planes. While other airlines are outfitting them to carry more passengers in multiple classes, Austral is opting for the "budget" route and outfitting the planes to carry a whopping 840 passengers all at the economy level from their Paris-Saint-Denis route.
Given that there are only about 827,000 people in total living on the island of Réunion, it is obvious that they are planning to ply towards the holiday makers. Of course, at 11 hours in flight time and a cost of 800€ or so, it makes for a strange terminology to call this a "budget" flight as I'm much more used to seeing this applied to stag parties on Ryanair in Europe. Of course, they must obviously believe that there will be a good deal of profit in this or they would have paid the 1 billion (thousand million) USD for the two jets. And maybe there is something to be said for this approach. If it does indeed work, it might prove to be a decent model to drop the cost of flights to Africa and allow for an increase of connectedness which is most definitely needed.
A couple months ago, I wrote about the Central African Backbone which was in the process of being planned. More news has come along on this front and it runs a bit counter to what seemed to be the plan in my previous article. The good news in all of this is that, according to this article, the World Bank has indeed fully committed to the development loan:
The Board of the World Bank has approved total project funding of US$215 million, of which US$26.2 million will go towards the first phase of developing each country’s national backbones to give them access to the international landing station in Cameroon.
The only thing is that instead of the line running from Algeria to the south, apparently the line is going to run from the Cameroonian coast, inland to the east, in order to connect Chad and CAR. The goal being to obviously favor countries starting with the letter C as C stands for 'connectivity' or something like which I've just made up... The genius of this plan is that they expect to run the cable along an oil pipeline that terminates at the coastal town of Kribi in Cameroon. Sounds good to me if it means that people will get proper terrestrial connections in the very near future.
This recent article makes a brief mention of redundant connections, which may be where the connection up through Algeria comes in to play at some later date. The ambiguity goes a long way to explain why the CAB hasn't made as much news as it should because in reality, the coastal cables are incredibly easy in comparison to connecting up those who are further inland. Hopefully we'll get more coverage as the deployment proceeds and solidifies.
This is a continuation in my series on low bandwidth development.
The almighty WYSIWYG. It's a tool that makes life on the net a great deal easier for most everyone. Those of us who are web developers rain scorn down upon these systems, but it's awfully arrogant of my coding brethren to do that as we live and eat code all day long. For those that don't, it is a massive pain and even a obstacle to working on the web if one has to type in all the direct HTML code.
Don't get me wrong, I'm completely against a WYSIWYG for overall web development. What DreamWeaver does when it creates code for a site is criminal. But, when it's the case that someone needs to write something in a text field on a website (like an article or a comment), there is a definite need for this tool as the web thrives on links. If people don't link, then there isn't much of a web, and I think that many people don't link because of the need to use HTML code.
About four years ago, I was an IT Manager for a publishing company and one of my direct reports was working on setting up a WYSIWYG for an internal website to edit articles for online publication. He came back to me a week later and said, "Well, I've got one in place. It's pretty decent, although it only works in Firefox, not Explorer, and completely heaves on itself in Safari..." I shook my head sadly as we had to deploy it like that because those were ugly times, but they have since changed a great deal. These days the WYSIWYG of choice is TinyMCE. Wickedly powerful and full of every option in the world to obfuscate direct HTML coding from the end user, it is by and large, the choice of many.
There are two glaring issues with TinyMCE. One is that you might very well not need all the power that it packs (think of driving a Ferrari in rush hour traffic.) The second and much larger issue is that in its full state, it's a whopping 320kb! Minified, it drops to 175kb and if you have the ability to compress it, you can get it to about 60kb. And this is before adding in images and styles, which will add another 10-20kb depending on how you want it to look.
So, for the purposes of creating a light, quick to download site, TinyMCE is simply not going to work. This has been noted by a great many people who have set out to create alternatives that, while having less options, are most likely easier to implement and considerably lighter to download. As I've been working to improve the WYSIWYG editing abilities on Maneno, I've been working through a number of these and following are my thoughts on how some of them implement.
For those using the MooTools JavaScript library (which I like a great deal), as the name implies, this is a very simple editor that works to complement the library and provide a simpler method to writing code without having to know code. The filesize is 15kb when minified and 5kb once compressed. Can't beat that really which is why I've been using it for some time.
The only downside is that it is indeed a very basic editor and it doesn't hide the HTML code, it just inserts it automatically. It's mainly for these reasons that I'm shifting away from it as while this system works nicely for me, it isn't so great for the intended audience, who are those folks that would much rather not deal with code.
Also, for the MooTools library, there is MooRTE, but I haven't really spent enough time with it to give feedback other than to say it's there and give it a go if you've got the time.
I tried this editor out briefly. It has promise and is a good deal smaller than TinyMCE, but the problem is that it's still 76kb when minified. It's just too big to be used on a low bandwidth site. It also requires jQuery, which while a very nice library, will increase your download footprint by 20kb by having it around.
I've been moving a lot of things I work on over to use jQuery. The reasons behind this are the topic of a much larger and much geekier article than I think most people would want to read right now. But in doing this, I was looking around for an editor that would take advantage of the library. I thought that jwysiwyg would be just the thing. It's quite light, simple, and seems like a good tool despite only being at version 0.5.
Turns out, there are many problems with this system. If you just want to plunk it in to whatever you're using, it should be somewhat okay. But the code hasn't had an update in almost a year and requires a number of hacks to work with Explorer 8. Also, modifying it has problems and functions such as ordered and unordered lists just don't work well.
I'm not sure what's going on with this project, but it doesn't seem to be in a good state at the moment. This is a shame as the intentions behind it are quite solid and something I would like to encourage the developers to continue to work on if they have the time.
At the moment, this is my choice. You can squeeze out a very lean version of it if the download page works well for you. Unfortunately to get it to work well, you need to customize your download, get it in the full (not the compressed version) and then use something like a YUI compressor to get it smaller. I have no idea as to what's up with this and that's one unfortunate side in system that the developer doesn't appear to be able to offer any support currently, which I can't fault him for as he gives away the product for free.
I have needed to customize the download a good deal for my needs and amazingly, it's taken well to this, which was refreshing. It doesn't rely on any outside JS libraries, so you don't have to worry about breaking an dependencies. It's all self contained and happily working with itself.
The only big issue beyond the source downloading problem is that if it appears the system is built mainly around AJAX form submissions, which is very cool for those only doing that. For those who are doing a more traditional posting of form submissions, you'll need to shift the content of the WYSWYIG in to a form data item to actually get it. Not a terribly hard thing to do, but it will drive you insane until you realize that that isn't happening.
This is my take on a number of editors. If you have other suggestions, please feel free to contribute below. I'm actually going to be rolling out some work with the NicEdit system in the next few days, so you'll be able to see that in action. It will be in a limited fashion though, so if you show me something that's better, I'll gladly give it a try!
At the BarCamp Africa UK, a good many of us had a common problem in that while the event took place at at the Vodafone headquarters in a very slick, new building, Google Maps was nearly no help in finding it. The actual address is 1 Kingdom St,London W2 6BL. As you can see in that link, it does indeed pull up an address that is near the event, but is not the actual event. That address points you to a series of row houses on the other side of the train tracks going to Paddington Station. The actual location, I've shown below. As you can see, it's close, but no cigar.
The quick, obvious moral of this is that you can't entirely trust Google Maps. But, that is getting harder not to do as we rely on technologies like this for a great deal of our information because more often than not, they are a great deal more correct than traditional sources. While Google is taking a great deal of effort in trying have more community involvement in their mapping projects, you still end up with maps like this one of central Mombasa. Sure, whatever automatic system they used to generate this worked decently well, but at the same time, in the map version, there are streets going across the water! And of course, a lot of things are unnamed. While many would say that this is a cost of crowdsourcing which is far outweighed by the eventual benefit of more data, unlike Wikipedia, Google is a corporate entity. They make money off these maps (through related ads) and as such, I believe that there is a good deal of responsibility to make sure that things are accurate. For anyone who is in development communities, you know very well the difference between the "nightly build" which is often bleeding edge and very much broken vs. the "stable release". Google seems to be releasing their "nightly build" for general consumption. Yes, I realize that it may encourage others to come and fix it, but what about those who see it, see that it's Google and take it as cartographic gospel?
While Google is one of the few companies really striving to have their products work in Africa, it seems that there is an underlying principle of "good enough" in some of what they're deploying. Because the fact that there were no digital maps of Mombasa or other cities available before, what they're offering is better than that because it's "something". But all this is doing is quashing some kind of local group or even OpenStreetmap (their view of Mombasa) to flourish.
Google and other companies need to really be called out on things like this and have a great deal more accountability. If their maps other other data are going to become the de facto, then someone needs to certify that things actually are correct because in my book, you simply cannot half-ass data collection; it's full-ass in or don't do it at all.
The Dirty Truth about Rural Broadband
Just to show that telecoms really are dirtbags no matter where you are in the world when it comes to providing service to those in the less profitable regions of a country.
La population rurale et le téléphone portable au Mali.
An article by Maneno author, Boukary on his blog Fasokan about general mobile use in the country. Read worth the cut and paste in to Google Translate (yes, it's in French.)
M-commerce and its Impact on Africa
An article by Alex Twinomugisha about the rise of the mighty "m" in Africa. Mobile everything and how it is changing lives.
Technology and the developing world
The article is about development that actually takes place in Nicaragua, but is absolutely and completely applicable to African development efforts in that basically, you can't dictate how people use what they are given and more often than not, people will chose what they feel is more important to them.
Remember the Right to Communicate?
An article about the (rightly) ongoing debate in one having a human right to communicate and thus be granted access to telephony in some variant.
The once-in-a-blue-moon offerings from the Google Africa blog produced an article about their Google Street Trikes today. Basically, you take a Google Street View car and smash it in to a tricycle to get a highly-mobile, pedal-powered imaging machine. They're deploying them in South Africa, but I could easily see these being used other places on the continent as well as oh... everywhere in the world.
It's always a tad bit annoying when using Street View to come across a street that a car can't drive down and so you're just stuck there, looking at it, trying to zoom in, in the hopes you can see more of it and figure out where the place is. While not a big problem in the US where the concept of a pedestrian zone is an incredibly rare occurrence, in Europe, whole sections of cities have been un-viewable due to the limitation that Google Street View is generated by cameras mounted on cars. Maybe some people are happy with it this way, but as it currently sits places like the entire old town of Barcelona are not viewable and that's a shame as it's one of the most interesting parts of the city to see; drunken, urinating tourists aside.
Anyways, you can watch the trike in action around Stonehenge in the video below which they've included in the article I linked to above:
The Open Moko group are a determined lot. I came in contact with their smartphone efforts about a year ago when I was spending a good deal more time coworking at PariSoMa where their group had their meetings there. The phone they were working on at the time had a ways to go, but the people involved were quite committed to the project. It seems that just last month, they've released a stellar little product called, the WikiReader.
While at BarCamp Africa UK, Tariq Khokhar of Aptivate showed me the little palm-sized device that allows you to download the entire Wikipedia (sans images) to be able to look up entries from the device wherever you are. The battery will last for something like 6 months with regular use. You can read all the serious stats on Wikipedia (of course). The cost is $100 and they'll mail you the entire Wikipedia twice a year or you can just download it at will.
Something like this is needed. My friend, David Sasaki long ago downloaded Wikipedia to his iPhone in order to settle debates when out drinking; the 21st century Guinness Book of Records if you will. This WikiReader obviously sidesteps the need to get the iPhone and risk potentially being RickPhoned. It's great for all the aspiring intellectuals in my family who want to pretend like they know everything while on the go.
Using it, the device reads quite well in the sun. The touch screen, while not the most amazing in the world, works well. It's a good size in the hand and is responsive. There are maybe a couple of bugs to tweak out of it here and there to make it a bit more snappy, but it works quite well overall.
Inevitably, I'm sure that there will be people who get one sniff of this little device and think, "Holy moly, we're going to airdrop these across Africa. Knowledge to the masses!"
Is this a good idea? At $100 it's a bit expensive for this kind of proposition. Even at $25 it would add up quite fast, but maybe not out of the question. Obviously, they're a great deal cheaper than a full-fledged laptop and the power requirements are much more lenient. Of course, what happens if one were to toss a couple of solar panels on the back? Obviously the price would go up, but the battery life would extend out indefinitely.
It does indeed seem like it's a good idea, doesn't it? But how will this really help people? Issues in Africa aren't due to a lack of information for people living there, as that is spread quite readily, but more due to a lack of outside communication. It's a one-sided, one-way communication for some group from Northern America or Europe to dump something like this on a people.
The issue is that it's short term, scatter shot thinking to just send a device like this to Africa. Yes, it could give knowledge to the next William Kamkwamba, but it is much better if someone comes from the continent, sees the device, thinks it is indeed a good idea and takes one back to share with people. Others see it, agree and have more sent in. That is more of what is needed, Africans making the decision as to which technology they think is appropriate for them. I believe the term often used is, "supply and demand". I know, it's revolutionary.
