This article came up on the ever-sporadic Google Africa blog. Basically, those business owners who want to geographically target their AdWords in Kenya and South Africa can now do so. It's good news, although when it comes to Kenya, we'll see how it works out as the satellite connections they use to a large extent are notoriously hard to track location on due to the identifying land IP they get being the one where the connection touches down. So, if the satellite link you're on touches down in England, you appear to be from England, even though you're actually in Nairobi. Obviously this will change a great deal with the new cable lighting up, but for the time being, it's an issue that I'm rather curious about as it completely cripples this new system how I see it.
The other thing that I'm vastly mystified about is that there is no mention of how people from Africa are to either pay for AdWords or for content publishers to be paid for AdSense displays. As I've mentioned before, Google has no practical payment set up for anywhere in all of Sub-Saharan Africa. I've looked over the Adsense blog to see if I missed some recent announcement, but nothing pops out. Surely it would make sense to have a blogger writing in Nairobi who talks about some new restaurant that just opened up to get paid AdSense revenue if the owner of that restaurant wants to use AdWords to promote it next to the article about it. That's how the model works in the rest of the world and it seems logical to me they'd want to continue it here. While it sucks to criticize new innovation in Africa, there seems to be a tremendous disconnect here that is really not helping out anyone and I'm really hoping that I'm daft to something awesome that's happened recently.
I remember a girl from my hometown who went off to UC Berkeley the same time I did. She graduated with a degree in Computer Science. I got mine in English Literature because I was too lazy to do four semesters of calculus which I regret every time I need to brag about just how much math I know. While I ended up learning all the skills I needed to work as a developer, my hometown compatriot now works in some wickedly deep assembly language coding which she enjoys very much. For all purposes, she was a very normal girl who was a geek, but at the same time, an extreme anomaly in the US.
I bring this up because of the cartoon down below and what has now become the general perception of "Women in Tech" not only in North America, but to a large degree in Europe. Gone are the days of Grace Hopper and other normal women doing tech-related jobs, although maybe they were never completely here to begin with. Technology seems to still be very much a male dominated world. Women who are considered tech-centric or "geeks" usually take the form of a girl who can blog or install an App on her iPhone.
And when it comes to journalism, it isn't much better. I read Cringely a good deal as he's a guy with a serious background in technology. This is often the case for guys talking about tech in that they need to be geeks. For women (again in North America and Europe) the focus is usually on being some cutesy girl who does the occasional special interest piece, but who has no idea which end of a conditional statement is up. The worst of this type are the Sarah Lacys and Xeni Jardins of the world because they create a perception that if you're a cute, sexy girl, then that's all that matters. In other words, style and appearance far outweigh the substance of what they write. For instance, most people probably just think that Marissa Meyer is some blond marketing wonkette for Google that they parade around, when in fact she has a Bachelors in Symbolic Systems and a Masters in Computer Science. She has chops, but then again, like my neighbor back home, she is the anomaly. Most peoples' in depth questions to them stops at asking where they get their hair done. There is a cult of persona that far outweighs the strength of words whether they be good or bad, which is so much the case when it comes to women in tech.
I bring all this up about America/Europe because it provides a background for how technology-related professions have fallen across gender lines in the countries that are seen as defining a lot of the technology in the world. It just happens to be the case that Africa is providing a much more interesting setting for the woman geek in tech. Off the top of my head, I can name , Juliana, Nadine, Brenda, Maureen, Edith, Ory, and of course the fantastic Rebecca (who also sits on the Maneno board.)
It is by no means a paradise of equality. There still are relatively few women in the field overall, and men still dominate by and large, but I generally feel that for those who are in it, they are in it as equals, not as divas trying to provide a "glamorous" angle to the cable rollout in East Africa. You see, any of the women in Africa I know of who work or write in tech are very normal people. I can have great chats with them on just about anything that's going on in their countries or tech trends at large. They do not ascribe to the princess, "shot by Annie Leibowitz" avatar, "Oh. My. God." manner of acting; at least not when we're sharing a beer.
Why is this? Is it such that technology is in such a massive state of flux and upswing on the African continent at large that the playing field is broad enough to include everyone? Or maybe, if you want to generalize, then you could say that a good deal of life in African countries is traditionally male dominated, so it seems like women would be even less prone to any kind of technology. One premise I thought was that it was due to decades of aid expenditures in Africa wherein aid groups keep pounding the fact that gender equality must exist in society, although ironically, the home countries of these groups most often fail at this. I feel like there is some part of that in it along with other factors, but that isn't the only thing.
I was cleaning out the memory on my phone and I came across this photo which I took with my Blackberry instead of my proper camera for some reason. These are the rails in Kumasi, Ghana just north of the train station that loop around the top of the Ketejia Market. The market expanded over the rails once the trains stopped running a few years ago. I talk more about it here, but amazingly, the rails are still in pretty good shape despite the price of shirts being debated over them daily.
Moses Kemibaro gets a real taste of proper broadband in Kenya. Honestly, I'd be happy to get the speeds he was experiencing in San Francisco!
For those unaware "mzungu" means "white person" in Kiswahili. Tumwijuke relates a number of quotes she's heard from white friends in Uganda. I have to admit that I never get tired of posts like these because even when North Americans/Europeans mean well, we still blunder in to saying things like these.
The U.S. Ambassador to Kenya, Mike Ranneberger... [drumroll] has started using Twitter. First the US Embassy in Kinshasa and now this. Twitter knows no freakin' bounds!
Kiswahili Tech Projects are Falling Apart
Good article talking about all the issues in creating a local African language version of software and other technology. I know the pains all too well and as the article points out, people often end up using the English (or French) versions which does little to motivate Microsoft or anyone else to bother in the first place. Damn you, chicken and egg!
I remember the scene at the end of Back to the Future II where, just after watching Doc Brown getting blown up by lighting, Marty McFly stands there in the rain, not knowing what to do next. A car pulls up and a strange man gets out to deliver a telegram from 1885 to Marty in 1955. Of course, that scene was brought to us by the Western Union man. What an incredible point of branding that was in 1989 when the movie was shot, by inferring that your messages will get delivered even if it needs to be 60 years in the future.
Now of course, I curse the graves of the founders of Western Union anytime I need to pay someone for work who lives in Africa. With their telegram operations shelved 162 years after they were founded, 17 years after that scene in Back to the Future II was shot, and some 10 years after widespread adoption of the internet and email, one wonders how many more years before they shutter completely? Given the rate of contraction, I'm thinking maybe four years or so. Because it's really money transfers that are keeping that company alive now and I don't know what the exact statistics are, but it seems like the bulk of them are to Africa.
Don't get me wrong, I'm thrilled that there is actually some sort of mechanism that allow me to transfer money around the world in mere minutes to pay someone, but the prices they charge are ludicrous. I'm sure everyone has their own story, but I just spent $8 to send $25. That's a 30% surcharge. It's an impressive way to make money (although SMS charges still beat it) but it simply can't last forever.
I was reading about launch of Zap International by Zain mobile. They're just one more player in what's bound to be a very crowded field soon of transferring money via the mobile phone. On a certain level, it's pretty impressive to have this kind of flexibility. On another, it terrifies me to a large extent that at some point in the very near future, if not now, your communications network will also be holding your money. I don't like that. It's too much wrapped up in to one entity and from where I'm sitting, there is a large "black hole" element to the operation that isn't transparent. While I despise the charges from Western Union, at least I know what they are and they're not a bank. But then again, their charges and inflexibility are part of the reason why so many people are gladly turning to mobile payments.
I honestly don't see the future being in mobile payments completely. It will definitely grow and be an aspect to our daily lives around the world and a mobile operator with have to offer mobile payments if they want to maintain their customer base. I see it as a feature set that is tied in more to regular old banks than to the mobile operator. They and their phones work more like a credit card terminal than anything else. And that's the real solution, having proper banks that are accountable to a great number of countries and regulatory bodies handling our money. Africa definitely needs more of this. How does Western Union fit in to that? I don't think they do.
A great deal of articles have been written about all the East African cables being deployed. Rightly so, given that connectivity is paltry and slow at the moment and about to get a good deal faster (hopefully.) But while this is all good, when you read about how fast the cable is laid out in the ocean (10+km a day), you realize that it's really the inland part that's tricky and there's a lot of inland land in Africa. Sure, you don't need a boat to make it happen and the ever-present media-spawned threat of pirates is less, but the issue of cutting across fields, farms, and most importantly, international borders on land is pretty daunting.
I suppose it's because they haven't broken ground on the project yet, or probably more to the point that the majority of coverage has been in French, but the Central African Backbone is starting to gain a bit of momentum. (Please add to the Wikipedia link if you know more as I had to create it when writing this article.)
A good deal of what I know came from this article on ZDNet in French which covers the basic layout of the cable and the fact that it will most likely start in Algeria and connect to Europe to the north and Sub-Saharan Africa to the south. While there was a little bit mentioned about this last February, it's the fact that Algeria has decided to really set forth and start laying the cable that has garnered more worthwhile attention lately. Their Information Minister is pushing it in the name of getting rid of the satellite connections and helping Algerians better connect to the internet. But in reality, anyone smart knows that this is going to be a major cash cow for Algeria once they punch through to the other countries including Chad, Cameroon, and CAR. All of that comprises Phase 1 of the project and I'm not exactly sure how they're planning to connect Chad with Algeria and not be connecting Niger which lies between the two. Apparently there is a bit of a "and then a miracle occurs" aspect to the planning currently.
Phase 2 of CAB is even more in the Wild West portion of planning as a great number of countries have been tossed around in the mix to connect. While Nigeria might be there, the most probable candidates are Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, São Tomé, and Congo-Brazzaville. Congo-Kinshasa is also on the list to possibly be connected. Of course, Kinshasa could be very well have its own link very soon, so it's not quite as crucial for that area. What would be more impressive is if Northern Congo-Kin could get in on the link coming in to CAR assuming that they would naturally run any fiber link to Bangui, the capital, which sits against the border with Congo. If only Mobutu would have lived to see the day when Mad Men could be live streamed at Gbadolite...
Unlike the Globacom cable, this initiative is indeed being financed be foreigners, namely the World Bank. You can view a brief overview of the loan, here. They quote Phase 1 as being $30 million USD. The ZDNet article quotes it as being €17 million, so I don't really know which figure is for certain. Phase 2 is set to cost in the neighborhood of $160 million, so obviously due to the amount and the number of countries involved, it can be understood as to why it's so undecided at this point.
However the pieces fall, once the links start getting put in to place from Algeria, there will be a world of change for the interior of Africa which usually relies solely on VSAT connections that are obviously better than nothing, but still suck. As to speed for CAB, I couldn't find any hard figures. It is said that Cameroon will have 12 optical fibers and Chad will have six, which doesn't make a lot of sense, nor does it really say much about speed. I guess once things actually start happening over the next year, we'll get a better sense of all this.
Akendewa, which means, "spider" has been announced. It's an organization formed to promote the internet, innovation, and workers in Francophone Africa. Sounds like a good deal to me as they're often ignored by the Anglophone sphere of tech. Originally article is in French, but as always, Google Translate is your friend if you want to read about this initiative. Also, in full disclosure, the president of the organization, Jean-Patrick Ehouman is a Maneno board member, but I still would have written about it anyways, because it's cool to see initiatives like these coming out of Africa instead of going in to it.
Loy Okezie muses on the recent announcement of the SeedCamp 2009 teams. If you note, absolutely none of them are from Africa despite being a very international group. Check out what Loy has to say.
This is from awhile back, but Pernille humorously makes the comparison between using USB drives in internet cafe computers in East Africa and the "thrilling" feeling of having unprotected sex (anywhere, not just Africa.) The comments are also part of the fun in the read and are (with an exception) quite good. She promises to expand on the article at some point and if you don't follow Pernille, you should as she writes nice articles from the point of view of a Danish expat living in Dar Es Salaam.
A vehemently shameless plug for my article on the Pop!Tech blog that just got published today.
Many thanks to Rebecca for pointing out this video. Appears that the solar powered mobiles have hit the market in Kenya and they're selling out like crazy. This video gives good coverage, unfortunately in Dutch, but with English subtitles. The phones look pretty cool, although on cloudy days, one must revert to the way of the charger...
Apparently as of 1 July, 2009 all mobile phones numbers need to be fully registered in South Africa. Prior to this, it was like many places in that you popped in for a SIM, topped it up and off you went with a number. Now, you need some form of identity and an address tied in with buying the number. You can read more about the general aspects of RICA, which stands for "Regulation of Interception of Communications and Provision of Communication-Related Information Act" (I'd hate to see how it's written in Afrikaans) here.
As attendees to Highway Africa found out, even if you're just a visitor and MTN is handing out free SIMs (which only cost $0.13 anyways) you need to somehow register the number before you can use it. While a passport works fine on the ID side of things, the address is a problem as their system will not accept foreign addresses. So, you just register the hotel's address.
While picking up a SIM is still a much better deal than in Africa in general than in the--US ($25) or Europe (~$8)--regulations like these have always left me scratching my head. It is true that it's the same deal to register in most European countries and most definitely the US with all of this is in the name of security, but it can very easily be sidestepped. Wouldn't some would-be criminal there on a fake passport just give a fake address and (no way!) render the whole registration process useless? Or maybe mug somebody with a valid SIM and just use that? These laws are antiques, from the days before people moved as much as they do now, when we had much more permanent addresses, and no mobile electronics. Governments at some point need to realize that if they're going to actually monitor security on mobiles, then they need to get ahead of it. Of course, given the fact that this requires people working for the government who innovate faster than those catering to the private sector then it explains why we're stuck with things like RICA or the PATRIOT Act in the US.
One note on the instruction sheet about RICA they hand out with every phone that I found most remarkable was this to deal with the address issue:
If you live in an informal settlement you can provide a letter and/or affidavit from a school, church or retail store where you receive your post...
Again, it circumvents the whole thing they're trying to achieve and has rendered this Act to be more of a pain than anything useful to the state. And according to the Wikipedia article, it's quite possibly unconstitutional. Plus there's the fact that it's clear this was done in preparation for the 2010 World Cup, which is ludicrous as it's going to kill anyone visiting from picking up a number and using the telecom providers while there. If a fan or journalist has to go to a special place to register a South African number or just deal with the price of roaming while in South Africa, I'm assuming they'll choose the latter given how much they're already spending on the flight, tickets, and everything else. Way to start killing World Cup profits early on SA regulators.
I came across this good read yesterday about the closure of Senegalese internet cafes. For those reading this blog right now, it might be a tough go as it's in French, but Google Translate can be a good friend if you want to look it over and get a tasty overview of the internet situation in Senegal currently.
Basically, it comes down to the fact that the monopoly is a huge problem in Senegal. Sonatel (who apparently offer the iPhone) is the current government-owned monopoly on the main internet connection to the outside world. Naturally, since they have no competition, they don't really care about offering competitive prices. No matter if it's Orange, Tigo, or relative newcomer, Expresso, it doesn't matter that they offer data plans as they all have to buy bandwidth from the Sonatel connection and costs work out to generally the same. This is a common problem throughout most of Africa unfortunately.
In Senegal, the situation was exacerbated by the fact that internet usage took off and people got in to getting online. This in turn made for more internet cafes. More internet cafes made for more competition. The prices for users dropped from about $3 USD an hour to $0.65 per hour. This of course made for even more people getting on the internet, but only once those price points were reached.
These prices it turned out, were not tenable for business. Despite a massive demand, internet cafes have been closing left and right simply because they can't afford to pay the connection fees and offer service at the prices people are able to afford. Naturally, the connection fees didn't drop with more usage, which has been the inverse of this situation in the US, Europe, and Asia, with a number of Asian countries making out the best on price vs. speed (Japan is spoiled rotten with 100Mbs per second at $25 USD.)
Tossed in to this is also the case that a growing number of people have been able to connect at home through the growing ADSL network, especially in towns such as Dakar. It's all been downhill for those on ground trying to provide cafe connections for the masses.
While the circumstances are a bit different, one does have to wonder how much life an internet cafe has left anywhere in the world? Outside of tourists locations, they seem to be drying up everywhere to some degree as more and more of us travel with laptops or at the very least, wifi/highspeed data enabled phones that can do simple browsing anywhere we go. And this is a trend you see in Africa as well. Like I found in Cape Coast, Ghana, there are a number of growing cafes that have ceased to be the typical cafe of the past. They offer more of a place to plug in and work for the day, aka, the coworking space.
Obviously when your outbound connections are controlled by one entity, any change in the market is treacherous as the free market is anything but. Even still, I'm not sure that only connection costs are to blame for less internet cafes in a country like Senegal. User habits as to how people get online are changing the world over and I ask if the public internet access point soon be a relic? As I watch people wondering the streets, checking Facebook on the iPhones, I say yes, although it's a yes I don't necessarily like as the 21st coffeehouse was something I was enjoying.
