Why the MTN-Bharti Airtel deal collapsed
Rebecca covers the collapse of what would have been a $23 billion mobile network merger in South Africa. Apparently the main stopping block was obstinacy. Go figure.
Jen writes about how Africa is at a crucial tipping point in terms of investment in technology and how many countries are in a state where investment in ICT will be an investment in the country's society and economic growth. Definite food for thought.
This very cool site project was supposed to launch yesterday. Apparently drupal gave some pain, which I know well. Stay tuned and see where they go. Should be something to watch and keep updated on with their @ZimbabweInPix twitter account. Twiga will also soon have an interview with one of the founders working to make it happen.
I read the Google Africa blog whenever there is new content, which honestly, isn't that often. For some reason, the fact that their Google Translate can now translate between all its current languages as well as Swahili and Afrikaans hasn't been mentioned there. I mean, this is huge! This is great! This is... reported on an unofficial Google blog?
I assume that a bigger announcement must be coming soon and they're just checking to make sure that all the conditionals are closed in the code before letting everyone know. For instance, three days ago, before the Afrikaans option was in there, I actually had to translate something from Afrikaans to English. I used Dutch for the source language option and magically, it translated fine, which it shouldn't have given the dialectic drift from Dutch at Afrikaans. I can only assume that Google Translate auto-detected the language as Afrikaans, which was lurking somewhere in the background.
There are implications with this that go above and beyond a simple announcement, specifically for Swahili. A year ago, I talked with some of the guys who work on Google's linguistic endeavors and they told me that the required corpus for Swahili machine translation was at 40% of what was needed and that was the highest for any African language. This means that in the last year, there was either a huge batch of pages in Swahili which Google had missed or there was a 250% increase in the amount of Swahili text available on the web. I'm guessing it's some combination of both as well as Google paying something get a dictionary in there because Google really wants to get established in Africa.
Whatever the case, it's quite excellent news for languages in Africa as these are the first two African languages to be included in this system. If you create the tools, you grow the language. Here's to more and soon, although I don't know what this is going to mean to the Kamusi Project...
And now apparently the Google Africa Blog has decided to write about this over a week after the fact. I feel so incredibly ahead of things right now.
Just the other day I was thinking (actually, no, I wasn't, but go along with it), you know with Ben Affleck all up in Congo's aid business, where on earth is his best buddy Matt Damon? I mean, he's done soooo much for Darfur, but has otherwise been kinda quiet lately. Ah, that's why... while Ben has been saving Congo, Matt has been saving Zimbabwe. Man, what a duo. My awareness is so raised right now, that I probably shouldn't get out of my chair for bit.
Of course, the big thing with Matt is that he skipped that whole fact finding thing that Affleck was trying to do (and for which I initially admired Ben until he went to ABSS). Yeah, Matt is completely in to the "Won't somebody please think of the children?!!" phase of it all. And hey, don't get me wrong there are some serious problems in Sub-Saharan Africa which remained unsolved after decades of ill-constructed aid programs. It's just that when reading...
action has to be taken
...right next to a headline about how Rachel Ray would do her FHM shoot again tomorrow, it makes me ask the questions, "Um yeah, okay, what 'action'?" Why does the news even cover these soundbites anymore? They're useless and while I have don't the solutions (I don't think any one person does), I'm not sitting there, trying to use my "celebrity capital" to bring attention to issues that have already been brought-ed. Of course, I actually don't really have any "celebrity capital" to use, but still, ergh.
As a side note, Morgan Freeman is playing Nelson Mandela? I guess with Don Cheadle typecast as Rwandan and Forest Whitaker typecast as Ugandan, that just left Freeman or Denzel Washington to play Mandela. Way. To. Stretch. Yourselves. Hollywood.
One of the time waster sites that I read published, 6 Real-Life Vigilantes Crazier Than Batman and 5 Real World Criminals Who Were Certified Super-Villains. They're pretty wild lists, but maybe a bit incomplete, because if they're going to mention Papa Doc as a Super-Villian, then they should probably list Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo who is the current president-for-life of Equatorial Guinea. If you're not familiar with this country, that's not surprising. While it's on the west coast of Africa, it's rather small and it happens to be the only country in Africa with Spanish as its official language. Not a lot of information comes out of the country and this is mostly due to Obiang who seems quite happy to run the place for nearly 30 years and amass $600 million in ill-gotten money from plundering the state in a small homage to Mobutu.
But beyond being corrupt, the man is a bit nuts and drunk with power. For instance he believes that he is "in permanent contact with the Almighty" and "can decide to kill without anyone calling him to account and without going to hell." Of course this only natural given that he declared himself to be a god, although he still swears he's Catholic. I suppose it's in case the whole self-deification thing doesn't pan out. Then of course there are the rumors circulating that he's a cannibal as well, although that's most likely just to keep the masses in line. It's rather surprising how Robert Mugabe gets all the press these days, when Obiang is far, far worse.
Maybe it's because of this or maybe it was just because Spain, South Africa, and maybe the US and UK thought that they wanted to have more of a hand in governing the third largest oil producing country in Sub-Saharan Africa that they decided to set in motion and assassination attempt. And if it wasn't enough to have several large countries backing this, why not toss in Mark Thatcher (yeah, the son of former British Prime Minister, Marget Thatcher) in to the mix as well. But wait, that's not really enough. Let's hire one of the most impressive mercenaries I've ever heard of in the form of Simon Mann. Take a look at that guy's Wikipedia page. While he's more mercenary than vigilante, he still should have been on one of the lists I mentioned earlier. He's like a real life manifestation of any lead character in Michael Bay film.
I'm not going to get in to intricacies of how the whole assassination plot when down, but needless to say, it failed and failed hard when the mercenaries involved were in Zimbabwe of all places and got captured by Mugabe's forces. If you want to read all the gritty details, take a look at CNN and Reuters . Then read up on Executive Outcomes. Due to the fact that Mann was extradited to Equatorial Guinea and is now serving time in Black Beach Prison (where he'll probably die), I see a good chance of a movie being made of this beyond the British production of Coup! in 2006. Something big. Something with a lot of money. Something with Michael Bay as the director perhaps? I like the odds.
