For those who don't know, sexiest-dot-com-in-the-world-at-the-moment, Twitter has relaunched their homepage.
This builds on a series of changes starting last year when we redesigned the homepage to make search and trending topics more visible and easily accessible to everyone. With that version, we brought the power of search.twitter.com to the homepage and let people explore the value of Twitter without an account.
This is all fine and good as it marks what seems to be either the third or fourth iteration of their home page, but I'm curious if perhaps it goes a bit far towards the "die Explorer die" camp? I mean, for some time now, I've noticed that for Explorer 7 & 8, Twitter works alright, but it's not nearly as good as in Firefox, Chrome, Safari, or Opera. And when it comes to Explorer 6, it's a real disaster. To a degree, I support this direction, especially as Explorer 6 is a dead horse, but at the same time, Explorer still makes up just under half of the browser market and when viewing Twitter in Explorer 8, it tosses a compatibility error mode. It's not the most amazing thing in the world and I was rather surprised to see it. I'm curious as to whether it's just a temporary bug or if Twitter thinks that somehow all these Explorer users are going to vanish in the coming months? Or maybe it's more that they seem they market divesting to the tablet/mobile side of things and they don't really care about the desktop/notebook era?
My other issue is heaviness of the home page. What I've really liked about Twitter in the relatively sans-FailWhale epoch is that it's been simple, light, and quick. This home page changes a great deal of that and depending on the time of the day I access it, it is very difficult to load. Seeing as how I am indeed a member of the site, I don't really need this home page and thus, I tend to just go straight to twitter.com/login to get to a slimmer, faster way to access my account. That works quite well to bypass all the craziness of the home page and get to the Twitter I know and love.
Ultimately, it would be nice to see a couple of things come about:
- Just a bit more attention paid to at least Explorer 8.
- Streamline the home page information as now it's almost too much.
- Lighten up the bandwidth requirements of the home page as it's running about half a meg currently.
Twitter had it's usually data twasm when Google announced their new Buzz application which marks Google's hard push in to some form of social media dominance (Don't be seem evil?) Buzz might very well be useful for collaboration, but it seems like a lot of hype over integration of tools that already exist. I'd be like if I put a hammer, a wrench, and two screwdrivers in a box, held a press conference and told the world that I'd just created the ultimate tool, which I call the BuzzBox. In fact, Microsoft and Yahoo! are already asking what the big deal is as they've had these options available in their email systems for some time now. Of course, they aren't good Google. Microsoft is the neighborhood bully and Yahoo! is the kind of quiet little brother that just sort of goes along with what over-achieving bigger brother Google is doing.
But all this reminded me of the last hypefest with Google in the form of Wave. The much sought after, invitation-only product that Google showed off to thunderous applause, that once the great majority of us got access, we just looked at it and thought, "Hmm, okay, might be worthwhile in awhile; a long while." But, I bring up mention of Wave as when I first accessed it, I was in San Francisco, bopping along on my low-latency 3Mb connection. Now I'm in Côte d'Ivoire on what is in theory a 1.2Mb line which feels more like a 256Kb (or less) line that oft drowns in latency. Then there is now, when I'm writing this offline, as the connection is completely dead.
What I am about to say should not come as a surprise in that Google Wave sucks a great deal from here. It takes about two minutes for the main interface to load and from there on it's quite lagging. Unfortunately, as everyone I know threw in the towel on Wave, it's hard to test out any real conversations on the thing. One thing is clear though in that as more applications like Wave are developed (and there will be more) the barriers to information access will go up. I covered all of this in an older article because it's a rather massive problem that no one is addressing. People are just more in awe of postulating about what The Cloud will mean to data when they should be asking how hard it will screw the vast majority of the world in accessing their data.
Where I am, with this connection, I am lucky. It's generally okay for web and email interactions. I can even call my family (sparingly) on Skype. Video is a hit and miss affair depending on the time of day. But for these ajax-heavy, GUI-rich environments, it nose dives. And this is a really good connection outside of North America or Europe. Imagine for people on satellite or other systems.
So, how do we address this? Despite the good counter articles by Steve and Andi, the answer is not SMS in any way shape or form. The final answer is information technology deployment for connectivity around the world. This is not only expensive, but will also take a great deal of time and many nations are already missing out on certain elements of it, such as Côte d'Ivoire who didn't get a landing node for the new GLO-1 cable, which is going to seriously bite their decently strong technology scene in the digital butt.
But, until the day arrives when the billions of us have immediate information access to the entire wealth of human knowledge, developers need to be mindful in maintaining an accessible internet. We need to optimize sites for those with slower connections to guarantee them access until the day that their throughput catches up. I know it sucks to create multiple versions of a site, but think of it as a more worthwhile expenditure of time. Much like being multilingual, multi-bandwidth is a method to get your system and product in to the hands of more people, because really, the internet markets are quite saturated in North America and Europe. A first half of the 21st Century business model needs to develop for multiple tiers of bandwidth. Despite the clunkiness of Wave, Google gets this with their current, live products. Twitter gets this as well. Facebook also gets this. If your company doesn't, then you have problems.
So, I've been settling in to my new home well. Admittedly, as I saw, all the action is down in Abidjan and Abengourou is a bit slower pace. It's relaxing though and as there is ready internet here, I have no complaints. There really aren't too many choices in landline internet and as far as I know, Aviso is the only one in these parts.
At $45 USD a month for 1.2Mb down and 384Kb up, as internet goes in West Africa, it's pretty reasonable and so far, pretty reliable. Yes, there are times when it is slower than others, but that just makes me have more of a purpose in online activities. The farting around aspect in being online gets largely reduced.
The only problem I'm having (and this is where the request for help comes in) is that this package came with this clunky USB modem to connect with. There are two and at times more of us who need to use this connection, so this simply won't work as it is a one to one setup.
From the US I brought two ADSL modems (a Zxyel and a Brightport) as well as an Apple Airport Express. I figured that at least one of the modems would work and that the Airport could be set up with a PPPoE connection to bypass this whole USB modem garbage. It turns out that this doesn't work and I'm stumped. In theory, everything should be happy. The Airport is set up and everything gives the appearance of connecting. The modem has a solid DSL light and seems to be happy. But, when it comes to actual browsing; nothing. Pages don't resolve, nor do attempts to ping outside addresses.
At this point, I'm kicking myself for bringing the Airport because, while compact, easy to carry, and hapy to switch between 120/240v, it is also without a great many options and I can't configure the WAN side of things as I would like to. So, is it the case that I need to spend another $100 of Aviso blood money to get their router/hub (which is the upgrade to this USB modem) or is there simply some setting somewhere that I'm not aware of?
Any help would be greatly appreciated and earn a Flag or Castel (the big one, not the small one mind you) upon sucessful wifi-ification of this connection. Thank you!
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!
I've recently come across the site Online Africa which really picked up publishing steam in this month of October. The site has great loads of promise, working to cover connectivity issues across the African continent. No small feat obviously as there are a great many countries and a great many issues.
One of the things that the site is trying to do that makes it relatively unique in what it's covering is to break down data in to individual countries. There is a great deal of data out there and it's good to see someone else trying to make use of it and present in an easy to digest form.
Of course, there are others writing about these topics as well, so people may ask as to what is the point of another blog? I would counter that the point is to have more of a conversation and to have as many people covering what happens in regards to the connectivity for the billion people living on the African continent. When Apple has the smallest of bowel movements, there are literally thousands of blogs echoing news about said bowel movement. When a cable lights up internet for millions in Africa, are there even 100 blogs that cover the event?
So, I'm really happy to see Online Africa start up. I wish the site a great deal of luck and hope it will grow and cover more over time.
I'll not get in to the specifics of what IPv4 is as you can read this very thorough Wikipedia article if you want to know the details. For the purposes here, all you need to know is that if you've ever had to deal with setting up a router at home or seen something like 192.168.0.1, then you have been in contact with an Internet Protocol address, version 4. We've been using this system for three decades to give a physical point where a website or piece of hardware can exist on the internet. For instance, when you type in subsaharska.com, you're actually going to the numerical address 74.50.48.186 as is translated by another system called DNS, but we'll stay out of that for now.
This addressing system has worked pretty well for us and it wasn't really thought to have any problems as given that each 8 bit chunk of the available addresses can be a number from 0 to 254, which in turn gave us a total of 4,294,967,296 to play with. It seems like a lot, but most predications show that in the next two or so years, we're actually going to run out of addresses because in addition to every website in the world needing one, every computer (other other device like a mobile phone) in the world also needs one when online. This is a problem for everyone in the world, but because of these addresses being a scarce resource, they were assigned in large blocks to each of the countries in the world and naturally, as if often the case, Sub-Saharan Africa got shafted. Here is a run down of about 40 countries on the continent and the number of physical IPv4 address that they have available: Angola: 50,432; Benin: 18,432; Botswana: 77,056; Burkina Faso: 30,464; Burundi: 2,304; Cameroon: 68,096; CAR: 3,328; Congo: 1,024; Congo DRC: 15,872; Cote d'Ivoire: 113,152; Djibouti: 12,288; Equatorial Guinea: 2,048; Eritrea: 4,096; Ethiopia: 16,384; Gabon: 155,136; The Gambia: 11,264; Ghana: 180,736; Guinea: 66,560; Guinea-Bissau: 1,024; Kenya: 336,640; Lesotho: 12,544; Liberia: 1,024; Malawi: 22,016; Mali: 24,576; Mauritania: 32,768; Mauritius: 271,360; Mozambique: 123,904; Namibia: 148,480; Niger: 17,408; Nigeria: 479,232; Rwanda: 156,672; Sao Tome: 0; Senegal: 92,416; Sierra Leone: 15,616; Somalia: 0; South Africa: 15,045,120; Tanzania: 122,112; Togo: 12,288; Uganda: 156,928; Zambia: 42,752; Zimbabwe: 43,520. Look up more if you'd like. And thanks to a bit in this article which started me thinking about this.
You can see that there are some pretty large points of inequality happening. For instance, Mauritius, which is a tiny island has over a quarter million addreses, while Sao Tome (also a tiny island) has none and Somalia (a very large country) also has none. Naturally South Africa was given about 15 million, which is the most out of whack country on the continent. Ah, but before you think that this may be unjust, how many addresses does a country like the United States have? 1,477,921,534. Yes, 1.5 billion. That's 3,000 times more addresses than Nigeria which has a third the population of the US.
If you revert the math (and I hope I'm doing this right) an American citizen will have access to 1,000x more things online than a Nigerian. You can see the disparity and even when taking America out of the picture, you can see how this has played out in Africa in that South Africa, Ghana, Kenya and other countries with larger IP blocks have a much more vibrant web community than say, Somalia or Burkina Faso. And as I pointed out earlier Mauritius with its large block that is out of scope, even has a datacenter, which is impressive given that it only has 1.2 million people.
Having less available IPs in a country raises the cost of getting online due to the fact that you need to have an IP and in order to get one, you will have to pay more in Sub-Saharan Africa because there simply are less of them than in the US. This is another reason why there are so many datacenters in the US, which has in turn led to people from any number of countries hosting their website there despite it incurring a slower response time and not fostering local jobs and development. It's a fact that it's cheaper because the US horded so many addresses when they were being handed out (along with ICAAN, but that's another article...)
Plain and simple, it's IPv6 which is the next generation of internet addressing. IPv4 has 2 to the 32nd addresses while IPv6 has 2 to the 128th addresses. Basically, so many more that I can't reasonably type that number. I'm sure that one day we'll figure out a way to use all of these up as well, but in theory due to how the addressing system works, we can just assign massive and very much equal top-level address blocks to each country, meaning that every one of the 195 countries in the world would get their own block to exhaust however they wanted. There would also be plenty of room to add more top-level blocks if places like Darfur or Southern Sudan officially become their own countries some day.
It's obvious to see that (I'm assuming) the US assigned address blocks based upon internet access, so it's actually rather good timing that adoption of IPv6 is slowly happening now due to more countries the world over being online than at any other point in years past. There is little one could say to justify the US hording a third of all the available addresses like it did. Of course, they did it before, so it could easily happen again and thus vigilant we all must be as companies are already starting to buy up IPv6 blocks.
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.
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.
So 2009 appears to be going down in the books as the Year of the Cable in Sub-Saharan Africa what with all the cable lighting up in East Africa and now the Glo-1 landing in Lagos over the weekend which will provide additional bandwidth to West African countries. Friends in Ghana were excitedly talking about this when I was there last month as it will open up a second route out of the country above and beyond the single line that they currently have which is tied in to the old SAT-3 line.
Throughput is going to start out at 640 Gbs and eventually be cranked up to 2.5 Tbs. There's been a bit of coverage on it which you can read at 27 Months, TechMasai, Vanguard, ITNewsAfrica, and This Day. I'm probably missing a lot of others as cable landings are a pretty big deal and this one is made even more so as it's being deployed primarily by Globacom Limited who are a Nigerian company.
The only thing that should probably be mentioned in all of this is that from Ghana to Senegal, the cable leapfrogs six countries (yes, I am indeed counting The Gambia in there). I'm not sure if this is because these other countries didn't want in on the connection (which colleagues in Côte d'Ivoire tell me is often the case) or if the countries were simply left out. It's a shame about this as a lot of Information Ministers are going to hobble their countries in the future if they don't have enough connectivity coming in. They'll have to run connections to neighboring countries who do have it and then pay a premium for something they should have had directly in the first place. So it goes apparently, but bandwidth is decidedly becoming a hard currency around the world and countries need to get in on it when they can.
Like most things encountered by unsuspecting foreigners in Ghana, the high quality offerings at Busy Internet in Accra are quite impressive. It sits on the main Ring Road just a bit east of Kwame Nkrumah Circle. This is a large, modern building with every service imaginable for those who choose the geeky path in life to those who just need to check their email. Even nefarious taxi drivers know where this place is.
Started in 2001, Busy Internet was created to provide faster internet to the masses. It opened with about 100 computers to use in an internet cafe manner and evolved in to an incubator housing the offices of Ghanaian startups. The incubator aspect has faded away though as many of the original companies that started there have moved on to their own premises. In their place, a lot of groups rent space at the office to run their operations. Additionally, Busy Internet functions as an ISP in Ghana and I'm told that they provide much better service than Vodaphone, the lovely country monopoly most people have to turn to for internet.
With secretarial services and copy machines available, Busy Internet is basically The place in Accra to meet, socialize and network if you're the least bit invested in the tech scene there. I saw great proof of this as the place is packed all day long with folks working on a wide variety of projects like the Busy Lab. Of course, with the discovery of oil this year at Takoradi, they seem to be providing a lot of services outside Accra as well.
Overall, quite cool and it blows away a great many internet cafe/incubator/networking spots I've seen in cities the likes of Barcelona and San Francisco.
One group that calls Busy home is Internet Research. I met these guys previously, but actually had a chance to sit down for awhile and chat with Worlali Senyo and Charles Amega-Selorm about what it is they do.
The company started in 2001 and moved to Busy in 2006. In a nutshell, they provide research and consulting about IT intelligence for all of Ghana as well as a great deal of West Africa. They've consulted for OSI, TIER (a UC Berkeley project), Balancing Act, and The World Bank to name a few. They also work as the secretary to the Ghana ISP Association which is comprised of 23 of the 40 total ISPs in Ghana. They are working on getting the other 17 in to the fold.
But beyond all the general work that they do, they are working for that whole "down the road thing". For instance, they're trying to get a Google cache server set up at the Internet Exchange in town, which happens to be the AITI Ghana-India Kofi Annan Centre of Excellence where Maker Faire Africa was held. This cache server would be a massive change to how internet traffic shapes up in Ghana as apparently (and I'm only quoting these guys on this) 80% of all of Ghana's outbound traffic is going to YouTube. With a cache, you could drastically reduce that and open up bandwidth for more... well, useful things.
Overall though, when it comes to a group like Internet Research, I have to say that I'm thrilled they exist. There are far, far too many foreigners going in to Africa to "assess this situation", which is ridiculous when there are local groups like these guys already there, who know the region, know the languages, and have a vested interest in seeing things change. I find this to be a much more effective way to run operations than having some result of nepotism come in to a country for two weeks, look around and say, "Yes, yes, they need more bandwidth here." and then leave. That person isn't going to push for a local IX, whereas these guys will and that is something we should all get behind. Great to meet this crew and see the premises on my last day in Ghana.
