By: Mongezi Mtati

The first panel this morning had Nic Haralambous (Motribe),  Jason Xenopoulos (Native) and Brett St. Clait (Google) who took an in depth look at the growth and usage of mobile devices in Africa. Their focus from the user, as opposed to a business perspective.

Take-outs from the panel

Nic Haralambous (Motribe)

• People do not necessarily want to connect on mobile as they do in real life.

Nic cites that most people who use Motribe do so to experiment with, and grow personalities that other platforms don’t allow.

• The success of mobile platforms lies in increasing users and rapidly increasing activity.

• Questions to ask when starting a mobile campaign:

1. Do you want users to register?
2. Do you want them to buy? @nicharry #T4A #t4amobi

Most companies do not set clear objectives when taking off with campaigns that have a mobile element.

Jason Xenopoulos (Native)

• The power of brands has shifted from being owned by business, to now being owned by the consumer.

Jason emphasized how the social web has allowed consumers to express their views and own brands online.

• Mobile can be used as a powerful marketing tool, if looked at from a user perspective.

• Unless you are adding value, you are interrupting the consumer.

• Data on its own is useless, it’s insight that can be extracted from data that matters.

Brett St. Clair (Google)

• Entertainment drives innovation in mobile.
• More people book their hotel accommodation using their mobile phones, at times 30-50 kilometres from the venues. This localizes search and makes it more contextual.
• Google search spikes tend to correlate with radio and TV ads.

In closing, the speakers agree that data can unlock the potential of brands in mobile, but very few brands are using the data Africa.

By: Heidi Schneigansz

Josh Spear likes to say he is ‘from the internet’. He is a digital nomad in the true sense of the word. He spends most of his time travelling around the world – he has literally visited 12 countries in the last 30 days!

He started his keynote with a little bit about him: He once told his parents he wanted to ‘sell ideas’. So, in his freshman year of college, he started a blog, within a few months, advertisers came flooding in. This led to an investigation about digital marketing and what success looks like, which in turn led to the birth of his digital consulting company. Undercurrent strives to solve complex business problems with a digital worldview. He’s consulted to some of the largest companies in the world and they listen to him because he believes the Internet is not about technology, it’s about human beings.

He is obviously one of those, he actually danced around the stage to a video of a ginger cat playing a keyboard FFS! Josh taught a room full of Internet geeks about the origins of the memes we spend our days sharing. And then he Rickrolled us.

I, for one, didn’t know just how influential 4chan is. I knew what it was, I just didn’t know what it’s done for us. Apart from the obvious LOLCATZ, 4chan represents the zeitgeist of the connected world. And that’s scary.

Spear says that sites like 4chan prove that the web must change the way we communicate and market, that getting excited about a 1% click-through rate on a banner campaign is getting excited about a 99% failure rate.

The average person has so much media being thrown at us everyday that we have effectively become air traffic controllers of information. Are we even absorbing anything anymore? We need to stop and ask “OMG, who am I? Why am I here? What have I become?” Imagine a whole world of people who have grown up taking the technology that overwhelms us today for granted? How should we be communicating to the future captains of industry?

According to Josh, “disruption is the only path to success”. Do things differently, cut through the crap and communicate to people the way they communicate with each other. There are rules and norms of the world that can’t be understood unless you participate. Companies need to realise that people drive culture, not brands or advertising, that digital is about shared interests and people aren’t one dimensional.

I wish Josh Spear wasn’t getting on a plane tonight to New York. I wish he would stay and teach this to big brands in Africa. We need it.

By: Gustav Praekelt

Africa’s first mobile career opportunities social network was launched today at Tech4Africa by Gustav Praekelt, founder of Praekelt Foundation.

Called Ummeli – the Nguni word for “mediator” – the mobile platform went live on October 27th on YoungAfricaLive, a community to share and discuss critical issues such as love, sex and relationships of over 500 000 active participants and that celebrates its second birthday on December 1st.

Already over 3000 users have joined Ummeli in its first day, a mobile social network that focuses on creating opportunities for young, primarily poor, Africans – the segment of society most affected by unemployment as several recent YAL polls have potently shown.

One, asking YAL’s community what the single biggest challenge facing today’s youth is, drew close to 4500 responses – 2233 of which said a lack of jobs was an even more significant challenge than HIV/AIDS. Additionally, in a recent poll to ask YAL’s users how the mobile community should expand, an overwhelming 65% of respondents asked for “jobs and education” to be added to the platform’s mix. As one YAL user, Judge Jury, movingly put it in a community post, “I passed my matric very well, applied for NFAS loan, but didn’t get. Applied for low standard job but didn’t get it. Now the community thinks I am lazy but that’s not the case. I cry everyday, I’m so stressed”.

Ummeli is founded on the principle of Ubuntu (“I am what I am because of who we all are”) – resulting in the creation of a supportive community of young jobseekers who use the platform for advice, suggestions, connections, and an ideas exchange. In addition, registered Ummeli users will be able to share job posts and relevant information around bursaries and grants. Easy-to-use practical tools ensure users can edit their CV on their phones, and submit their CVs for jobs they may be interested in – or even use the CV Coach tool in creating this vital part of job-seeking.

“Ummeli is a much more than simply a portal to find a job through,” explains Shikoh Gitau, who developed a mobile job board and CV builder as part of her PhD in Computer Science at the University of Cape Town. “The emphasis is very much on a community where young Africans can support each other in the development of their careers, share ideas, act as connectors or even just be a sounding board when things seem hopeless.”

Hailing from Kenya and currently working for Google, Shikoh was motivated to come up with Ummeli whilst observing the sometimes overwhelming unemployment faced by Africa’s young citizens.

“In Kenya, like in so many African countries, it’s the youth that is most affected by unemployment. But as YoungAfricaLive has shown in the territories where it operates, Africa’s youth are fully switched on to mobile technology and Ummeli is a way of using that to help young Africans in developing countries on their journey to find employment.”

Currently, the official stats for unemployment in South Africa sit at 25.70%, although this is widely considered conservative. Earlier this year, the South African Institute of Race Relations published its South Africa Survey in which it showed that unemployment amongst 15- to 24-year-olds is 51 percent, more than twice the national unemployment rate. Unemployment is highest among African women aged 15 to 24 years, coming in at 63 percent.

“This is a horrific figure,” says Gustav Praekelt. “Building on the success of YoungAfricaLive in getting its users engaged around the issues that affect them, including HIV/AIDS, we believe that Ummeli has every chance of making a real impact – of really changing people’s lives and positively impacting the cycle of poverty.”

In this, Ummeli fits into Praekelt Foundation’s mission of building open source, scalable mobile technologies and solutions to improve the health and well-being of people living in poverty. Already, with the support of funders like Omidyar Network, programmes that have emerged out of Praekelt Foundation and its partners have reached over 50 million people across 15 countries in sub-Saharan Africa. On October 26th, the Praekelt Foundation-driven Project Masiluleke, which uses mobile phones and other technologies as high impact, low cost tools in combating HIV/AIDS, was named the first winner of the Tech4Africa Innovation Award, created to encourage innovation in solving uniquely African problems whilst also encouraging global thinking.

Working with Gitau, the team at Praekelt Foundation – led by computer science graduate Milton Madanda – has built the Ummeli platform specifically for mobile devices, aiming to harness the power of this technology in the hands of young Africans . Among its users will be people looking for employment in developing countries, companies seeking employees, NGOs looking for volunteers and community-initiated projects.

Ummeli can be accessed for free, with no bandwidth charges, while users are on the YoungAfricaLive platform on Vodacom. Once users click on a job link or the URL of a company advertising a job, they will be charged normal bandwidth rates to access that URL. Ummeli will be initially tested within YAL while a standalone Ummeli mobi platform is created.

By: Heidi Schneigansz

The Tech stream of day 2 of Tech4Africa kicked off with a mind-expanding session about the one thing on everyone’s lips (and some people’s t-shirts); HTML5. The new messiah of markup languages was described by MC, Toby Shapshak, as; ‘a handy thing with which to build the Internet”.

Our speaker was Robert Nyman, who works with Mozilla in Sweden. Mozilla are the champions of the open web and have recently launched innovations like BrowserID, a single sign-on that will work on all modern browsers, including recent versions of IE, and on mobile browsers.

Despite the fact that I’m more of a ‘mouth’ than a coder, Nyman managed to teach even me more about HTML5. He explained that it is spilt into:

1. Semantics
In this version of markup, the tags are more specific, simplifying code and cutting out elements which are not needed to streamline the way browsers render pages.
HTML5 aims to become the ‘one language to rule them all’ by offering standard code for common elements that previously relied on complicated Javascript, things like sliders, calendars etc.

HTML5, at it’s core, is making the web easier and faster.

If you want to know more, go to http://HTML5doctor.com, it lists all the elements within the specification.

2. APIs
According to Nyman, there are over 100 specifications already, and growing by the second.

It was at this point of the presentation that my brain started short-circuiting. Nyman is just too smart. So, I Googled it. Wikipedia says some of the APIs available are:

• The canvas element for immediate mode 2D drawing
• Timed media playback
• Offline storage database (offline web applications)
• Document editing
• Drag-and-drop
• Cross-document messaging
• Browser history management
• MIME type and protocol handler registration
• Microdata

Since HTML5 is the new darling of the web, there are already hundreds of thousands of resources online. So, who should you trust? According to Nyman, these are the ‘daddies’ of sites to learn about HTML5:

http://www.quirksmode.org/html5/inputs.html

http://wufoo.com/html5

And for the lovers of Flash? Well, don’t worry, you’re not dinosaurs, doomed to extinction just yet. Nyman explains that HTML5 supporters who say “Flash must die!” are shortsighted, we should look to Flash for inspiration, rather thinking that one technology should replace each other.

Despite the fact that the session made me feel a bit stupid, it inspired me and made me think about the possibilities HTML5 offers. I almost want to tell all the devs I work with to rebuild all our sites in it. I must remember the words of Nyman though; “HTML5 is about being pragmatic, about building on top of the things we already have, rather than reinventing the wheel over and over again‚ what’s important is that you dare to do anything, failing is OK.”