Registration now open for Tech4Africa 2011

May10
Comments Off

A world-class line-up of international and African technologists will present at the Tech4Africa conference in October this year. The event provides South Africans with a rare opportunity to learn firsthand from technology evangelists about the role that the web plays in African business and development.

The two-day conference runs from 27 to 28 October 2011 at The Forum in Bryanston, Johannesburg and will bring international experience and perspectives to the African continent, while at the same time showcasing what Africans are doing with mobile, web, digital media and other emerging technologies.

Registration for the event is open and early bird tickets are available until 15th of June. To register or for further information, visit Tech4Africa or contact us.

“2010 saw the launch of Tech4Africa and we were met with overwhelming support from both the tech and business communities and our foundation partners, First National Bank and Internet Solutions,” says Gareth Knight, MD of Tech4Africa. “This year we’re delivering the same high standard of content and looking forward to bringing technologists together to look at what’s current now, with an emphasis on social media and how it’s relevant to digital marketing, mobile convergence, the growing cloud and the applications of BigData. We’re also focusing on great African technologists that really are leading the way.”

Keynote speakers include Josh Spear, one of the youngest and most respected digital marketing strategists in the world, and Herman Chinery-Hesse, commonly known as ‘The Bill Gates of Africa’.

Spear is a trend spotter, blogger and brand strategist, sought out for his fresh perspective and no-holds-barred style of consulting on everything from design and gadgets to authenticity and word-of-mouth. His recent focus has been the power of the blogosphere, technology, and the impact of digital media on the world. In addition to his internationally recognised trend-spotting blog, he is a founding partner of Undercurrent, a digital think-tank focused on exploring new ways to reach young people without interrupting them. With Africa rapidly leapfrogging the web and PC experience with a mobile one, the insights into how people and brands interact digitally is crucial, and indeed sets the stage for the foreseeable future. Spear has appeared in publications including Time Magazine, the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune and has presented for such diverse clients as McDonald’s, NBC, Pepsi, Virgin, The American Advertising Federation and The Google Zeitgeist conference.

Chinery-Hesse is a renowned Ghanaian technology entrepreneur who co-founded the million-dollar software company SOFTtribe, and then went on to launch BSL, which provides the infrastructure for entrepreneurs across Africa to sell products and receive payment through their cell phones. Chinery-Hesse is passionate about the contribution that technology can make in unlocking prosperity and wealth across Africa, and will be presenting his thesis on this. He has won a number of awards and is also an accomplished speaker who has delivered talks at the Wharton Business School, Harvard Business School, Cambridge University, the University of Ghana, and the TEDGlobal conference in Tanzania.

Spear and Chinery-Hesse are part of a line-up of African and international thought leaders from organisations like Amazon, HP, Johns Hopkins University, Mozilla, SwiftRiver, the African Institution of Technology, SimpleGeo, Motribe, Clearleft, Ultinet Systems and many more.

Knight adds, “With Tech4Africa our simple aim is to congregate the best practitioners in Africa and the world to provide inspiration, guidance, case studies, success stories and ultimately experience, so that Africans don’t need to travel the world to gain this understanding and exposure”.

m-Pedigree awarded the Grand Prix NetExplorateur 2011

Feb03
Comments Off

At the fourth NetExplorateur Forum, the Grand Prix NetExplorateur 2011 was awarded to m-Pedigree. The Ghana-based project uses the mobile phone as a weapon against pharmaceutical counterfeiting with the aim of saving lives.

At UNESCO headquarters, Paris, Eric Besson, French Minister for Industry, Energy and the Digital Economy awarded the Grand Prix NetExplorateur to Bright Simons, founder of m-Pedigree, at a ceremony that also recognised nine winners of NetExplorateur of the Year awards. Every year, the Grand Prix NetExplorateur goes to the world’s best digital innovation.

m-Pedigree: saving lives with just a text message

Created in Ghana and successfully piloted in six African countries to date, the m-Pedigree platform is supported by technological partners such as Hewlett-Packard for IT infrastructure, pharmaceutical laboratories and government bodies. It makes instant authentication of drugs possible. Anyone can send a free text message to m-Pedigree quoting the code on the medicine’s packaging. The system sends back a message saying whether the product is genuine.

Fake medicine kills an estimated 2,000 people a day worldwide, chiefly in Africa and Southeast Asia. In some developing countries, fake medicine accounts for up to 25% of the market according to the WHO.

The NetExplorateur Forum: exclusive insight into the digital revolution

As the culmination of a year’s observation and analysis of the changes in digital society on a global scale, the NetExplorateur Forum was created in 2008. It has become an unmissable event at which 1,500 senior figures from business, politics and the media can grasp the most significant emerging initiatives and the most promising breakthroughs.

Thierry Happe, founder of the NetExplorateur Observatory, commented: “The Grand Prix NetExplorateur 2011 is an exemplary African initiative that delivers an exportable model, because fake medicine is now a global problem.”

The 9 NetExplorateurs of the Year 2011 (in addition to the Grand Prix)

CENSO 2010 (Brazil) The first fully digital national census of almost 200 million people.

HAL (Japan) A robot suit that enhances the muscle strength of people with reduced mobility and helps the human body in the hardest physical tasks.

FLATTR (Sweden) The first voluntary micropayment platform for rewarding the creators of digital content, with no amount too small.

E-SKIN (USA) A synthetic skin that gives robots a sense of touch.

LEWATMANA (Indonesia) A collaborative platform for beating the traffic in Jakarta.

OBAMI (South Africa) Creating a dedicated portal for schools through the social network concept.

NATURAL SECURITY (France) A biometric authentication system making electronic payment easier and safer.

MYTOWN (USA) Turning the real world into a Monopoly board where players can buy their favourite places to win points and deals.

DATASIFT (UK) A system that analyses messages from social media in real time.

SA startup selected as TechCrunch 'Best New Startup'

Nov18
Comments Off

The TechCruch Europas, the European Startup Awards for tech companies, has listed Cognician as one of the top 11 Best New Startup’s in 2010. The company is a South African technology startup founded by Patrick Kayton, who was a speaker at Tech4Africa 2010.

The Europas serve to honour the best technology companies and startups across the web and mobile space. The awards span 22 categories and recognise and celebrate the most compelling technology startups, Internet and mobile innovations of the past year.

Cognican, the original thought processor that presents content in the form of provocative questions, helping users to apply the author’s ideas to their own tasks, so that they can think better, further and faster, was selected through a process done by referencing TechCrunch’s database of tech companies on CrunchBase. This was followed by a month of online public voting that saw 33,126 votes being cast across all categories. The final award winners will be determined based both on popular votes received through website voting along with the results submitted by The Europas Advisory Board.

The award winners will be revealed at The Europas event which will be held in London this Friday, November 19. The evening will be attended by over 350 people from the cream of Europe’s startups, VCs and entrepreneurs along with industry leaders of the the tech startup and investor scene who will be presenting the awards to the winners.

Says Patrick Kayton, co-founder and COO of Cognician “We’re thrilled to be recognised through The Europas and we wish to send out a big thank you to everyone who voted for us. It is especially rewarding as the Europas finalists are determined by the tech community who were invited to have their say in which startups should be recognised. It’s quite remarkable that we’re there at all actually, as little or no votes would have been cast by our local network.

“Cognician has made great strides in 2010 with limited resources and see being nominated in the final 11 as testament to both the quality of Cognician and the work that our small team has put in,” adds Kayton.

“Prior to it’s soft launch in September Cognicain has won the Cape Town Activa competition in the Ideas Track. Later, we were selected as one of Africa’s top three startups at Seedcamp Week Johannesburg and we were finalists at Seedcamp Week in London.

Kayton explains that Cognician is currently making 70 original cogs for two leading corporate clients in The Allan Gray Orbis Foundation and Old Mutual. “Furthermore we’ve signed publishing deals with the UK-based publishers, Profile Books and Infinite Ideas which will enable Cognician to produce further cogs.

“To now be recognised as a finalist in The Europa Awards is the cherry on the top of 2010,” concludes Kayton.

The entrepreneur, an agent of change in the emerging markets?

Oct19
Comments Off

The first edition of Tech4Africa last August proved to be one of the largest gatherings in Africa of international and local bright technologists, business people and entrepreneurs. One in that bunch was Bright Simons, the founder of mPedrigree.com, who sat on the panel “Mobile content for grownups, being clever with the simple”.

Simons, a young Ghanaian, embodies the figure of the entrepreneur of the emerging markets, as The Economist labelled him in its recent article “The other demographic dividend”. According to the influential magazine, this kind
of entrepreneur has an impressive ability to identify gaps in markets. This is something Simons has shown to have had. His development, mPedrigree, came up with an innovative solution for dealing with the epidemic of counterfeit drugs using the mobile phone. The service helps people to ensure that the medicines they are buying are legitimate and safe.

In his interview “Bright hope for continental scourge” for ITWeb, Simons recognizes that “I felt I could do something more than just write about the issue”. A massive tragedy in Nigeria related to fake drugs that killed 90 children and the daunting statistics about Africa’s plague of counterfeit drugs prompted him into action. From the drugs that find their way onto the market, 30% are illegitimate. And according to the UN, at least half of the anti-malaria tablets that are sold in Africa are counterfeit, meaning a business of about $438 million a year. Simons added that: “A 2001 Interpol research conducted in Lagos, Nigeria showed that 80% of all the medicines on sale were counterfeit.”

With his endeavour to transform lives, he bootstrapped the mPedigree system, which is very accessible and easy to use. Manufacturers place an unique code on the medicine label, which the consumers have to SMS to see whether the medicine is safe. Consumers are responded to with a simple “yes” or “no”, assuring whether the medicine is good for consumption or not. This is in effect a great consumer experience, simple and easy, but it wasn’t that way for Simons to implement it. In the interesting article “Innovative Mobile Phone Strategies in the Developing World“, Simons stressed that “when you develop new technologies, you are not trying to change the consumer; you are trying to change the manufacturer to serve the consumer”.

The raising figure of the entrepreneur in the emerging markets as an agent of change is backed up by academic research, as the article in The Economist points out. Demographers have often noted that most of the emerging world will stay young while the rich world ages. Among other benefits brought by this factor, this will be favourable due to the boost of a more entrepreneurial business culture. This is being reinforced by two big changes in the emerging world:

1- The information-technology revolution: Many consumers in emerging markets are much more likely to access the Internet via mobile devices rather than PCs. “That gives local entrepreneurs an advantage”, says Rob Salkowitz, the author of “Young World Rising”, meaning that Africans can build companies around coming technology, while their Western peers first have to transform old systems and mindsets to do it.

2- Pro-entrepreneurial revolution: Global institutions such as the World Bank and the World Economic Forum as well as several big companies have helped to popularise entrepreneurialism.

These facts may show that Bright Simons, as many other successful African social entrepreneurs, could be in fact representatives of a new leadership scenario in the emerging markets, which drives change and promotes transparency by connecting people and organizations via communications technologies. If this is true for the whole of Africa, it has to be proved, but cases like Simons’ clearly show that technology and entrepreneurship can be a solution to fight some of the toughest plagues that hit the continent: political and economic inefficiencies.

Do you think entrepreneurialism could be an agent of change for Africa?

Africa: problem or opportunity?

Sep06
6 Comments

In his article “Why does being in Africa make you untrustworthy?“, Erik Hersman points out to the fact that Africans are generally suspects by default to the eyes of global corporations, which often put the continent off their radar.

Africa could be a continent of contrasts, but with lots of potentiality too. If only the world stopped making easy generalizations and looked closer to realize that.

One of the key factors for any business is to assess and be real about the context and the market in which operates. Thus, more accurate solutions can be provided to address specific needs, what improves the chance of success. If the context is problematic, that means there are needs to be fulfilled, and therefore that could be seen as an opportunity.

Tech4Africa_Ushahidi_Conference_Technology_AfricaAn example of this could be Hersman’s own enterprise, Ushahidi, a website that was initially developed to map reports of violence in Kenya after the post-election fallout at the beginning of 2008, and which now it has become a platform with global reach.

Ushahidi is a world-class technology service, but owes its roots to providing a solution to the very African need of transparency, which turns out to be a global issue.
The organization’s technology is open source, and it is often used by Internet writer Clay Shirky as an example of a successful crowdsourcing movement.

Other entrepreneurs and businesses are also working to provide services tied up to specific regional socio-cultural and economic facts, as were seen at Tech4Africa 2010. Services like PesaPal (a mobile payments company in Nairobi, Kenya) or mPedigree (allows consumers to verify with a free text message if their medicines are safe), are proving to be on the right track when addressing local needs via the most used and available technology in their target markets.

Many other startup services in Africa are choosing to use SMS as their trading platform, among other things, due to the scarce Internet connectivity and the broader use of the cell phone in many areas of the continent. And companies are focusing on that too, such is the case of Zain Nigeria, which is offering its customers access to Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo via SMS.

Nevertheless, whether focused on local, regional or global needs, African technology startups and companies must build their products based on the highest standards, and for that it’s important to keep in touch with the world’s latest developments and practices, if the continent wants to get into the world’s radar and export its innovative products or play globally.

All in all, one of the ways to bootstrap Africa to the spotlight might be what the aforementioned African organizations are already doing; which is, as Erik Hersman put it in his article: “to come up with our own business solutions that work here first, and then interact with other global systems.”

Do you agree this could be a solution? Should Africans see the problems or the opportunities?

Photo courtesy of @whiteafrican via Flickr/Creative Commons

Tech4Africa: The PanAfrican Perspective

Aug20
Comments Off

“Until lions have their own historians, tales of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.” ~ African Proverb

That proverb has been used to sum up the continent’s state (or fate) for a long time. And what’s become more apparent is that in some cases, you need to point out which Africa you are referring to, South Africa or the rest of Africa. Given that we’re now seeing the kind of innovative web & technology startups coming from Nigeria and Kenya, the Tech4Africa conference put a lot into perspective.

South Africa has always been one of the main doors into the continent. A leading economy no doubt with a vibrant entrepreneurial space with the likes of Naspers showing how powerful an emerging market this is. However, even as the crown jewel of the continent, with we’re beginning to see a balance play out with the South, East & West shifting as each develops not on a linear path, one after the other, but each on its own tangent, converging and diverging with time.

Take Kenya for instance, who recently trumped South Africa in broadband thanks to services like Wananchi Online & Cisco’s Zuku which brings fiber-to-the-home and an uncapped service of 1 MBps as well as 100 television channels. Crisis mapping and visualisation platform Ushahidi was the centre of attention at Tech4Africa, from cofounder Erik Hersman sharing their missteps, challenges and shortfalls in “failing spectacularly.” Even to mentions from Clay Shirky at Tech4Africa and his most recent TED Talk where he shares how it began, and how it fits in with his thoughts on collaboration and cognitive surplus. Or in West Africa, where Bright Simons and mPedigree are changing the pharmaceutical landscape by allowing consumers to verify via SMS the authenticity and safety of their medicines.

Leila Janah, keynote speaker at T4A, spoke about her non-profit Samasource, who’ve created a network of 800 women, youth and refugees across the world in developing countries and empowering them with digital work and resources to make better livelihoods. Her keynote showed the scale, reach and impact of Samasource’s efforts as well as their plans and challenges. It’s certainly clear that East and West Africa are learning from South Africa and now more than ever, the continent’s developing three pillars to build on.

Any pan African approach will present very unique challenges in comparison with what works in South Africa and Tech4Africa’s ability to share between tried and tested practice in the Southern part of Africa, with input from The East and West and an international perspective is what differentiated it for me.

Whether it was debating approaches for the mobile marketing arena shared or the insightful tips and tricks behind the proposed redesign of Payfine.co.za or Andy Budd’s entire session at that. The value in creating simple, relevant user experiences may inadvertently not be at the top of many priority lists across the continent but from what the principles behind it are, what they unlock can be the difference between success and failure. We can expect that with time, these user experience and interaction principles will adapt and be tailored to fit the African context in new ways.

The inspiration and vision to shift perceptions about Africa and those in Africans about the possibilities for great things when it comes to technology are what struck me about Gareth and his remarkable team. Gareth Knight, the man who returned to South Africa bearing the Tech4Africa vision has been the one brave enough to take the first step. And if one African proverb proves true then as Gareth leads this generation to plant the seeds, we’ll wait to how the next generation of Africans use the shade.

It was certainly an honour to witness this beginning.

Mark Kaigwa

http://ukwelii.wordpress.com

@mkaigwa

Take-Aways from Tech4Africa

Aug18
1 Comment

News from the conference room: this is a series of blog posts in which blogging experts briefly review key Tech4Africa 2010 talks and panels from Day 1 and 2.

By the time we got to the closing remarks at the end of two fantastic days at Tech4Africa, the atmosphere was a mix of exhaustion, inspiration and eagerness to get to the after party and then beyond into the world, to start applying the learning’s and following up with new connections made.

I had already started asking people what their number one take-away from the unconference-conference had been, so was delighted when the panel opened up their closing remarks along the same lines.

Hearing what other attendee’s pick out as their number one take away, is a great way to summarise the key points and highlight any trends from all the information that was imparted.

So here are some of the take-aways that were shared with me and that I picked up from the panel:

Simon Dingle declared that “Tech4Africa has arrived!”

Duncan McCleod is “going to make it a priority to come to next years Tech4Africa”.

Ivo Vegter felt that “our (as in South Africa’s) engineers and developers are at the top of their game”.

Andy Higgins said his take away was “to build small and good, rather than big and mediocre”.

“Only Africans are going to solve African problems. The international context is a great wake up call, but it needs to be applied to the African context by Africans. It’s only a matter of time before Tech4Africa is dominated by the rest of Africa’s start up’s and speakers. The time is now to look forward!” exclaimed Mark Kaigwa from Kenya.

Dustin Diaz was a man of few words, all he could say to me was: “Blown away!”

Whereas Darren Smith was a bit more verbose with his points, being: “T4A take-away: Seedcamp and Tech4Africa was an eye-opener, in as much meeting the local and international innovators brought home just how fast the world is moving, yet how small its boundaries have become (something that Clay Shirky alluded to in his keynote). What it brought home to me though, was the difficulty in bootstrapping a genuine tech start-up in this country. There seems to be a massive gap between the bootstrapped start-up, and genuine VC investment in a BUSINESS. Most of the entrepreneurs I chatted to and listened to during Tech4Africa were long on tech, passion and ideas, but short on business acumen. And in the absence of a degree of working capital, these start-ups simply will never start-up. Its simple economics.

Sadly, I left Tech4Africa with little semblance of sufficient support structures for entrepreneurs other than ‘family and fools’. It seems to me that most so-called boot-strapped business successes in South Africa are actually extensions of established businesses, products/services … and are funded through the working capital of their benefactors. VCs are looking for much bigger investment opportunities than offered locally (they’re looking for global scale, and 60% plus returns). Yet many of the innovations NEED to serve South Africa needs, and if that’s all they do, it doesn’t make them any less valuable.

So, a few mixed feelings. On the one hand, a tremendous fillip for tech innovation in Africa, but again a sobering assessment of our ability to harness the capital needed to put this innovation to work.”

Ashley Shaw summed up his take away as “solutions to challenges and meeting people”.

“I had a take away pizza last night” was what came to Gordon Greeff’s mind when I asked him, while Mongezi Mtati felt ”the conference has raised the bar much higher than before, the perception that innovation originates from somewhere outside Africa no longer holds true. The challenge is to transcend the needs of a select few who know what the web is about, and create applications that change lives.”

Renier Meyer asserted that “Tech4Africa was an awesome experience and all the panel discussions and presentations were very inspiring and made me think differently about lots of things and also made me think about things I’ve never thought of before. One thing that I realised is that we as South Africans and Africans, are different. And we do things a lot differently here than in the rest of the world. How we do things here even differs from how they do it in other African countries, I’m especially thinking about the mobile market. But even though its a lot different it works well for us and there are entrepreneurs that see opportunities to make these things that make us different, better for us.”

Jonathan Smit’s primary reason for going to Tech4Africa was to hear and meet the international speakers who we would normally not have access to. His take away was: “It was fantastic to hear from some of the great Internet minds from around the world and to connect with like minded Africans. The skills necessary to create, run and grow great Internet businesses abound within Africa and the learnings from our international colleagues can be readily applied to our context to achieve great success both locally and internationally.”

Irene Walker had this to say as her sum up: “The difference between good and great digital solutions lie in their consideration and implementation of satisfied user needs.”

My take away? I think that there is a lot of innovation in Africa, and the sharing of international best practice mixed with the out of box thinking from Africa which is driven by need, is going to see a lot of exciting new developments originating from Africa.

So what is your take-way?

Share your nugget with us here or tweet it with the hashtag #myT4Atakeaway.

Telana Simpson

http://onematchstick.blogspot.com/

@Telana

Sidebar