Tech4Africa: Building for a Global Technology Market in Africa

If only Johannesburg were closer. Too many buds and too many interesting discussions were happening at the Tech4Africa Conference. Below is a recap taken from MemeBurn, which focuses on web and innovation technologies for the emerging market sector. 

The panel discussion was called: “Building for the Global Market. Lessons and Learnings From The Coalface.” Leila Janah of Saiasource, Sheraan Amod of Personera and Malcolm Hall of Open Box Software discussed the challenges of building tech companies from Africa. The discussion was facilitated by Toby Shapshak of Stuff magazine. MemeBurn's wrote-up below. 

  ON BREAKING INTO THE AMERICAN MARKET 

Leila Janah: The biggest challenge we face is that Africa has a damaged reputation in the service sector. And being a non-profit doesn’t exactly help us either. There is a perception that people in Africa can’t do this kind of work. Many educated people in the West don’t even know that there are PC’s in Kenya, let alone that there are over 2 million Kenyans on Facebook. 

You need to overcome bias at the start and the best way is to get results. We did many trial jobs for free to build a relationship and people were pleasantly surprised. You can’t compromise on quality when you’re a non-profit, especially when you’re from Africa.

Sheraan Amod: In the US, there is a lot more energy and innovation than there is in Europe or anywhere else, and people are willing to speak to new businesses. To succeed, you need to stand out. I preach 2 major actions if you want to build a product business that can scale to the US.

Firstly, your product needs to be something they have never seen before. If it’s unique, they will see it and they will take it seriously. Secondly, you need to get a solid introduction to the people who matter in Silicon Valley. That introduction is like a stamp of approval. We are lucky to have Vinny Lingham as an investor, and he is very well connected in the San Francisco tech scene so he setup a few crucial introductions. 

Leila Janah: We have to work as hard as a “for profit” company, because leads come in because of who we are, but no one will sign on the dotted line because of a good story. There is a lot of anti-outsourcing sentiment right now because of the crisis in us. We want people to understand we’re not in to screw American workers. 

Malcolm Hall: The key differentiator is the quality of your product. I don’t believe that it matters where you are. If you deliver something good, then people will use it, no matter where its from. 

ON MAINTAINING A PRESENCE IN THE UNITED STATES 

Leila Janah: There’s a benefit to understanding what your customers are doing so it makes sense to have part of your business where your customers are. You need to have a great product/customer fit and living amongst them is so important. Whether it’s from casual conversations or more formally, you have to get feedback from your customers. 

Malcolm Hall: Certainly it’s important to have a sales and marketing presence in the larger markets. That then allows you to have developers back here at home working comfortably in T-shirts and slip slops. And getting paid in rands. 

Sheraan Amod: If you haven’t lived where your customers are, then probably don’t start. It’s critical that you understand how they live. 

 ON FINDING THE RIGHT MARKETS FOR YOUR PRODUCTS 

Leila Janah: Outsourcing requires pretty mature markets. Our market is definitely in the Fortune 500 companies. But if you can monetize many tiny transactions, like M-Pesa has done then perhaps your focus is different. But at Samasource, when we talk about technology companies, we gravitate towards the United States. 

Audience: The BRIC countries are very interesting markets for South Africans. We are in a unique position of being comfortable in transitioning between 1st and 3rd world environments in the same country. We can navigate all of that very easily and should take advantage of it. 

Toby Shapshak: My contention for a while has been that Africa is the next China, the next Russia and Brazil. So it’s very important to grow your market right here in Africa and South Africa is going to be the springboard to all of that. It’s an exciting time. I always say that South Africa’s best export is South Africans.

New Photo Books Now Out: Faces of London and Post Apartheid Kids

I've been working on a series of Photo Books of various eclectic and wonderful places around the world - from American cities and cafes to people, places, designs and architecture in Europe, Africa and Central America. The first two are now out: Faces of London and Post Apartheid Kids. Below is a little background and a sneak peak of each.

Faces of London shows the surprises you get from walking through the streets of London. If you spend enough time people watching, you'll notice a wide range diversity of cultures who now call themselves Londoners -- from countless countries around the world.

Did you know that at the time of the Roman Invasion, London was called Londinium? In Saxon times, it was referred to as Lundenwic, and during the Kingdom of Alfred the Great, the city was known as Lundenberg? It is a city rich in history, diversity and miraculous transitions.

Today, London represents countless cultures from around the world. Regardless of what part of the city you're in, the experience is always breathtaking, energizing and stimulating. Ask someone a question and be challenge and inspired at the same time -- again and again. Faces of London shows these transitions. It shows London's diversity through beautiful, colorful shots of its people in a wide range of neighborhoods throughout the city. From east to west and north to south, join us on this colorful and artistic journey.

Below, you can get a sneak preview of Faces of London:

Faces of London by Renee Blodgett | Make Your Own Book

Post Apartheid Kids takes you on a journey through various parts of South Africa - both rural and urban - capturing wonderful and surprising moments of children in a post-Apartheid world.

Take a journey through a post-Apartheid South Africa and see it in the eyes of its children. It's a visual story of one child's face after another -- their smiles, their eyes, and their energy. Because of deeply-rooted pains of South Africa's complex past, we don't ask to forget, but we do ask for a harmonious life for the next generation.

We meander from Johannesburg, the Transvaal and Venda in the north through to Natal, Swaziland, the Orange Free State, the Highlands, the Cape and the beautiful and desolate Karoo.

Below, you can get a sneak preview of Post Apartheid Kids:

Post Apartheid Kids by Renee Blodgett | Make Your Own Book

TECH4AFRICA Hits Jo'burg

TECH4AFRICA is coming to Johannesburg on August 12-13, 2010. Bringing together the web & emerging technologies, the event will focus on the latest emerging trends for Africa from a global perspective. Other discussions will include:

* Applications for Web 2.0 in Africa

* Mobile & wireless innovation and trends for the next 3 years

* Cloud computing and it's relevance for business in Africa

* Startups & business opportunities in Africa

* African success stories

* The funding landscape in Africa

While there is a long line up of African speakers, yanks like Clay Shirky, Matt Mullenweg, Dustin Diaz, and Joe Stump are making the long trek for the occasion.

Seedcamp is also participating, which is a program created to jumpstart the entrepreneurial community in Europe, and now Africa. They connect next generation developers and entrepreneurs with over 400 mentors from a top-tier network of company builders; including seed investors, serial entrepreneurs, product experts, HR and PR specialists, marketers, lawyers, recruiters, journalists and venture capitalists. We met with their England team in London during our UK Traveling Geeks tour.

Youth Day During South Africa's World Cup

It was 34 years ago today that black students protested the apartheid policy of teaching classes in the Afrikaans language. The riots that day marked the beginning of the Soweto uprising, which in addition to drawing the attention of the world helped put the African National Congress (party of both Nelson Mandela and the current president, Jacob Zuma) in a leadership role in the struggle against apartheid, ending white rule within a generation.

The boy being carried in the photo to the left was killed by a police bullet that day. The Hector Pieterson Museum, which commemorates him and the struggle, is a moving and essential visit if you are in Johannesburg.

So it was appropriate that among other events to mark the day the South African soccer team played their second World Cup match this evening.  Here is a video with Graeme Addison, a South African journalist who was at the scene on June 16, 1976.

Horatius, San Francisco's World Cup Host for Portugal

Horatius, in San Francisco's Potrero Hill, is an art gallery, bistro, event space, wine bar and culinary specialty shop. It is also one of the few places in San Francisco open for the 4:30 a.m. matches from South Africa, and offers the biggest screen in the city on which to watch them.

Horacio Gomes, founder and CEO, has like others given us a gift by sharing his passion for soccer, especially the Portugese variety. This morning Portugal played its first match of the 2010 World Cup, against the Ivory Coast. The match started at 7 am but by halftime most of the seats were taken by a crowd that included at least a few fans of Cote d'Ivoire's Elephants.

The space is more like a gallery than a bar or cafe, lit by candles on either side of the large screen. Folding chairs take up most of the floor and there are couches along the sides if you get there early enough. Farther back are tables where you can set up a laptop and  eat breakfast.

Though the match was scoreless it was entertaining, with much artistry, and the crowd appreciated the drama and flow. Here is a short tour of the space, followed by an interview with Horacio (his last name is pronounced GOMSH, not Gomez, as it was mangled in the video). He'll be here every day, for every match. Come share a few.

The Bar Less Traveled: Mexico vs South Africa in World Cup Opener

A Yanqui walks into a taberna and...  GOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAALLLLLLLLLLLLL!!!!!!

The El Farolito Soccer Club is the place to watch Mexican football in the Mission, but it was already mobbed by the time the second half began. Just on the opposite side of the BART station entrance is Carlo's Club, which had two TVs and about 25 patrons devoted to the match.  Day workers, a few tourists, some neighborhood fixtures, but mostly people of all sorts ducking in for a few moments on the way to the train. 

Before being able to order an orange juice the ball was in the back of the South African net, an unmarked Rafael Marquez recipient of a cross-field pass which he calmly deposited, generating an impressive early-morning roar from the assembled. 1-1.

One patron noted that Mexico scored upon my arrival so I was made a good-luck charm. This was confirmed as regulation time was running out. South Africa played long ball for most of the rest of the match and almost converted, a shot from a speeding Katlego Mphela hitting the outside of the left post in the 90th minute. 

Back to Farolito for the exodus.  Most of the patrons were dressed in team colors. Many looked as though they had spent the night with their heads on the bar. This, by the way, is the great challenge of the tournament for social drinkers living on the West Coast. San Francisco, for example, is dry between 2 and 7 but the first match starts at 4:30. Does one get a few hours rest, an early breakfast, disappear into the darkness and drink out of a bag? Maybe a pickup game at the nearest soccer pitch. Match of the Living Dead.

The fans looked pleased with the result, perhaps relieved given the fact Mexico fell behind and almost lost in the final moments. South Africa is not an elite team but the host nation is always a danger lurking in the high grass.

Something has happened between 2006 and 2010 in the United States, or at least on the coasts. The World Cup has gone from under-appreciated to ubiquitous. The U.S. match with England tomorrow is even going to be shown at AT&T Park for free (and there's a ferris wheel for after).  Have we finally fallen in love with the world's sport? Is this part of the Obama effect, our global re-entry? Or is it just another event to market and over-expose with product tie-ins?  A little of each, maybe.

Here, by the way, is a great resource for finding out where to watch matches in the Bay Area, especially if you're looking for a country's home field advantage, as it were. They're looking  for additions if you know where the North Koreans are hanging out.

Uruguay and France in less than 30 minutes. Meantime, chapeaus off for Bafana Bafana, as the South African side is called, extending the streak of host nations never losing the opening match.

Top Twitter Cities

As an avid tweeter and someone who has lived in countless countries over the years, I found this chart incredibly fascinating....twitter usage and popularity around the world, starting with London in first place, LA in second place and Chicago in third (a surprise). The rest of the line-up through #70 below.

Should You Pack Candles for the World Cup?

If you are traveling to South Africa to attend the World Cup, your flight safety demonstration will be supplemented by a request from the host country to conserve electricity during your stay. 

In January of 2008 South Africa endured blackouts that crippled the country, shutting down some of the major industries for days and causing a general drag on the economy.

Power has been rationed to the major consumers and general public since then and other conservation measures have been in effect.

Yet blackouts continue, in spite of a reduction in demand due to the global recession's effects on South Africa's economy. The problem is a result of decades of neglect in capacity generation and is exacerbated by power cable theft. Increased supply is supposed to help the problem but this isn't coming until 2012.

The problems were serious enough to draw the world's attention and questions have been raised about whether the country would be able to power the World Cup. 

A trip to South Africa 18 months ago included a meeting with Eskom, the public utility which supplies 95% of the country's electricity and is one of the world's ten largest producers, and a meeting with FIFA, the international football organization presenting the tournament.

Questions to Eskom were met with brief and confident responses, and FIFA's answers focused on the games themselves, with reassurances that power generators would provide sufficient electricity for the stadiums during play. 

When the same questions were asked of business leaders and the general citizenry the responses were much less certain.  Many people mentioned crime and public safety as a trouble spot, but electricity was the primary infrastructure concern cited, with ground transportation a distant second (freight transport workers are on strike and the passenger train unions joined them earlier this week). 

Now with the tournament less than a month away it is clear that authorities are worried.  Eskom recently released a statement saying that they "expect quantities to be sufficient" but acknowledge pressure on the system and  increased their calls to spare usage. Color-coded referees will appear on television to alert citizens and visitors about imminent reductions in power, at which point people will be asked to limit their usage to one light and one television. 

Hopefully they are also asking people to "power pool," something that would make sense for a social activity like watching football. Perhaps an ad campaign of  "Got Torch?" (We call them flashlights in the States).

The scheduling of matches can't help. FIFA understandably wants to avoid overlap. But 19 of the preliminary round's 48 matches are at night, with an additional 19 finishing after dark. Only 10 are day games.   Among South Africa's biggest electricity consumers are the natural-resource extractors, but these consume electricity day and night. Residential consumption increases dramatically in the evening, and the games are taking place during South Africa's winter, so people are going to need heat as well as light.

In addition to concerns about the effect on the games themselves, there is the considerable matter of public safety, particularly with large crowds. It's not going to matter that FIFA has sufficient generator capacity to keep the bulbs on in the stadium if the traffic lights, street lights and public transit are shut down.

Meanwhile, here in San Francisco the first matches begin at 4:30 in the morning, or at nautical twilight, which is the point at which seafarers are able to discern a soccer ball against the horizon.  Our biggest concerns are whether to stay up all night or wake up early, and how to change the city's liquor laws so that the game's first match can be met with a civilizing Bloody Mary or Mimosa.  How about a new pub tradition called Groggy Hour?  Ah, the problems of a first-world nation in consumptive decline.

Which brings us to the matter of global perception.  This is being pitched as South Africa's coming-out party.  It's been 17 years since the end of white rule, close to a generation, and the country is eager to demonstrate its modernity and readiness for a prominent place among the many new players in the global economy.

But what happens if the lights go out while everyone is watching?

On Humans Becoming Firefox Icons

Below is a recap of my first contribution to Memeburn which launched about a week ago in South Africa.

The site is dedicated to news and opinion, tech culture, innovation and business, and while focused on emerging markets, it monitors worldwide trends. This post is the result of a dream I had where I had turned into a Firefox icon and was jumping from browser to browser in offices of new start-ups, a world I intimately know.

Nothing was real in the 'human sense' and yet I was connected to everything and everyone - in this online virtual world, the kind that so many of us have created for ourselves.

ARE WE BECOMING FIREFOX ICONS?

A few weeks ago in a very bizarre dream, I was a beautifully customised icon on my Firefox browser, adorned in bright colors with HC on the bottom right.

HC didn’t stand for HealthCrunch, nor was it an alternative to creative commons. What it stood for was Human Connector. The difference between this multi-colored creative HC icon and all the others was that it could jump from one Firefox browser to another. It could also pop in and out of people’s IE and Safari worlds, hang out, and observe their behavior.

HC didn’t have a face, but had a magical wand that allowed me to engage with whomever I wanted, a power granted by the HG – Human Gadget – who mostly hung out in the open source galaxy that only a few of us insiders knew about.

DREAM VERSUS REALITY

In this dream I watched a group of people in an Internet Café somewhere in Silicon Valley. They were referring to each other by their Twitter names, and many were shouting random things into their iPhones, such as “I just got tagged in a photo” and “I just joined the ‘I’m a social media addict group’”. The waiter seemed a tad confused by the names people used, particularly @madjellyman and @toadwalker.

Oh, the things I saw as HC. I watched my human self too, not unlike the way Sully watched his blue-bodied Na’vi body in Avatar. The difference was that my icon was the human and the human me had become the alien.

A couple of weeks later, I discovered a YouTube video that showed a Twitter and Facebook café with people doing the same things as I’d dreamed of. It was so similar it was surreal.

The always-on world is catching up to us in ways we’re not even aware of, simply because the rate of change is too fast. Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near talks about the intense pace we’re moving at, as does research on the psychological and sociological impact of technological stimuli on the human brain.

Our digital world moves so rapidly that the reality and the dream can become one before you’ve realised it’s happening.

Are we really ready to become Firefox icons? Will we have a choice?

We’ve become so addicted to the adrenalin we get from new gadgets or social media tools that it’s all too easy to put the human connection aside – even if it’s only an hour less people-time than it was last week and the week before. It’s a gradual thing when machines take over.

There’s no doubt about it – I love discovering new tools that help me navigate the web in different ways, social media apps that give me a richer experience on the web and iPhone downloads that fascinate me during a boring panel discussion.

When Foursquare came out, I was hooked within a week. Why? Because it’s cool. Not only is there a game component like many of the geo-loco services on mobile devices, but there’s a Twitter-like “wow” when you discover that a friend just checked into one of your favourite places.

THE UPSIDE

Services such as Skype, Twitter, Wordpress, Foursquare and Facebook are perfect for connectors like me who not only engage with people in their professional capacity, but in their personal lives as well.

These tools allow me to connect with people from countries all over the world. A day doesn’t go by where I don’t talk to Europe, Australia, South Africa, Israel or other American states.

Additionally, voices that were unheard 20 years ago now have countless platforms to tell their stories, in video, audio, on a blog, or in 140 characters or less.

THE DOWNSIDE

While there’s no question that I love trees and lakes more than my Blackberry and iPod, the connection that I have to my devices isn’t a small one. These devices go with me everywhere, the technology “hooked factor” sets in and the result isn’t always a healthy one.

You are not a Gadget argues that Web 2.0 designs value the information content of the web over individuals. Says author Jaron Lanier: “It suggests that only the aggregator (like Google, for instance) gets rich, while the actual producers of content get poor. Web 2.0 is a formula to kill the middle class and undo centuries of social progress.” He also believes that the internet has become anti-intellectual because web 2.0 collectivism has killed the individual voice.

It’s another perspective, not one that everyone shares. Yet I don’t know anyone who doesn’t agree that managing an ever-growing world of online content and conversations sucks up far too much of our time – and many are opting out because they simply can’t keep up.

While the grass is growing around me and the waves are crashing against a shore somewhere not far from my house, their voices are getting dimmer as the calls from my countless inboxes and browsers are getting louder.

It’s no great surprise that as technology continues to beckon us with its magic and promises, our time connected to it will increase.

But as our inboxes, IM and Twitter clients, Facebook pages and text messages continue to grow, isn’t it long overdue that we demand products that give us more time with friends, more time on mountaintops, and more time playing with our children?

We need tools that really merge and converge, not tools that only promise this. We want solutions that simplify, not complicate, and smart aggregators and personalised curators.

We need to demand solutions that humanise our daily lives and serve our personal needs. Before it catches up with us and turns us into Firefox icons.

Memeburn Goes Live

Memeburn goes live, a news and opinion platform tracking tech culture, innovation and business. The new site, founded by Cape Town-based Matthew Buckland, focuses on the web, mobile, social media, online media and social networking fields.

I am a contributing blogger together with dozens of others, and although Memeburn has a particular focus on emerging markets, it tracks innovation worldwide.