Mac-Jordan Degadjor's Blog

Mocality – a business directory start-up by Stefan Magdalinski with a Kenyan-wide coverage accuses search-engine giant; Google of antitrust-style behavior with its Google+ search integration. You should read Mocality’s blog post about the situation in full, but below is a summary: As we all know, there are no Kenyan Yellow pages, so the business directory from Mocality was crowd-sourced; paying over Ksh. 11m (over $100,000) to thousands of Kenyans to help create and validate its database of business & ventures in [...]

Re-blog from How We Made It In Africa From “the hopeless continent” to “Africa rising” – how The Economist made a U-turn on Africa. In May 2000, respected magazine The Economist on its cover called Africa “the hopeless continent”. One of the articles painted a picture of a continent ravaged by war, famine and disease. “Floods in Mozambique; threats of famine in Ethiopia (again); mass murder in Uganda; the implosion of Sierra Leone; and a string of wars across the [...]

Nokia has stated it has a broad portfolio of mobile devices specifically targeted at the African market for its African market. Blanca Juti Nokia’s Vice President Product Marketing Mobile Phones made this known during the just concluded Nokia World conference held in London. According to her, Nokia acknowledges that even though most people in the continent have the aspiration and the need to communicate, not everyone can afford a supper high phone that is why the company has designed a [...]

From 28th – 30th Oct, 2011 I shall be working together with Magnus Gameli Adzaho & Jo Webber on the Kuyu Digital Project; a digital literacy program introducing a group of high school students in Keta Secondary School and other surrounding schools in the Anlo District to: Basic Information & Communication Technology Skills (ICT4D) Emailing & Social Networking Engaging in Social Media positively and Video Reporting (Citizen Journalism) The key to successful implementation of digital technology in our society and [...]

From October 6 – 8, 2011; Inventors, Developer, Makers, Idealist, Entrepreneurs and Bloggers will meet-up on the campus of American University in Cairo for Maker Faire Africa 2011 under the hash-tag: #MFA11. As was the case in Accra, Ghana (‘09) and Nairobi, Kenya (’10); MFA 2011 will present and spotlight the vibrant & endless creative individuals that have come to represent the spirit of ‘making’ throughout our dear continent. According to Emeka Okafor; these innovators, artists and tinkerers will be [...]

World’s leading mobile manufacturer, Nokia is living up to its promise to connect the next billion to the internet using its platform, the Nokia phone. One of the moves is to push for the development of quality applications for their S40 mobile platform. And Nokia is doing just that. About Create 4 Millions Contest Reflecting Nokia’s stated strategy to deliver mobile phones and services for the next billion, there will also be a tremendous need to offer outstanding apps for [...]

Re-blog From Brian Solis Blog: “For the first time ever in a single day we had 500 million people use Facebook” – Mark Zuckerberg For those who focus on the debate between Facebook, Google Plus and Twitter are missing the true story. Today at Facebook’s f8 developer conference we were reminded about what the story really is…you and me. No, it’s not about features, capabilities, or the number of users. We were reminded about the power of something much more [...]

Ghanaian BlackBerry Users can now have full access to the BlackBerry App World. This morning, my friend @Lydia Elim-Ama re-tweeted @BlaclBeryDev [photo below] which stated, Ghana and a host of other countries; Albania, Armenia, Benin, Algeria, Belize, Burkina, Bosnia, Lebanon, Lithuania, Morocco, Serbia, Tunisia and Zambia  can now access and enjoy  the full functionality of the App World which of course, brings with it many other applications. Somewhere in November, 2010; I read David Ajao’s frustration about his “Top 3 [...]

As an avid TweetDeck user, I have always wanted to share links from my blog-posts and other interesting articles on Social Media, ICT4D, African Tech, Mobile Entrepreneurship, Gender Issues and Photography with Google’s URL Shortener; Goo.gl After much digging and research, I came across a link/API which shortens all links in TweetDeck using goo.gl. Please find more details below: Start your TweetDeck client Go to TweetDeck “Settings” by clicking wrench icon in the top right corner Select the tab “Services” [...]

This tweet below from one of the organizers of the Festival of Ideas conference got me very inspired to write this blog-post about the award recipients who happen to be young and energetic change-makers from Ghana in my Social Circle. Yesterday, I virtually joined and participated in Day 2 of the #FestivalofIdeas event from Takoradi which took place at the Accra International Conference Center. If you follow this hash-tag; #FestivalofIdeas, you’ll definitely come across a couple of tweets and re-tweets [...]

Londoners woke up to one of the disturbing scenes of total lawlessness and violence experienced in decades. “Senior officers say the violence and looting on Monday night was the worst in living memory; eclipsing the 1980s inner city riots in Toxteth, Brixton and Tottenham at the height of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership” (The Guardian). A lot have been written on what went on and perhaps what is still going on so no need over elaborating here. These events in the past [...]

A lot of discussion is currently on-going about the need for bloggers/citizen journalist to adopt a sort of “code of conducts” for their chosen passion in new media and citizen journalism. According to Lanita Pace; Director of Multimedia and Technology Programs at the Knight Digital Media Center at UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism; Every news organization has only its credibility and reputation to rely on. I couldn’t disagree with her when she made those comments during a training session [...]