Mac-Jordan Degadjor's Blog

Most people these days  think the social networking tool – Twitter is an American or European phenomenon, but you’ll be surprised how heavily it is been used on the African continent based on research findings by Portland Communications and Tweetminster from the last three (October, November & December) months of 2011. Twitter map: how Africa tweets Young people tweeting from mobile devices are driving the growth of Twitter in Africa. This pan-African analysis of Twitter traffic was complemented by a [...]

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 [...]

Determined to provide an avenue for businesses to reach and connect with customers efficiently, Edward Amartey-Tagoe; co-founder of Nandimobile is focused on creating platforms which empower connections between businesses in Ghana and their customers. They launched a new product, Infoline, one of the biggest mobile business directories in Ghana. Infoline is simply a business directory service that enables mobile users in Ghana search businesses from a directory of over 18,000 local businesses in Ghana via SMS. A search result typically constitutes business [...]

Tomorrow; 6th Jan, 2012 – Rhapsody’s Restaurant & Pub located inside the plush Accra Mall will serve as the venue for the first Venture Capitalist for Africa – VC4Africa Meetup from 6:00pm till 9:00pm. What is a VC4Africa Meetup? Second to networking online, VC4Africa makes use of the Barcamp model (an international network of user generated conferences – open, participatory workshop/events, whose content is provided by participants) to organize our very own series of VC4Africa Meetups. We like this open [...]

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 [...]

Congratulations to the winners of the App 4 Climate Challenge (West Africa). From the Apps4Africa Blog: 1st prize $15,000 – HospitalManager by Victor Ogo Ekwueme (Nigeria) HospitalManager is a web-based application that helps hospitals and health organizations prepare for disasters such as floods and storms. More frequent heat spells, rains, and floods are leading to heath emergencies, both due to the event itself, and later to water related disease. HospitalManager will help hospitals in Nigeria, and potentially throughout Africa, identify [...]

Congratulations to Bright B. Simmons (TED Fellow) named one of the top mobile health innovators of 2011 by the mHealth Alliance and Rockefeller Foundation. Bright Simmons is the founder of mPedigree, a mobile phone and cloud-computing platform designed to combat counterfeit drugs by providing instant, free access via text-messaging to a drug quality verification system in Africa and South Asia. His work is channeled through his mPedigree Network and the IMANI research institute, ranked as one of the world’s 20 [...]

Erik Hersman asks us to shed outdated notions of Africa as a unified place plagued by starvation and war. Between mobile phone innovations like M-PESA, social networking like MXit and entrepreneurial spaces like Maker Faire Africa, Hersman sees innovation and entrepreneurship exploding within some of Africa’s—and the world’s—fastest growing economies.

Cross-posting from VC4Africa Blog This past weekend, Startup Weekend Accra took place at the Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology (MEST) in East-Legon, an area in Ghana’s capital Accra. The event was sold out and attracted more than 100 attendees. On the last day (of the three day event) the winner was announced: Dropifi – an online messaging platform that turns contacts of large and small scale businesses into loyal customers. Startup Weekends are 54-hour events where developers, designers, marketeers and startup enthusiasts [...]

From November 18th – 20th 2011; the first Accra Startup Weekend will take place at the Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology (MEST) in East-Legon, Accra. About Startup Weekend Startup Weekends are 54-hour events where developers, designers, marketers, product managers and startup enthusiasts come together to share ideas, form teams, build products, and launch startups! Startup Weekends are weekend-long, hands-on experiences where entrepreneurs and aspiring entrepreneurs can find out if startup ideas are viable. On average, half of Startup Weekend’s attendees [...]

In this era of mobile technology booming in Africa and Dual SIM phones becoming the preferred choice in most African countries; mobile phone manufacturing giant; Nokia also stepped into the market with their latest Nokia C2-00 (GSM+GSM). The Nokia C2-00 seems like a mid-range phone from the nineties at first, but this modest handset actually makes a lot of sense, and use. Being a dual-SIM, dual-standby phone is the obvious highlight: you can have two active phone lines in 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 [...]