Africa‘s technology community will thrive only by facing up to the continent’s fundamental problems. – By Ory Okolloh Africa is trending, if stories in the international media over the last year are anything to go by. And no story about “rising Africa”—many of us would argue it has “arisen”—is complete without mention of the role technology is playing in this transformation. The rise of the mobile phone, disruptive SMS services like the money-transfer platform M-Pesa, and mobile tools for democracy [...]
Categories: Featured, Innovations, Mobile Technology, Startup
The success of Ushahidi as both an activist organization and as a technology startup is one that is widely recognized as Africa’s first big ‘garage’ startup success story. The organization was born out of the 2007 post-election unrest in Kenya when Ory Okolloh put out a call to map citizen reports of violence. Erik Hersman, David Kobia and Juliana Rotich all heeded the call and Ushahidi.com was born. In a blog post – Stepping Down as Ushahidi Executive Director; Ory [...]
Categories: Africa
In two weeks time, I’ll be traveling to Nairobi, Kenya to attend Maker Faire Africa. This is an event which is bringing together inventors, ingenious craftsmen/women, artisans and innovators under one roof to showcase their latest inventions & products, dialogue between experts and non-experts and also network in promoting their works. Maker Faire Africa is a celebration of African ingenuity, innovation and invention and will take place in from 27th – 28th, Aug 2010. Last year, I volunteered at the very [...]
Ushahidi won the Weblog of the Year award from Deutsche Welle at the Deutsche Welle Global Media Forum in Bonn, Germany. The award ceremony took place on Tuesday 22nd June, 2010 at the Planery Chamber of the World Conference Center where the Climate Change and the Media forum were on-going. According to award recipient – Erik Hersman; “The Ushahidi platform is an African technology innovation that is changing a lot of things, not least of which is the way that [...]
Last week, I saw a couple of tweet updates from my colleague blogger; David Oluniyi Ajao about the Mobile Web East Africa Conference which took place in Nairobi, Kenya from 3rd- 4th Feb, 2010 at the Hotel Intercontinental. The hash tag for the event on twitter was #MWEA10. The event focused on “harnessing the potential of the internet and applications on mobile devices”. Even though I couldn’t make it to the event, I followed a couple of bloggers for more [...]
