Every once in a while a company will rise that makes incredibly large waves on a simple idea. MXit is doing this right now with mobile phone-based chat. Started in South Africa in January 2005, MXit has grown exponentially to a userbase of 4 million (between 7-10k new signups each day).
I was able […]

• 9 Comments

Gavin Chait, Director of Research at Whythawk, has put together a great video on the size and potential value of South Africa’s informal sector. This is actually just an intro video, the full video will be available for Whythawk Ratings clients.
Take a moment to watch it:

• 1 Comment

Ruud Elmendorp is a Dutch video journalist in Africa. This video is about Computers for Schools in Kenya, an organization that refurbishes old computers from the West and uses them in Kenyan schools. There are English subtitles.

You can download the video from his website, where you can also see some of […]

• 0 Comments

Ken Banks and his FrontlineSMS system have been around for about 18 months. In February he was contacted by a group in Nigeria who wanted to use it for monitoring of the upcoming presidential elections from the grass roots level (see BBC story).
powered by ODEO
Interview with Ken Banks of Kiwanja.net (mp3 file)
Ken isn’t just […]

• 6 Comments

“Most of the people using phones are living in the developing world.”
Nathan Eagle’s presentation on Africa and the mobile phone market at the LIFT Conference. Nathan is working on a project called EPROM, which stands for Entrepreneurial Program and Research on Mobiles. As referred to in Ethan Zuckerman’s post, and talk with him […]

• 0 Comments

Eric Osiakwan is an incredibly well-spoken advocate of change in African technology circles. He advocates an increased need for ISP’s to band together in Africa. Only by coming together as a united front will ISP’s begin to counter government corruption, overreach and monopolies.

He has started the African ISP Association (AfrISPA) and can be […]

• 3 Comments

African Signals is going to be a weekly videocast of technology news for Africa. I am currently working on the first episode, and will be contacting individuals for interviews.
I’m always looking for new and interesting stories that showcase African ingenuity, technology stories and events that are upcoming. Let me know if […]

• 0 Comments