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 […]

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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).
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Interview with Ken Banks of Kiwanja.net (mp3 file)
Ken isn’t just […]

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“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 […]

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Welcome to the first video cast and podcast of African Signals. I almost didn’t post the following clip, due in part to the fact that I realized giving a canned speech pretty much sucks (for me). In the end, it does explain why I’m doing it and I gets the message across. […]

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