Each of the icehubs offers an open workspace, services for startups, business coaching and programs designed to stimulate an entrepreneurial drive and generally inspire leadership among doers. Perhaps the greatest thing that these innovation hubs has to offer its members is a community around which ideas are nurtured and skills are shared to everyone’s benefit. They strengthen bottom-of-the-pyramid innovations and scrappy startups in ways that few organization can.

A place for makers

What makes the icehubs unique is their focus on promoting a maker culture that actively prototypes physical goods. They do this by providing open access to small-scale production facilities and equipment, including wood/metal working tools, CNC milling machines, laser cutters, 3D printers and so on.

These Fab Labs, or personal digital fabrication centers, are able to make almost anything. In doing so, they encourage experimentation and the exploration of new ways to shape and combine materials. They understand that startups don’t have access to mass-production facilities, so with these tools they’re able to take concepts off the drawing board, prototype them and show the potential of their products to investors.

icecairo, the third node in the network, provisionally operates from a large flat in the center of downtown Cairo just off Tahrir Square. Earlier this month, I traveled overland with members of the icecairo team to deliver workshops on using the Business Model Canvas to entrepreneurs in four Egyptian cities (more on this in a follow-up post).

While the downtown location and nearby Fab Lab attract a growing following, a variation on the iconic stacked shipping container design which first debuted in Addis Ababa is set to be replicated in Cairo. A plot was secured in Heliopolis, strategically located just outside Cairo International Airport, and in September six 40-foot containers were delivered to the site.

I had an opportunity to visit the future home of icecairo on our return flight from Aswan. Wael Sabry, the principal architect, met us at the airport and drove us the short distance to the site. His wife, Nashwa Ibrahim, herself an architect, has done extensive work on appropriate building patterns for St. Catherine’s Monastery in Mount Sinai. We were clearly in very capable hands.

The third evolution

The Cairo hub departs from the Addis model in its overall layout and use of materials that make it better suited for Egypt. On the ground floor is a main meeting area, space for startup incubation, a kitchen and working alcoves. The second floor is home to the Fab Lab and has cafe-like terraces shaded by suspended textile screens. A solar chimney window and air inlet provide passive ventilation and cooling for the space.

Wael graciously showed us around the site, pausing to bring up renderings of the finished hub on his iPad. To comply with building height regulations defined by the airport authority, the site will be excavated two meters below grade. When it’s done and the containers are set on their foundations, the impression will be like “entering an oasis from the street level,” says Wael. When trees are eventually planted an additional measure of shade will complete the oasis feel. icecairo has good company—coffee houses, an artistic center and food courts are located a stone’s throw away.

True to its driving principles, the future home of icecairo is designed as a space for exploration, environmental consciousness and open collaboration. It’s also very much an evolution—beginning as it did with the first iteration in Addis, then Weimar and now the second of two spaces serving greater Cairo.

Innovation, especially disruptive innovation, requires risk and comes from the edges of society. The icecairo ethos embraces this by building something completely unique in Egypt, with the aim of fostering a green, entrepreneurial future for the country.

The 2012 Cameroon Startup Challenge was the first competition of its kind to recognize the achievements of technology entrepreneurs in the country. The awards ceremony, held on September 20th at the Foyer du Marin in Douala, brought together Cameroon’s leading innovators, their teams, judges and special guests. Also in attendance were investors and leaders from the local and international technology community. The competition was made possible through collaborations with Sanaga Ventures, AppsTech, ActivSpaces and VC4Africa. It was an electric evening filled with positive energy and enthusiasm for the Cameroon startups in the spotlight.

The awards ceremony kicked off with a welcome by the hosts, Sanaga Ventures, followed by an introduction of the panel judges and the startup teams. After a review of the success criteria used to determine the winner, a presentation was made of the first and second runners up, followed by the grand prize winner. The winning team addressed the audience before a speech was delivered by Rebecca Enonchong, the CEO of AppsTech. The evening closed with a banquet dinner served at the hotel.

Celebrating Cameroon’s Top Innovators

Judges highlighted the overall quality of the entries. It was noted that the applicants were well past “idea” stage with most having promising business models and working revenue streams in place. When the final results were tallied, one startup clearly rose to the top while the first, second and third runners up were each separated by a single point.

We shared the excitement of the audience as Djoss.tv was announced as the grand prize winner.

Djoss.tv is a social TV platform that lets viewers engage their favorite TV shows in real-time. The service brings television programming to life by allowing viewers to, for example, share their excitement when their favorite football team scores a goal or join a heated debate on a social issue. By unlocking this real-time sharing, Djoss.tv integrates a missing social layer into any television program. The service also provides viewers with additional context and information on the program they are viewing, introducing a vital new tool for editorial staff.

For the cable companies providing the shows, Djoss.tv is an invaluable tool for gathering feedback from the audience. It’s also an important channel for advertisers and sponsors to engage with audiences to further brand awareness. The Djoss.tv team has completed a successful pilot with Spectrum Television Cameroon (STV) and is looking to secure a partnership with the station while also expanding their offering beyond Cameroon’s borders.

The project is headed up by an all-star team that includes Patrick NDJIENTCHEU, a software engineer and cofounder of Koutchoumi.com, Hervé DJIA, a software engineer and tech enthusiast, Eloge FOKEM, a web developer and CEO of the web agency Dotcomcm.com, and Kouotou ABOUBAKAR SIDIKI, a software engineer with expertise in social media. The four person team took home a USD $5,000 cash prize. In a passionate acceptance speech, the team explained their motivations for the project and outlined some exciting developments for the future. The winnings are critical in the team’s effort to push the venture across Cameroon and abroad.

The top three finalist are presented below:

Grand Prize Winner: Djoss.tv ($5,000)

Pitch: With Djoss.tv, you’ll never watch TV the same way again. Djoss.tv is a social TV platform that lets TV viewers ever aroundywhere discuss their favorite TV shows in real-time.

For the users, Djoss.tv provides additional information and comments around their current TV shows, crowdsourced from other users, or directly from our editorial staff. Sometimes, we just want other viewers to know how pissed off we are when our favorite soccer star loses a penalty. For the cable TV companies providing the shows, Djoss.tv is a fantastic innovative tool to gather audience feedback and further develop brand awareness.

First Runner Up: KingMaker Ad Network ($1,000)

Pitch: KingMaker is an internet (cyber) cafe ad network that uses innovative technology to serve relevant ads to an audience which can be highly targeted.

Mobile internet is still too expensive for most of Cameroon’s population and few local websites have enough users to actually interest advertisers. Cyber cafes are the number one internet access points in the region because of their affordability and relatively good internet connection. We work hand in hand with them to bring relevant local advertising to their clients, thus creating extra revenue channels for their business.

Second Runner Up: AGRO-HUB

Pitch: AGRO-HUB aims to combat poverty among rural farmers by boosting demand for their products. We achieve this through an innovative use of the web and mobile technology to streamline the flow of market pricing information for farmers’ products.

Our agricultural market development strategy involves partnering with rural farmers to source products and information for newly sort out local and international markets. Sourcing of products is done through setting up of collecting centers [or storehouses] within rural communities while sourcing of information is done through provision of SMS based tools and knowledge farmers need to access and share information about their activities. The information sourced from the farmers thereof is used on the web to attract consumers for their products.

The SolarKiosk is modular, able to be transported in a lightweight package to remote areas and is available in numerous configurations:

Much like a “platform” in the automotive industry, the basic model can be arbitrarily extended and modified, adapting to all kinds of uses depending on the local market, local tax benefits and so on.

Certain parts of the kiosk—the electrical components, in particular—are manufactured centrally to ensure quality and durability, but all others can be made of local materials such as bamboo, wood, adobe, stone, metal or even recycled goods. This makes the kiosk attractive for purchase or license by entrepreneurs and both public and private and institutions. It’s also possible to connect multiple kiosks to create a local grid.

Thinking about many a dark night I’ve passed in Cameroon, with container shops and call boxes lit by candles or kerosene lamps, the need for a solution like this is obvious. If the capital expenditure makes sense for business owners over the long term, SolarKiosks could become a viable alternative in on- and off-grid areas.

Sudan recently released his new mixtape ‘Rage against the machine’ directly through his Blackberry, cutting out any labels or middle men. He made a deal with airtime merchants that enables him to sell his latest mixtape from his BBM at the cost of R5 MTN airtime per single. Within a few days he managed to sell hundreds of copies of his single ‘Cheaters’ in this way.

“The future is literally in our hands” says Sudan.  “Mobile phones have 80% penetration in South Africa and everybody knows that this is Blackberry country. My music also promotes a ‘do for self’ attitude so it’s important that it walks the talk. To prove that this is a great business model for all of us, I’m planning to go platinum this way.”

Join Sudan on BBM #27AC730C, follow him via Twitter and check out two tracks from the mixtape which are available for download below.

via Timbuktu Chronicles.

For Ben and myself, being at this event was an opportunity to reconnect with Jörn Schultz, Marton Kocsev and Oliver Petzoldt—the energetic founders of the icehubs network whom we’d met in Addis Ababa last year—and to network with ‘doers’ from a range of disciplines who are actively prototyping the continent’s future.

Highlights

With a solid roundup of sessions planned, choosing which ones to attend proved to be a challenge. I gravitated toward presentations focused on technology, maker culture, innovation hubs and the like. One of the most intriguing projects I saw was Simon Höher’s demo of the knowable.org online DIY community, which just entered its beta phase:

Knowable is a network that provides free and open access to effective, creative, low-tech solutions that help people provide for their basic needs on their own. It combines elements of Afrigadget, the Appropedia wiki, Make magazine, GitHub and the Instructables online communities, remixed in a totally original way with a genuine desire to foster the growth of a grassroots DIY culture. Their platform is engaging, clean and designed from the outset to be accessible in conditions commonly found in Africa. As knowable’s co-founder Simon put it, “we want knowable to work in IE6 in a crowded cyber cafe.” The founders have won numerous pitch competitions, including the Enorm Social Business Angel Competition and are looking to attract investors for their seed round. I hope to connect with Simon again soon and will definitely watch this startup closely.

Growing AfriLabs

On Saturday morning I gave a presentation together with Marton Kocsev on innovation networks that are spreading across the continent. Marton is currently heading up the development of icecairo, the newest node in the growing icehubs network. Building on the success of iceaddis, which I had the pleasure of visiting, I’m sure that the Cairo hub will be poised to make a similar if not greater impact.

Just prior to the conference, the founders of AfriLabs processed the applications for new member hubs and sent out invitations to community managers and representatives across the continent. Here are two slides I pulled from my deck to illustrate the growth of the network. The first visual represents the AfriLabs network at its founding in 2010:

As of today, we have added nine new open coworking spaces, incubators, startup accelerators, pre-incubation labs and social innovation hubs to the network:

The light blue circles represent hubs which are either coming online shortly or have membership applications in process.

A system to connect innovators

Putting African tech hubs under an umbrella organization like AfriLabs is well and good but, practically speaking, how does this help facilitate collaboration and communication across borders? Following the example of hundreds of existing hackerspaces that span the globe, including a growing number in Africa, I made a modest proposal to link the AfriLabs member hubs with a communications network. The ChaosVPN (wiki and GitHub project) is an open, secure, mesh-based network designed to connect hackers wherever they are. It has no single point of failure, low latency for voice over IP (VoIP) and is designed such that noone sees other people’s traffic.

A solution based on the ChaosVPN model provides the low-level communications infrastructure—or basic plumbing—which permits a range of services to be rolled out across the network. These services could include things like website mirrors, local caches of resources such as MIT OpenCourseware, LDAP, FTP, Jabber, TOR entry/exit nodes, cloud services, distributed computing and so on. As usage increases and more nodes join the AfriLabsVPN, additional sevices pop up and its potential reach is further extended.

This offers loads of possibilities for virtual incubation as well; with greater numbers of virtual memberships being offered through AfriLabs member hubs, online resource offerings can be tailored to these various member levels. What are the implications for computing services? One exciting possibility that springs to mind is eschewing Amazon’s AWS in favor of iHub’s forthcoming supercomputer cluster for “parallel and resource-hungry applications such as weather prediction, draught prediction and real-time information dispatch.”

The software is there; the hardware costs are negligible—all that’s required are a few brave souls to step forward and start hacking the future. Who’s in?