Ismael Nzouetom, the Cameroonian wunderkind behind I-Dispo, an innovative online booking platform, is visiting Cameroon and eager to meet up with the tech community. Harambe Cameroon in collaboration with ActivSpaces is organizing a Power Hour meetup between Ismael and the local startup/tech community tomorrow at Akwa Palace in Douala. Take your time and check out this inspiring video to gain a little insight into I-Dispo and the entrepreneurial brilliance behind it.

A Brief History
Ismael Nzouetom, born and bred in Cameroon, received a Francophonie scholarship in 2002 that landed him in France to further his studies at the University of Paris XIII. After receiving training as a telecommunications engineer, Ismael developed his career with Giants such as Expertime, Microsoft and British Telecoms where he was in charge of the dot.com portfolio. While working on his masters, Ismael developed the idea for I-Dispo, a venture that would turn into a life-changing adventure that would take him to Silicon Valley and beyond.

The Details
In our Power Hour with Ismael, he will be sharing the story of his success and his habit-altering innovation at Akwa Palace and as usual, where we unite there is force. There is a lot of multilateral lessons to be learned from one of Cameroon’s finest who is building up a track record on the global startup scene.

Power Hour with Ismael Nzouetom

When: Wednesday, 21st December | 6:00pm – 8:00pm
Where: Akwa Palace, Douala
Guest Speaker: Ismael Nzouetom, Founder at I-Dispo

Activity: Ismael will be sharing challenges, trials and triumphs of entrepreneurship with the local startup community and there will be healthy exchange as well. Bring your bundle of positive energy.

For our friends near the city of seven hills and others who can’t make it to Douala, we’ll be holding another Power Hour at Concordia Lounge in Yaounde’s upscale neighborhood of Bastos on Thursday, December 22nd at the same time (6:00pm – 8:00pm).

For Tweeps
Follow Harambe Cameroon’s president, Olivia Mukam, on Twitter at @sankara1111 for updates on the event. Use the #PowerHourCMR hashtag to stay in the cut. Catch Ismael Nzouetom’s occasional tweets from @ismosoft.

Buea-based African job search engine Njorku rolled out a major update to its platform this week, with an eye toward improving relevance of search results, performance and scalability. Additionally, they have expanded their offerings to include job search in Uganda and Egypt.

The Njorku search engine crawls websites with job and classified listings serving African countries and indexes results based on keyword searches. The search results are available to job seekers in Cameroon, Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, South Africa, Uganda and Egypt. As increasing numbers of Africans consume content via mobile devices, users have the option of accessing Njorku via a mobile interface and receive updates via SMS or email. In addition to keyword searches, visitors may also browse popular and recent searches.

Below is a sample query demonstrating Njorku’s enhanced search results. In this case, a search for ‘developer’ in Egypt returns job listings from such diverse sources as LinkedIn, Craigslist and job search portals serving North Africa and the Middle East:

Since Njorku’s public beta in March 2011, founder Mambe Nanje Churchill has done a “total rewrite” of the platform including a new algoritm that determines the critical ranking of search results based on keywords. Moreover, Njorku’s core (crawling and indexing) has now been distributed into separate processes running on different servers. This gives Njorku a noticeable performance boost and enables it to scale up to expand its offerings in more countries. According to Churchill, “we can now crawl close to 300 sites in a very short space of time,” which was not possible in the past.

Last October, Njorku received seed funding to help improve its search technology and marketing efforts.

Njorku

Website: Njorku | Njorku mobile
Facebook page: Facebook
Founder: Mambe Nanje Churchill (@mambenanje)
Founded: March, 2011
Location: Buea, Cameroon
Listed: VC4Africa.biz/ventures/njorku
Njorku is a startup based in Buea, Cameroon. Our mission is to provide jobs search in Africa and more on your mobile phone and computer. We offer job search solutions for Africans worldwide via email alerts, sms alerts and more. Watch our video pitch for more info.

“Look at how a single candle can both defy and define the darkness.”
-Anne Frank

When I first came to Buea to join ActivSpaces, a night walk through the suburban residential areas revealed one outstanding insight: the paths stretched out into total darkness. It was only a matter of time before I heard the accounts of accidents, outright robbery, and other mishaps due to the absence of adequate street lighting in the small town. Identifying this problem, I took it straight to the African Center for Technology Innovation & Ventures where I was already involved in a real estate project.

Nurturing Ideas & Collaborating
My first idea was to write up a project for the erection of light poles around residential areas. These would have a display panel affixed to them which could generate advertising revenue to keep the lighting solution sustainable. While theoretically feasible, Sebastian Prengel, a member of ActivSpaces and one of best engineers I know, cautioned me on several difficulties with this approach, the most pertinent being finance.

Sebastian and I debated until we hatched out a smaller version of the original plan, where we would build an innovative lighting unit that could be attached to public infrastructure as opposed to setting up entire light poles. The main objective would still be reached and even better, this was a project we could easily set up in the lab.

The “Rebirth” of Bisou
Sebastian and I set to work gathering the material needed to build the first model of the street lighting unit. After a few days of purchasing and assembling pieces, we had a working prototype ready for testing. It was however on this fateful day that Sebastian’s cat, Bisou, who had kept him company during all the tinkering, tragically passed away. As homage to his cat, we named our street lighting device “Bright Illumination & Sound Unit” – Bisou.

The Kiss of Light

Bisou is effective, cost efficient and an easy hardware hack. We connected a lamp with a motion sensor to a pair of speakers and an MP3 player. The lamp only comes on when there is motion to minimize consumption. Once the lights are triggered they are accompanied by audio media which can run a message such as “This light is sponsored by ActivSpaces“. Our 2nd Bisou prototype featured an encasement to protect the unit against weathering and to facilitate secure installment on outdoor structures.

Moving On
After test-running Bisou in a student residential area and recording positive results, we applied to the town council for the approval to operate the project in Buea. The Mayor of Buea, Charles Mbella Moki, was delighted with the initiative and being formally employed at AES-SONEL (the national power utility company), he pledged to support the necessary negotiations that would need to be established with them. With the mayor’s endorsement, we knocked at AES-SONEL’s door to forge the final alliance we would need to make the project work.

After dozens of meetings, presentations, field studies and technical assessments, AES-SONEL finally validated the street lighting project for Buea and authorized deployment of Bisou units in January 2012.

24 Hour Action
On the 15^th and 16^th of December, the 1% Club is hosting their annual 24 Hour Action and the Bisou team at ActivSpaces is a participating action group. For our launch, we are inviting the whole community to ActivSpaces to donate to the street lighting effort, record their own audio messages and hear them played across the streets of Buea when we deploy our solution with AES-SONEL in January.

Following last month’s investor live chat with Dariu Trueb of Ringier Africa & Kitendo Capital, we’re pleased to welcome Christina Tamer and Sean Smith of Invested Development, a Boston-based, impact-focused, seed-stage investment firm with its sights set on African innovators. Invested Development targets emerging markets with risk capital investments in the most innovative alternative energy and mobile technology startups.

ID believes that firms such as theirs have a role to play in merging the heart of the social sector with the efficiency of the free market. To achieve this, they are committed to supporting entrepreneurs with high growth, for-profit social ventures that deliver radically affordable innovations in alternative energy and mobile communications. In addition to seed funding, ID provides mentorship, in-country and international contacts as well as access to their global network of like-minded investors, funds and support organizations. For more details and highlights of ID’s portfolio check out their BSP Fund.

From Invested Development’s website:

The Missing Ingredient in impact investment is seed capital. Intrepid angels have led the way in Silicon Valley and they are destined to do the same in impact investing.

The Key Problem is that unlike the technology sector, social and environmental investing doesn’t have hordes of prosperous industry veterans to catalyze investment with their keen industry knowledge, deep pockets and extensive rolodex.

Our Solution is simple; combine our industry knowledge and contacts with the financial resources of high-net worth individuals and organizations. Together, we have everything it takes to catalyze the next innovative explosion while generating strong social and financial returns.

Talk With the Investors
On Monday, 28th November at 10:00am EST/ 4:00pm West Africa Time, ActivSpaces will again host leaders in the local tech community for a candid conversation with Christina Tamer and Sean Smith. Christina has a background in finance and began her career working with women entrepreneurs in Uganda. Today, she continues her focus on assisting entrepreneurs in making the transition from great idea to great business. Sean is the Investment Analyst and new investment manager at Invested Development. He manages ID’s office in Nairobi, Kenya. Sean works to source the pipeline and analyze investment opportunities.

Christina and Sean will be presenting Invested Development, discuss their emphasis on the mobile technology and alternative energy sectors, profile some of ID’s African investments and take questions from startup founders at ActivSpaces and from the local community. We’d like to invite techies, entrepreneurs of all stripes and other interested individuals to join us at ActivSpaces for this live event. If you’re not able to come to ActivSpaces, you are also welcome to follow the event online and contribute to the conversation. This is an outstanding opportunity to ask questions, exchange ideas and engage an impact investment firm backing innovative African ventures.

We look forward to seeing you there.

Activ Insights: Invested Development

When: Monday, 28th November | 10:00am EST/ 4:00pm W.Africa Time / 6:00pm E.Africa Time
Where: ActivSpaces Buea
Guest Speakers: Christina Tamer, Market Research Manager & Sean Smith, Investment Analyst and new investment manager at Invested Development.

Activity: Christina and Sean will be presenting Invested Development followed by a Q&A Session with the audience. So bring the questions you want answered and let’s build.

The majority of Cameroonians are entrepreneurs at heart; they love to set up businesses of their own, no matter how small. Apprenticeship leading towards sole proprietorship is the main aspiration for even the uneducated kid on the street. 9-5 employees are also looking to save up enough to get into real estate investments or a strong “buyam sellam” position. It’s this spirit that we tap into at ActivSpaces, and it’s this spirit that we are celebrating this week, Global Entrepreneurship Week.

Unleashing Ideas
This week, in our effort to help unleash ideas, let them run into projects and turn those into businesses, we are going to be hosting the Business Plan Writing Workshop for actors in the startup community. Global Entrepreneurship Week is about inspiring, connecting and equipping entrepreneurs while showcasing the support that is available to them all year round.

The Workshop
It was in May of this year that Ben White of VC4Africa visited ActivSpaces and delivered the Business Model Workshop where we learned to create a business model from our ideas and visualize these on a canvas. The Business Plan Writing Workshop can be considered as a sequel to that exercise, where we’ll be documenting detailed steps of each procedure in executing your venture.

An Analogy
A nice analogy for a business plan is that it’s like a car. Once you’ve got the engineering right, all you need to do is pour fuel into it and it’s ready to run. The fuel in this scenario is the money. This workshop is about getting the specifics and the structuring of your business idea right, preempting questions that will arise later if you don’t, and fully gearing yourself for dealings with stakeholders at all levels.

The Schedule
The Business Plan Writing Workshop starts on Friday, November 18th at 2:00pm and ends at 5:00pm. The session will be hosted by ActivSpaces in our HQ at Fakoship Plaza, Buea. We’ll be coming together, inspiring each other, connecting, and showcasing that we all have something we can utilize to support each other.

Join ActivSpaces
As Cameroon’s leading innovation hub, this workshop serves as the first part of a three-phase business development program commencing at ActivSpaces. If you are an entrepreneur or simply just aspiring with a project in the works, use the workshop as a launchpad or feel free to drop by our office anytime this week to get information on membership.