Hive Colab is the newest co-working space on the East Africa scene. But what is it and where did it come from? To explain I should start from the beginning. Over the past two years I’ve been fortunate to see Appfrica grow and change as a company. We started as an incubator, and gradually shifted to more of a profitable, and very busy software development consultancy (which is how we continue to funded ourselves).

A Retrospective

Appfrica started in the little kitchen of my house in Kitintale.

Later, we moved across the street to my landlord’s guest house. A little cramped, but a fun space none-the-less.

We soon moved up again, to a double suite at a local office complex.

We’ve been in this new space almost exactly a year now. In that time, I reckon I’ve spent about four months actually in the physical office. Partly due to my heavy travel schedule; partly because when I’m in the space I get roped into all sorts of things that distract me; and partly because I often go to bed working and wake up working. With a 3G modem there’s no need to even get out of bed some days. (Although, I try to get out to at least to see the sun.)

Also, most of the Appfrica staff also have dongles, meaning they can also work from anywhere. We came to the conclusion that the office space was essentially just a luxury for us rather than the necessity it once was. (I still remember those hot summer days hacking apps on thumb drives.)

The Solution

Because Appfrica no longer needs our physical space, I’ve decided to contribute it and all it’s resources (servers, desks, laptops, phones, etc.) to the local Ugandan software development community. Along with an agreement to cover staff and maintenance costs, at least for the first year. It’s a significant investment but one we’re fortunate to be able to make. Our office has always been a open space, the big difference with Hive is that a number of community stakeholders are involved, each hopefully vested in the success of the initiative.

So together with a colleagues and local stakeholders like Project Diaspora’s Teddy Ruge, UConnect’s Daniel Stern and others, we accouned Hive Colab a month ago at Africa Gathering.

The Vision for Hive

As you can see on the map above, this first space (represented with the blue pin) is located on the outskirts of town, just across the street from Makerere Business School. Rather than have one big centrally located space, we hope to replicate what we’ve got here on the other side of town so that the two Hives become more accessible to people who don’t have the money or time to travel across town. Two or more spaces, distributed across Kampala will simply reach more people. The red pin illustrates where we hope to locate the second one, where Google Uganda is located now, and near Makerere University proper.

So our vision is to have three parallel spaces in operation within three years, rather than one big one.

How Does Appfrica Fit In?

I mentioned above that Appfrica made the initial investment to ensure the Hive has a great first year by covering most of the startup costs. We consider it an investment, although there’s no fiscal return expected or ownership on our part. It’s a position grateful to be in, and we’ll continue investing in local talent and great social initiatives like this one. As a for-profit business, Appfrica will continue providing it’s clients software development and design solutions, and we will continue to invest in local talent through initiatives like Apps4Africa, Hive and AfriLabs.

Double Down

Over the past two years there’s been a lot of talk about Uganda and the potential of it’s private sector, but little action on the part of investors or organizations offering grants. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, rather I see it as an opportunity for Ugandans and Ugandan diaspora to double-down, both figuratively and literally on the countries nascent sectors and talent. If we truly believe in the opportunity that exists here, then we shouldn’t wait for other people to invest. It should be about being the example that encourages them.

For more information, please email us at honey@hivecolab.org

© 2008 - 2009 Appfrica International. Looking for more African tech? Try our podcast Appfricast which you can also find on iTunes.

I found this interesting because it’s not everyday you have someone as high ranking as a Deputy Coordinator fielding ad-hoc questions from youth and entrepreneurs in East Africa. The hour long conversation took place at here and you can view the full transcript and video by clicking the link or the image below…

The other thing that I found admirable about this whole thing the way in which the State Department used social media to not only speak to Africans, but to listen and actually have a conversation with anyone who was in the room at the time. Some quick highlights and personal observations from the conversation:

One person in the room going by the name Tolo asked, “If you hold the competition and someone wins with a great new application who will hold a right to future profit?”

Elana and Bruce pointed out that most of the apps entered will be open source, but not all. This means developers of proprietary solutions can enter, keep their code private and would thus retain all the rights to their application. Winning the prize does not require the app to be open source although we encourage it.

Teddy Ruge (TMS Ruge) of ProjectDiaspora.org asked “With all the great innovation going on now in East Africa, what do you see as the bottlenecks to greater innovation and growth, especially in East Africa?”

The response from Bruce, “Secretary Clinton has often mentioned the barriers (tariff and non-tariff trade barriers) that exist between the countries of East Africa. Lowering those barriers is one thing that will help support innovation.”

I was also in the room and asked the following question, “Is this a shift in the US thoughts towards policy with Africa?”

Bruce answered, “There is a general recognition that the aid and development programs we’ve pursued in the last few decades have had mixed results. So we are all looking for ways to improve the model. President Obama has laid out a model of ‘let’s be partners and not patrons’.”

Visit Apps4Africa.com for more or to find out your next opportunity to participate.

© 2008 - 2009 Appfrica International. Looking for more African tech? Try our podcast Appfricast which you can also find on iTunes.

Google is hosting two events in September to teach the use of Google technologies and products in Africa…

Google is dedicated to making the Internet relevant and useful to Africans, and to developing meaningful products for Africa. We realize fully, we can not do this alone. We believe that tech entrepreneurs and developers have the opportunity to transform the web for the world and Africa.

With this in mind, Google is hosting developer and tech days across Africa with two exciting events, G-Uganda and G-Kenya, taking place early this September. These web and mobile themed conferences will focus on Google’s developer and business technologies from Chrome Extensions, App Engine, to mobile and AdWords. Attendees will have the chance to explore Google’s open source technologies through a combination of tech talks, breakout sessions and codelabs run by engineers and business teams from across the globe.

G-Uganda will be held on September 1st – 2nd at Speke Conference Centre just outside of Kampala. Closely on its heels, G-Kenya is running September 6th – 8th at Strathmore University in Nairobi.

Each day of the conference will cater to a different audience, spanning professional developers, students and tech marketers. Take a look at our sites (G-Uganda & G-Kenya) to learn more about a G-day that might fit your appetite. You must pre-register as space is limited. We look forward to meeting you!

© 2008 - 2009 Appfrica International. Looking for more African tech? Try our podcast Appfricast which you can also find on iTunes.

Image via O’Reilly

Facebook announced this morning that they now reach 500 million active users (just five and half years after launching). But where do these half a billion users reside? Refreshing my post from February, the share of users from Asia continues to rise and now stands at 17% of all Facebook users1.

Africa is the other fast-growth region and I’m expecting the region’s share of active Facebook users to rise sharply over the next year. In terms of market potential, the number of active users in Asia is 2.3% of the population (1% in Africa) so the company still has lots of growth potential in the region:

The chart below shows active users by region.

So what are some of the countries where Facebook is growing the fastest? Angola, South Korea and Haiti.

© 2008 - 2009 Appfrica International. Looking for more African tech? Try our podcast Appfricast which you can also find on iTunes.

TED Global 2010 wrapped up last week in Oxford, UK. As a TED Senior Fellow, I’m lucky in that I’ve now attended three TED events and I’ll also go to the next three. To be totally honest I’m hooked, so even after my Fellowship is over I’ll continue to fork over the $6,000 per ticket (not including travel) to keep attending if I can afford it.

I know what you might be thinking. What is TED? Why is it so expensive? How can any conference be worth that much?

TED started some twenty years ago as a gathering of successful intellectuals and scientists who gathered once a year in Monterrey, California to discuss their multidisciplinary fields. Topics ranged from the Art to neuroscience, to astrophysics, to global developmental aid to crime statistics. It was a forum where the riveters could be riveted, where traditional logic was challenged, and where ideas worth spreading were proposed.

Fast-forward to now and TED is probably the most powerful international brand no one has ever heard of. Seriously, there are two possible responses to people when I tell them about TED:

“What is that? Never heard of it.”

or

“Holy kaw! You went to TED!?!?”

There’s not really an in-between. People seem to either love TED Talks, or they just aren’t aware of them. In 2007 the little exclusive, and somewhat elitist club I mentioned above decided to open up. They began filming all the talks at their annual conference and posting them online. Today TED talks (there’s under 1000 published) have been viewed over 300 million times! It turns out there was a huge nascent audience for prerecorded talks exploring niche, ultra-intellectual and entertaining subjects like string theory and bat guano.

It’s one of the few places in the world where people like Bill Gates, Cameron Diaz, Annie Lennox and Malcolm Gladwell can all sit captivated by speakers waxing philosophic about “the communal brothels where ideas have sex” a.k.a. coffeshops.

The stigma of ‘elitism’ has stuck with TED for better or for worse. Partly because it’s nearly $10,000 (with travel expenses) a seat to do. But mainly because even if you have the money, and even if you want to spend it to go, TED can still deny you a seat. The selection requirements to attend are a bit ambiguous. But as much as they curate the speakers whom they invite to their main stage, they also curate their audience. In college my art-school friends would have referred to this as ‘maintaining a vibe’. In other words, TED’s the ultimate ‘in’ crowd. So not only do you risk your hard earned cash, but you can also get your feelings hurt!

In recent years TED has begun to explore new ways to share it’s content and brand with the world. With TEDx, anyone who’s been to a TED event can put on an event ‘inspired’ by the TED experience. With TED Global, TED has hosted evens outside of America in India, Tanzania and the United Kindom. There’s one off ideas or special events like TEDWomen, TEDYouth and TEDxChange.

The TED Fellows and Senior Fellows program is how I got involved with TED. Basically, the idea was to gather young social entrepreneurs, artists and activist from all over the globe, curated by how interesting TED finds their work and invite them to the conference. There’s no real age limit (the youngest Fellow was 17 while the oldest is in his or her forties) or obvious preference. The TED Fellows come from all over the globe, Venezuela, Nigeria, USA, UK, India, Pakistan, Uganda, Kenya, and many more places.

But perhaps the boldest move TED has made since releasing all of it’s talks online for free in 2007 came in 2010 when TED announced that any broadcast media company in the world could air their talks for free! To me TED is like higher-brow, adult, equally-educational version of what PBS was for me as a child. Now the talks actually can air in syndication for all to see.

So what’s the TED experience like? Find out in Part 2.

© 2008 - 2009 Appfrica International. Looking for more African tech? Try our podcast Appfricast which you can also find on iTunes.

Using the soon to be released Nokia N8, TED plans to ship phones pre-loaded with TED talks (curated by TEDx organizers in those countries) to many parts of the world. These phones will be free to TEDx organizers in different countries and will feature 16gb of storage, a powerful projector for slides or playing back videos, an HDMI video camera, bluetooth, wifi and GPS. They will also ship with apps for audio and video editing.

Here are some of my notes from a discussion lunch that took place around the announcement:

– One of the Nokia reps pointed out that “Phone numbers used to represent locations not necessarily people.” This has changed a bit in that the reverse is often the case now, especially in developing countries.

– He also said that the “Kodak moment of the 21 century is the sharing of the moment.” Suggesting that it’s no longer enough to just capture the moment, people now want to share via social media with family and friends.

– Soon there will be 1 billion mobile users, 80% with gps enabled phones.

– Location based recommendation services are the new concierge maps.

– The goal is to get the ‘long tail’ of the world producing their own TED events and talks.

© 2008 - 2009 Appfrica International. Looking for more African tech? Try our podcast Appfricast which you can also find on iTunes.

Earlier in the day we announced Apps < 4> Africa, a competition for app developers across Africa. Also, today in Uganda, Appfrica Labs in partnership with Project Diaspora, UConnect, and Node Six are also announcing the Hive collaborative workspace in Uganda!

Hive Colab is a collaborative, community owned, open work environment for young tech entrepreneurs looking to focus on projects, to access the computing resources and bandwidth, have a quiet professional environment to develop their ideas in, and to generally collaborate with each other. Something very similar to what our friends are doing with the outstanding iHub in Nairobi.

It will be a space for nascent application developers to register as freelancers, if they are looking for paying projects that people need to be done around the world; a list of projects and clients available through the pan-African consortium of incubators, AfriLabs. Participant projects will remain wholly owned by their creators, although there there will be access to a network of investors looking to cherry pick some of the more promising ideas for investment, also through AfriLabs. AfriLabs is a loose consortium consisting of the iHub & iLab in Kenya, Appfrica Labs here in Uganda, and Limbe Labs in Cameroon.

The only requirement to membership to the Hive, is that applicants actually be working on projects, and thereafter they must be able to show progress on their ideas to retain membership. This is to keep energy high and to favour people who remain productive. There will be other types of memberships available to be announced soon. For companies or individuals who occasionally need space to host events and trainings relevant to our mission, we are happy to offer the Hive as an open venue. All applications to use the space will be approved by the board.

Our vision is to establish the first Hive at the present location, and eventually expand by opening other Hives in different parts of Kampala to make them convenient locations for many.

It is important that the Hive operate independent of any contributing stakeholders, so that it is not any one person’s or group’s property. Thus, all decisions are made by a community board which currently consists of Teddy Ruge (Project Diaspora), Daniel Stern (UConnect), Solomon King (NodeSix) and Jon Gosier (Appfrica Labs) and more (to be announced soon).

More details tomorrow at Africa Gathering UK and at http://hivecolab.com. Follow us on Facebook or @hivecolab on Twitter.

© 2008 - 2009 Appfrica International. Looking for more African tech? Try our podcast Appfricast which you can also find on iTunes.

Over the past few weeks myself, Solomon King of NodeSix.com, Joshua Goldstein an Appfrica Fellow, Jessica Colaco at the iHub in Nairobi, Philip Thigo and John Kipchumbah at SODNET (Social Development Network Kenya), and a number of very dedicated individuals from the United States Department of State have been working behind the scenes to put together a contest for African software developers called Apps < 4 > Africa.

The contest is a collective effort to support some of the many young minds out there working on ideas that would improve quality of life in African countries in ways that can be accomplished through software. In many other countries around the globe, these innovations have come from the bottom as constituents become more engaged with their own communities and representation. African countries are on a trajectory that’s no different.

Thus, it makes a lot of sense that civic minded individuals across the continent may also be turning to technology as a way to get involved. And like entrepreneurs of all types, hopefully it’s encouraging for them to know they’ve got support for their ideas and that their work will be rewarded. This contest won’t be a silver bullet to any of Africa’s struggles, and none of the apps that come out of this contest will be either, but this competition, the prizes, judges and mentors supporting hopefully represent the type of community that can help a handful of these ideas and apps mature over time.

Here is a description:

From July 1st to August 31st, we welcome citizens to submit ideas that technology can help solve, and challenge technologists to build tools that lead to a better world. The top applications will receive cash, cool gadgets, and the chance to hob-nob with our judges panel of technology and civil society luminaries. On Thursday, we are particularly pleased to have Under-Secretary of State Judith McHale join a group of civil society leaders and civic-minded technologist to launch the contest at the *iHub_ in Nairobi.

This is only the beginning. Over the duration of the contest, we will host events around the region that address a variety of technology platforms and activist themes. We’ll also be encouraging collaboration between mentors from around the world and coders in the region. Whether you are a citizen, civil society leader or technologist of any kind, we hope you will join us in the Apps 4 Africa challenge!

THE JUDGES

Anil Dash (Expert Labs), Nathan Eagle (Txteagle), Thomas Gibian (Investor, ECP), Joe Mucheru (Google), Emeka Orafor (TED), Ory Okolloh (Ushahidi), Tim O’Rielly (O’Reilly), and Rakesh Ranjani (HakiElimu).

PRIZES AND DETAILS

The prizes haven’t been announced yet, but I assure you the bounty will be sweet! Several thousand dollars in cash or gadgets for multiple winners. All entrants will use our repository at http://code.apps4africa.org to submit their ideas where they will remain as open source projects that others can either build upon or learn from. The other details like duration of the contest and rules can be found at http://apps4africa.org.

© 2008 - 2009 Appfrica International. Looking for more African tech? Try our podcast Appfricast which you can also find on iTunes.

Geologists working in Ethiopia have found that a 60-meter-long canyon is steadily expanding and will allow a new ocean to form — one which will bisect the African continent.

The shifting of molten rock beneath the Earth’s surface initially caused the rift in the remote Afar region of Ethiopia and, as those underground eruptions are continuing, the rift will continue to widen — and, in about 10 million years, create a vastly different Africa.

“Eventually this will drift apart…. The sea will flood in and will start to create this new ocean. It will pull apart, sink down deeper and deeper and eventually… parts of southern Ethiopia, Somalia will drift off, create a new island, and we’ll have a smaller Africa and a very big island that floats out into the Indian Ocean,” says seismologist James Hammond.

In other news, also, in 10 million years we might see a handful of the Millennium Development Goals finally realized. (I kid!)

via io9

© 2008 - 2009 Appfrica International. Looking for more African tech? Try our podcast Appfricast which you can also find on iTunes.