A few months ago I formalized this nature of the company as the Appfrica Fellows program. The mission of Appfrica’s Fellows program is to breed an atmosphere of cultural diversity and knowledge sharing. Fellows spend their time in Uganda working along side the staff, earning the equivalent local wage for that job, regardless of their individual skills. It’s a great way to see the world and the challenges others face from a completely different vantage point.

Joushua Goldstein was our inaugural Fellow. Previously an intern at Google, Josh worked on business development for Status.ug, one of our incubated startups. Richard Jeong was the second Fellow working as a graphic designer. David Ellis is currently working with us in various areas of business development. Yesterday we welcomed our fourth, Oliver Haas from the Franklin W. Olin School of Engineering. Oliver will be working with us for six weeks, partially as the lead developer and designer of our HIGH Award winning project ResultsSMS.

We’re always interested in knowledge sharing and building capacity through cultural exchange. To find out more about Appfrica Fellows and how you can apply click here.

Current and Past Fellows

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

At a little more than double the price of the One Laptop Per Child’s XO-1 and equal in price to nearly every decent netbook on the market, the Apple Tablet has been announced and it’s entry level price is only $499. It’s certainly cheaper than most full fledged laptops making it a not-so-luxury choice for Mac fans across Africa.

Principal Analyst Julien Blin of JBB Research feels differently:

While Apple is set to experience strong success in developed markets such as North America, Western Europe, and Japan, it is likely to have almost zero impact on emerging markets like South America, Africa, and even parts of Asia like China. Content issues, IP (intellectual property) issues, lack of 3G/WiFi support, and pricing issues due to the large proportion of low income customers, are set to remain key hurdles for Apple in this region to drive the adoption of its new flagship product.

I disagree, actually. The Apple iPad at $499 is already at the same price point of many netbooks sold here in Uganda. (I’ve seen $200 ASUS EEPC’s sold at the equivalent of six hundred dollars here!) So even if a base price of $500 is marked up to $800 in a country like this, it’s still $200 dollars less than the last Acer or Dell laptop I purchased here. Those computers were both crap, defective after the first few months of use. And much like Apple, most Dell parts are simply hard to get in Africa.

So the cost is pair with what the African middle class is consuming in terms of laptops these days. And it’s portable which mobile natives will appreciate. As the price of bandwidth falls, African consumers are becoming more and more ‘connected’ and eager to consume digital content. It’s a mistake to assume that because a Ugandan or Malawian teen can’t access the iTunes store that they won’t want an iphone, or will be bored due to lack of content. Any geek will tell you the fact that the device has a wifi connection is more than enough to load it it with the content of your choosing.

Plus, in a year or two, Apple will release a new iPad (they always do) and the prices of old models will be undercut slightly (a pattern they’ve maintained for three years now with iPods and iPhones). Prices won’t necessarily fall in countries like Uganda as a result, but it will mean more product is available on the aftermarket for resellers, and if the demand is there, these products will find homes easily.

Apple Well Poised to Enter the BOP

The only real hinderance is the bottleneck of distribution. There are only a few authorized Apple retailers and repair stores on the continent, but most of their stock comes from distributors in the UK (As far as I can tell). This makes markup prices rather ridiculous in some cases. That’s a serious hurdle, but one that could be overcome if Apple decides to offer a more reasonable method of distribution to Africa. For South American and continental Asia, there are closer first-teir suppliers (in North America, Korea and Japan respectively).

As far as features, the fact that Apple has embraced a natively unlocked 3G device is huge. It means any of their partner carriers around the globe can be offered the device in their market as a premium item. This might take a year or two but it happened with the iPhone so I’d expect the iPad to follow.

I don’t know about elsewhere in Africa, but in Uganda people love the ‘exclusive’ brands. It’s a status symbol among a burgeoning group of young professionals like everywhere else in the world. Brand recognition of Apple amongst computer users in Africa is high. Yes, it’s a luxury item, but a good sign of a growing middle class is the growing consumption of luxury items.

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

The internet has a complex. Sometimes we want things to exist so bad that we, the public, simply hang on to any shred of potential evidence that points to their existence. The tech community calls these beasts ‘unicorns‘, items that would be magnificent if they did exist but theres simply not enough proof. Case in point, for the last FOUR years I’ve been reading rumors about an Apple Tablet. Enough time for a high school senior to, read the rumor, go to college, graduate, get a job at Apple, find out it doesn’t exist only to find himself working on the development team that makes it a reality.

Remember that other ugly fantasy? The Google Phone? Well, it turns out that was actually true. Okay, Google didn’t actually hire a hardware team to manufacture a phone, but they did assist in design specifications of more than just the software drivers, they helped design the device itself. I do believe that’s as close to a gPhone we’re gonna get for now. That was a unicorn for about a year or two or so but it manifested first as a specter (initial speculation lead to the release of Android), then as something tangible (the Nexus One). Sometimes the fantasy is real. Is there a Zune Phone on it’s way as well? It would make sense, Microsoft has been getting destroyed in mobile since the iPhone, Palm Pre and Androids all came about. And many people (myself included) have wondered what the hell Microsoft was thinking by not giving the Zune phone capabilities from day one. iStartedSomething writes:

Coinciding with the scheduled Zune.net maintenance today, a new Zune software update was also released (version 4.2.202.0 for those playing along at home). What might appear as just a regular software update is actually hiding a very big secret. The elusive “Zune Phone” is pretty much confirmed.

By looking closely at the code of the recent Zune software update, a developer spots evidence that the Zune phone cometh. Another unicorn apparently dancing around on the grave of it’s ghostly rumor.

So what about the iSlab/iSlate/iPad/iFlat/iSlablet/Apple Tablet? Four years is a long time for grown men, professionals, CEOs and fanboys alike to simply ‘wish upon a star‘. In a few hours we’ll find out for sure….for now. Of course we could always just ask the Unicorns.

Update: As the world now knows, the Apple Tablet (the iPad) is very real and very affordable. That’s two tech Unicorns that have manifested. Microsoft, your turn.

Unicorn image from Flickr used under the CC.

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

Or “Separate but Equal hits the Open Source Community”.

I wrote a blog post a while back about location based profiling on the web. Many websites do it, particularly television and movie sites and financially sensitive websites. The reasoning I can often gather from looking at the terms of service and other language is that these sites are simply trying to ‘protect’ their users who happen to usually be primarily North American or European. They can’t rely on foreign authorities to police the hackers, phishers, and scammers coming from those countries, and since it’s not cost effective to do anything else, they blindly classify anyone who happens to born in the wrong place as not being able to use the their services AT ALL.

But today, I think I died a little inside. As a champion of open source as a way for people to stop depending on aid, and to improve their own education and resources to empower themselves as digital citizens, I was more than surprised to read that SourceForge (one of the leading hubs of open source activity) has begun denying access to ANY IP addresses identified as originating from the countries of Sudan, Syria, Iran, North Korea, and Cuba. If you don’t immediately get the ramifications of this just type the query “open source” into Google and what’s the first site that comes up? SourceForge.

SourceForge is quick to explain they do not support this decision but they were essentially forced to as a company based out of the United States:

Since 2003, the SourceForge.net Terms and Conditions of Use have prohibited certain persons from receiving services pursuant to U.S. laws, including, without limitations, the Denied Persons List and the Entity List, and other lists issued by the U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Industry and Security. The specific list of sanctions that affect our users concern the transfer and export of certain technology to foreign persons and governments on the sanctions list. This means users residing in countries on the United States Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanction list, including Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria, may not post content to, or access content available through, SourceForge.net. Last week, SourceForge.net began automatic blocking of certain IP addresses to enforce those conditions of use.

Still, this is a truly disheartening blow to the open source community as a whole. It attempts to say that we are not truly ‘one’ software community, and that we as human beings are nothing more than the sum of the parts of the people who claim to represent us. Furthermore, this action seems to imply that any software hosted on U.S. soil is therefore on U.S ‘property’ and thus subject to U.S. jurisdiction. That stands against the very idea of the internet and the world wide web. Hell, it’s hypocritical of everything the current U.S. administration has said about internet freedom and digital rights and about providing access to information to all. Furthermore, how will this affect all the social and aid organizations attempting to combat illiteracy, poor education, and the ideals of terrorism from the ground in these countries? How can we ever expect change by limiting people’s options instead of expanding them?

I realize that there are national security measures that must be taken against the people in certain countries who wish to do other countries harm. But is the neighbor of a terrorist simply guilty by association? I truly hope that’s not the global digital future we’re headed for.

More on this…

• http://sourceforge.net/blog/clarifying-sourceforgenets-denial-of-site-access-for-certain-persons-in-accordance-with-us-law/
• http://blogs.zdnet.com/open-source/?p=5698
• http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/26/sourceforge_ip_address_filtering/
• http://www.techeye.net/software/1683

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

Around two years ago I had the pleasure of meeting some of Silicon Valley’s brightest developers for a conversation on microformat open standards. Among this group was Tantek Çelik, a member of microformats.org and one of the early contributors to the open standard for hcards and vcards. At the time, I was interested in micro-formats as part of the next evolution of web applications, it was only recently that I began to see the need for micro-formats that could be applied to more urgent real-world scenarios. While developing Haiti Tracker at Ushahidi, I discovered two new sets of open micro-format standards aimed at augmenting the flow of emergency information in ways that can save lives.

What is a Microformat?

Microformats are described on microformats.org as being a way of thinking about data and design principles for formats. They go on to say that micro-formats are “a set of simple open data format standards that many are actively developing and implementing for more/better structured blogging and web microcontent publishing in general.” For the non devs out there, what all that translates to is a way of marking up machine readable content in ways that are both relevant to the machine and the human reader.

In html writing a person’s name and phone is done like so:

<p>Johnny Walker - Home +1.555.555.5555<p>

To humans, that makes perfect sense; to the machine it’s just a string of alphanumeric digits.

Using micro-formats, one might instead write:

<span class="vcard"><span class="fn">Johnny</span> <span class="ln">Walker</span> - <span class="tel"><span class="type">Home</span> +1.415.555.1212</span>

Now a software application knows to interpret a first name as a first name, a lastname as a lastname and our contacts number as his home number.

Microformatting Emergency Information

An area that’s relatively new to me, is the role microformats play in marking up information relevant to crisis events. Three emerging standards here are PFIF (People Finder Interchange Format), GeoRSS and GML (Geography Markup Language) and EDXL (Emergency Data Exchange Language). These are three XML format standards for passing along context in addition to the data itself. I’ll go into detail on PFIF because it’s of particular interest to the recent situation in Haiti.

PFIF (People Finder Interchange Format)

An example of a form that collects information to the PFIF format (click the image for a closer look).

And an example of the XML generated:

The various bits of information recorded are marked-up with machine readable tags that convey the same context that humans understand by reading the form. This allows various software applications to talk to each other without confusion. A number of organizations are using microformats for increasingly sophisticated emergency response applications like InSTEDD’s EIS and GeoChat. Something Ushahidi is also tackling with SULSa.

One of the cool things PFIF provides is a way to offer cyclical data-flow. One app might allow users to report people as missing, another might allow web users to report missing people as found, with such a standard the two applications can easily pass information back and forth to each other. This was the case with Haiti Crisis People Finder (now curated by Google). This allows organizations to not just report incidents of emergency, but to also ‘close the loop’. In this case, to designate a missing person as found. (ex. Woman reports her child missing to Ushahidi. Another reports an ‘orphaned’ child wandering the streets. The family is reconnected, the application can accurately downgrade the initial report as ‘closed’.) The critical factor here is not just allowing users to know, but to allow software to ‘know’ as well by offering them mark-up they can interpret.

EDXL (Emergency Data Exchange Language)

The EDXL is an XML based messaging standard that facilitates information sharing between government entities and emergency related organizations. For more check here.

GeoRSS GML and Simple (Geography Markup Language)

GML is an XML format for “the modelling, transport, and storage of geographic information.” It allows applications to share information about the locations of their users. For more on GeoRSS check this page.

These open standards are all a part of the effort to increase efficiency and interoperability between different groups and software applications, something invaluable to increasing the response times of emergency organizations to the victims of disasters.

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

Haiti Tracker is a platform that helps curate reports from Twitter that are then forwarded on to Ushahidi, which has been overwhelmed by their uncurated feed of news. Ushahidi manages reports of incident during a crisis and with haiti.ushahidi.com, the organization is helping to match displaced families, pass on messages to separated loved ones and provide logistical information to people helping on the ground. Haiti Tracker has been put together in the past few days, thanks to a number of volunteer contributions here in Uganda, Kenya, the United States and all around the world.

A number of similar, incredible efforts have been created including Haiti Stream (which arose out of CrisisCamp a few days ago) and InSTEDD’s EIS, all of which could also use additional volunteer support. Their contact details appear below.

Ushahidi/Swift/HaitiTracker – jon@ushahidi.com

InSTEDD/RIFF – nditada@instedd.org

Crisis Camp/Haiti Stream – crisiscommons@gmail.com

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

That said, my new job at Ushahidi saw me go from zero to sixty as soon as I was back on the ground here in Kampala. The nation of Haiti suffered a catastrophic earthquake, killing over 72,000 and displacing hundreds of thousands. If you aren’t aware of Ushahidi, the company makes it’s mission to curate and crowd source reports of incident during crisis events. My job at Ushahidi as the Director of Swift River, is to help to deal with the overwhelming flood of information, commentary and rumor that often follows a tragedy such as this one. Needless to say for the past week it’s all I’ve been willing to make time for. The result was Haiti Tracker, a tool that helps Ushahidi manage the flood of invaluable information coming from Twitter users.

For more on what we’ve been up to at Ushahidi, please visit – http://blog.ushahidi.com/

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

James Cameron’s latest epic AVATAR arguably represents the greatest shift in filmmaking since 1999’s THE MATRIX. While it won’t break any grounds on story or character development (it’s been compared to Disney’s POCAHONTAS and FERNGULLY: The Last Rainforest), visually it truly represents a leap forward that’s pushed the film genre to the limits of technical possibility. Not since the early-80’s have grown men and women been so excited about a 3D movie (Jaws 3D anyone?). The comparisons to Pochahontas are inevitable: stranger from a faraway land comes with company to abolish the natives and profit from minerals, only to change his mind when he falls in love with one and instead fights to save them.

However, from a purely literary perspective, the movie falls squarely in the ‘Lost World‘ sub-Genre of speculative fiction. And that begs comparison to the first novel to ever be classified as such and the first english fiction novel to be set in Africa, King Solomon’s Mines.

King Solomon’s Mines by Henry Rider Haggard was also a contemporary breakthrough when it was published and went on to become critically acclaimed but only after the author struggled to find a publisher for being ‘a complete novelty’. While the story of Solomon’s Mines isn’t an exact parallel to AVATAR, it does feature similar elements and themes like the ‘native’ heroine befriending and saving the lives of our protagonists, and people from a distant land coming to pillage the ‘lost world’ for minerals and resources. Unlike many contemporary novels of the time which are now critiqued for blatant disrespect and negative portrayals of native cultures, Haggard diverged by showing duality, black Africans as heroes and heroines. His novel was also among the first to depict an interracial relationship, between the characters of Foulata and Captain Good.

King Solomon’s Mines has been adapted to film no less than five times in the 20th century and once in 2004 starring American actor Patrick Swayze. While I doubt Cameron was directly influenced by the actual novel or film, the ‘lost world genre’ itself owes a lot to this book, it’s characters and ideology. Other novels that are associated with the lost world genre include Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King, Michael Crichton’s Congo and Conan Doyle’s The Lost World.

Jame’s Cameron’s AVATAR was released on December 16th, 2009 in the United States and opens Internationally this weekend.

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

We’ve received multiple tips right around 10 pm that Twitter was hacked and defaced with the message below. The site is currently offline. We’re looking into this and waiting on a response from Twitter.

The message reads:

Iranian Cyber Army

THIS SITE HAS BEEN HACKED BY IRANIAN CYBER ARMY

iRANiAN.CYBER.ARMY@GMAIL.COM

U.S.A. Think They Controlling And Managing Internet By Their Access, But THey Don’t, We Control And Manage Internet By Our Power, So Do Not Try To Stimulation Iranian Peoples To….

NOW WHICH COUNTRY IN EMBARGO LIST? IRAN? USA?

WE PUSH THEM IN EMBARGO LIST

Take Care.

Update December 19: If the attack on Twitter had been an attack on AT&T or the U.S. power grid, it would have probably been considered an act of terrorism: It was an attack, by a politically motivated group, claiming to have political ties making a political statement by deliberately assaulting a communications platform in an act of defiance against another nation. Again, TechCrunch writes:

There is a history between Iran and Twitter. It was well noted and covered in the media that Twitter was used as a tool during the Iranian election protests. The US government actually intervened to assure that Twitter was available to the protestors in Tehran and around the country. This attack may be an act of reprisal from groups who were not happy with the role that Twitter played during the protests.

The famous Estonia Hack Attack of 2007 crippled an entire countries banking system, sending the economy reeling for nearly an entire month. In that case it was very much an effective, politically motivated attack by Russian hackers looking to do as much damage as possible to a perceived enemy. We’ve entered a new age of terrorism (cyber terrorism or terrorism 2.0) was Twitter just a victim?

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

You know you’re successful when you start climbing the corporate ladder in reverse. Mark Shuttleworth, the South African, space faring, billionaire CEO of Canonical (the enterprise side of Ubuntu) has announced he’s stepping down as CEO to focus on product design and innovation. From his blog…

From March next year, I’ll focus my Canonical energy on product design, partnerships and customers. Those are the areas that I enjoy most and also the areas where I can best shape the impact we have on open source and the technology market. I’m able to do this because Jane Silber, who has been COO at Canonical virtually from the beginning, will take on the job of CEO.

I’ve become very passionate about design and quality, and want to spend more time figuring out how we harness the collaborative process to build better, more insightful products. I can’t think of a more interesting challenge, and luckily I couldn’t think of a better person to take over my formal management and leadership responsibilities at Canonical than Jane. We’ve worked together long enough, and closely enough, that I can be confident of continuity in the pieces I most care about and also excited about the ways in which I think Jane will raise the bar for the senior team. As a former VP at General Dynamics, Jane has more experience of large customers and large organisational leadership, which I see as essential for Canonical over the next five years. We are being welcomed as a partner and supplier to ever-larger businesses, and I want to make sure we are a robust answer to their needs.

Neither Ubuntu or Canonical are changing directions, but rather focusing on their corporate strategies, developing new products and improving the Ubuntu OS.

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