Africa’s got software talent… but for how much longer? What do African techies make of Silicon Valley? What might Silicon Valley make of them?
Steve Mutinda: Kenyan App developer. Photo Credit: WhiteAfrican
No Prada suits, hoodies or flip flops. No algorithms stolen off dorm room windows. None of that Social Network, San Francisco stuff. Steve Mutinda’s award-winning mobile health app may be designed for the global market, may end up slaying them in Silicon Valley, but, built in Africa by Africans for Africans, MedKenya comes out of a clear African sensibility — that’s its unique selling point.
"We want to showcase the potential of Africa in creating solutions that make a difference," explains the 29-year-old software developer from Nairobi. "We want the world to see that, yes, it is possible for Africa to be a net producer of solutions rather than a net consumer."
A one-stop shop for healthcare advice, the app squeezes out revenue from the realities around Mutinda: the technology available to him; Kenya’s most urgent healthcare issues; and, crucially, what’s considered affordable by ordinary Kenyans.
Subscribers to MedKenya pay to receive health alerts. Doctors pay to be included in its directory; the more alerts they write, the better placed their entry.
So Facebook hired a PR firm to plant negative stories about Google. What you gonna do about it? Get over it, already… although it isn’t right, obviously… MG Siegler on the latest Facebook “slimeball stunt”:
Like it or not, Facebook is too integrated into the fabric of the web now for everyone to just walk away. As has been proven time and time again, people will get really angry with them for some misstep, and then totally forget about it a week later.
Time was when African software developers didn’t register on Silicon Valley’s radar. No undersea fibre optic cables meant that there wasn’t much of a digital infrastructure in most of sub-Saharan Africa and so accessing and developing its software market was tough work.
These days, with access getting easier, the African blip on the Silicon Valley screen is starting to ping somewhat louder: the world’s biggest technology companies can’t get enough of the right kind of African ideas.
Seeking solutions to African needs, the kind not generally grokked by Silicon Valley VCs, companies like Google and Nokia are working hard to encourage African developers.
They go into schools and universities. They set up apps markets. They help with marketing. They sponsor conferences. But the most obvious way, the one which gets the most attention, is via the kerching and bling of the apps challenge.
African countries are trying to “cheat history,” as one senior UN official I met put it. Barely literate people in the poorest villages, places where there are no schools and the life expectancy is under 50 due to lack of health infrastructure, use mobile phones to listen to the radio, send money, buy and sell stuff, and even to study. When we flash polled a roomful of eighty nursing students in rural Sierra Leone, everyone’s hand went up when we asked who owned a phone and had heard of social networking. Their lives are a mashup: Facebook Zero meets the Middle Ages.
- Leila Chirayath Janah
The Women’s Technology Delegation, set up by the US State Department, travels through Liberia and Sierra Leone.
Apple has made it possible for almost anybody – a jealous spouse, a private detective – with access to your phone or computer to get detailed information about where you’ve been.
Pete Warden
Apple’s iPhone contains a secret file which keeps track of everywhere you go, say researchers.
