This is a pretty interesting talk held at DEMO ‘08 conference with Erik of White African / AfriGadget, Juliana Rotich of Afromusing / Global Voices and Mike Stopforth of Afrigator. The talks give a basic overview on mobile technology and african web-technology and innovation. Mike also shortly presents some (mostly South-African) Web2.0-Websites. Watch the video here. (just could’t get brightcove-embed running with a plugin – any hints?)
I just stumbled upon a great article and video report “From Matatu to the Masai via mobile” by Paul Mason on BBC. It shows what huge on impact cell phones have in africa. It is fascinating how such simple apps as M-Pesa will (probably) revolutionize money transfers. (Check out this article on M-Pesa)
In five years the number of mobiles in Kenya has grown from one million to 6.5 million – while the number of landlines remains at about 300,000, mostly in government offices.
Just today I chatted with my family in Mbagathi via Skype trying to set up an email account. They are using a GPRS connection which seems to be a real improvement compared to the mostly broken land line before. Yet the GPRS network does not seem to work with Gmail’s SSL connections. At least we weren’t able to set up Outlook pop3-access to Gmail.
