Cash Envoy performs payment processing for online vendors, auction sites, and other commercial users, for which it charges a fee. It also charges a transaction fee for receiving money (a percentage of the amount sent plus an additional fixed amount)...it can be used to make payments, send money and receive money online. It can be used on all merchant websites that accept Cash Envoy. Get cash to friends and family - practically anyone with an email address-websitevia...
The emergence of collaborative spaces continues across the continent. The latest addition is Hive Colab of Uganda. Appfrica reports: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. Related articles by ZemantaSwiftRiver 101 at the iHub...
ICTworks profiles Akirachix "a group for ladies with interest in Information...
Red-i reports:The Pinnacle Point Group has selected SiMS as the property sales management platform for Lagos Keys, their high-profile leisure and residential development in Nigeria’s commercial hub. As one of Africa’s fastest growing economies the demand for exclusive residential property is soaring. The Lagos Keys development is set on a tropical peninsula with six kilometres of water frontage and will include a private marina with moorings for 100 vessels.Related articles by ZemantaLiterary Clusters-Lagos,Nigeria (africaunchained.blogspot.com)Lagos Disco Inferno! (africaunchained.blogspot.com)Applauding the Shadow City Dwellers of 'Welcome to Lagos'...
In a piece relevant to the startup scene within Africa, Sarah Lacy of TechCrunch writes about the opportunity of Indonesia :I think what Indonesia (replace with Africa) could use is something in between the current state of no high-growth capital and the money that goes to countries like India and China: A Y-Combinator-style incubator that could help Indonesian entrepreneurs make sense of the pitfalls of modern startup life, including things like recruiting and managing talent, how to deal with Silicon Valley giants, how to make money online and when and when not to raise outside funding. The funding amounts and exits would be small, but a Yossi-Vardi-style angel could clean up where many classic VCs might crush startups under the weight of millions. Someone to coax these entrepreneurs as...
Co-Founded by O O Nwoye, Onepage is "...a digital platform for creating, sharing and storing business/contact cards...take your OnePage to be your business card online. The link you put when you have a single place to put "your website" like on Facebook, Twitter, email signature or on a business card. That way, people can contact you wherever you are (Facebook, LinkedIn, Skype, email,...
Kenyan/Nigerian geek deathmatch? Bombastic Element writes:...remember that debate back at ICT Works about 3 reasons why Kenyan developers are kicking Nigeria's ICT butt? Well, in the CNN report below, Christian Purefoy talks about a new generation of Nigerian geeks, who despite the country's power shortages have begun innovating around a population that's getting more and more comfortable and savvy with mobile technology. The clip also features Tunji Lardner founder of Wangonet and ACID More...
In ICTworks the founders of TechHub Nigeria state:We are raising money from our pockets and from partner companies to build a physical tech hub that will be able to take at least 100 geeks at a time. This will allow techies who are constantly battling with power problem, internet subscription and computers to get started, and build stuff they have dreamed of. The hub will also provide facilities that will help them build business around their tech ideas and mentoring from best tech brains Nigeria have! In five to six months time, the tech hub should be ready....
An improved method for storing maize, Togo's main cereal crop.Mechanical and electrical engineering services company Building Consultants LimitedNigerian privately owned and managed incubator-NextzonOpenSys a Dakar based open source focused IT consulting firm founded by Karim SyTrigen a healthcare skills training and consultative...
Cory Doctorow writing in Boing Boing:Bangladesh's Infoladies ride from village to village on bicycles, toting netbooks and mobile phones, and set up infobooths where they use net-gathered info to teach hygiene, help with childbirth, assist with crop problems, and so on. There's an army of them. "An InfoLady's netbook is loaded with content especially compiled and translated in local Bangla language," says Mohammed Forhad Uddin of D.Net, a not-for-profit research organisation that is pioneering access to livelihood informationMore...
Ker Thiossane (Senegal) in association with open hardware advocate Joel-Noel Montagne(fr) is creating a teaching suitcase (Valise) that would allow for the portable instruction of:...interactive sensors-channel technology; real time signal processing;the interfacing of those signals with multimedia and mechanical actuators, robotic outputs or light. The unit will allow hackers to reconstruct and simulate thousands of different interactive combinations...
In a piece on a noticeably strengthening trend in entrepreneurship.Hash profiles two notable trailblazers:Karanja Macharia who is the founder and CEO of Mobile Planet, a mobile company in Kenya that provides third party services to both the main mobile providers and other corporate clients. They’ve been around for a number of years, Google invested in them 2 years ago, and most importantly, they’re profitable.andFritz Ekwoge is the founder of iYam.mobi, he too comes from a professional background, though as a programmer and developer, not pure business. He represents a different type of entrepreneur, a younger generation that knows and cares about the web world beyond his Cameroonian borders, and tries to figure out how the two can work together....More...
Another option for Africa's hardware hackers? Following the path of open source software,its sibling OS hardware comes into its own. Adafruit Industries reports:Open source hardware $1m and beyond - foo camp east 2010 from adafruit industries on Vimeo.Related articles by ZemantaMaker Business: Adafruit Industries, how it's made - an open source hardware company in NYC...
Loy Okezie provides an overview of Nigeria's startup scene:Startups 2.0: The Nigerian StoryView more presentations from Startups...
"...iLAB Nairobi...home of the tech ideas turned global product and service platforms. At the iLAB its ll about making ideas become concepts and concept into ventures. And we crowd source help to build the struts that support the business too. Your idea remains your idea, we just help young tech entrepreneurs find everything...
Afrinnovator profiles Zimbabwe's Kubatana Trust's Freedomfone application:Freedom Fone is an information and communication tool, which marries the mobile phone with Interactive Voice Response (IVR), for citizen benefit. It provides information activists, service organisations and NGO's with widely usable telephony applications, to deliver vital information to communities who need it most...Related articles by ZemantaQuick Hits Around African Tech...
Naomi Griggs constructing with others a computer lab for F-Sham Girls Academy Monrovia with seed equipment provided by computer aid continue watching slideshow...
Developed by Kenya Mobile World Consulting "...Flemil offers more user friendly and intuitive widgets on a device independent manner while utilizing the least resources therefore leaving the user and the developer of an application with a lot of resources for use with business logic implemetation..."In an interview software engineer Solomon Kariri explains: Flemil is a Java 2 Micro Edition (J2ME) library for creation of user interfaces that are appealing to the user. Many users are familiar with applications such as E-Buddy, Trutap, Mig33, Nimbuzz and many more which have good looking user interfaces. To develop an application that is likable by a user, you need to make it appealing to the user and easy to use. Flemil achieves this while making sure that it uses minimal resources on your...
Founded by Victor Amokeodo Easyware builds "...powerful, yet easy-to-use and affordable business and consumer software targeted at Nigerian companies..."Their product lineup includes 'Payroll and HR systems' and a 'B2B Commerce and Shopping Cart'...
Image by wallyg via FlickrJon Gosier writing in Appfrica:I have had a handful of conversations with the staff from OLPC and presented the idea of locally manufacturing parts or assembling entire machines in-country, and rather than only distributing through governments at the disruptive cost of ‘free’, selling to governments at a premium and selling to small private sector companies at cost. My complaint echoing Teddy’s that there need to be local stake holders who AREN’T just governments. This model has a double bottom line, supporting local business while also offering the same immense social benefit that Nicholas Negroponte originally aimed for.I sometimes wonder whether the OLPC folks understand the importance of building local productive capacity. And the futility of relying...
Bill Zimmerman writes in 27 Months:"...The idea behind the iHub—and other new technology labs cropping up across Sub-Saharan Africa—is to put a group of exceptionally smart “doers” under one roof, provide them with a top notch work environment, generate ideas at a rapid pace, filter out the dead ends, present the best candidates to investors and produce viable businesses (and success stories) along the way. The end goal isn’t to generate wild profits for the iHub itself under an exclusive brand, but rather to grow a stronger technology community that hackers, researchers, policymakers and VCs are naturally drawn to..."Watch related iLab video about the 1 percent club here...
Idesign creates rich internet applications.A natural fibre forum for ‘under-used’ coconuts etc gains a foothold.Innoson unveils and indigenous car-All Africa White African on how Moneygram is tackling mobile...
233Tech reports The Ghana Cyber City:The $40 million Ghana Cyber City (formerly Ghana Technology Park) is designed to facilitate incubation of innovative firms, manage offshore IT and business process outsourcing ventures, and seek to create 5,000 jobs in 5 years. GCC will also provide high tech office space and a Tier IV data center. We were planning to start on a small-scale basis but it our prospective partners encouraged us to scaled it up right from the conceptual stage.More hereRelated articles by ZemantaUshahidi Ghana Meet up...
Founded by Aneto Okonkwo: MyRadeo is a microblogging service for music. It helps you share and discover songs with your friends. "It's like Twitter for songs or Pandora if your friends pick the songs for you"Speaking during a Tech Masai interview Aneto stated:I initially started using it just with my friends, and now many of their friends use it regularly which is very encouraging. Its been exciting to take a simple idea and evolve it over time based on feedback and the way people use it. In the next few months, we plan to improve our integration with Facebook, expand the mobile experience, and eventually even launch a desktop version to integrate with iTunes...[continue...
Ghtech profiles Ghana Real E-Books:...on the platform, you can basically select story books (by the way, all books are by Ghanaian / African writers) of your choice and read them. A little window (mimicking the size of a story book) opens as you select a book to read .More...
Hopefully the first of many Africa-wide Ihub's opens in Nairobi,Kenya.Related articles by ZemantaMaker Faire Africa: Call for entries! (makezine.com)iHub Nairobi Launch and IgniteNairobi...
In vc4africa:eVA Fund is dedicated to mobilize capital and experience in the Netherlands/Europe to invest in small and medium sized African internet related companies. The fund focusses on development in terms of capital and business development support, i.e. knowledge, experience, access to proven business concepts/applications, and network.More...
Tales from the Hood lays out the harsh reality of aid work - lots of manual data entry. How does that stack up against Robert K’s Talking Papers?
About two thirds of the form was numerical, and so entering that data got to be pretty mechanical after the first hour or two. But that last third [...]...
Banta Labs "...builds websites, web applications and mobile tools that help organizations improve their workflow, communication and outreach.We almost exclusively use - and contribute to - open source tools such as Drupal, Asterisk, Ubuntu Linux and...
iHub: Nairobi’s Tech Innovation Centre,Techshops next?:iHub First Look - Nairobi's Tech Innovation Hub from Ushahidi on Vimeo."...will have a redundant 10Mbs connection, hardwired and WiFi, and it’s freely available to any tech person in Nairobi to use once they become members. Membership is free, our only requirement is that you are indeed involved in the tech space as a programmer, web designer or mobile application...