Om Malik at GigaOm writes:
According to TeleGeography, a research firm that tracks the global broadband business, there are about 12 cables either in planning stages or under construction that will connect Africa to the rest of the planet. Those connections will have a theoretical capacity of over 13 Terabits per second, and construction is estimated to cost more than $3 billion...Building new...
Founded by alumni of Ashesi University, DreamOval's "...products include Outreach, i-Wallet, and Global Virtual Stock Exchange (GVSX). Outreach is a communications solution that enables enterprises to utilize SMS and Email for business-critical communication and relationship management(CRM)..."-Ashesi...
Ghana Chronicle profiles the growth of Atwima Rural Bank
Gambia's first investment bank BSIC Gambia is launched-GambiaNow
Simphani brings to our attention a video on village phones in Uganda.
Naija Blog proffers a simple power solution for Nigeria.
Makezine profiles "a proven, commercialized technology" for generating power from manure.
West Africa Sustainable Economic Initiative shares are...
Fusion Capital offers SME focused financial solutions.
Derrick Ashong launches Ashong Ventures.
The Economist applauds Endeavor's success in spreading the gospel of entrepreneurship.
CopperNet leads in the provision of information technology services.
Founded by Baba Jibrin Adamu, Inetworks Canada believes strongly in the provision of low-cost communications and...
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mPedigree co-founded by Bright Simons emerges as tool to fight the deadly scourge of drug counterfeiting and other product reliabilty challenges: ...It refers both to a world-first technology platform that interconnects GSM mobile networks in the West African republic of Ghana to a central registry wherein pedigree information of product brands belonging to participant manufacturers are stored,...
From the TED Website:
Stanford researcher Kwabena Boahen is looking for ways to mimic the brain's supercomputing powers in silicon -- because the messy, redundant processes inside our heads actually make for a small, light, superfast......
Ahmed Mohamed founder of Zebra Ng'Arisha discusses the lime production business a critical component of the chemical industry supply chain:
via...
Image via WikipediaSean Park at the Park Paradigm writes:One of the most obvious - yet no less powerful or potentially transformational for it - themes is the combination of mobile communications, internet and geo-location technologies to disseminate information and increase connectedness from the bottom up. This emergent collective intelligence is all the more remarkable, given the typical...
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G. Paschal Zachary writes in the NYTimes:
While engineers in the United States lavish attention on expensive phones that boast laptoplike features, in Kenya there are 10 million low-end phones. Millions more are used elsewhere in Africa. Enhancements to such basic phones can be experimented with cheaply in Nairobi, and because designers are weaned on narrow bandwidth, they are comfortable...
From the X-prize Foundation website:
The X PRIZE Foundation is researching prizes structured around entrepreneurial solutions to global poverty. The focus is to find methods that catalyze profit-generating firms both in terms of financial as well as human development metrics that address major development challenges in agriculture, capital, education, health and water. The goal of these...
The Global Voices Citizen Media Summit in Budapest two weeks ago was a whirlwind of new ideas and information. Among them: a list of handy Web 2.0 tools for liveblogging/covering conferences.Throughout the summit I used ScribeFire to blog within Firefox. It is my new favorite blogging tool, hands down: a quick window that opens in the bottom half of your browser window and lets you save drafts, publish directly to multiple blogs, edit old posts, tag and categorize, all without leaving the precious set of relevant sites you've carefully opened and arranged in tabs.During the summit, I also posted quick updates to my Twitter account. You can follow me and everyone else who tagged their posts with gvsummit08 using Summize or Hashtags. Summize picks up more from Twitter than Hashtags, but...
Global Voices Advocacy director Sami ben Gharbia is leading a workshop today on Google Maps mash-ups. The results of our first efforts:View Larger...
East and Southern Africa Dairy Association reports:
Shambani Graduate Dairy has been a blessing to the farmers in Morogoro municipality. Shambani graduates started off with one milk supplier, processing capacity of 30 litres. Today the plant receives milk from over 200 suppliers and has a capacity to process 750 litres of milk dairy and produces up to three different products. Pasteurized...
Mwangi of Displaced African has a conversation with David Kobia creator of Mashada and co-founder of the award winning...
For many people, visits to the field represent a chance to meet the beneficiaries of our programs and really get a feel for the difference which we’re making. Unfortunately I’ve chosen the wrong sector for this. Working in supply chain management means that a field trip only involves going to another office, in a remote [...]...
Geekcorps profiles an alumni who lost wireless connectivity and rejigged his business model:
Papou Coulibaly saw the potential for offering offline ICT services in Ouélessébougou and went about creating a unconnected cyber café at his boutique. Using the Geekcorps’ Cybertigi design, Papou acquired three computers, a laser printer, scanner, digital camera, photo printer, a Bluetooth adapter,...
Stock Market Nigeria reports on two impending IPO's from non-financial sector companies, Florence Seriki's Omatek Ventures and Tantalizers both covered previously:
The management of the Nigerian Stock Exchange at a recent Quotation Committee Council Meeting (QCCM), held at the exchange, gave a nod to Omatek Ventures and Tantalizers Plc’s bid to list on the Exchange. Omatek Ventures Plc would be...
"...Emperion designs, deploys, operates and maintains broadband IP communication solutions and services based on digital satellite (VSAT) and fixed wireless access (FWA) networks. The solutions are targeted at enterprise class customers and are deployed to a rapidly growing client portfolio in more than 30 countries in Europe , Middle East and Africa (EMEA)..." The company "...has focused on...
Seyi Oyesola co-inventor of the Hospital-in-the-Box discusses Off-Grid healthcare at TED......
The Green Step Off-Grid initiative in Cameroon,will instruct locals on"...how to construct their own wind turbines and hydroelectric plants using local materials...The organization will teach the 7,000-person town of M'muock how to build and operate small renewable energy plants out of wood and old car and radio parts.",Ebono...
From the Seven Funds Pioneers of Prosperity documentary site:
Entrepreneurs create products, services and jobs. They expand economies, improve people's lives, provide employment (high and rising wages) and bring about competition. A competitive environment, in turn, gives rise to efficiency, meritocracy and further innovations and entrepreneurial drive.
The potent combination of entrepreneurship...
The following statements were taken from the IPC web site and quoted without editing. There is much more informaion on the IPC web site, and I have only quoted it in part to illustrate some of the points that I consider to be significant.What is Food Sovereignty ? "Food Sovereignty is the RIGHT of peoples, communities, and countries to define their own agricultural, labour, fishing, food and land policies which are ecologically, socially, economically and culturally appropriate to their unique circumstances. It includes the true right to food and to produce food, which means that all people have the right to safe, nutritious and culturally appropriate food and to food-producing resources and the ability to sustain themselves and their societies."What is IPC ? "The IPC is a global...
Science in Africa reported in 2003 on the work of Menker Wolde Kiross:
Menker believes there is great potential in developing effective farm equipment in the country(Ethiopia)...The latest and potential bestseller is a foot-driven water pump, which cost around US $1,000 to develop. The original idea was based on a design from Kenya that Menker modified.Many of the ideas developed at his workshop...
Founded by Leila Chirayath"...Market for Change aims to catalyze economic development by creating a market for responsible outsourcing to small and medium-sized firms in developing......
Co-founded by Tesh Tesfaye "...JEDA Technologies provides advanced Electronic System Level (ESL) verification automation solutions that are scalable and reusable at various levels of SystemC or C++ based designs. JEDA offers products for verification with temporal assertions, simulation coverage measurement and intelligent stimulus generation to accelerate ESL model and design validation, and...
The Industries for Africa Foundation lays out their proposal for a hybrid Biofuels-Machine Tools ecosystem a subset of their incremental modular industrialisation proposal:
The manufacture of machine tools is widely accepted as a significant component of any industrialisation. Without exception industrialised nations manufacture, or have manufactured, machine tools. Those that have reduced...
Chemin is an example of an incubator that deserves emulation across the continent.It nurtures and addresses a fundamental critical industry essential to industralization.Its mission is to:
Stimulate, launch and grow globally competitive and sustainable SME chemical manufacturing start-ups, as well as project development within established SMEs, in South...
Jan Chipcase writes about the pervasiveness of small engineering workshops in hyper industrialized Japan:
Wander around a Tokyo neighbourhood and you'll soon come across a small engineering workshop - part of the urban infrastructure and a skill base that enables small scale repair and manufacturing and is very much part of the flavour of living here..
Within SSA there is a worrying tendency to...
On the final day, we presented our Information Management track project. It was decided that our project would look into social networking at the camp, so a questionnaire was prepared and distributed, asking various questions about the number of friendship people had before during and after the camp, and the best activities for making [...]...