Local Start Ups get a Boost

Thought I would share some exciting news with VijanaFM readers. According to a recent article in The Guardian, I/O Ventures, an angel investment fund and business incubator based in San Francisco is working with the government to setup a local incubator in Dar es Salaam.

For those unfamiliar with the concept of an incubator. These are basically programs led by venture capital (VC) firms to develop early stage companies with seed capital, mentoring, coaching as well as assistance with resources such as office space and technology infrastructure. In return firms usually get a small stake in your company. In the case of I/O ventures, this comes with access to an exclusive network of mentors including founders of Silicon Valley giants such as Youtube and MySpace.

What does this development tell us? Investors and technologists are constantly seeking new markets and fresh talent. Tanzania with its stable environment, burgeoning economy and army of fresh talented graduates is a prime feeding ground. Tanzanians need to wake up and realize that foreigners have already realized the potential of our country even if we are still dozing. So if you have a great idea, are passionate about it and have some form of a business plan, wake up and get started.

If you have an idea, don't know how to get started or are stuck on a problem reach out to myself I will gladly help or point you in the right direction.

Cross listed here.

A Giant Fails

This week Google (yes Google) announced that it will be shutting down its much hyped 'Google Wave' service. For the non technology buffs Google Wave was an advanced real time collaboration and communication tool that would change the way we work and interact. The idea was that you could create 'waves' that would be equivalent to real face to face conversations except virtually. You would be able add people into the conversation in real time and determine what they can and cannot see. The same can be done with adding files, pictures and other media into the wave (conversation). Even more impressive was that you could quite easily pick up an entire wave (conversations, media, etc) and send it all to others to review.

When I first saw a preview for this new tool, the technology was mind blowing (this is the geek talking) and I spent quite some time playing around with it. The problem, was that no one else I knew was doing so. Which meant that I quickly stopped using the service. This is what eventually led to its demise. The critical mass of users needed to sustain the service just did not exist.

What can we take away from this series of events. Firstly we must realize that even the most advanced and innovative products are useless without users to use it. Products/services must constantly be evaluated to understand how consumers are using it and how it can be improved. Secondly, timing the launch of a product is crucial. In the case of Google, the technology they introduced was too advanced at this point in time for the average lay person. Lastly, we must learn that everyone fails at times, even the best and biggest. Its how you react to the failure that counts. Google didn't hide the failure, they acknowledged it and shutdown the service. Many of us will not realize that what we are doing is wrong and continue making the same mistakes.

Have you suffered from a failure in the past? What went wrong? How did you react to it? Share your stories below.

Cross listed here.

What Do You Want to be When you Grow Up?

I'm sure everyone reading this blog was asked this question repeatedly throughout their childhood. Your answers to this also probably changed as you grew older and your interests changed. Some folks might still be trying to answer this question even beyond university and their first job. This post tries to shed some light on how one can go about finding what they want to do when they are growing up.

Trying out new things
I remember as a young boy, I was fascinated by planes. Naturally, whenever I got asked what I wanted to become, I would answer a 'pilot'. Then one day I was fortunate enough to be able to go see a cockpit of a plane (yes, this is before 9/11 and double reinforced doors). My initial reaction after looking at all the switches and lights was 'wow,' so cool. Soon, this changed to 'oh my god' as I was explained that one needed to learn how to use each and every switch before you got to fly. The aim of becoming a 'pilot' quickly went away.

The point of this story is that as you pass through more experiences the clearer your direction becomes. The example above was a simplistic one, but 'experiences' can be varied and not necessarily through employment. They can involve volunteering, athletics/sports, part-time work, boy scouts etc etc. It is also important to be open to trying out new things and keep your mind open, otherwise you will never know what you missed out on. These 'experiences' allows us to discover both what we like/don't like and our strengths/weaknesses. Do you like to work with and talk to people? Are you detail oriented? Are you a problem solver? The list goes one. Through this iterative trial and error process you may be able to arrive at your answer to 'what do you want to be when you grow up?'

Keep Talking
The trial and error process is a long term plan and takes time to take shape. To speed things up, you need to talk to a lot of people, even if you don't like to. Most people are more than willing to share their story, you just have to ask. If you don't know a lot of people you can start with your family members, siblings, parents, uncles, aunts and then ask them to refer you to others in your area of your interest. You can even request them to let you shadow them at work for a day to learn what its like. In return for their time and patience be extra willing to help them out with anything such as running errands, making a website, teaching them how to use a feature on their mobile phone etc.

The process of figuring out what you want to do in life can be daunting and confusing, but by following some of the suggestions above as well as starting early you may be able to make it an easier and fun process. Do you have stories of how you found out what you wanted to become? What other strategies have worked for you? Please share your thoughts.

Cross listed here.

3 Ways to Increase Web Traffic!

I'm collaborating on another web project called VijanaFM.com. I posted on the site about what we're doing to increase web traffic. Posting it here as well for my readers.

VijanaFM is a very young blog and is constantly competing for eyeballs among the plethora of content that is available online. That being said, the VijanaFM team is actively working to increase its web presence and gather sustained web traffic from its primary audience group, East Africans.

#1: Content is King
Blogs are about content. The more original, interesting and relevant content that is posted the greater our our traffic. VijanaFM has therefore increased the number of voluntary contributors to its site in order to maintain a steady flow of new content. The VijanaFM team is also very diverse in their experiences which leads to diverse content, again, a plus! We also realized that we need a good balance of Swahili and English content in order to gain greater acceptance among locals in East Africa.

#2: Make it easy
From a usability perspective, we're also trying to make it easier for people to find what they are looking for. We're maintaining a consistent tagging mechanism for all our posts and removing any overlapping and unnecessarily tags. We're also working on categorizing by the three content types (audio, visual, text) that our platform seeks to promote.

#3: Just Google it
We all know Google is the top search engine so how we rank on the search engine is a key priority. Now Google automatically increases your rankings as you have more visitors to the site which #1 and #2 are also helping to do. Each of our postings is also disseminated through social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, this increases the number of 'backlinks'(other websites that link back to yours) and thus increasing your rankings. Lastly, we're also monitoring the portion of our web traffic that comes from organic Google searches and optimizing our site for the most actively used keywords for our target demographic.

Do you have any experiences of your own with building a sustainable web presence? Any strategies that worked for you? Please comment.

Crowdsourcing - true value or unfair competition?

Crowdsourcing is a modern term that describes the use of a group or community to complete a task at hand. This crowdsourcing phenomenon as it relates to the internet initially started with creatives tasks such as design work being crowdsourced by companies large and small. Small or freelance designers suddenly had access to projects for the biggest brands while small businesses could now relatively afford high-end design work. The internet was the perfect medium for such services as it brought millions of potential creative folks together right where they were needed.

This phenomenon like many others on the internet has since been ported to other applications. These range from crowdsourcing solutions for complex R&D problems to getting mechanical tasks completed. You can find more examples here.

This seems like a wonderful idea, but is everything all hunky dory? Crowdsourcing has faced criticisms in that:

1. Quality of work received is often lower
2. A lot of wasted effort in crowdsourced competitions
3. Difficult to maintain relationships with crowdsourced workers

I feel that although these criticism may be true, businesses (those paying for crowdsourcing) need to understand that not all tasks are appropriate for crowdsourcing and they must pick and choose when the pros outweigh the cons.

I posted a crowdsourced logo design project on 99designs.com a short while ago. On a relatively small budget, I quickly realized that most of the projects offered rewards much greater than mine and it seemed apparent that the higher the reward the greater the number of submissions. I understand that this is completely rational since more designers will be attracted by the prospect of more $$$. The key question is, will the level and quality of my designs be lower than if more money had been offered? I'll wait to find out. Eventually I think it all stays the same, since the money offered by larger companies will always be higher than what a small business owner can offer and thus attract better designers. Just like a non-crowdsourced project.

Have you conducted a crowdsourced project? What was your experience?

Crosslisted here

Whats all the Buzz about?

Many of you avid Gmail users such as myself may have recently noticed a new 'Buzz' link on Gmail. Well in all honestly I was a little late at finding out because I'm always logged into Gmail and not until I was forced to log out(Gmail addict!) for a Firefox restart did I see the new link .

Buzz is Google's new entrant into the social media space and unlike Orkut/Google Freind Connect, Buzz gained instant traction (albeit a few privacy hiccups) among its already existing and faithful Gmail community.

I'm not going to go through a feature list or comparison with facebook/twitter here, you can read more about that on mashable. I want to comment on is what this means for us mortals in the real world. Buzz will mean more time on Gmail...obviously Google wants that, but its also means that we now also have to track friends and their status' on Buzz. Aren't we doing enough of that on Facebook and Twitter already? Because of the simplicity and ease of use of Buzz a lot of users will get convinced to start Buzzing on Buzz, which in turn will mean less time you spend on Facebook, Twitter etc or working (whichever you do more of). We do after all only have 16-18 awake hours in a day and everyone is fighting for your time on their service.

Businesses have an even harder challenge since they now cannot ignore Buzz and so they have add it to their social media marketing strategy(if they have one). The vast majority of businesses are no where close to having a social media marketing strategy and a new entrant into this space makes it an even more confusing, expensive and daunting task. One set of businesses however will really benefit, the companies offering social media marketing services for others. They just got more money handed to them.

What are your thoughts on Buzz? How has it impacted your time on social media sites? Please comment.

Cross listed here.

Technology incubators, a slingshot to success!

I visited a Silicon Valley technology incubator(Plug&PlayTechCenter) a few months back and I remember returning from the visit simply awed by the level of energy and entrepreneurial buzz around me. Start ups were given a mere two minutes to pitch their ideas to venture capitalists and angel investors lined up in front of them ready to invest millions of dollars into the next Google or PayPal. I recently read about a new technology incubator (iHub) and technology park(Malili) in Nairobi which got me thinking about the potentially immense value of incubators to developing nations.

For those not familiar with the concept of an incubator. An incubator is a usually an office complex or building that hosts early stage start up companies and provides them with invaluable access to finance (venture capital, debt etc) as well as sales, marketing, HR and legal support. The key idea is that start ups get access to a large network of advisors that they would not normally have. Going through the selection process for an incubator also allows starts ups to fully vet their idea and get a preliminary 'stamp of approval' that their idea is viable. Technology companies are specially suited to incubators because of the remote and collaborative nature of the business. Technology incubators in Silicon Valley have been particularly successful at harnessing their power.

These projects in Nairobi show a great foresight and initiative on the part of the goverment and local technology community since the vast majority of the impact from an incubator is intangible and extremely long term. InfoDev an NGO affiliated with the world bank has done a number of studies (available for free) on technology incubators as a means to promote sustained growth. One of the key findings is that incubators in developing nations must be formed on a sustainable financial as well management model to ensure that the long term value is derived from the investment. It also stresses the importance of corporate partnerships/sponsorships to bring in local stakeholders who would benefit from the incubation. The report also analyzes multiple case studies of incubators in developing nations in South America and the Middle East.

Technology incubators should be on the roadmap for all countries in Africa as an integral part of their plans to ecourage entrepreneurship and boost job creation. With the recent fiber optic connectivity to Eastern Africa a major infrastructure hurdle has been resolved leaving just the initiative to be taken.

How do I find new stuff?

As Google continues to grow, it faces a mounting challenge. Where to find new content to search and index? Content apparently isn't coming in as fast as Google needs. So it took it upon itself to create new content as this article describes. Google started a contest at universities in East Africa to promote the translation of Wikipedia articles to Swahili, a language with very little content online but a potential 100 million strong user base.

Does it really have to take foreign firms enticing us with prizes for us to generate new content? Especially in Swahili. Bloggers in East Africa have started to create some of this content, however the quantity is minuscule. The question is how can we promote 'local' and 'original' content creation? Should local universities start promoting this? Will print media companies see this as a void that they can easily fill?

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, so please leave your comments.

The cutting edge from CES!

Last weekend, I attended the annual Consumer Electronics(CES) show in Las Vegas. For those that don't know, this is the largest annual consumer technology event in the U.S (i.e geek Mecca) and has all the cutting edge technology on display for you to look and play with.

Needless to say, being a technology enthusiast I've been dying to go for many years and it definitely did not disappoint. I'm going to try give a glimpse of some of the technologies/trends that I saw, especially those that would be more practical and useful in developing countries.

The big hype:
A couple of technologies that everyone was talking about were 3D home televisions, E-readers and Mobile digital TV (M-DTV). 3D technology in general is not anything new, however the fact that you can now enjoy 3D television from the comfort of your home, is a compelling proposition. The sample movies on display were extremely captivating and they are already plans to launch live broadcast tv in 3D. Imagine a live Manchester United Vs. Arsenal game in 3D!

Mobile digital TV is another next generation technology that is gaining some traction. Again digital television is not new, but imagine that you could now be watching your favorite tv show while sitting on the beach.

E-readers were recently launched in the US, most popularly by Amazon ('Kindle'). The thing to note from CES about E-readers was that smaller companies are rushing into this market. E-readers of multiple shapes, sizes, colors and functionality are emerging much like MP3 players did about 3-4 years ago. From a developing world standpoint, very cheap e-readers could help students in developing countries avoid the large, expensive and hefty books that need to be purchased each year. Mobile phones took away the need for landlines in many parts of Africa, E-readers could do the same. Plus this might be more ecologically friendly in the long run...woot for less paper.

The cutting edge:
An augmented reality demo was one of the coolest things I experienced. I was given a pair of funky glasses to wear and a small board with bar code like squares on it (see below). As soon as I wore the glasses, the board turned into a virtual reality maze that could be juggled around to get a virtual ball through the maze.

The extremely thin size of LED TVs was also very interesting to see. The models I saw from LG, Samsung and Sony were as thin as a cigarette in thickness (from the side, you could only see a line).

Wireless charging devices were on display by 'PowerMat'. Basically, a small pad on which mobile phones (with a small attachment) could be placed, which would charge the device's battery. This is definitely a technology to keep an eye on.

The practical solutions:
A key trend I noticed was that the Android OS platform has been widely adopted by various OEM manufactures and so any device with a screen and some memory could now potentially have an OS built into it. This means that applications could be developed to run on Android and any of these devices...your creativity is the only limit as to how this technology could be put to use (e.g portable tablets for waiters in restaurants)

Wi-fi routers with 3G capabilities were also on display. These routers either come with a direct sim card slot or allow for a USB data card to be plugged in to provide the 3G/EDGE connection. Very useful for internet cafes or homes in areas were wired internet is still not available but mobile phone service is.