Internet access in many regions in Sub-Saharan Africa is still far from perfect, and a number of non-profits are working to improve this situation by providing technical assistance and working with local organizations to provide services to ISPs. Today, Google.org, Google’s philanthropic arm, announced that it is providing a total of $4.4 million to the Network Startup Resource Center (NSRC)… → Read More
One of the amazing things about technology is that it opens the doors to things for less fortunate folks that many of us take for granted. Being able to sit down and read a good book is something that we do on a daily basis, but never think about all of the people out there who don’t have that luxury. With sites like Amazon, we have a seemingly infinite number of choices on what we’d like to read… → Read More
What phone does Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales have in his pocket? An unlocked Android-powered 3G smartphone, made by Huawei – which was selling for $85 on the streets of Kenya last year and now goes for $50. Hundreds of thousands have been bought in Africa — and Wales believes the pace of smartphone adoption on the continent is changing its digital landscape much faster than people realise. → Read More
Analyst ABI Research expects mobile phone subscriber penetration levels in Africa to pass 80 percent in the first quarter of next year. In Q3 this year, it said the continent’s 54 countries and 1.08 billion people had accumulated 821 million mobile subscribers, up 16.9 percent year-on-year — to 76.4 percent — and it expects this to grow to 1.12 billion subscribers by 2017. → Read More
Growing up as an adopted Korean boy in the cold climes of Norway, Jorn Lyseggen would have had no idea that one day he would be spearheading a technology renaissance in the sweltering heat of a West African state. But having created the successful $100m-in-revenue Meltwater SAAS company, which has made a name for itself in social analytics, he realised that it would be for nothing if he didn’t… → Read More
Feature phones are not the future. Of course that verges on tautology; of course everyone will have a smartphone, until everyone has something smaller and better and even more integrated into the fabric of our lives, like Google Glasses or cybernetic jawbone/retinal implants or whatever Charles Stross dreams up next. But when, exactly?
I’ve spent a good chunk of my life wandering around and … → Read More
The news that i/o Ventures had launched the Savannah Fund in Africa is clearly welcome news for an emerging continent. It’s $10m fund size will be a shot in the arm for the eco-system there. But I was surprised to see that it was being described in some quarters as the “first ever” Sub-Saharan African incubator and accelerator. Because it patently is not.
“I think MEST would actually be the… → Read More
Don’t look now, but sub-Saharan Africa is booming. Since 2003 its growth has been skyrocketing, and, to quote none other than McKinsey, “today the rate of return on foreign investment in Africa is higher than in any other developing region.” There are several reasons: commodity prices, Chinese investment, diaspora remittances… and, I would argue, the GSM revolution that has swept the entire… → Read More
Seventeen years ago Wired published Neal Stephenson’s magisterial epic “Mother Earth Mother Board”, about the web of undersea fibre-optic cables being built to connect all of humanity. Well – almost all. Africa, again, was left behind. Until 2009, all of East Africa could only connect to the Internet over slow and hugely expensive satellite links.
Finally, two years ago, SEACOM laid a cable… → Read More
Seems like it’s Sub-Saharan Month around here: first Sarah Lacy went to Nigeria, and now here I am in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital and Africa’s fourth-largest city. It feels like a boomtown. There are cranes and construction sites everywhere, throwing up gleaming new glass-and-steel buildings full of shops selling computers and mobile phones. The major thoroughfares throng with people making… → Read More
China may overtake Japan to become the world’s second-largest economy this year. On its heels is India, and countries such as Brazil and Russia are not far behind. What does this mean for entrepreneurs? That, increasingly, the big opportunities lie outside the U.S. Most people aren’t aware of another advantage in emerging markets: you can freely leverage the wealth of proven intellectual… → Read More
I’m in. This article from Laptop magazine showed me why the One Laptop Per Child XO laptop is worth all the hullabaloo. The magazine sent an XO laptop to a handler in Guinea, who then showed it to grade school-aged kids. The kids, not jaded by megahertz races and touchscreens and format wars, readily took to the XO; built-in features likes its VGA Web cam caused a commotion amongst the… → Read More
Austin, TX
Seattle, WA
San Diego, CA
Menlo Park, CA
San Francisco
San Francisco, CA
