As part of BarCamp in Nairobi, Erik Hersman, kindly conducted a simple survey for O’Reilly. Here is a brief summary of the results of the survey:

The goal of the short survey was to get a feel for the technologies favored by the attendees. Of the 52 completed surveys, 21 respondents (40%) cited php as one of their primary programming languages.

27 (or 52%) cited one of the common scripting languages (perl, python, php, ruby). The fact that c# was more popular than python, ruby, and perl, is probably indicative of the local IT job market as well. Windows and Linux garnered almost the same number of users:

More than half the BarCamp attendees develop for mobile phone platforms: 27 responded Yes (52%) when asked whether they do any mobile phone application development.

Pixelsebi has taken a closer look at the South African blogosphere the last days. And there I have learned about the awesome website amatomu, which is done by the South African news site Mai l& Guardian online. Amatomu provides you with tons of informations about the south african blogosphere. You have a huge directory of round about 2400 weblogs, sorted by different categories. Pixelsebis analysis found out, that the majority of the blog traffic is based on sport related topics, (massively by rugby). He writes:

„For me it’s really interesting to see, that the Mail&Guardian seems to drive the South African blogosphere quite strongly, not only by creating amatomu, which claims to generate 10% of the total SA blog traffic, but also by being present with two popular top blogs. Even if also German publishing houses have started their own blogs, none of them plays such an active role within the blogosphere, like the Mail&Guardian seems to play in South Africa.“

The analysis shows, that Africa is strong in Web 2.0:

The top blog in South Africa, adii, has a Technorati rank of 1288 and the German top blog, Basic Thinking, has a Technorati rank of 1896 – therefore the quantity of discussions within the blogosphere about what other blogs are writing seems to be pretty equal, regarding the top blogs.

228 attendees were counted at the barcamp Nairobi 2008. You can find a recap from White African and from deeper meaning online. And there are Videos from the barcamp on Youtube, too. (mehr …)

China’s Huawei Technologies, a leader in providing next generation telecommunications network solutions for operators around the world, is seeking to expand its services to become a dominant player in telecom services in East Africa. (mehr …)

The Rwandan government wants to use advanced information communication technologies, or ICTs, to transform its traditionally agricultural society into what has been dubbed „the Singapore of Africa“. (mehr …)

The Ajegunle.org project is community-based capacity building project targeting the youths of Ajegunle slum in Lagos. The aims to train some 25 youths each other month, who “will be equipped with ICT and entrepreneurship skills which they will then pass on to other youth, along with starting their own business”, as Africa Loft writes. (mehr …)

„We are five years behind US and Europe“, the first South African multimedia news paper maker said. „But we definitely catching on“. An interview that took place between Colin Daniels, former New Media Strategy Manager at The Times and Mandlakazi Mpahlwa, host of the Kaleidoscope show at CNBCAfrica:

Experience has shown a weakening U.S. economy would be good for open source, as a shortage of cash is usually a major catalyst for innovation, particularly around open-source applications, Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Ubuntu Linux, said at the annual Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco.

The presentation below summarizes the findings of the 2008 Future of Open Source survey led by North Bridge Venture Partners in partnership with Acquia, Ingres, SugarCRM, Sun and Ubuntu. The results were presented at the 2008 Infoworld Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco as part of a panel discussion led by Michael Skok, general partner at North Bridge Venture Partners.

(mehr …)

Forbes wirtes today about the rising salaries of Indian programmers under the title „The Coming Death of Indian Outsourcing“:

However, the reality is that wages are rising in India. The cost advantage for offshoring to India used to be at least 1:6. Today, it is at best 1:3. Attrition is scary.

And the resume about this fact for the Forbes editors?

Jobs that are low value-added and easily automatable should and will disappear over the next decade.

The software as a service (SaaS) megatrend in technology also plays against India, they said. But mainly, in the terms of payment – the times plays for Africa.