A24 Media has delivered a sorely needed shot in the arm to the African media environment with the launch of its online content delivery site, designed to bring the African voice to a global audience.
“A24 Media will change the face of journalism in Africa and will truly give us Africans control over our stories” hopes Salim Amin, Chairman of A24 Media in Nairobi.

A24 Media is Africa’s first online delivery site for material from journalists, African broadcasters
and NGO’s from around the Continent. The organisation is committed to building the
capacity of reporters and photographers to compete globally for share of voice for African
issues and is thus solely structured with the journalist’s needs in mind.

Content generators will send their material to the main office in Nairobi where it will be
verified and re-edited as necessary to create a slick, marketable and branded story. The
stories will be checked and verified for balanced, accurate and independent content, and
will be of the very highest technical and journalistic quality. Feedback will also be provided to
the contributor in order to promote a culture of journalistic excellence.

A24 has allready opened an office in Berlin, headed by Kani Tuyala.

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.

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. (more…)

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. (more…)