A review of three Cameroonian Blog Dibussi Tande has done. He wrote about Chiareport, wrote from the US; GEFs Outlook, produced in Dakar, Senegal and Voice of the Oppressed maintained by Steve Neba Fuh from Sweden.
I think, GEFs Outlook is the most interesting one. his newest blog entrance is about China in Africa: Invasion or the New Face of Globalisation - a topic I also have already written about.
Olumide Alabi and Gbenga Sesan are blogging live from the Nigerian Bloggers’ Conference, which is holding at the Banquet Hall of Elomaz Hotel in Lagos, Nigeria. They talk about domain names and about the way, bloggers-to-be become real-bloggers. About the findability of blogs.
In short: you see a Nigerial blogosphere come to life in a very early stage. Highly recommended…
For those, who may be interested, a detailed report of the various roles played by young Nigerians taking advantage of ICT opportunities can be downloaded from www.pin.org.ng/old/downloads/glocal.pdf. It is a very large file and it may be easier to download through the link at the end of the book summary page (via Gbengasesan).
Thanks to African Loft I learned, that there is a market analysis about China and their business in Africa. Excerpt:
“While America is preoccupied with the war in Iraq (cost: half a trillion dollars and counting), and while think-tank economists continue to spit out papers debating whether vital resources are running out at all, China’s leadership isn’t taking any chances. In just a few years, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has become the most aggressive investor-nation in Africa.”
My question: What does Germany, what does Europe do? (I think, they just spent money and hope, the Africans will think good of them.)
Operator-billed service revenues across the Africa & Middle East region are expected to rise to more than $107 billion in 2013, according to a new report from Juniper Research.
The report found that growth would be driven by mobile data services, fuelled by the greater availability and wider variety of rich-media content coupled with lower browsing costs. However, it noted that regional operator-billed voice revenues were likely to peak in 2011 and would subsequently fall away due to increasingly competitive pricing in that sector.
According to Juniper Research report author Dr Windsor Holden, “While the downward trend in regional ARPU will continue as adoption increases amongst lower-usage customers, we expect the decline in voice ARPU to be partially offset by an increase in data revenues, both amongst 2.5G and 3G customers.”
The report also observed that the region was likely to witness a surge in the growth of mobile financial services, with a raft of operator-led payment initiatives such as M-PESA and mobile banking providers such as WIZZIT having already gained substantial user bases.
Other findings from the Juniper Research report include:
• The Middle East/Africa mobile user base is to grow at an average annual rate of 10.5% between 2008 and 2013
• Mobile data services are expected to contribute 24% of operator-billed service revenues in 2013, against just 9% in 2008.
• Saudi Arabia will provide the largest share of cumulative regional revenues over the forecast period, followed by Nigeria
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.
On 11th and 12th of July I will be presentating in Mainz at the conference of Rwandan Diaspora Germany e.V. Its about „Abanyarwanda baba mu budage nk’inkingi y’iterambere rirambye mu Rwanda“ („Ruandische Diaspora in Deutschland als Akteur für die nachhaltige Entwicklung in Ruanda“ - Rwandan Diaspora in Germany as a actor for sustanable development in Rwanda). Thanks to president Providence Tuyisabe for the invitation.
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. Read the rest of this entry »
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. Read the rest of this entry »
