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The Lessons of Garage48 Lagos – Evaluation Toolkit of Ideas

By
Tekedia Editors
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0

Garage48 Lagos is past tense and CallCamp has won. Congratulations to the team. As we round up this experience and exercise, we refer you to this nice post by Tarmo Tali.  If you follow these ideas, you can take out the noise in your vision.

 

Step 1. – Search for existing solution 

Step 2. – Is your idea clear?

Step 3. – Who are your users and what is your offering?

Step 4. – Stay out of jail.

Step 5. – Does it matter?

Step 6. – Who is your team?

Step 7. – Value is more important than money.

Step 8. – Stand on the shoulders of the giants. 

Step 9. – How you boot and sustain?

Step 10. – Learn from history.

When U.S. State Dept Funds Social Media Dissidents – Can It Work in Cameroon?

By
Tekedia Editors
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2

We read this story from Businessweek and were taken aback that it could publish this. What is the motivation of exposing the obvious that most of the social media driven activism are sponsored by the US. We think this kid of activity should be  covet and not trumpeted on the pages of a respected magazine.

 

Antigovernment protesters in Syria have a hard time reaching the outside world, since the government selectively blocks cell-phone coverage in protest areas, and most use a slow dial-up Internet connection. Some of them rely on a contact overseas. The Syrian, who has seen the inside of prisons before and asked that his name not be printed, receives video files from activists in Daraa. The Syrian helps format the videos and posts them to YouTube. He’s exactly the kind of person the State Dept. would like to help right now: a pro-reform dissident, enabling others to get their story out through the Internet.

[…]

According to Posner, State has already held training sessions for 5,000 digital activists around the world, including one in February in Beirut that brought together participants from Tunisia, Egypt, and Syria. The sessions, quietly run by local organizations, teach participants which websites and technologies are most vulnerable to government monitoring—and which government-seeded rumors about technology are false. Daniel B. Baer, the deputy assistant secretary in the democracy bureau, says that in one country,

 

[…]

The agency has already awarded about $22 million in Internet freedom grants and plans to raise the total to $50 million by the summer.

 

Very interesting! Where is this money in Africa and where do they advertise them? We have one question: can this strategy work in Cameroon and get Paul Biya out of power?  Let the money come because Mr. Biya has spent his welcome!

Corporate Social Media Solutions – Where Employees Do Facebook and Twitter

By
Tekedia Editors
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1

In case you are planning of buying a social media solution to enable your staff do Facebook and Twitter in your company, we have got three good companies for you to consider. Here are the companies:

 

Chatter from Salesforce

 

The best way to collaborate at work

  • Collaborate privately and securely
  • Follow people, information, and groups
  • Share files and status updates

Work more efficiently and closely with your colleagues on your own private and secure social network — Chatter. Where updates on the people, projects, and data that matter most are automatically pushed to you.

 

Yammer

The Enterprise Social Network

Yammer is revolutionizing internal corporate communications by bringing together all of a company’s employees inside a private and secure enterprise social network. Although Yammer is as easy to use as consumer products like Facebook or Twitter, it is enterprise-class software built from the ground up to drive business objectives.

 

Yammer is free for your whole company, enabling users to communicate, collaborate, and share more easily and efficiently than ever before. It reduces the need for meetings, increases communication across silos, surfaces pockets of expertise and connects remote workers.

 

IBM Connections

 

If you could have experts at your fingertips, build vibrant customer communities and instantly engage creative ideas to your biggest challenges, there’s no telling what you could do.

Designed with a Social Business in mind, IBM Connections gives you fast access to everyone in your professional network – your colleagues, customers and partners. The latest capabilities in IBM Connections such as Moderation, Ideation Blogs, and the Media Gallery, enable you to embrace networks of people who are engaged and work in transparent and nimble ways to create business value.

 

Our Choice – Yammer. The major reason is that it is FREE.

Precurio 2.1 Open Source Intranet Software Released. Read Here The TechOpenDay 2011 Presentation

By
Tekedia Editors
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2

We wrote about Precurio few weeks ago. This is one of the ideas in Nigeria, Tekedia believes could move to the global arena.

Software as a service (Saas) is in Nigeria. Precurio is making it happen. Do not be surprised if this company is acquired by Salesforce. Precurio is a complete intranet solution designed for small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). It is an open source intranet platform that combines a comprehensive package of collaborative and social networking tools with robust reporting, workflow and enterprise content management.  In simple terms – this company wants you to do your job while they give you all the tools you need. And they seem to be doing that good enough.

 

Precurio was one of the firms that gave a talk in TechOpenDay with Lacy. This is the presentation that  they delivered in case you missed it:

Some of Precurio features

  • A Forums module to facilitate discussions on the intranet
  • An anonymous user feature that allows intranet administrators open or close certain parts

of an intranet to non-users, giving their intranet some extranet like feature

  • Multilingual Support with the Spanish language pack included and
  • An additional free theme.

The current version of Precurio is 2.1. According to a statement on their website:

“Precurio 2.1 is a response to the feedback from our community. Customers will now have more control over their intranet start page and our developer community will be really pleased at the new widgets framework.” said Shola Akinlade, Co founder, Klein Devort.

About Precurio:
Precurio is an open source intranet platform that combines a comprehensive package of
collaborative and social networking tools with robust reporting, workflow and enterprise
content management. The product web site at www.precurio.com contains additional
information.

About Klein Devort:
Klein Devort Limited is a software development firm that specializes in building enterprise
applications. They are privately funded and based in Lagos Nigeria. The company’s web site at
www.kleindevort.com contains additional information.

Kenya, The Capital of Africa’s Social Media Innovation, Brings Girls Along

By
Tekedia Editors
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2

We know that many will argue that South Africa leads social media, in Africa, because of MXit. Afterall, Google is locating one of its major incubator events in South Africa, umbono, largely on the idea that MXit was born there. They made a point that MXit was created there and it was natural that  South Africa becomes the seat to incubate the idea of the future.

 

Yes, South Africa is the largest economy in Africa. However, it is not the most innovative social media environment in Africa. We think that belongs to Kenya. Kenya is the undisputed seat of Africa’s social media innovation. They are creating Apps and most of these ideas have gone prime-time. Think of Ushahidi. Think of  VirtualCity that won Nokia’s $1m prize. Kenya is full of ideas.

 

Tekedia has this opinion that what is helping Kenya is not their better education or schools, rather, they have a better incubation environment. The westerners prefer Kenya than any other African country for visits. If you visit Kenya, you will notice that most U.S. students that want study abroad programs choose Kenya. They visit there for short programs and in the process they seed ideas to the Kenyans. Relatively, it is a very peaceful place (discount the election crises that gave birth to Ushahidi). Generally, East Africa is perceived to be better than West Africa and that has affected the flow of traffic from US and European campuses.

 

In addition, we think Kenya has gotten better in bringing the girls into the tech world. In Nigeria, the boys still think they know better. But in Kenya, girls are winning top prizes.

 

Overall there were 37 ideas presented, out of which 18 teams was formed. All the teams worked hard over the weekend to present their products on demo event Sunday evening at Strathmore University in Nairobi.

 

The jury voted a girls team M-Farm as winners. M-Farm startup focuses on helping small farmers get the much needed information for distribution of their products to the market. The mobile application will allow a farmer get real time price information without having to deal with brokers, sell the products through mobile phone, get weather alerts, connect with other farmers, find nearest farm stores and get help from farm experts.

 

The ecosystem is great to allow participation of girls and boys in tandem. And this is what will help Kenya stay on top. We think that Kenya will run this show and most ideas for Africa will come from there. They are driven by passion and they are making progress, daily.

 

Kenyans have picked something from the playbook of the Chinese – you cannot progress without your girls. China has high literacy rate for girls than most nations. That means they get all the working age into the labor market. In most countries, those girls are not in. In Kenya, they have figured that out, at least in the social media circle where their tech girls beat the boys and that is good thing for Africa.

 

Kenya – the undisputed seat of Africa’s social media innovation has a lot of ideas ahead in store. Other nations must learn from it.

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