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Nigeria Techstars Series – Prof Kunle Olukotun of Stanford University

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Tekedia Editors
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Tekedia Nigeria Techstars Series: Every Friday, we will profile one Nigerian doing awesome job in the technology arena. Today, meet Prof Kunle of Stanford University. He is one of the world’s best in his job. He specializes is developing programs that enable multi-core processors to work in harmony, among others. We are careful to write it -but without his works, some of the multi-core chips on sale worldwide may not be possible. He is a legend and highly respected in the industry. This is a man who when he speaks, the industry listens. In one of his interviews in ACM few years ago, he made is known that building and packing cores is not the problem, the key one is optimizing them to work effectively. People, this is your own – Prof Kunle Olukotun.

Kunle Olukotun is a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Stanford University and he has been on the faculty since 1991. Olukotun is well known for leading the Stanford Hydra research project which developed one of the first chip multiprocessors with support for thread-level speculation (TLS). Olukotun founded Afara Websystems to develop high-throughput, low power server systems with chip multiprocessor technology. Afara was acquired by Sun Microsystems; the Afara microprocessor technology, called Niagara, is at the center of Sun’s throughput computing initiative. Niagara based systems have become one of Sun’s fastest ramping products ever. Olukotun is actively involved in research in computer architecture, parallel programming environments and scalable parallel systems. Olukotun currently co-leads the Transactional Coherence and Consistency project whose goal is to make parallel programming accessible to average programmers. Olukotun also directs the Stanford Pervasive Parallelism Lab (PPL) which seeks to proliferate the use of parallelism in all application areas. Olukotun is an ACM Fellow (2006) for contributions to multiprocessors on a chip and multi threaded processor design. He has authored many papers on CMP design and parallel software and recently completed a book on CMP architecture. Olukotun received his Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from The University of Michigan.

Microinsurance – Crop Insurance Made Easy. The Power of Mobile Payment

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Tekedia Editors
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As we get to rounding up our coverage of Kenyan startup, we bring Kilimo Salama (“Safe Agriculture”) that has developed a very good way of helping farmers to invest in quality seeds and fertilizers. Simply, it offers insurance to farmers. And it does this through Mpesa that enables quick claims to crop loss. The opportunity for farmers is no matter what happens, they win. By examining weather reports to collaborate losses and using Mpesa to pay claims, this company is breaking the resistance that exists in farm insurance. A new era in micro-insurance is here with us.

 

For Kilimo Salama, it is simple. They install solar powered weather stations that collect data on pertinent weather conditions like rainfall and wind. Immediately a farmer files a claim that it did not get enough rainfall (or too much as the case may be)  and yield was low, it quickly pays out. This eliminates subjective bias and endless prove that low yield was related to weather. As payments are made in easy ways, farmers are spared all the troubles of insurance companies. No need to travel to town and put on ties. Just do the farming and agents will come to you and get the digitalized registration process done.

 

Good enough, they even subsidy the premium through their partners. For more about Kilimo Salama, read below :

 

Kilimo Salama is an insurance designed for Kenyan farmers so they may insure their farm inputs against drought and excess rain. The project, which is a partnership between Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture, UAP Insurance, and telecoms operator Safaricom, will offer farmers who plant on as little as one acre insurance policies to shield them from significant financial losses when drought or excess rain are expected to wreak havoc on their harvests.

 

Kilimo Salama was designed based on the learning of a pilot in Laikipia district where several hundred maize farmers insured their farm inputs against drought in the long rains season of 2009. Following the drought that season, both weather stations showed that there was a payout and all farmers were compensated depending on the extent of the drought as measured at their weather station (a 30 percent and 80 percent payout, respectively). The pilot was the first of its kind in Kenya.

 

Kilimo Salama features many elements—like the mobile phone registry and payment system and distribution through rural retailers—that are micro-insurance firsts.

 

Mobile Technology Training Academy – When World Bank Goes Into Mobility Business

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Tekedia Editors
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eMobilis Mobile Technology Academy is a training institution that focuses on mobility. It was founded in 2008 and is the first of its kind in Sub Saharan Africa. It does training for  individuals on mobile software development, as well as network infrastructure management.

 

The mission of eMobilis is to create opportunities for local talent by training them on Mobile and Wireless Cellular Technologies.

 

We have only started to scrape the surface while exploring the opportunities for growth in the Mobile Industry in Kenya. It is our goal to ensure that local talent is available and trained in order to recognize and exploit these opportunities.


eMobilis is part of the winning consortium, tasked by World Bank donor agency Infodev, with hosting the first Mobile Applications Laboratory in Africa. Announcing the winners at the September 2010 AITEC East African ICT Summit, in Nairobi, InfoDev’s lead ICT policy specialist, Dr Tim Kelly, said: “This successful consortia were selected out of 39 original applicants – nine of which were short-listed.” This is one of two labs established by the World Bank – the second lab is in South Africa, and will be run by a South African consortium comprising the Meraka Institute of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), The Innovation Hub, Innovation Lab and Ungana-Afrika.


The establishment of this lab is evidence of the increasing power of mobile to support socio-economic development. The lab will be the focal point run and used by Africans working to increase the competitiveness of innovative enterprises working in mobile content and applications. Each lab will be a platform for building the technical skills, business knowledge and personal relationships needed to transform scalable mobile solutions into thriving businesses that address social needs. Besides providing state-of-the-art equipment, the labs will also offer technical training and workshops and connect developers and entrepreneurs with potential investors, academic experts, and public sector leaders.

OK. MXit is Instant Messaging Application. Yet to Get MXit Moola in Nigeria

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Tekedia Editors
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From Wikipedia, we collect the following on MXit

 

MXitis a free instant messaging application developed by MXit Lifestyle (Pty) Ltd. in South Africa that runs on multiple mobile and computing platforms. Along with its own standard protocol, it can connect to Yahoo, ICQ, Google Talk, Facebook, AIM, or Windows Live Messenger contacts as well. MXit currently has 27 Million subscribers, making it the largest social network in Africa, with 40 000 new subscribers joining every day.

 

You better watch. This stuff is addictive and can drop your grades if you are a  student. Be warned before you sign up. Parents in South Africa are crying that kids are failing exams because of the addition this service provides. Yet, we cry the same way after Faceook. Who cares to learn? This is social media and it may not really matter to learn since you can post your homeworks in Yahoo Answers.

MXit API /SDK Revealed – Get Ready to Build on MXit Platform. Insights From Africa’s Top Mobile Chat Provider

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Tekedia Editors
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Paul Scott shares some cool insights on MXit API. For developers looking to build for MXit (one of the world’s largest mobile chat firms), read this:

 

The “API” as it turns out, is really an SDK. A Microsoft .Net C# SDK at that. There is no API (well not counting the standard XMPP “API” which we have been using for years anyway) at all, but a Windows DLL that contains an interface to the MXit currency functions (they call it Moola) and some basic messaging options. They have also introduced a simple markup language that allows some simple graphical elements to be cached client side for performance. The markup would be really useful IMO, but that seems to be secondary to MXit themselves.

 

 

Essentially the DLL is only useful to Microsoft Visual Studio coders as it uses the Net.TCP function to do the bidirectional API calls. That basically means that you cannot even hack this thing onto Mono and still use a Free Software stack to run your apps. There is a WCF service that runs on top of the API to handle the requests to handle the HTTP requests from client apps.

 

 

This could all have been achieved in a much easier way by sticking to pure old XMPP plus a basic API to handle some non-standard XMPP stanzas for the transactions etc. I do not know why they approached it in this way at all.

 

 

Basically the MXit API is Yet Another Walled Garden (YAWG) that I do not need to think about again.

 

 

For those that are interested in doing something with the “API” the approach would be:
1. They are very interested in games, so make a simple text based multiplayer game.
2. Get in real early. I suspect that the apps will quickly become saturated and lose novelty fast, so start coding immediately if you think that you may want to make money from this thing
3. Be aware that your revenue stream is based on MXit Moola, which means a Premium Rated SMS service via MXit. That means that for every Rand you charge your clients, you will get 50c

 

 

One vector that I can think of for one person to make an absolute fortune from this would be to buy the infrastructure and software and create an Open API around it for 3rd party devs to use. You will essentially become the middle middleman and create value for everyone in the world that does NOT want to fiddle with Windows DLL’s and such. You could then charge a small transaction fee on that service.

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