What a Week! The whole team wants to fall over with all the product delivery. In this week’s report, more about BRCK and Crowdmap Public Beta. Plus, we’ve got a Deployment of the Week from Pakistan and a google hangout all about monitoring Dangerous Speech with the Umati Research.
[Last week I had a security problem with WordPress, which is fixed now, my apologies for any inconvenience] Pivot East, our East African pitching competition, will be held in Uganda for the first time this year. Get your applications in, and plan your travel for June 25-26th in Kampala.
In the last couple weeks I’ve had the opportunity to be in Nigeria (Maker Faire Africa), followed by South Africa (AfricaCom). Along with Kenya, these countries represent the biggest technology countries on the continent. They are the regional tech hub cities at this point in Africa.
I was recently approached by a Kenyan journalist who was bemoaning the fact there was so much activity in the local tech scene, but that so many weren’t making a lot of money on their startups yet.
Ushahidi was born out of a flawed election. The post election violence in 2008 following the fractious Kenyan election season of 2007 highlighted the need for a tool that allowed ordinary citizens to report on incidences that would otherwise have been under reported or completed unreported.
AfriLabs is a network of the tech hubs and labs across Africa. The labs serve as an accessible platform for bringing together technologists, investors, tech companies and hackers in their city. Each lab shares a focus on entrepreneurs, Web and mobile-phone programmers and designers.
