Ushahidi Liberia began this year with a new mission-critical: set up a well-resourced technology lab for local partners to use the Ushahidi platform and other information sharing tools. We’ve been on the ground since June 2010, so you would think by now we have everything in place for the Ushahidi platform to work. And in part, we do: we set up customized instances for 14 partner organization
Last week at the Rutberg Summit in London – an event dominated by senior mobile industry executives – one of the more interesting topics for me was differentiation. How will the new Microsoft/Nokia relationship impact the mobile OS ecosystem?
I owe a lot to Nigeria. Throughout 2002 I lived in Calabar where I helped run a primate sanctuary. I made many friends and gained a real understanding of many of the problems facing the country. Five years later, in 2007, a loose coalition of Nigerian NGOs took our FrontlineSMS platform and monitored their elections with it, a breakthrough moment for us and for them.
I’ve just spent two days at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona – courtesy of the GSMA – an event described as the “must-attend annual gathering of the mobile industry”. An estimated 50,000 senior mobile leaders from 200 countries converge on Barcelona for four days to talk, sell and promote all-things mobile.
It goes without saying that we rely upon location pretty heavily here at Ushahidi. SwiftRiver’s mandate is to help users process and validate data. For Ushahidi users, applying geospatial context to content that doesn’t carry it (like SMS, news articles, blog posts, in some cases Tweets) has proved tedious, with questionable results.
