This weekend the iHub Advisory Board met with the managers (Tosh and Jessica) to discuss the future direction of the space and what our focus should be for the coming year. The meeting was facilitated by my friend Peter Durand of Alphachimp Studios, who is in town as a part of the PopTech Lab. The [...]

Pivot East: East Africa?s Startup Pitching Competition

Mark your calendars, buy your tickets, submit your applications! We’re ramping up to the Pivot East pitching competition, where the best startups in East Africa come to show what they have, pitch their startup to investors, media and the judges for a chance to win the prize money. Pivot East will be held at Ole [...]

Infographic: Mobile and Internet in Tanzania

The iHub Research team has worked up an infographic on Tanzania to match their past ones on Kenya and Uganda. We’re looking at 50% mobile phone penetration in Tanzania, with about 22 million connected, where Vodacom has the largest market share at 42%. The crazy stat is online: In Tanzania, only 2.5% of the population [...]

20th Century Parallels

At the beginning, they shared an excitement about technology, an optimism for the future, and even a certain clumsiness in getting down to business. While that quote sounds a lot like our current state of affairs in the technology space, it’s not. It’s from a good story on how the movie and film industry came [...]

The ?Mobile Web? as text and voice

The mobile web revolution has already spread around the world. The phase of it that we live in is where we see the internet hitting critical mass based on the availability of web connectivity on mobile devices. Data is widely available, and the costs continue to decrease at an alarming rate. We’re seeing the disruption [...]

Google Plays Dirty in Kenya

There is a damning post out by Stefan Magdalinski on some unsavory business practices being done by Google Kenya against Mocality. Mocality designed a fantastic crowdsourcing tool to create their mobile web-based business listings directory back in 2010. There is undeniable proof that Google’s team here has been systematically calling businesses in the Mocality business [...]

Kikuyu Grass and the Macro / Micro Problem

Kikuyu Grass comes from East Africa, and is heavily used in sporting fields and schools around the world due to it’s hardy nature and ability to repair from damage quickly. It’s also tough, aggressive and spreads like a weed due to how it sends out long shoots. If you know this grass, you aren’t surprised [...]

What?s on Tap for 2012

2011 was a good year – a great one even. Here’s why: iHub reaches one year, clocks over 6,000 members and more than 100 events. Companies were founded, business got funded and many companies found CTOs and employees through the network. (What makes the iHub work?) The m:lab (East Africa’s mobile lab) was founded, with [...]

Our Voices Revolutionize the World

[The following is from my Institute of Medicine Talk on communications technologies for violence prevention in Washington DC today. A good background paper to get started on the context of tech in violence prevention is found in this PDF. ] Something has changed over the last decade. New technology is lowering barriers. For everyone, and [...]

Thoughts on Africa?s Mobile Operators and Disruption

Generally speaking, mobile network operators (MNOs) were highly disruptive in the 90′s, but have continued to decrease in this over the last decade. Operators are no longer the offensive, attacking force of yesteryear, instead they’re putting up barriers and defensive walls trying to protect what they have and hide. Instead, the disruption comes from the [...]