This last month has kept me too off-kilter to get a good blog post up. However, there have been some very interesting happenings around the continent, here are the ones that caught my attention: Pivot East East Africa’s mobile startup pitching competition is just a month away. We announced the top 50 a few weeks [...]

Skoll: Entrepreneurs in a Time of Flux

“To improve is to change. To be perfect is to change often.” – Winston Churchill The theme of the 2012 Skoll World Forum is “Flux: seizing momentum, driving change”, which I think is a fantastic one. We’ve never had such upheaval in the way businesses work, in how citizens interact with government, or in how [...]

Oxford Jam: Social Impact Investing in Tech in Africa

I’m in Oxford for the Skoll World Forum on social entrepreneurship, and this afternoon I took part in an event called Oxford Jam, where I carried on a discussion with Michael Szymanski (MEST Ghana) and Corina Gardner (GSMA) focused on “investing in tech in Africa”. It was a good session, as it was very much [...]

Innovation Kills the Status Quo

This is from a blog post that I wrote for the Skoll World Forum, coming up in a couple weeks, that I titled, “Innovation Comes from the Edges“. I was recently asked, “how do you find innovators?” It’s an odd question really, one that I hadn’t thought about before, but one that is valuable to [...]

Your Chance to Speak at TED

“More than half of the speakers at TED2013 will be selected through an ambitious experiment in crowdsourcing: the TED Worldwide Auditions.” Speaking on the TED stage is hard. It’s hard to get to. It’s hard to speak from. It’s hard to stand out enough to make it to TED.com. For all of these reasons, it [...]

Quick Hits Across African Tech

What Africa’s Entrepreneurs Can Teach the World Ghanaian friend and TED Fellow Bright Simons does a piece for Harvard Business Review on African entrepreneurs, excess diversification and hyper-entrepreneurship. A quote: Then there’s the tendency toward what I initially saw as excess diversification. My think-tank colleagues and I were stunned to see how many concurrent businesses [...]

Fab Factories: Hardware Manufacturing in Africa

Across Africa there is a vibrant culture of people creating things. Hardware products. It’s rarely glamorous as our inventors and micro-entrepreneurs innovate on products due to necessity – there simply aren’t enough jobs and they need to feed their families. Regardless of the reasons why they do it, what this has created is a culture [...]

Will The Real Payment Disruptor Please Stand Up

Farhad Manjoo makes a compelling argument for why the real winners of the payments revolution are the same players we already know, the credit card companies and the banks, in his, “Don?t mess with credit: Why the future of payments is already in your pocket.” “Nearly every start-up working in payments is simply creating a [...]

The iHub in 2012: Freelancers and Presentations

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 [...]