Pinboard (guardiantech)

Asha to Asha >> Stratechery

guardiantech — 2013-05-18T19:45:34+00:00

Ben Thompson:

Asha… has worse specifications than a cheap Android phone, and a much worse app selection. Thus it has been largely ignored by a tech press that considers little more than features and price.
However, finding a market is about finding a new axis of differentiation. In the case of low-end smartphones, are there things that matter beyond price and performance?
Consider again where Asha will be sold: India, Africa, Latin America – all have markets where mobile phones are the primary form of computing, as well as areas without consistent electricity. In such markets, nothing matters more than battery life.

And Asha has that in spades. In fact, the Asha range has sold more phones in the past three quarters than Windows Phone. (Also, bonus point for the title of the post.)

The problem with Wikipedia >> cartesian product

guardiantech — 2013-05-13T05:28:29+00:00

Adrian McMenamin:

Wikipedia has a real blind spot when it comes to covering to Africa – there are more articles on “Middle Earth” than many African states and there are perhaps 10 times as many wikipedia edits (in any language) originated in the United Kingdom than in all of Africa.
And that’s not the only problem – 91% of Wikipedia editors are male and, of course, that is contributing to Wikipedia’s growing reputation as the home of the same sort of maladjusted and poor socialised individuals who inhabit various parts of the “open source” software world.

That's not the rudest thing he says, either.

Mobile phone data redraws bus routes in Africa >> BBC News

guardiantech — 2013-05-02T17:17:46+00:00

Researchers at IBM have redrawn the bus routes of Ivory Coast's largest city using mobile phone data.
The research was completed as part of the Data for Development competition run by Orange which released 2.5bn call records from 5m mobile phone users in Ivory Coast.
The anonymised data is the largest of its kind ever released.
Such data could be used by urban planners for new infrastructure projects, said IBM.

Discovery: they could reduce travel times for people by 10%. If they could have integrated it with bus timetables..

Witch killing and the rule of law in Africa >> Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies

guardiantech — 2012-10-18T15:20:57+00:00

Meanwhile, outside the filter bubble:

The killing of persons accused of witchcraft continues to take place in different parts of Africa despite the existence of enabling laws and human rights mechanisms.
Occasionally there are arrests, prosecutions and conviction of witch killers. But that has not brought this murderous campaign to an end. Alleged witches in Africa are at risk of being attacked, tortured or lynched with impunity by mobs. This regional calamity continues to spread.

The details given are truly scary.

Google’s African affair: an internet giant puts its money where its mouth is >> memeburn

guardiantech — 2012-10-12T14:30:46+00:00

Among other initiatives:

Not wanting to leave the “dumb phone” owners out in the cold, earlier this year Google launched GMail SMS, a service that lets you send and receive emails as SMSs. Previously Gmail users were only able to access the service via a PC or a smartphone. So it made sense for the search giant to pick Ghana, Nigeria and Kenya as the countries where it would launch the service. Clever Google — it’s just introduced itself to a huge group of mobile-only people it would previously have been irrelevant to.

Android tablets also make up 49% of the (very small) tablet sales there; the iPad is 46%.

Google in Africa: It’s a hit >> The Economist

guardiantech — 2012-05-15T20:26:02+00:00

Faster downloading speeds have helped make Google’s YouTube video-viewing more popular. Young urban Africans organise YouTube parties. The company is also trying to help African governments digitise information and make it freely available to their citizens. Many rulings in the higher courts of Ghana, for instance, are going online.
Yet critics complain that Google is buying up enormous amounts of virgin digital land in Africa at virtually no cost. Within a couple of decades, without the regulatory oversight of the African Union or African governments, they say, Africa’s internet life will be almost entirely in hock to the Google giant. Even the company’s decision to go slow on seeking profits from Africa by offering cheap deals has been attacked by African would-be rivals, which say that such tactics are only extending Google’s unfair advantage.

Africa's mobile economic revolution >> The Observer

guardiantech — 2011-07-24T21:30:56+00:00

Killian Fox: "Africa has experienced an incredible boom in mobile phone use over the past decade. In 1998, there were fewer than four million mobiles on the continent. Today, there are more than 500m. In Uganda alone, 10 million people, or about 30% of the population, own a mobile phone, and that number is growing rapidly every year. For Ugandans, these ubiquitous devices are more than just a handy way of communicating on the fly: they are a way of life.
"It may seem unlikely, given its track record in technological development, but Africa is at the centre of a mobile revolution. In the west, we have been adapting mobile phones to be more like our computers.. In Africa, where a billion people use only 4% of the world's electricity, many cannot afford to charge a computer, let alone buy one. This has led phone users and developers to be more resourceful, and African mobiles are being used to do things that the developed world is only now beginning to pick up on."

Africa's cascade of Internet censorship >> Al Jazeera English

guardiantech — 2011-05-13T07:44:18+00:00

"Despite much attention paid to Egypt and Libya's Internet shutdowns, Tunisia's pervasive Internet filtering, and Morocco's arrests of bloggers, little attention has been given to Internet censorship issues throughout the rest of the African continent. Events in recent weeks, however, have brought the region's online troubles into sharp focus."