I write a lot about tech companies in Africa and it began to seem like a real waste that I had to repeat a lot of information for the sake of new readers and people unfamiliar with certain organizations. For instance there’s at been at least five separate occasions where I’ve mentioned the Kenyan start-up Ushahidi and twice as many references to Google East Africa on Appfrica.net. It’d be a lot easier for me if there were a way to re-syndicate basic information. So this past week I toyed around with some code and came up with Afridex, an aggregator for businesses, start-ups and organizations operating in Africa.

Afridex is an exercise in data portability, information sharing, data mining and aggregation. Right now it’s at version 0.1.1 so it’s very basic and too early to really call it a platform, but I thought I’d put it online as I continue to develop the engine while working out bugs and kinks as I go.

Afridex will be hosted both locally and abroad. I wanted to make sure that this was a tool for Africans but therein lies a problem. Hosting local to Africa, unless it’s in South Africa, means that content can be delivered faster to locals but it also means the inverse is true for people abroad for which using Afridex would be rather slow. So there are two databases that will exist independent from each other, updated once a week manually until I can figure out a better way.

Like Crunchbase for Africa

I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that I wasn’t 100% inspired by Mark McGranaghan’s work on TechCrunch’s Crunchbase.com. Although the backend of Afridex isn’t nearly as robust as Crunchbase (which was built in Ruby On Rails), I’ve got a lot of plans to improve it over the next few weeks. Crunchbase is a business database of startups and companies in the U.S., mostly all related to technology and Silicon Valley. With Afridex I’m taking the same general thought and applying it in a way that I feel benefits business professionals, start-ups, NGOs, non-profits and government institutions operating in Africa.

Microformats

Being a follower of all things in the semantic web, I’ve embraced microformats for easy parsing from capable applications. This includes an hCard for each contact and microformat markup for things like names, addresses, phone numbers and e-mails for parsing by other applications.

Aggregation and Persistent Search

Because many businesses in Africa are just beginning to understand what it means to have and manage an online presence, Afridex has been set-up to persistently search the web for mentions of a brand name or company. Right now you can get a sample of this by navigating to any company profile on Afridex and looking at the Persistent Search area. Currently, the live version is just querying Yahoo! but I’m working on a module that will query many different search engines and social networks at once allowing for monitoring of your brand across the web. For anyone concerned about reputation, PR and brand management (*ahem* MTN, Warid, Zain) you might consider.

Data Portability

The information in Afridex isn’t tied to our application. Instead we encourage you to embed it on your blogs, social network profiles and web pages using the embed feature. Unlike most applications that use embed features Afridex doesn’t force you to run javascript, it exports standards compliant xHTML meaning it can literally be pasted anywhere from a Webpage to an e-mail.

Comments and Feedback

Afridex also allows companies to build conversations around their profiles. Consumers and representatives of the company alike can use the engine to make statements, respond to questions and inquire about new products or services. Representatives from each business can apply to moderate their own profiles and thus if a conversation starts to go the wrong way or become unproductive, they can moderate accordingly.

Who’s it For

News organizations that want to quickly cite information related to company (like CEO, staff, countries of operation and country of origin). Independent bloggers and journalists for those same reasons and so that they can quickly embed information in their websites and articles. Researchers who need to know who’s operating in a given area. NGOs and Nonprofits who are looking for potential partner groups. Businesses to quickly share information about their company. And perhaps students looking for employers.

What It’s Not

It’s not a social network, it’s not a job board and it’s not a classifieds board. It’s what it claims to be, an index of businesses related to the African continent.

Development Wiki

Afridex is built with Wordpress at the core (but not the entire) back-end which means large parts of it are open source. This means we can leverage the community help us make it bigger, better and more stable over time. However, this isn’t a typical hosted wordpress installation, large parts of it require that the core of Wordpress itself (like functions.php) is hacked, optimized and in some cases improved. I chose Wordpress because PHP is one of the few web programming languages that is taught extensively in Africa and I want the members of Appfrica’s Incubation Team of students to be able to participate in the project’s continued development. The development wiki tracks changes and areas where we need help.

Example of Live Data from Afridex.net

Below you’ll see an example of what the portable data from Afridex looks like. The code is standard compliant xHTML and can be embedded anywhere on the web.

Appfrica

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URL – http://appfrica.org
Email – j.gosier@appfrica.org

Appfrica.org facilitates, mentors and incubates entrepreneurs in software in East Africa. Their goal is to offer a physical space with a solid internet connection, servers, software and computers that will allow students and recent graduates a place to develop their ideas in a constructive environment outside of school.

Information Provided by the Afridex