This Week in Appfrica [Nov 2 - 8, 2008]

^{“This Week in Appfrica” is a weekly digest highlighting articles and stories from the previous week.
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This week was incredible for many reasons. The United States decisively elected Barrack Obama as their next president. The Web 2.0 Summit also kicked off this week and featured a keynote by old school social entrepreneur Al Gore who recently joined Twitter.

Editorials

20 Ideas for Social Entrepreneurs [Part 2]
In the first half of this article I shared a few ideas for social ventures in emerging economies. Some of them I’m working on, some of them I’m not but regardless I don’t think it should stop others from trying. You’ll notice that some of these ideas don’t have examples because I’m not currently aware of any but as I find them in practice I’ll revise both posts. Here’s ten more ideas for responsible fortune hunting in developing countries…

Where are the African Designers [Part 2]
A few months a go I wrote a post that questioned where the art movement of Africa existed and who was leading it. I covered the landscape of mainly contemporary African designers like typographer Saki Mafundikwa, photographer Simon Njami and fashion designer/writer G. Kofi Annan. I decided to follow up on this because I overlooked quite a few people…

News

Open Source Leading African IT Boom
Last week marked the beginning of I-week in Accra, Ghana which drew government officials, businesses owners, academia, developers and venture capitalists from all over the world; people interested in the countries new focus on IT.

Africans Break Records Googling Obama
Africans are very interested in the new President of the United States.

Disparity in Major U.S. Cities Rivals Africa
ome major U.S. cities are now as unequal as those in Africa, according to a new UN report…

Ancestral DNA Split Almost Lead to Two Human Races
Researchers compiled a “family tree” of different mitochondrial DNA groupings found in Africa. A major split occurred near the root of the tree as early as 150,000 years ago.

State of the African Blogoshpere
Statistics from Afrigator reveal some interesting facts about African bloggers…

Reviews

VoxOx: Unified Messaging
VoxOx is a unified communication application that combines your Phone, video conferencing, Instant Messaging, Text Messaging, Social Networking Accounts, your email and file sharing services in one place. In other words it’s like Skype + Xoopit with a side order of Trillian.

Feedalizr: Lifestreaming on the Desktop
Feedalizer is an Adobe Air desktop lifestreaming application built by MIH Swat in South Africa. It’s interesting because of the way it currently integrates with Twitter but it also features support for Facebook, Jaiku and Flickr. However, Feedalizr has found most if it’s popularity because of it’s integration with Friendfeed.

From the Archives

The State of eCommerce in Africa
There’s a really interesting conversation brewing over at Google’s Africa community that’s all about the state of ecommerce (or lack thereof) in Africa.

Campala2008 Day 1 Recap
Recap of Barcamp Kampala in Uganda

Links to Appfrica

Startups Nigeria examines why Nigeria’s been left out of the VC space.

Barcamp Africa has finally finished uploading videos from the days events.