News At Appfrica Labs April 1

It’s been a big two months for the company with a lot of rapid development and many new hires. By the end of the month we currently have seven more people than we started the previous month with, effectively doubling our staff, if only temporarily. Three operators under contract for the Question Box pilot, two new developers at Appfrica Labs, and two hires for the translation project.

Administrative Assistant Barbara Birungi has been promoted to be the Project Manager of the pilot Appfrica Labs just launched in partnership with the Grameen Foundation and Open Mind. In addition to managing the internal operations of Appfrica Labs, she will now be the project leader on this project, dubbed AQB (Applab Question Box). New responsibilities include supervising QB operators and acting as the liaison between Grameen’s agricultural experts and Question Box’s team of operators.

The Appfrica Labs Dev team lead by Moses Mugisha have completed a robust offline search engine technology for use in the AQB pilot. The technology uses open source search engines Lucene and Sphinx to search an offline database of information on any given topic. It goes where companies like Google don’t by offering highly accurate search on topics that can be very niche oriented or as broad as the user wants…completely offline. For instance, for the Grameen Agricultural pilot, several hundred hand-picked documents related to their needs were added to the database to make it highly effective at finding information related to Uganda-Agricultural topics. If the information can’t be found offline, it then goes online to search the web. With each search, the database gets smarter as it indexes previous queries.

Developer Dennis Senyonjo is near completion on an incredibly practical mobile application. The mobile device simply sends an SMS to the owner when their power is out and SMSes again when the power is back on. Simple but for anyone who’s lived in sub-Saharan Africa in the past ten years, it’s been a completely absent utility. For small business owners and professionals we think this will be invaluable as it will increase productivity and reduce needless trips too and from the office to see if the power is back. The app has been benchmarked using Nokia emulators and a physical prototype is nearly complete.

Appfrica Labs is facilitating a project for AnLoc (African Localization) and Kamusi to build up a dictionary of English terms translated into Luganda, along with their Luganda definitions. The software provides an API that allows any application developer to use the resulting terminology strings to localize their software.

We’ve also announced our Fellows program which takes the philosophy of Peace Corp and applies it to developers who want to come to Africa. It was very much inspired by the apparently defunct non-profit Geek Corp. Much like those programs, developers have to be motivated enough to come to Kampala with little assistance, but once here we will put them to work at a local wage both as a peer and mentor to our software entrepreneurs. Read more on this.

Developer Apac Manak has left the company for personal reasons, to focus on his final year of school. We wish him the best and encourage him to pursue his aspirations.