1. Social Venture Acquisitions
It happens in every industry, A few companies are breakout successes and everyone wants piece. In this case Clean Tech and Social Ventures ‘doing good’ will increasingly be targeted by larger corporate entities with deep pockets. Think General Motors buying Optimal Energy (the alternative energy car-maker) or Microsoft buying a group like [...]

Wow, It’s hard to believe that 2008 is coming to a close. What a year can change!? Obama won the U.S. Presidency; Zimbabwe, Somalia and Congo tragically spiraled deeper into lawlessness and a number of companies began to pay attention to Africa again. Not for it’s troubles, but for it’s market potential. Here’s a look [...]

What better measure of society is there than through the fiction it creates? In 1988 the Japanese animation feature film AKIRA was released to the world envisioning the near future of a 2019 neo-Tokyo. At the time, there was nothing like it, most animated films (especially those from Disney and Warner Brothers) targeted kids and [...]

Evolution is the natural progression of biology over time when the inherited traits of a population of organisms is passed from one generation to the next. In theory, unfavorable traits are eliminated, while only the favorable ones (traits helpful to survival) are passed on. Barring genetic mutations that occur because of sheer odds and [...]

Photo by EduTourist
The new communication is social. Tools like Twitter and Facebook represent a big portion of the way people are beginning to do business with one another. In Africa, it’s not so much important that you do these things because you’re ‘trendy’ or ‘in-the-know’, rather we need to make the world aware [...]

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 [...]

Photo by Filipe
‘If it will work in Africa, it will work anywhere.‘ That’s the new mantra among African tech enthusiasts thanks to Erik Hersman. With that in mind I’ve been brainstorming about ideas that I think would work exceptionally well in Africa. Since I’m only one man with way too much on his [...]

In the post “Can Freeconomics Work in Africa” I debated whether or not ‘freeconomic’ business models could flourish in Africa as they have for some companies like Google, 37Signals and Ubuntu in the U.S. and Europe. Recently a new debate was started when Andrew Keen of internetevolution.com boldly challenged, “The hungry and cold unemployed [...]

Every now and then someone likes to come along and make the distorted statement that the 3D virtual world SecondLife has a per capita GDP that rivals emerging countries. Let’s take a look at that statement and see if it actually holds up.

According to the CIA World Factbook, as of 20 October 2008, [...]

When many people around the globe hear expressions like ‘Africa for Africans’ and ‘Pan-Africanism’, they tend to associate it with the more militant movements of decades past. But there’s a new meme forming that I like to call Neo Pan-Africanism, the idea that Africa’s peoples have to take a more active role in the [...]