There’s a full page ad in this month’s WIRED Magazine for a media group in North Africa called TwoFour54.com an integrated, state-of-the-art environment that supports and inspires content creators to flourish in the Middle East and North Africa. Intrigued, I did some research to find out more about the company. I didn’t find [...]

dotSUB wants to crowdsource the translation of video, from any language, to any language.

dotSUB is a browser based tool enabling subtitling of videos on the web into and from any language. There is nothing to buy and nothing to download. Recognizing the potential of global communication powered by the Internet, the founders of dotSUB created [...]

The Fader, Trace, Urb, Spin, NME…all these magazines are closely connected to the indie music, fashion and art scenes of the west. It’s only right that Africa would begin producing it’s own lifestyle mags to expose the subcultures of it’s various countries to the world.
Popafricana is to the African continent, what those aforementioned magazines [...]

Although the title of this post may sound like the title of a new show on the Sci-Fi Channel, it’s actually about Bart Weetjens’s group Apopo and the legions of rats he uses to save lives. Okay it still sounds a little bit fantastic, let me explain….
Bart Weetjens was selected to be an Ashoka [...]

I had the pleasure of meeting Temi Kolawole at Barcamp Africa in Mountain View last week. He recently launched a web start-up called Sturvs which could be described in short as ‘Nigeria’s answer to Digg.com’.
The word “sturvs” is a nigerian slang for “stuff”. So basically this is just a place for you to view and [...]

Being back in the Valley revealed several trends of the tech community when it comes to their motivations for social change initiatives. The title of this post lays them all out from my perspective…

Niche-driven
Companies that are trying to segment out a very vertical slice of the market or technology so as to differentiate their [...]

NodeSix is a very successful Ugandan webhosting company that has gone on to offer a number of value added services to its customers; including domain registration and parking, file hosting, and free-email. More recently they’ve started deploying a number of web applications through their ‘Sandbox’, an area for beta-testing new applications: a blog community, [...]

Crowd-sourcing news and citizen journalism outlets are on the rise. A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of chatting with Turi Munthe, CEO of the ‘citizen wire’ start-up Demotix about the future of reporting and social media’s place in journalism…
Appfrica: What is Demotix and how did it come about?
Turi Menthe: Remember all those [...]

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 [...]

Earlier this month I started hearing about a new social media site that would aim to crowd-source the opinions and views of the Ugandan public. ThisIsUganda.org (as of yet not up), aims to be the hub of citizen journalism in the country. I had the pleasure of talking to founders/editors Siena Sofia Magdalena Anstis, [...]