The close of the year is often a time for reflection, for individuals and companies alike. For Appfrica it’s no exception as we profile the … Read More
This week we’ll be distributing all the talks recorded last week at TEDxKampala. What was TEDxKampala? On November 23rd, 2009, Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor … Read More
People often only see Africa from one perspective, here’s another. The above infographic details some of the happenings over the past few years in regards … Read More
Can institutions [be they international organizations, companies, universities, foundations or governments] enable innovation in local technology industries? We explored this question on a rainy … Read More
One of the most rewarding aspects of running this company has been our International Fellows Program which invites developers from all over the world to Uganda to work alongside our staff as peers. The following post was written by one of our recent Fellows, Oliver Christopher Kaigwa Haas (we called him Ollie) who now works at Frog Design.
This morning Erik Hersman and I had a conversation about all the innovation spaces turning up across Africa. We agree that it’s incredibly exciting to see, and that it opens up the opportunity for many exciting possibilities. For instance, what if people with memberships at a hub in Ghana, could drop by a space in Kenya or Uganda?
It’s a solid idea that encourages cross-border business and collaboration, and one that Appfrica and iHub support. This would also offer groups in one country a way to deploy applications and test ideas in another, cheaply and in an environment that’s conductive to experimentation.
Erik and I have already agreed to explore this between our companies, to let young techies travel on a sort of an innovator passport. I’m curious as to how young entrepreneurs out there feel about this. Do you see it adding value to your efforts?
Guy Consolmagno fears that the future of celestial mining will sink developing countries even deeper into poverty…
Can you put a price tag on an asteroid? Sure you can. We know of roughly 750 S-class asteroids with a diameter of at least 1 kilometer. Many of these pass as near to the Earth as our own moon — close enough to reach via spacecraft. As a typical asteroid is 10 percent metal, Brother Consolmango estimates that such an asteroid would contain 1 billion metric tons of iron. That’s as much as we mine out of the globe every year, a supply worth trillions and trillions of dollars. Subtract the tens of billions it would cost to exploit such a rock, and you still have a serious profit on your hands.
But is this ethical? Brother Consolmango asked us to ponder whether such an asteroid harvest would drastically disrupt the economies of resource-exporting nations. What would happen to most of Africa? What would it do to the cost of iron ore? And what about refining and manufacturing? If we spend the money to harvest iron in space, why not outsource the other related processes as well? Imagine a future in which solar-powered robots toil in lunar or orbital factories.
“On the one hand, it’s great,” Brother Consolmango said. “You’ve now taken all of this dirty industry off the surface of the Earth. On the other hand, you’ve put a whole lot of people out of work. If you’ve got a robot doing the mining, why not another robot doing the manufacturing? And now you’ve just put all of China out of work. What are the ethical implications of this kind of major shift?”
The One Million Bones project is an art installation to get the world to reflect on the human tragedy of genocide. The image above shows one of the manufactured bones which are biodegradable. The project was co-founded by Senior TED Fellow Naomi Natale.
The Open Source Embargo
Or “Separate but Equal hits the Open Source Community”. I wrote a blog post a while back about location based profiling on the web. Many websites … Read More