It would be ridiculous to just tweet and believe its enough.Our mothers are very important pillar of strength and on such a day even calling might not be enough, you need to something special and nice for mother.
You "need" to, in the same way an engagement ring "needs" to be diamond and cost 3x your salary. Certain things matter!
WTF? We're talking about a PHONE CALL vs a tweet for your mom not spending $20K. If you can't spare five minutes, don't bother with a tweet (unless you're in Iraq, the South Pole etc.)
Even though Africa is less homogeneous than Europe, it's roughly divided into two halves, the English speaking and the French speaking countries. I would like to believe it's still homogeneous if you look closely. I think http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mxit have managed to scale , with over 40 million users and still counting.
Why the downvotes?
Mpesa was made for a VodafoneUk subsidiary. It's not network ubiquitous(& hasnt scaled as succesfully in other vodafone subsidiaries) but makes a lot of profit for its network.
Ushahidi is OS & not-for-profit & has shown "growth".
ps: I use Mpesa regularly and I've tried Ushahidi, they both 'fill a need' but differ on scaling & revenue.
Much contrary belief, I agree with you that there is a lot of talent. These developers are very talented and intelligent; they lack the experience and exposure. Given time and the right investment, there won't be much difference with the rest of the world.
Speaking of there being a lot of talent contrary to much belief, I recall seeing a TED talk that mentioned how people in many African cultures excelled at binary arithmetic when it was introduced to them because it was actually much more similar to their mode of thinking (as evident in binary-tree patterns in their art, IIRC) than the decimal system predominant in Western culture.
As someone who grew up in southern Africa, I'd love to put some time and resources towards efforts to help the start-up scene in Africa.
Very few, at the moment - I only started thinking about it a few days ago when I saw the "AfricaHackTrip" on MeetUp.com. I would be unable to join them on that trip, but it's got me thinking about what else I might be able to contribute. Do you have any ideas?
Well, most damage(to hacker-mindedness) is done in high schools and universities, that's a place one can start with. I'm thinking our hackspaces need to have good libraries so a book donation inititave would help.
The South Africans and Kenyans have already built a strong technology scene, so really it's not far fetched. The market is already there and still pretty much open for most products. The talent is available to kick start the industry, a lot of computer science graduates lying around doing nothing. All that is left is for the government,the corporate world and other stakeholders to take advantage of this opportunity. I would also like to point out that telecommunications companies like Econet and MTN have also contributed a lot to their countries' GDP. While the drawbacks you mentioned are significant; they can be solved if everyone involved can share the same vision.
One huge disadvantage also is that many Africans don't have access or the ability to get credit cards and so it locks them out of the ability to pay for hosting and cloud services. If someone can figure out how to connect the local SMS payment infrastructures that most countries have to Amazon AWS, then there could be some serious dough gained from the developer community. I learned this the hard way when I did a presentation on deploying Python Apps to Amazon at klab.rw in Rwanda. Everyone loved it but no one could actually try it out because even for the Free Tier AWS requires a CC.
Well that's a huge disadvantage; I had to ask someone to pay for my domain. Telecommunication companies are in a position to offer such a solution. I heard Telecel,Zimbabwe has been working on such a solution .
