The Popularity of Programming Languages in Africa

The Next 2 Billion: China-Africa Relations

The Costs of Doing Business in Africa

Appfricast 18 – A Chat with Tim Berners-Lee
Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web visits Kampala to discuss the history of the web as well as the future of the semantic web, the mobile web, and Africa’s opportunities. Recorded at TEDxKampala on Nov 23, 2009. Download or Stream the Podcast – MP3 | Subscribe | iTunes

Population of the Dead
How many people have ever lived? While doing research about populations for my last piece, I began to wonder just how many people had ever walked the face of the earth. The articles I found [here and here] were intriguing so I decided to visualize them as well. Link to the high-res.

Infostate of Africa
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 to infrastructure improvement and capacity building in Africa, paritcularly in the area of the internet and cost. The sources are various reports from the International Monetary Fund, InternetWorldStats, the Millennium Development Goals, research papers, various websites, executive market research and more; compiling some fascinating facts about the continent’s ‘infostate’ (trends in information technology and communication).

Typekit For Arabophones: Arabic Fonts When You Want Them
Angolphone (and speakers of languages with similar alphabets) have many tools available to work with type on the web. As design becomes more sophistocated, designers need better and better tools to manage fonts online. TypeKit, for example, is a tool that will allow designers to use embeded professional fonts without requiring the end-user to download new fonts, however, the foundries and designers currently working on the project do not have plans to include non-Western fonts. The lack of Arabic fonts available for Windows, Apple, and Linux systems has long frustrated arabophone web designers, especially as they see their anglopphon

This Ain’t a Phone, It’s An Arms Race
It goes without saying that mobile is exciting business these days across Africa. Chris Andrews writes…. If you want a picture of explosive growth in mobile communications, look to Africa. A report from The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) has found that between 2003 and 2008, mobile subscriptions surged from 54 million to almost 350 million; or a 550% increase in five years. In 2008, the report found, Gabon, Seychelles, a