Tags, Time and Location
On Friday I had a long conversation with Noam Cohen from the New York Times about Ushahidi and Twitter. He was doing some homework for an article he was writing on the increased value that geolocation data can add to the massive streams of data coming out of tools like Twitter, called “Refining the Twitter Explosion with GPS“. A lot of our discussion was centered around location, especially since he was thinking of the Ft. Hood shootings and the value of location in determining useful information from the Twitter stream during

An African Tech List on Twitter
A lot of people are on Twitter these days. So many, it seems that you can be overwhelmed by the number of people and it’s hard to find the right people to follow. To help with that, I’ve created a my own Twitter list that follows African Tech twitterers. My plan is to keep this list pared down to only those who put out a good number of tweets regarding technology in Africa. I’ll be the biased curator, and hopefully it’ll be useful to others. This means that people will get dropped, and others added, from time-to-time. Don’t be offended if you’re not on it, it’s not personal, it’s just that I have to keep it small to be useful

Trusted Intermediaries
If you’ve run into me in the last couple months you’ll likely have heard me talking a lot about the need, power and abilities of trusted intermediaries. What is a trusted intermediary? It’s someone who sits between two parties, entities or ideas that don’t naturally trust each other and provides a bridge. Do you trust this brid

PesaPal: Kenyan Web & Mobile Payments
Start local, then Africa, then the world. That’s the mantra app developers in Africa should be repeating to themselves as they build their game changing tools. That’s what Agosta Liko and his team at Verviant are doing with their new web and mobile payment platform: PesaPal (goes live on Friday, Oct 2). PesaPal is an eCommerce platform focused on Kenya. It’s built to work s

The FLAP Bag Project at Pop!Tech
If you follow AfriGadget, you’ll know that this summer I spent some time testing some new bags made by combining flexible solar panels from the people at Portable Light with the top-notch bags made by Timbuk2 in Ghana and Kenya over the summer. The whole initiative was put together by Pop!Tech, and it’s called the FLAP (Flexible Light and Power) bag.