Roads & Chapters

Finally. nomore sweets and silly credit notes for change....

Sun, 05 May 2013 20:41:00 +0300

Finally. nomore sweets and silly credit notes for change. Concerned though about the time it takes to pay, especially if the network’s playing up like it usually does.

Was unable to use it here at Spar 5 Ave coz EcoCash (or just the POS devices here) was down

Just got this ZTE basic phone for $13. comes with $5 worth of...

Sat, 04 May 2013 11:48:11 +0300

Just got this ZTE basic phone for $13. comes with $5 worth of SMS so effectively 8 bucks with no contract! Who ever knew??

About a tech hub in Zimbabwe, Jumpstart, donor funding, entrepreneurship and... Paul Kagame

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 07:42:00 +0300

In recent months, we (Jumpstart and the team behind it) have attracted a lot of attention from NGOs, embassies and donors that want to fund a tech hub in Zimbabwe and would like us to be part of the founding team.

We have said no.

Our problem with the proposed model is that it’s primarily intended for funding “technology-driven projects to bring about social change” in Zimbabwe. I do not agree with this ofcourse because I think business and commercially viable technology-driven projects are key.

When I expressed disagreement with this, it was then proposed that we both compromise and accommodate both commercial and social projects in the proposed tech hub. “Social” partners where identified by the funders and a meeting arranged for us to meet them and agree on how we would work together. This of course didn’t work. I think mostly because we view the potential commercial impact of connectivity and tech differently. Radically so. We also view the role of external ‘social impact’ partners differently. I think they see them as a funding opportunity to finally do this tech Hub thing that’s all the craze in Africa. We see them more as an opportunity for business networking. The proposed funds can be raised locally easily and are not key to the hub. to any hub. Business networks, exchanges, mentorship, relationships, and investment (as opposed to feel good charity money) are more. They are priceless in comparison.

Social impact is just a natural consequence of commercial success. Job creation for example. And as an extra csr -> Microsoft, Google, IBM, Econet and countless others are examples. The consequence of “Social first” on the other hand is aid-dependent individuals whose chief skill is squeezing dollars out of donors through elaborate funding proposal writing and aid-gaming. Plus it does terrible things to their self-worth as individuals.

Our ‘no thanks’ response has mostly surprised our peers locally, some of who insist, “hey, just get the money”. It’s almost understandable why they suggest this; what, with the aid addiction. Just getting the money is something we would never even consider though. So, no.

The funders on the other hand have just insisted from multiple angles why being part of this initiative is progressive. They have cited examples of how they have successfully executed similar initiatives in other African countries with amazing results. By their definition, they indeed have. Still, no.

We think they are just not listening.

They have it all figured out ready to deploy, and they are going to execute as they know best. They are going to empower women using ICTs, they’ll help homosexuals be accepted, help end corruption, poverty, and if they are lucky, maybe change the government and help us choose better leaders in a better way. And these priorities, we should have too.

This has been going on for a few months and we’re actually past the back and forth and multiple angles stage. I decided to share this after reading this interview the HBR had with Rwandan president, Paul Kagame.

Kagame explains that his approach as a leader has been business and investment. He says ordinary people quickly grasp how they need each other and they value each other when they focus on value they bring to each other. He says it’s creating an awareness in society like never before and that this is helping society to move forward. He’s then asked by the interviewer “And it’s your sense that business and economic activity do that?” His response:

I would rank it number one. The rest will follow. At the end of the day we’re just human beings. You want food and you want it for your family. Plus, you really need dignity, to be able to do something on your own and benefit from it. And there’s nothing that does that better than being able to do business.

I encourage you to read the whole interview.

image via HBR

Most Startups Should be Deer Hunters

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 03:17:59 +0300

Most Startups Should be Deer Hunters:

Brilliant article on segmenting

When you start your company the very first question you need to ask yourself is which kind of customers do you want to serve. Many start-ups (and even growth firms) lack this discipline and they therefore serve customers off all sizes. This leads to suboptimal results for all.

Make sure you know what the size of customer you want to serve is, what the people in a company of that size do, the problems they have, the features that will resonate and the channels you’ll need to sell into and service that customer. Because it will vary dramatically by different segments I believe you need to pick an animal size and go for it

The Impending Rise Of Solar Power

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 08:28:13 +0300

The Impending Rise Of Solar Power:

It has always struck me how the national power company’s supply is so irregular and yet so few people in the city consider solar an alternative.

parislemon:

Christopher Mims for Quartz:

All this will encourage yet more homeowners, businesses and communities to buy solar panels as power from the grid gets more expensive. You can see where this is going: The EEI says it could become a feedback loop that eventually wrecks the whole US utility industry, or at least greatly diminishes it.

Eventually, people will only be using the grid as a backup, combining ever-cheaper solar panels with ever more affordable batteries to store the power for when the sun isn’t shining. That’s called an energy transition.

The gist is that as solar panels continue to get cheaper, more people will install and use them. This, in turn, will cause the traditional electric companies to jack up rates to offset the decreased usage (they have pay off long-term plant investments). And that, in turn, will cause more people to buy solar panels.

isthisafrica: by Zanele Mhlaba I have always enjoyed reading....

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 07:09:41 +0300

isthisafrica:

by Zanele Mhlaba

I have always enjoyed reading. At boarding school in grade six, we would have competitions to see who could read the most books in the least amount of time. Every week we were allowed to pick a book from the school’s one room library which was filled with secondhand books from the UK and America. Maybe it was because cellphones were not as widely available then, but everyone read so much. At night after lights-out, the braver ones would go into the bathroom and read there while the rest of us would hope the light streaming in from outside would be enough to help us see the words on the pages of our books. What were we reading? Well, personally I could not get enough of Nancy Drew, Sweet Valley High and the Baby Sitters Club. Even though there was never anything I could relate to, never any descriptions of places I had been to or people who looked like me, I loved those books. I could not get enough of them and I never wondered what authors in Zimbabwe were writing about or if they wrote at all. I get the feeling that if he knew me, Chinua Achebe would have scolded me for that.

I knew how important Things Fall Apart was before I ever laid eyes on it. I remember my mother mentioning Okonkwo as though he was an actual historical figure, as if he had been alive and died at some point. She is a historian, she talks about so many events and characters so this was not unusual. What made this different was that she was not alone; it seemed like everyone talked about Okonkwo and Chinua Achebe and Things Fall Apart. So, I knew they were important.

I was so excited when the announcement was made that we would be reading Things Fall Apart in our 10th grade English class. Finally I would get to see what all the fuss was about. After reading The Canterbury Tales and Beowulf, I was counting on Things Fall Apart to put me out of my misery and be worth the hype. Along with my excitement I also felt a tinge of pressure; I was the only African in the class so I knew people would expect me to have something to say because anytime Africa was mentioned, everyone would turn to me to confirm or deny whatever had just been said. My teacher wanted us to focus on themes of fate and destiny, she wanted to teach us about irony and discuss the imagery of this and that but my mind was elsewhere. When I read this book it was a literary experience like one I had never had before. I was intrigued that 45 years after the book was first publish, I could identify with people, places and lifestyles for the first time ever. All I could think about was home — I thought of my gogo in her village and wondered if she could relate to the people of Umuofia, I thought of my father who had been schooled by missionaries in his village, and I thought about my own struggle with tradition, change and assimilation in America. Things Fall Apart moved me. It was the first and only time in my primary and secondary education that an African author would be a mandatory reading assignment and it was indeed worth the hype.

Read More

Just me. Jason Njoku.: Victory has defeated me.

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 07:38:09 +0300

Just me. Jason Njoku.: Victory has defeated me.:

jasonnjoku:

Peace has cost you your strength. Victory has defeated you

The intensity of my work ethnic used to scare my then girlfriend and now wife. She would fall asleep and wake up and I was always, always at my laptop, worried about something. Terrified that someone else would happen on this…

Harare: Is It Really the Worst City on Earth?

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 07:46:46 +0200

Harare: Is It Really the Worst City on Earth?:

For a change, I don’t want to discuss politics. I don’t want to debate whether big bad Mugabe is actually an African national hero, as many on this continent believe, or some brutal dictator, as we are told relentlessly by the BBC, The Economist and virtually the entire Western establishment media.

‘Data’ about Zimbabwe is developed somewhere, to serve Western political interests, and then it is recycled, repeated by hundreds of websites all over the Internet. Old reports are not updated when the situation improves. Incorrect statistics are hardly challenged.

Refreshing outsider view of Harare

Tesla Is The New Apple

Sun, 17 Mar 2013 15:29:29 +0200

Tesla Is The New Apple:

parislemon:

Steven Johnson on the impending electric car revolution being led by Tesla:

And if that’s the case, then the automobile industry will go through exactly what the computer and software world went through with the rise of the PC, the Web, and the mobile revolutions. Smaller companies that bet heavily on the new paradigm will become dominant in an amazingly short amount of time; behemoths who cling to the old models will swiftly become afterthoughts. The EV revolution will be like Hemingway’s classic line about going broke: it will happen gradually, then all of a sudden.

Agreed. This is going to happen sooner than most people think.

[via Daring Fireball]

Startup Metrics for Pirates [Dave mcClure]

Thu, 03 Jan 2013 13:36:22 +0200

I already tweeted, liked and +d this already, but it’s important enough I had to embed it here as well. If you’re working on a web or mobile startup, please go through this presentation.

Instead of moving blindly hoping for the best, McClure teaches you how to measure meaningfully and (hopefully) monetize your traction

Startup Metrics for Pirates (SeedCamp, Sept 2009) from Dave McClure

Want to help someone? Shut up and listen!(Ernesto Sirolli)

Tue, 01 Jan 2013 10:25:00 +0200

Want to help someone? Shut up and listen!(Ernesto Sirolli):

A lot of sense in this TED talk video I found on @SirNige’s blog. The guy talks about how to help entrepreneurs succeed.

Paradigm shifting stuff

Mon, 31 Dec 2012 08:59:15 +0200

Paradigm shifting stuff:

And we need more. Lots more. Paradigm shifting stuff that has almost zero chance of succeeding. Which is ok. Because whoever tries this stuff (and fails) will certainly land on their feet, and they’ll have great stories to tell their grandchildren.

US offers African tech women Silicon Valley mentorship

Mon, 31 Dec 2012 08:40:00 +0200

US offers African tech women Silicon Valley mentorship:

I attended a program in many ways similar to this one earlier this year. Can’t say enough how much it benefits you professionally whatever you are working on. Perspective improves significantly. Networks improve a lot. So yes, I recommend this to any woman out there in tech.

The small limitation (if you let it be of course) is that you have to have a university degree. My principle is that life will always have exceptions for exceptional passion and effort, so I’d apply without one anyway :)

One of the most immediate issues that bothers me is...

Sat, 29 Dec 2012 11:16:08 +0200

One of the most immediate issues that bothers me is infrastructure. The lack of it. Adequate enough to have life and business flow better. It’s too there as a symptom it distracts from the causes and the solutions that we should focus on. The bad drinking water that pours out our taps every day. The power that goes out so often it’s really hard to not be constantly frustrated with ZESA. The bad roads, the uncollected refuse, the dysfunctional public health system, the bad mobile phone reception, the too expensive internet. It’s easy to curse out and focus on being mad about these and demand that they be fixed.

Being thrown in the midst of significantly better infrastructure earlier this year, reminded me how it’s not about infrastructure development or social amenities at all. It’s something a lot less complicated. Responsibility.

And not that we’re not responsible enough for ourselves. I think most of us. But I think the responsibility just has to stretch to those around us. Simple brother keeping. That’s the difference I could at lease notice. And it’s funny that I learnt this in the US.

Africa is supposed to be the place of Ubuntu. Of ‘being because the other is’. Where’s is it?

Is starting a tech startup just too costly for us?

Sat, 15 Dec 2012 15:51:07 +0200

Article appeared first on Techzim earlier this week.

I usually argue on the side of “lack of funding is just an excuse”. If you work hard enough, if you’re solving a real problem, if you’re passionate enough, if you think outside the box etc… But sometimes I wonder if the problem is lack of funding, or if it’s more an issue of young people having so much more to lose if they decide to take the startup route and its high risks. More to lose compared to their counterparts in, say, Europe, the US or Cape Town.

Is it that most young people have come very far to get to the relatively good jobs they have and that there’s so much extended family responsibility and expectation it becomes a really dicey issue venturing into the unknown?

For a lot of young people, not only are they trying to start a company, but they’re also the bread winners for the the extended family. To generalize a bit, this is unlike their counterparts in the west whose parents usually own a decent home and their children can use the family garage to start a startup, or validate their ideas at least.

It’s a system in which, if one blunders chasing an idea that comes to naught, it’s not just them that pay dearly for the failure. It’s their young brother in primary school for whom they pay tuition fees. It’s their parents as well who depend on the $200 he sends them every month. And even for the entrepreneur himself, that one failure could result in the city spitting him out into the midnight train back to the small town where opportunity space is even tighter. Are these realities what keep people grounded to the 8 to 5?

Faced with this, one way to approach it is to get a very good education, get a very good job and save enough money to take you (and the family) through, say, one and half years or startup uncertainty. The risk here often times is that it’s easy to get addicted to the 8 to 5 rewards especially if the company coats them with that all important company car to make you one of the first members of your extended family to ever own one. It’s an achievement a lot of friends and family will call you crazy for even thinking of leaving.

The other option is to work on the startup as hard as one can at night and dutifully report for the regular job at day and execute so good you still get promoted to get some additional ‘disposable’ income. Leave days and off days (or too-sick-to-come-to-work days) become the precious opportunity to do the day stuff for the startup like physical meetings with prospective customers etc…

There’s another group that has a different problem. It’s the unemployed group. For them the issue is actually that, even armed with a good education there are just no jobs to absorb them in the economy. Companies are closing down so the job market is shrinking. Starting their own venture becomes a means to survive as opposed to having dreams of making it big one day.

But for this group, starting their own venture is still as difficult if not more; Still relying on their parents even for the $1 bus far into town, their prospects of owning their own computer, let alone a broadband connection, are distant.

They may not even yet have a startup idea to work on that’s going to make them money. But access to resources is still important and access and access doesn’t come cheap. It is important that they get basic exposure to the tools they could use; a proper PC, a broadband connection and knowledge of development platforms and the possibilities. Of course the power to keep all these things on has clearly become a component that’s not a given as well. It’s a dull picture right? But maybe this is the picture we need to see and find solutions to before we proclaim that lack of funding is just an excuse.

I guess this is why co-working spaces (you can call it a hub, innovation centre, or whatever else you prefer) have been great enablers on the African continent. I imagine they’d have the same effect in Zimbabwe. Of course the resultant benefits won’t be apparent immediately, but slowly they enable more people to access tools, knowledge, a community of similarly venture minded folks and, hopefully, people with money that are prepared to back great ideas & teams.

Is starting a tech startup just too costly for us? How can we lower these barriers?

Not sure why but leaving Seattle and looking down at its fields...

Mon, 12 Nov 2012 05:50:57 +0200

Not sure why but leaving Seattle and looking down at its fields earlier this year, I remember thinking to myself, the world is much bigger than our petty stubbornness back home. The world is moving on without us. It’s up to us to look at where we are now, to be honest with ourselves, to wake up, to stop the nonsense and be relevant again.

Some day in the future our children will laugh at us

Tue, 06 Nov 2012 07:48:00 +0200

So the conversation goes

Spar Till Operator: so what do you want for your change?

Me: my change.

Spar Till Operator: no. we don’t have any coins for change

Me: Well, get some.

silence

Me: ok. give me some Econet airtime.

Spar Till operator: no, I don’t have any. What about sweets, gum, a pen?

Me: no.

Silence. Guy behind me in the queue is visibly getting impatient. With me.

Me: ok, the credit note then.

this:

Like hundreds of other notes before it, this one will either lose its ink before I can claim the change, get lost, or God knows what happens to the rest. It’s ridiculous how we have let this go on for 3 years now.

Some day in the future, our children will laugh at us. For our sake we need to stand up already and put a stop to this.

Casting your Silicon Valley ideas & methods aside to develop for your local market

Sat, 27 Oct 2012 15:10:00 +0200

Article appeared first on Techzim earlier this week.

Some several months ago a Zimbabwean friend invited me to check out website he was working on that’s modeled along the lines of American local business review site, Yelp. Our conversation, when we met and went through the website, quickly went into the relevance of his service to ordinary Zimbabweans. He seemed very much aware of the limited possible reach of his product, and he talked about how he so much wanted to have the product reach what he referred to as “the 80%”.

Talking further, we admitted to ourselves that as much as the penetration of the internet and internet enabled mobile phones was increasing, the majority of Zimbabweans, the ordinary Zimbabweans, that 80%, either still don’t have access or have very limited access. In its state his product had no chance of being used by these people. In fact, whether a review platform is currently relevant to the 80% even if tools to make it accessible were developed is debatable.

The problem is that if, as a founder, you’re not part of this 80%, it takes extra deliberate effort to know the 80% needs and build products that address those needs simply. Otherwise, you develop a product that Americans, Europeans and your fellow 20% locally would find very cool and usable, but a product that even they would really not use because they already use the American website you cloned.

Yesterday, here at the office, a colleague introduced the subject and pointed to an article that discusses this in a China context. The article narrates the paths of two entrepreneurs in China – one entrepreneur has been very successful addressing the needs of low income earners with applications such as mobile games that run on basic mobile phones; the other is an affluent guy who has had little success creating American style web products that basically target the 20%.

My colleague here noted examples of Asian web platforms, 51job.com and IndiaMart.com, which the typical affluent designer in emerging markets would write off as poorly designed websites. The 51job.com design is almost shocking actually. But the value of these properties tell a different story.

Locally, one could argue that the G-Tide brand and the business behind it managed to connect to the 80%. When “in the know” techies and the affluent where busy laughing at the low cost Chinese iPhone and Nokia imitations, the bulk of middle to low income Zimbabweans just didn’t care and were buying in droves. Some would even proudly admit that they knew they were buying a fake iPhone but for them, that was the closest they could get to owning one. What’s more, the fake phones played music so loud they doubled as small radios in homes. While the 20% were laughing (and broke), the smart entrepreneur was connected to the real market, and smiling quietly to the bank.

On the wider African continent, the most successful technology startup ideas have been products specifically designed to address specific emerging markets needs, and not just cool stuff or ideas copied as is from Silicon Valley. A few examples that come to mind are Prepaid mobile telephony, M-PESA, Mxit and iROKOtv.

But as my colleague at the office reiterates “it’s that cloning in itself is wrong, it’s whether you can adapt the solution and make it relevant to your market.”

Does your product real needs? Is your approach connected to the needs and cultures on the ground or are you trying to force an American or European approach to implementation?

Saw this neat piece of art at the Tourism Expo last week in...

Wed, 24 Oct 2012 20:05:00 +0200

Saw this neat piece of art at the Tourism Expo last week in Harare. Guy was selling his Gonyet for US $5,000. Worth it and more. All hand made with pieces of wire and a pair of pliers. The attention to detail is amazing!

andyswan: If it’s not worth fighting for, you’re going to...

Fri, 19 Oct 2012 06:51:02 +0200

andyswan:

If it’s not worth fighting for, you’re going to lose.

Know your core.

Fight for it.

Win.