With regards to Africa, Ghana has been a “pioneer” in so many ways- from being the first African country to gain independence from colonial powers, to being the first African country south of the Sahara to host the “first” African-American president of the United States of America.

Needless to say that Barack Obama visit to Ghana sparked an unprecedented frenzy in the country.  The air tight security which characterized Friday night and Saturday in the capital- Accra and (arguably) Ghana’s most famous city- Capecoast was a sight to behold, as commercial activity in both cities literally came to a halt as a result of severe road blocks.

The excitement was however not limited to the ground alone. According to the Google Africa Blog, searches for “Obama” increased by 150% in Ghana over the week preceeding the historic visit. By the “D-day”, the figures were up by 350%

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The Tour

In a post by Estelle Akofio-Sowah, country manager for Ghana, on friday July 12- Google announced that they had teamed up with the Ghana Ministry of Toursim to create a “special site” for President Obama’s visit. The Obama visits Ghana website shows “places that President Obama and the First Lady will visit during their trip to Ghana”.

Using Google’s geo products, the site includes a pictorial tour in Google Earth of key landmarks along the historical slave route in Ghana, such as Gwollu in North West Ghana, where people created a refuge from the infamous slave raids. The tour also visits Salaga Market, a major slave market where wells and cemeteries have now been turned into shrines, and the Slave River at Assin Manso, where the slaves had their last bath prior to leaving Africa’s shores. The tour ends at Cape Coast Castle in the Central Region, now a UNESCO World Heritage monument, with the final Doorway of No Return.

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The maps also showed details of Obama’s schedule in the country;
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The Message

The climax of President Obama’s visit (at least to me) was his address to the Parliament of Ghana. The import of the president’s message, amongst other things, being the fact that “Africa’s future is up to Africans“. It would be completely ludicrous to think otherwise.

Growth and democracy is one thing, but until that growth is directly linked to the development of the communities whose welfare the “democratic” process is meant to serve, it remains an excercise in futility.

These steps are about more than growth numbers on a balance sheet. They’re about whether a young person with an education can get a job that supports a family; a farmer can transfer their goods to market; an entrepreneur with a good idea can start a business. It’s about the dignity of work; it’s about the opportunity that must exist for Africans in the 21st century.

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Mobile telecommunications giant- MTN has announced the launch of
its 3.5 G service in Ghana.

The service, which uses high speed downlink packet access (HSDPA) technology, was announced at an impressive ceremony at the Ghana College of Physicians and Surgeons in Accra.

Speaking at the launching themed
“Go Beyond, Experience our better life today”, Chief Executive Officer, MTN Ghana, Brett Goshen said, “We are very pleased with the significant progress we have made in building an extensive 3.5G network and making it available to a large number of our valued customers”.

“We are launching our 3.5G network with more than 7 times the number of 3.5G base stations than the next competitor. In addition, we are launching with the widest and best connection in Accra, Tema and Kumasi and will be expanding aggressively to all major cities in the months to come.”

MTN currently has the largest market share in the Ghanaian mobile communications industry, and just as chief marketing officer, George Kojo Andah said in an earlier announcement in February;

this new 3.5G service is meant to enhance the overall network experience for its customers, and provide more efficient systems for the transmission of existing voice, text and data services.

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The development will pitch MTN against rival Zain, which launched its 3.5 service in December 2008 and both operators will also soon face competition from Globacom, which bought a 3G licence for Ghana in mid-2008, and is expected to start services soon.

The HSDPA based 3G service, offers several advantages over the existing circuit-switched techniques used for carrying mobile voice, and utilizes a number of techniques in parallel to increase the efficiency and reduce the latency.

This allows higher call volumes and support for new and exciting multimedia data applications such as broadband access to the internet, emailing, mobile TV, video telephony and video conferencing from a mobile phone, PDA, or laptop.

The company also plans to host a carnival and demo fair in Kumasi, on saturday, 9th may, which is meant to further expose its customers to the service.

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When Craig Newmark started his “email list for friends and co-workers about events going on in the San Francisco Bay Area“ in 1995, he probably never thought that his hobby would grow to become one of the “busiest sites on the internet, helping people with basic day-to-day needs such as finding a job, an apartment and a date, all within a culture of trust.“

The Craiglist Network- a centralized network of online communities featuring free online classified advertisements and forums on various topics, has local classifieds and forums for more than 550 cities in over 50 countries worldwide – community moderated, and largely free.

Of the 50 countries featured on Craiglist however, only 2 are from the continent of Africa- none from West-Africa !!

For a continent the size of Africa- the 2nd largest in the world, having an estimated population of 975,330,899 and 54,171,500 Internet Users, you can’t help but ask why?

Nigeria, for instance, has an estimated population of 140 million- 10 million of whom are Internet users according to Internet World Stats;

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Nigeria’s Very Own Craiglist

Oluwaseun Osewa, the founder of Nairaland.com (arguably Nigeria’s most used Forum), recently stepped in to fill the vacuum (if you will) and provide a service which caters for “a need that Craigslist hasn’t seen”, with the introduction of Nairalist.com

Nairalist.com is a free local classified advertising service that supports the listing of personals, vacancies, cars, flats, products for sale & services in any of the 37 states of Nigeria. The site was built from the scratch using Python by Seun Osewa (the Nairaland Boss) and was launched on the 7th of January and has been featured once on Hacker News.

The site features categories which include Jobs, Dating, Housing, Vehicles, For Sale, and Services, and had 1660 non-spam adverts and about 290,000  page views as at February 7 2009.

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One of the first things you notice about the site is the speed at which pages load. The minimal graphics no doubt had to a lot to do with this- a definitely well thought-out move, seeing as majority of Nigerians rely on Dial-Up connections for Internet access. Nairalist now only needs to gather as much momentum as possible, and the sky would be the limit.

With regards to increasing traffic to the site, Mr. Osewa’s Nairalist would surely rely heavily on his Nairaland Forum which currently has a membership of 292, 262, and a purported average traffic of 10,000 unique visitors monthly- a feat he would no doubt be hoping to replicate with Nairalist.

The site has already seen an influx of listings ranging from personals to job openings, and the future definitely looks bright for Nairalist, especially as it targets a country where majority of the populace  love “new toys”.

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I made an astounding discovery today. I never knew it was possible to send Postal letters through the Internet.

What! Postal letters? Yeah postal letters. You know;

• write your letter,
• insert it into an envelope,
• rush to the nearest post office,
• buy some postage stamps and drop the letter in a post box.

That kind.

I was glancing through this blog I recently fell in love with, when I came across a post titled;

“Send Postal Letters Anywhere in the World Through Internet – Email to Snail Mail”

A title like that would no doubt spark up interest so naturally, I read through the post and what I found left me astonished. Though (technically speaking)  it obviously isn’t possible to send Postal Letter through the Internet, there are a couple of online services which allow you do just that.

The postal service may not be as important as it used to with the advent of Email, but there are still a couple of reasons why you may want to use the service. This is particularly true with regards to our beloved “Mama Africa”. Let’s recount a couple shall we:

1. Some of your relatives live in remote villages where they don’t have computers let alone access to Internet.
2. Your grandparents know computers (or not) but they’ll probably feel more happy if you could send them emails and photographs in paper form that they can read in the lawn outside.
3. You are trying to reach someone who already gets a few hundred email messages per day. Your email may get lost in the clutter but if you take the snail mail approach, chances are high that he or she will at least read your message if not respond to it.

Whatever the case may be, should you need to send a Postal Letter, and would like to avoid the hassle, there are web based letter printing and dispatching services that “work more or less the same way”.

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You send then an email or upload the document as Word or PDF on to their servers, make the payment online and they’ll send the letter via regular postal mail to the specified physical address.

I have taken the liberty of compiling a list of some web based letter printing and dispatching service companies, according to the nature of their service;

Country-Specific

These companies provide their services to clients within a specific country;

• Via Post (for the UK)
• Pixel Letter (for the European Union)
• Snail Mail Me (for Canada), and
• India Post (for residents of India)

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Non Country-Specific

• Postal Methods
• Mail a Letter
• Postful
• EZGram
• L-Mail
• Click 2 Mail
• Email 2 Postal
• PC 2 Paper

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tags

Friday, 30th January marked the end of a revolution. Like most unsuccessful revolutions, this one lasted for only a short while, and was abruptly ended by a much more powerful force.

Julian McIntyre tried to make it as an investment banker, but fell in love with Africa instead. He worked at Deutsche Bank in his early twenties and, in his words, quickly came to hate it, leaving at 25 when “I got my first bonus”.

The Briton, who had developed a great affection for Africa while travelling, hooked up with a friend, Peter Gbedemah, to set up a telecoms business, providing infrastructure to mobile-phone companies south of the Sahara.

Eight years later, Mr McIntyre’s company is now GTV, a pan-African pay-TV company. The telecoms business, Gateway Communications, was sold in the summer to Vodacom in South Africa for $700 million (£474.8 million). GTV is what is left – a pay-TV operator aimed at a continent where pay-TV has barely existed, a “test case for African business”, as Mr McIntyre, 33, puts it……….

=> A brief chronological account of the company, as published by Times Online.

The rise of GTV started a Pay-TV revolution in Africa, rekindling interest in Paid TV, as many an average person could now watch their favourite satellite TV programs at low costs. In June 2007 for instance, the company offered a one month’s FREE subscription to “all who join the GTV revolution” – enabling access to programming every day in July without paying a cent.

The GTV Pay-TV revolution enjoyed widespread support from the populace, as it provided “premium international programming not just to a few people but to literally thousands of people who have never before been able to access to pay-TV.”

This perhaps led to the suggestions that MultiChoice DSTV’s dominance on the continent had finally come to an end, more so when results from a study conducted by Balancing Act- a London-based consultancy and research firm, indicated that;

“consumer demand for GTV and its services has resulted in his company becoming Africa’s fastest growing pay-television service.”

The study also reported that GTV took “five out of every seven new subscribers” who chose satellite TV in Africa over the past nine months.

Sadly, this was not to be the case. The GTV revolution, was abruptly ended by a force which attained global enormousness in 2008- as it succumbed to the global economic crisis. The company became the most recent casualty of the global recession.

According to a Press Statement issued by Gateway Broadcast Services- the suppliers of the GTV service to subscribers across Africa;

“The current financial and global crisis has severely interrupted the company’s ability to secure further funding for the continued operation of the business.”

“Increased instability in global markets interrupted our ability to secure funding on an acceptable timescale and have left us no choice but to cease operations,”

“We realise the negative impact this has had on our loyal customers, creditors and staff, all of who have believed in GTV and the revolution in pay TV it had created. We have tried every possible step to keep the company going but we are all the unfortunate victims of the current global economic crisis.”

The collapse of the company will no doubt have devastating effects on Pay-TV viewers across the African continent, many of whom relished the new opportunity GTV presented them, in terms of International TV programmes, not to mention staff of the company-

Permanent employees lost their jobs instantly, not to mention the hundreds of dealers and business partners, thousands of subscribers and the tens of thousands of English Premiership viewers who will miss their favourite weekend sit-outs.

This is indeed an unfortunate end for a company whose Africa-wide GTV service had “an estimated 100,000 subscribers across Africa and has over the last two years invested a total of $200 million and created jobs and competition in 22 markets”.

“Marketing is fundamental to the growth and development of any business, regardless of its size, nature, financial strength, location, or anything else for that matter”
(it’s fast becoming a cliche, but it’s true nonetheless.)

Though the fundamental principles of marketing remain the same, the approach to marketing has and always will be the underlying factor that sets apart the successful business from the unsuccessful ones. True, most businesses understand the need for marketing, and many allocate the required amount of resources to the propagation of their products and services through many channels- some effective, others not as effective, and some, well …….

Internet Marketing for one, has become extremely popular, with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) often topping the agenda in most Internet Marketing campaigns- the rationale behind it being to get into the Golden “top 10” search results of a Search Engine’s SERP. E-mail Marketing is also high on the agenda, I mean, you simply;

1) Prepare your HTML Email template
2) Compile a comprehensive list of Email Addresses you wish to mail to
3) Create your Email or E-Newsletter (Obviously)
4) Feed the Email or E-Newsletter into a Mass Email Software

AND ………… BLAST OFF!!!

Yep! That’s just about it. Or is it?

Whilst it may be easy to go according to structured, laid down marketing principles and methodologies, it is also extremely easy to lose track of the obvious;

Your entire Marketing Campaign was originally targeted at
“Individuals”, not the Search Engines.

Meaning- these individuals form the core of your target audience, and whilst it may be prudent to pursue the fine art of SEO and all the other E-Marketing techniques, it is however important to Remember Who You Really are Dealing With.

Links, optimized tags, PPC campaigns and the like may bring the much needed traffic to your website, and even place you in the top 10 results of Google’s SERP, but just as Google’s Matt Cutts said “last year” (it’s fun saying that);

“SEOs are starting to embrace the fact that they are marketers. It’s a broader spectrum. You have to think about how you build buzz, how do you get loyal customers, how do you optimize your ROI. All those different things and that can include how do I make good videos, do I have a book, things like that.“

“…. the smart SEOs are not just necessarily looking at the rankings. They are looking at conversion, they are looking at their server log. It’s great if you’re ranking for a phrase but unless that leads to sales that doesn’t help you very much.“

Similarly, with regards to E-mail Marketing, sending an email or calling someone up might be more convenient, but it’s also less personal — and therefore less effective. Words alone cannot always communicate what you want, your facial expression and body language often contribute to help your cause and help you reach your marketing goal.

There is also the issue of practicability- what assurance do you have that your E-mails won’t just end up in a Spam folder, and even if they do make it to the “Inbox”, what are the chances of them getting read, especially if they are unsolicited?

This is particularly true for most African countries, where most businesses don’t even have email addresses, and 90% of those who do, either do not monitor their mail boxes, leading to them being closed after a while, or deliberately post invalid addresses. It is extremely common to get E-mail bounce rates of up to 85% in E-mail campaigns (and that’s no lie)- all resulting from invalid E-mail addresses.

As such, you cannot and should not play down the role of physical marketing, and you should also pay serious attention to localized forms of advertising/marketing such as the radio, Television, NewsPapers, etc. Localization is also a very important aspect of marketing and branding.

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Problems affecting the development and use of Information Technology in West Africa have been a major topic of discussion and concern for eons, encompassing  discourse from various IT experts the world over, and even the average individual.

Over the years, in most parts of West Africa, the development of Information Technology has been hampered, largely due to inadequate or insufficient Telecommunication Infrastructure, and even where these infrastructure have existed, the service charges are beyond the reach of the average person.

Pascal Zachary, in his article titled Ghana’s Digital Dilemma- The lesson from West Africa: good computers and fast modems don’t matter if you can’t get a dial tone and the power keeps going out- which was first published in July 2002, writes;

“In the West African country of Ghana, one of the world’s poorest places, the busy signal is a reminder of the unfulfilled promise of the Information Age. Making a telephone call here requires persistence. Roughly half don’t go through because of system failures, but that’s only the start of Ghana’s telephone woes. The country has a mere 240,000 phone lines-for a population of 20 million spread across an area the size of Britain. Moreover, telephone bills are inaccurate, overcharges common, and the installation of a new line can cost a business more than $1,000, the rough equivalent of the annual office rent. Lines are frequently stolen, sometimes with the connivance of employees of Ghana Telecom, the national carrier. Phones go dead, and remain unrepaired, for months. Some businesses hire staff for the chief purpose of dialing numbers until calls go through.

The spread of mobile phones has only worsened telephone gridlock. There are more mobile phones in Ghana than wired ones-about 300,000, as of March-but the network is clogged because of a shortage of cell stations. Customers are bedeviled by what operators term “dropped calls.” Besides, calls are costly. The price of a one-minute wireless conversation, under the most common plan, is ten times higher than it would be in the United States. “The situation has come to a point of crisis,” says Kwesi Nduom, the country’s minister for economic planning. Ghana’s telecom mess limits the utility of the Internet, raises the costs of information services-and suggests that the country is mired in the Stone Age, technologically. But the situation here, as in much of sub-Saharan Africa, defies such straightforward conclusions. There is another side to the country’s technological profile, a burgeoning homegrown technology culture that explodes assumptions about the inherent backwardness of Africa and the nature of the so-called digital divide.”

Mr. Zachary, who visited Ghana on several occasions between 2000 – 2002, first as a Foreign correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, and later as a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Graduate School of Journalism,  goes on to talk about how Information Technology had changed the landscape in different ways, saying;

These problems however, are not peculiar to Ghana, but cut across the entire West African sub region, and a lot of effort has been made to tackle the issues highlighted, and nip the growing IT concerns, resulting in several meetings, workshops, and summits- most notably; the Africa ICT summits and the iPAD 2008. Unsurprisingly, these discussions are most often geared at tackling the same problem- Infrastructure. For instance, the most recent (7th) Africa ICT summit, held in Ghana, was on the theme: “Strategies for low cost broadband access in Africa.“ :

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Is IT Infrastructure Really West Africa’s Problem?

Perhaps not! To reiterate, the period between 2002 and 2008 has seen significant improvement in IT infrastructure in Ghana for instance, but not as much improvement in the attachment and use of these infrastructure.  Could the problem lie elsewhere? Just maybe! A school of thought has it that;

providing all the “tech” infrastructure without properly engaging the populace, would not only be- “a complete waste of resources, but also plain ludicrous”.

In most parts of the sub-region, the concept of being IT savvy appears to be completely misunderstood, as basic (sometimes Theoretical) knowledge of common Office applications such as Microsoft® Word, Excel, PowerPoint,  and (maybe) Publisher or Access would make one an “IT guru”. Extremely worrying also, is the Curricula of the educational system of most West African states as regards IT- where the course structure of Degree awarding, IT programs such  as Computer Science (Bsc.) for instance, is a far cry from what exists in most other parts of the world.

The concept of E-Learning also, which was widely promoted over the last couple of years, now seems to be mere Rhetoric, and at best a figure of speech- this coming at a time where the Full Sail University has just introduced an Online Masters Degree awarding program in “Internet Marketing”.

More so, a previous post “Top Paying IT Jobs For 2009″, quickly woke me to the fact that apart from AJAX developers and maybe Enterprise Architects, most of the other “hot” IT jobs for 2009 probably (I could be wrong) do not even exist in West Africa.

In a part of the world where innovation is not encouraged and (brilliant) ideas are “killed” before they even hatch- as almost everything is played to the gallery- it is difficult to envisage a period where the IT focus would have gone beyond just understanding and appreciating the concepts, to actually competing at a global level, but the belief remains that we would get there some day.

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This just in, Sony Ericsson’s has just released the new W715- the mobile device which is “all — and only — about Vodafone”.

The new and “exclusive to Vodafone” slider boasts a 3.2 megapixel camera, Bluetooth, aGPS, WiFi, DLNA certified, 120MB memory, quad-band GSM, 900 / 2100 HSDPA, ………

News of its release has been making the rounds all over the net, with several blogs, online news sources, etc. posting numerous articles commenting on the new and unique features of the Walkman.

Anyway, the most interesting (not to mention amusing-) aspects of its features, from an African perspective that is- is its purported ability to;

“enable quick access to its navigation services through among others a dedicated key.”

You may be wondering why this is so “amusing”.

Ever heard of Google Maps? Sure you have! “Play” with this (useful) navigation tool for a while, and you would begin to see the amusement in all of this. Try navigating to Ghana for instance at a zoom level of 25, and see what it tells you.

Hint: Click the link- Ghana’s Google map, and “navigate” to the bottom of the page for quick access.

According to the IT News Africa website;

Aside from turn-by-turn pedestrian or driving navigation available using Vodafone Find&Go, customers will be able to find their nearest restaurants, hotels or shopping centers all within a few clicks on their new mobile phone, the company said. (Company here referring to Sony Ericsson of course).

It beats the imagination how finding any kind of useful information on the Walkman would be possible in some parts of Africa, where even getting street names and postal codes is a “tug-of-war”.

Anyway, not to discourage any potential shoppers, the w715 Walkman is still good for many other things. Quoting IT News Africa again;

“On the top of premium music experience with crystal clear sound, the W715 includes popular Walkman features such as the music recognition application TrackID, SensMe for matching your mood to the music, and Shake Control to change tracks with the flick of a wrist. All this provides for a premium Music experience, fully integrated with Vodafone Music, allowing easy access to single and album downloads,” said Sony Ericsson.

In an earlier post, I commented on “Cloud Computing” and its expected changes to the way we …. errr ….. compute? As I began to try to imagine what the future of computing would be like, especially in Africa- specifically West Africa- one troubling issue that comes to mind is the low rate of Internet usage within the sub region.

As I pondered further, I was quickly reminded of an article I had written for Darrel Technologies, on web trends in Ghana, where I had placed the estimated number of Internet users (users here refering to people with “steady” internet access at the time) in the country at about 609,800 in Sept. 2007. I also went on on to talk about the increase in actual web surfers.

The reality of the whole issue quickly dawned on me- the number of “Internet Users” in Ghana is actually less than 5% of the country’s 22 million plus population.

According to the Ghana News Agency- Mr. Eric Akumiah, General Secretary, Internet Society, Ghana places Internet usage in the country at a mere 2.7%. Mr Akumiah seemed to blame the issue on “some policies (Government no doubt)”, and called on government to recognize the importance of a multi-stakeholder model of decision making especially on Internet Policy Development.

He went on further to say;

“To achieve an increased usage there was the need to ensure that human capacities in that area were preserved, including the ability to connect, innovate, communicate and share information.”

“We also encourage the government to create maximum benefit through networking to draw on the insight and expertise of all stakeholders, especially those from the internet technical community, to conceive and implement an internet-friendly policy framework”

With all due respect to Mr Akumiah, I totally disagree.

It’s all well and good to talk about the issues raised, but as good as Government policies and the likes may sound, i think there are more pertinent issues as to the spate of low Internet Usage in Ghana, and this i believe, cuts across the entire West African sub region.

Just so I have something else to blog about later, I will mention only one, and the most relevant of all in my opinion- Affordablility

Simply put, Internet Access is still too expensive in Ghana and West Africa as a whole. Most people would rather use the Internet cafe’s than subscribe to any of the ISP’s, solely becuase of the cost of Internet access.

Ghana Telecom’s Broadband 4U service which is amongst the cheapest in the country costs within the range of $45 – $280 per month for speeds of between 128Kbps to 1Mbps. Technically speaking, this really isn’t Broadband, but DSL => which costs at most $12.99 per month, in the US, with speeds of up to 1.2Mbps.

Actual Broadband in some countries costs no more than $45 per month, and
provides the user with speeds of up to 10Mbps.

You may want to Read This- if you haven’t already done so- to fully understand the following;

With the next generation of Operating Systems based on Cloud Computing, and in light of all the issues mentioned above, I can’t help but ask the question- Is Africa really ready to “Take To The Clouds“?