By 2015, 30% of businesses will not own any IT hardware as they choose to shift their operations to the cloud. That is a telling prediction coming from industry experts and it serves to reveal that Cloud is actually advancing faster than we think it is. Africa is not being left behind in this new wave of computing with quite a few cloud operators already offering services on the continent. The present is that companies and individuals alike are learning more and more about the cloud every day. The set-up costs for cloud services are still high and the procedures are still a bit murky as we wade through a swamp of SLA technicalities and decent but not quite seamless migrations processes in the journey towards standard protocols and a new best-practices standard. The result is an expensive price tag to the end user (enterprises or individuals depending on who you may be dealing with) for the services and a lot of confusion regarding the state of the cloud, it’s true relevance to progress and its role in our and the future of ICT as a whole.

Innovation:

In Africa innovation is fast becoming as much of a culture as the native traditions it is famous for. The rate at which new technological content is being generated is staggering and this is a great thing for the future of African cloud. The best thing about the cloud is that it is relatively new (as a public concept that is – the idea and the technology have been around for quite a while) and like all new things the cloud needs content and value to relate it to the user and no one is better at that than African developers and innovators (If you need proof just refer to the list of winners of recent international applications development contests).  What innovators such as myself are developing platforms which will make work easier for us and others like us in the future. In 3 years developing for cloud platforms like ionacloud will be huge. The general idea is to enable ideas to be turned into reality much quicker and at a lower cost than ever before. This will empower people and drive even more innovation.

Data Safety & Security:

Operators will have to separate the definitions between Data safety and Data security. Understanding the difference between the two will be crucial since it will allow for the development of separate protocols to deal with each. This will play a huge role in convincing the public that their data is actually ‘safe’. Data safety will be classified as the guarantee against data loss (Key word being data LOSS) through corruption, theft or storage hardware damage/malfunction. Data security on the other hand will be classified as referring to the guarantee against unauthorized access to the data (key words here being UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS). In data security the focus is on restricting access to user data by unauthorized persons but in data safety the focus is on ensuring there actually is something to be accessed by these persons (and to protect) in the first place. As public education on Cloud goes on and better protocols are created by the industry as a whole security will get better and this will help drive adoption by both enterprises and the general public.

Ease of cloud integration

I said at East Africa Com last month that the real measure of success for Cloud operators in the future will be the effective creation of what a lay man might call ‘instant cloud’. The process of joining and adopting cloud services is at present lengthy (if you’re to do it well) and extremely complicated (i.e. to the lay man on the street who has never thought of clouds as anything other than rain precedents or instant traffic jam generators).  There are SLAs to read through, multiple privacy policies, not to mention the process of actual migration where all the hardware-stored data is transferred into the cloud followed by a crash-course training exercise of sorts about the new dos & don’ts of cloud life. The checklist is simply far too long for anyone who’s not generally interested in IT to ever explore on their own. And this is the problem. In order to make something second nature it needs to be completely simple and basic not just in the purpose it is serving but also in terms of execution. Complicated actions are far harder to indoctrinate and often seem unappealing or as an unnecessary workload to the average person and without making it attractive to them you will never achieve the level of popularity you wish to achieve. In the future cloud operators will create these ‘instant cloud’ services allowing the general public to plug into the cloud with as little effort/disruption on their part as possible.

Adoption:

Courtesy of the above, the rate of cloud adoption in Africa will see a steep rise in the next 5 years. The first will work because it will create jobs and vested interest for developers in the success of Cloud which will drive them to push it even further and once you have mouths voluntarily talking about you on the street, in pubs and on coffee-breaks in the office then you’re on your way to the top. This is still Africa after all and here, nothing beats a good old conversation. You can pay for all the Google adverts you want but at the end of the day commercial success will belong to the guy whose name keeps popping up at the marketplace.

Post by @the_kageni_mind

Kageni Wilson (@the_kageni_mind) is an Innovator, Writer & Tech entrepreneur. He is the Founder & CEO of ionacloud (a free-to-use Personal Cloud Computer and virtual PC environment available at www.ionacloud.com). He lives and works in Nairobi, Kenya & is an avid Cloud and Africa 2.0 evangelist. You can reach him via twitter or email: wil@ionacloud.com

Investing in Africa

Ambushing Wall Street and selling Africa over coffee-break

It’s the year 2012. If you happen to find yourself in New York’s financial district at some point, go to any random Wall Street coffee shop at around 10:30 a.m. You’re bound to spot a group of well dressed money men. Some will be speaking into cell phones, some will be tapping away at their ipads, some will be reading the paper, some will be in meetings, others will be having a chat with old friends. The posy of three to five men in their fifties is the table you want to go for. You can always tell if it’s a meeting or a regular coffee-break based on the atmosphere and their manner of talking. If they’re simply having a cup of coffee feel free to introduce yourself and ask to take a moment of their time. They’ll ask you what you’re selling. Say you’re selling Konza Technology City to investment managers (or whatever it is you choose really. The point of this article is that you can use this approach for pretty much anything).

“It’s not my job. It’s just something I do for fun over coffee-break.”

They’ll ask you what the hell that is and you’ll basically be in. Explain then bring up in casual conversation the topic of Africa as a potential mega-market for technology and you may be surprised at the level of passionate skepticism that remark will spawn. Debate will flame up and a verbal hailstorm of comparative statistical terms and figures will be rained upon you, some of them either skewed or outdated but most actually true. And because of it you may very well be left with no leg to stand on let alone defend ‘the dark continent’ to these moguls. But at the end of it all, say this:

“If you’re in the right industry, lack of development is not a problem. It’s an opportunity. When the English bumped into North America in the 17th Century they didn’t scoff at the lack of infrastructure and head back home to their paved streets and gas-lit cities. They stayed and built what was to become the largest economy on earth (a position it would retain for over a century). To the prudent investor, lack and scarcity are merely alternative words for ‘growth potential’. In today’s world development on all fronts is a fundamental need and if you can fulfill that need then you’re in business. If you’re in business then you’re making money and in business that is all that matters. Now in this case you’re coming in at the rocky ground floor to build the tower and what you realize is that things can only get better from this point forward. Land there with a prospectus in hand and you find out there’s nowhere on the planet that foreign investment is more welcome. Yes, the first few quarters will be rough and the shareholders back home may or may not lynch you at the AGMs but jump to year 3 when you have adapted to the systems, learned to play ball with the governments, done the sweating and laid the brickwork, studied the market, chosen a niche and created a loyal consumer base –all before your competition has even touched down at the airport- and all of a sudden, it doesn’t seem so bad. Your hard work combined with the new environment and its unique set of challenges has given rise to a burst of innovation meaning you probably have a few new products, the revenue is flowing in from sources no one even knew existed before and the same shareholders  are now smiling at you on their way to cashing dividend checks.”

There’ll be a pensive look on their faces. Keep going.

“Success in hard times depends on vision, guts and the ability to make the best of a bad situation. You see, it’s all about perspective – the sinking of the Titanic was a disaster of unimaginable proportions to the people onboard but it was a miracle for the lobsters in the ship’s kitchen. In 2008, global finance crashed and has been sinking ever since. All the businesses on board the unsinkable ship suddenly had to fend for themselves. The privileged few had life-boats and were found alive by the rescue boats; but almost all the others either froze to death in the water while trying to swim to shore or are washed up in remote islands living in caves and trying to recover. The lobsters however, are thriving on the sea bed beneath them feeding, growing and multiplying. The question is give a choice, which of the two would you prefer to be?”

It won’t necessarily change their minds by any standard but it will get some chuckles which means they may let you hang around longer if only to challenge your assumptions (never underestimate the power of a good metaphor).  The chuckles aside, you will have made your point. It will get them thinking and for the simple reason that it is all 100% true …which is all well and good but in the present -as they shall tell you- the challenges are already very steep for people in their position. Almost too steep to take on any new ones which is also 100% true. In the current state of global financial crisis, most companies are finding their bottom line challenged by low consumer spending caused by rising inflation and plummeting incomes. Some market segments are worse hit than others with ‘essential goods & services’ (basic needs providers) managing to stay afloat by increasing prices while non-essential goods like leisure & luxury items take hit after hit even with shaved prices. The ripple effect means these companies can no longer afford to pay, leading to lay-offs which in turn lead to less money in the economy, translating to a further drop in sales since the unemployed can’t afford to go shopping anymore. It’s a vicious cycle and the worst part is that there is no definite end in sight. So far, the occasional light at the end of the tunnel has only turned out to be an oncoming train instead of an exit and the future is as uncertain as ever. Recovery from a depression usually means that most people are not living, merely surviving. The truth is that the general economic climate has people everywhere tightening their belts and the presiding thought pattern among consumers is ‘If I don’t need it to survive, then I’m not wasting money on it’ which in is hard to argue with. Just try convincing someone with credit card bills, a late mortgage, health insurance on the verge of being cancelled and unpaid college tuition for his/her kids to buy a vacation package or ‘invest’ in a new car. You’ll see what I mean. They know all this. It’s probably what they were complaining about before you interrupted the conversation so don’t waste time with it. Pick it up from there.

“If you look around, you’ll find that the most successful recoveries are being done not by companies struggling to regain the lost market, but by those daring to expand into new markets –in the case of tech companies, the mother of all new markets is Africa. Over a billion people, market-ready with trillions of dollars in GDP, literacy rates on the rise, embracing technology with the highest mobile penetration growth rate in the world with 65% of them (and counting) already owning mobile phones and only 15% of whom are direct internet users but over 65% of whom indirectly rely on the internet in one way or another every day. Interest exists, little indigenous competition (unlike in Asia) and massive space for expansion. And yet that is not the golden egg that Africa has to offer. The real X factor is in the minds of the innovators. They’re the real driving force behind the change that is going on and for the first time multinational corporations around the world are realizing the true value of this resource. The thing about Africa which makes it unique in the world is that ICT is not all you can do when it comes to ICT. Africans have developed this amazing ability to make mobile phones do these interesting and amazing things that no one had thought of before. They apply them to sectors of life that are industries apart and what’s more, do it elegantly.”

Rhetoric is good. It show’s vision. But you want to balance it out with realism and practicality.

“You have the money… Granted it’s not as much as it used to be or as easy to come by but instead of spending all of it on blowers to desperately fan a fire that may or may not die, why don’t you set aside some for matches and buy into the possibility of building another fire on the other side of the cave? That way if the first fire does go out, you’ll still have a place to huddle and keep warm after. More importantly, -if you stay warm and hence alive- you will still have the ability to re-light the first fire at some later point if you so wish. Diversification is the name of the game and this is where the gold rush is headed. The smart money arrives early so they can be the ones to set the rate for late arrivals. I know that conditions in Africa haven’t always been the most condusive but all that is changing – for real this time. Government is getting on board, legislation is on paper not in the pipeline, task forces are hard at work, tech imports are being zero-rated, professionals are training and re-orienting education, the skilled labor pool is growing, incentives are being waved around to woo investors, the population is embracing and integrating technology into a way of life… in other words, it’s all coming together. Slowly but surely. “

It’s obvious what reforms will do in the long term so they will ask you about the other stuff and what to expect in the short term.

“In 5 short years technology cities the likes of which you cannot imagine are going to start sprouting from the African savannah. Startups and multinational corporations will suddenly be neighbors and then you will see what African ingenuity in the right environment can really do. It won’t take long to get your attention. When you eventually go to visit you will land on a new runway, be driven on new roads to completely new hotels or apartment buildings where you will stay because of their proximity to the offices in the new business parks. You will notice that everyone has a mobile phone and you will witness people around you paying for shopping and cab rides with absolutely no cash and no plastic. It is on day two when you start to walk around and see what you can do to get in on the action that you will realize you have competitors you didn’t even know about heavily invested in the destination you’re about to recommend for data outsourcing. Then you will remember this conversation and kick yourself as you sit in your hotel room explaining the situation to your board back home via an internet connection facilitated by your competition.”

It’s a bit guerilla but it will do the job. You now have their attention. Hit them with the main summary. You’re talking to investment fund managers and at the end of the day it’s all about the numbers so give them some –time estimates, no cash amounts. You want them to go investigate for details themselves.

“Take Konza. It’s this billion dollar Tech city designed around an international business outsourcing center. They’re building through public and private investor buy in. If you get in early you could get your pick at pretty much anything but what you really want is to own a few buildings in the new ICT business parks. Renting the hottest new office space to multinationals will prove very profitable not to mention the long term advantages of a presence in East Africa. Place is growing rapidly right now, economy’s on the mend, HUGE entrepreneurship culture, regionalization is going on, lots of corporations migrating there, ICT is exploding… definitely the place to be. They’re talking functionality in 5 years, full establishment in 7 and if you play your cards right, full ROI (Return on Investment) in 10 – 12 depending on the scale of your investment. I’ve looked at the literature. It’s pretty awesome stuff. You guys should check it out.”

Write down the website on a piece of paper and slide it across the table to them. Do NOT have it on a card and DO NOT just happen to have a brochure with you. They’ll look at it and given there aren’t cards for each of them to take with them their professional mind will memorize it just in case it turns out to be useful information. People value information more when they imagine they have come across purely by chance and might loose it just as easily. In Wall Street, rumors at lunch have made and lost just as many billions as full days of office-work. And that’s it. You’re done. Don’t do any more pitching. Answer questions if they have any –just don’t get drawn into the details. Refer them to the website for any more info and once that’s sorted out, bring up something completely unrelated but happy. Like economic recovery and Wall Street being in the green again. This will probably eventually steer the conversation to politics and the election. Time for you to make your leave. Don’t sit in that chair over 25 minutes. They may or may not leave with you and they may or may not ask you for your card but that’s not too important (you won’t ask for theirs –this was just coffee with a bunch of random strangers- but if they give it be sure to accept. It’s a compliment.)

In all likelihood none of them will visit the website that day or the next but the seed of the idea has been planted and it will grow on its own. Let it be. If they gave you cards, don’t call to ask about it. Not for a least a month. Over the next few days all of them will suddenly begin noticing the word Africa popping off a page full of words and out of these one will start paying attention to News reports waiting for it to show up. Next time he has a bad day in the Middle East because Iran is acting up and the Saudi’s lost a pipeline pushing oil up to $130 a barrel and he finds out over lunch that China is investing dollar for dollar more in East Africa than the U.S. and all of Europe combined, the investment manager will remember your conversation. They’re not idiots so obviously there’s something there. He will put a research assistant on the region and check out the website you gave them. A hundred dollars says he likes what he sees but that’s promotional material. That’s what it’s supposed to do. Market the project. No real decisions are ever made on marketing but first impressions count. They’re what will keep him visualizing possibilities while research checks out the project. When the report eventually lands on his desk 2 days later and confirms what you said, he will call a board meeting by the end of the month (end of the week if there’s rumors of a competitor sniffing around the same project) and table it for discussion. At the meeting he will struggle to remember what you said to convince him and regurgitate as much of the phrasing as he can. If the board passes his proposal two hours later he will sit at his desk and a few minutes later make a call. Somewhere in Africa, a project manager’s phone will ring and on the other end will be an interested potential investor. Convincing them and seeing the deal through is someone else’s job. Your mission will have been accomplished the moment that call is made and by now, you’ll probably be 10 coffee-breaks down the line.

 Post by @the_kageni_mind

Kageni Wilson (@the_kageni_mind) is an Innovator, Writer & Tech entrepreneur. He is the Founder & CEO of ionacloud (a free-to-use Personal Cloud Computer and virtual PC environment available at www.ionacloud.com). He lives and works in Nairobi, Kenya & is an avid Cloud and Africa 2.0 evangelist. You can reach him via twitter or email: wil@ionacloud.com

Africa: The new mecca for mobile

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Africa has for the past few centuries been commonly referred to as ‘the dark continent’ for multiple reasons ranging from the literal patch of mostly darkness that it is from space at night to the color of its indigenous people. The main reason it received this label however was one utilizing the word ‘dark’ not in a literal manner but as a euphemism for primitive and backward. Unenlightened if you will. It has been for a long time the least technologically developed continent –perhaps with the exception of the polar ice caps. And yet this wasn’t always the case. Three millenniums ago this was the home of one of the greatest, most technologically advanced ancient civilizations in human history. Ancient Egyptians were at the technological fore-front of humanity. They mechanized their lives and built incredible structures using simple machines to carry out complicated processes. Structures that to this day stand as wonders of the world and tributes to human ingenuity (in this case, African ingenuity). So what happened? How did the African continent come from the greatness that was Ancient Egypt to ‘the dark continent’? A subject for another day but knowing that it did is enough for the purposes of this text.

McKinsey estimates Africa’s gross domestic product at about US $2.6 trillion, with US $1.4 in consumer spending. Africa’s population growth and urbanization rates are among the highest in the world and these are the statistics generating demand for innovative new ways to handle the problems they raise.

Ten years ago, Africa realized it had a desperate need for communication. However, this being Africa they couldn’t just settle for any system. They needed one that could seep into the very grassroots of its remote environments. Landlines and fax machines would work for offices and homes but what about out in the villages? Where there was no power in the houses or in the case of nomadic tribes no steady houses to even speak of? Necessity is the mother of invention and where there is a need, there is a solution. The answer was simple. Cell phones. And yet since the cell phones were being made by outsiders Africans had to do even more to adapt them specifically to their unique environment with its very specific set of challenges and needs. This led to finely customized solutions mainly on the digital front. Mobile software platforms emerged and suddenly there were developers coming out of Africa but these developers weren’t making the regular stuff. They were doing strange things with the code. Attempting to make it do things no one had really thought of before. They were using it to solve fundamental problems that lay at the heart of life on their continent. Soon, they were mass-tracking and mapping real-time events and banking the unbanked with a new independent banking system built entirely around mobile phones. All first class innovations from third world innovators.

The irony here was that people in first world countries would one day demand exactly the same thing not because they were faced with any of the challenges that led to their creation but because the fundamental need was the same. Freedom, mobility and adaptability. And so begun the leap. In the mid to late 80s when Europe and North America were under Microsoft’s siege to “put a computer on every desk” most of Africa was still using pen and paper for everything. Most Africans never bought a desktop computer. Quite a few bought laptops. On the other hand they are now buying smart phones and tablets in droves. As indicated by the authors of the paper titled “Information Technology in Africa: A Proactive Approach”, African countries have bypassed several stages in the use of ICTs. On the technology front, Africans have accelerated development by skipping less efficient technologies and moving directly to more advanced ones. If you look at it on the basis of who has spent the least money in the last decade and yet still has the best hardware then it would be the African who bought an iPad 2 after the price drop in February 2012 and not the American executive who has bought everything at every stage because unlike the African they could afford to. Yes, they were left out and fell back during the desktop era but they started catching up during the laptop age and now they are truly coming into their element on the mobile arena –which thankfully is now the only place where it actually counts.

A Cisco study predicts that by 2015, more than 5.6 billion personal devices will be connected to mobile networks, and there will also be 1.5 billion machine-to-machine nodes (nearly the equivalent of one mobile connection for every person in the world). Networking giant Cisco predicts an exponential growth in mobile data traffic in Africa. The Middle East and Africa are expected to experience the largest regional growth, with an expected 129 percent compound annual growth rate projected in the Cisco Visual Networking Index (VNI) Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast for 2010 to 2015. According to the Strategy Director at Cisco Internet Business Solutions Group Mr. Reshaad Sha, consumers and business users continue to demonstrate a healthy demand for mobile data services. The fact that global mobile data traffic increased 2.6-fold from 2009 to 2010, nearly tripling for the third year in a row, confirms the strength of the mobile Internet. The seemingly endless bevy of new mobile devices, combined with greater mobile broadband access, more content, and applications of all types (especially video) are the key catalysts driving this remarkable growth and Africa is right up there.

According to industry estimates, there are more than 500 million (half a billion) mobile phone subscribers in Africa now, up from 246 million in 2008. In 2000, the number of mobile phones first exceeded that of fixed telephones. In 2008, imports of data enabled phones for the first time exceeded that of non-data enabled phones in many African markets. In 2009, the undersea cables hit East and Southern Africa in a big way. In 2010, mobile operators became serious about data availability and cost packaging for everyday Africans. 2011 brought a new type of data-enabled mobile device. The tablet. The four biggest mobile phone markets in Africa are Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya, and Ghana. You will notice that the top 3 have already risen to prominence as ICT technology and innovations hubs on the continent and this is not a coincidence. Why? Because Africa is all about mobile. So much so that international companies from other continents have taken serious note and started to not only migrate but commit serious resources to solidify their position in Africa. A glance at the list of strategic investors in Africa’s mobile industry today will show names like Finland’s Nokia, America’s Motorola, Google’s ANDROID, India’s Bharti Airtel, France Telecom, Britian’s Vodafone and Luxembourg’s Millicom. They all know exactly what they’re doing and this is why they are landing on Africa’s shores.

Developing –especially for mobile is huge in Africa. As I write this there have been two hackathons held in Nairobi in the past month and a third one being held in 2 days. All of these have been for developers in the mobile field with prizes ranging from thousands of dollars in cash to listing in app stores on major platforms such as Android and Nokia’s Ovi Store. With this critical pace building up it’s no shock that African applications are winning international competitions and where mobile is concerned all signs indicate that the future is only going to get brighter for the once dark continent.

All tech companies internationally agree on the fact that mobile is the future.  Africa is nothing if not mobile therefore, Africa is the future. I once heard someone say that the next piece of killer code is just as likely to be written in Africa as anywhere else in the world. Well as an insider of the African tech community myself and having seen the stuff we and people around us are working on, I can now with a healthy amount of confidence confirm that statement. The next piece of killer code is being written as we speak and I assure you that it is being written on African soil.

Post by: @the_kageni_mind

Kageni Wilson (@the_kageni_mind) is an Innovator, Writer & Tech entrepreneur. He is the Founder & CEO of ionacloud (a free-to-use Personal Cloud Computer and virtual PC environment available at www.ionacloud.com). He lives and works in Nairobi, Kenya & is an avid Cloud and Africa 2.0 evangelist. You can reach him via twitter or email: wil@ionacloud.com

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