Tunafunga Pamoja

Written by: Brian Herbert

It was announced today that the blog aggregator, Afrigator, is being taken over by MIH Print Africa. Naspers Limited, MIH’s parent company is a multinational media company that has its hands in both traditional as well as new media. Their holdings include websites that target a number of different markets from Brazil to India to South Africa, pay television in South and Sub-Saharan Africa as well as a number of vibrant businesses.

It’s always exciting news to see a startup get acquired. All of the hard work that goes into the development of a site and the harnessing of a community does pay off.

Written by: Brian Herbert

When violence broke out in Kenya a few months ago, there were scattered rumors and reports of all sorts of atrocities happening in the country. Churches were burned, reports of police brutality surfaced and riots broke out across the country. It was virtually impossible to keep track of everything that was going on in the areas were I had been stationed only less than a year before.

Rather than incite violence with cell phones in Kenya, Ushahidi made an effort to consolidate all of this information into one convenient mashup. Aside from speaking with my colleagues on the ground in Kenya through Skype and Google Talk, Ushahidi became one of the most valuable resources on the Internet during this time. The concept was simple, take the Google Maps API and add markers over the places where there were reports of violence. Users were able to contribute by reporting violence themselves, bypassing traditional media. This gave people a “faster-than-CNN” look at what was happening on the ground.

What now? The post-election violence in Kenya has died down and there isn’t a need to consistently check a map charting the crisis. Due to the popularity of the mashup and an award of $25,000, Ushahidi has undergone a makeover. The new and improved Ushahidi will open the platform to allow anybody to create their own mashups. These will either be hosted buy Ushahidi or downloaded and installed on an independent server. This is great because the applications for this tool reach far beyond rioting and violent outbreaks in African countries. I can see this being applied to epidemics, natural disasters and any other number of situations where people need up to the minute, geographical information about an event that’s happening.

Not only African countries will find the new Ushahidi useful. I can see this working in Europe and North America as well. Having a tool like this would be useful right now in the Caribbean and the United States with hurricane season in full swing. Most importantly is seeing a project in Africa make an impact on the world as a whole.

Written by: Brian Herbert

Since today is Labor Day, a day off for “working citizens”, here in the States, I thought I would highlight the Ethopian based African startup Zebra Jobs.  This is a website that’s comparable to CareerBuilder.com or Yahoo! HotJobs.

Not only is Zebra a job board, but it also offers registered users a wide range of services from education and internship opportunities as well as pointers on job search and building skills. For employers, they can post their listings for free, as Zebra is supported through sponsorship and ad revenue with Google AdWords.

When signing up and entering my contact information, I noticed the “State/Province” dropdown didn’t work. Since this is a required field, I had to figure out how to make this work so I continued to fill out the form and it disappeared after selecting my country. Continuing with this form, I was told I had to fill in all the required fields. I suspect something went wrong with the AJAX lookup of valid states. I may be being picky but this should come after the country dropdown for usability sake or this should not rely on AJAX as most Africans are using very slow and unreliable Internet access.

To Zebra’s credit, even though I had the issue with the dropdown menu, the rest of the sign up process was a breeze. It didn’t require too much information, which a lot of job posting sites generally do. I was quickly able to sign up and start browsing positions and found a number of jobs related to technology.

Even though I found a few positions in my field, at the time of this writing, I only see 306 jobs posted for all of Africa. This is understandable given the current adoption of technology in Africa but could be much better, even though most people conduct their job searchs via word of mouth or through traditional media like the newspaper. As Africa becomes more technologically literate, more people will move their search online which will make this tool much more valuable.

It will be interesting to see how well this site adapts to the market as competetors will surely enter as more users come online. This is a great start and I’d love to see more sites like it.

Written by: Brian Herbert

PayFast is a new startup based in Johannesburg and is a direct competitor with PayPal.  Essentially, PayFast is a solution for South Africans to purchase goods online, send and receive money using electric funds transfer (ETF) or a credit card.

One of the major benefits for using PayFast is that a credit card is not required.  At least in Kenya, many people do not carry credit cards which makes it difficult to conduct business or purchase products online.  If a South African has a bank account, they will be able to hook into this service and initiate transactions with merchants that utilize PayFast.

There are three different types of accounts.  With a personal account, the limitations for users are they will not be able to accept credit card payments or set up an ecomerce store. Also, all fees are waived for personal accounts.  The next level is a premium account which is like the personal account except users with premium accounts can accept credit card payments (see edit at the end of this post).  Finally there is a merchant account which allows users full access to the service.  All accounts follow the same fee structure which is anywhere from 1.4-2% of the transaction.

Services like these are important for the growth of the e-commerce sector in Africa. However, there needs to be a broader approach with services allowing users to charge their accounts with methods other than a bank account.  I will be examining a service by Safaricom in Kenya which offers another alternative.

Check out PayFast here.

8/31/08/ Edit: Richard Catto of Cape Town News brought to my attention the fact that PayFast has yet to enable credit card processing. This is a critical feature for a system like PayFast so it will be able to adopt new users easily. For instance, when purchasing a product from a website that uses PayPal, you do not need to be a PayPal member if you use your credit card to initiate a transaction. According to the PayFast website, this feature is coming and will be a welcome addition to their service.  Even thought accepting credit cards is an important feature to launch with, PayFast is young and has an opportunity to improve on its offerings.