Heri does Ruby on Rails + Web Design

Félicitations à l’équipe de Telomiova pour leur nouveau site. Au menu des changements:

• Une page d’accueil plus claire, plus facile à comprendre
• Un réseau social à telomiova.net pour les membres (enseignants, étudiants, participants, équipe). Le nombre de fonctionnalités est assez impressionnant (voir “site-wide activity”)
• Un portail qui aggrège les contenus, avec des pointeurs sur d’autres pages ou destinations

C’est un travail assez impressionnant (même si la première version était déjà très bonne) bravo à l’équipe, ils peuvent être fiers du résultat. Je pense que le site couvre 100% de leurs besoins et qu’ils peuvent mainteant se concentrer sur l’adoption du portail (et aussi sur le financement, parce que à ce niveau, je ne sais trop comment ça marche pour eux)

Pour ceux qui se demandent ce qu’est Telomiova, voir ici:

Le projet Telomiova consiste en un ensemble d’initiatives visant à favoriser l’accès aux nouvelles technologies et surtout accompagner l’intégration, la maîtrise et le développement des usages des Technologies de l’Information et de la Communication pour l’Education (TICE) dans l’enseignement à Madagascar.

Yesterday was the peak, with Barack Hussein Obama elected for president of the USA. I thought it didn’t involve me, but finally it does.

See the video above. It empowers & inspires us to do new things. A little magic in the air. As if we were asleep previously and now is the time to wake up, brace up, and build things. For me, personally, it’s believing that I can also change and change things. And you?

I’ve been working on TechEntreprise for the past 4 months, and while it’s not official or launched yet, I still want to share the project on this blog.

In the technology world of Montreal, I am mostly known for having started MontrealTechWatch, a blog whose tagline is “Technology and Innovation”. The blog covered extensively technology events, new projects and ventures, entrepreneurship. It was especially exciting since it followed the birth of the technology community in Montreal. I was there for BarCamps, for Blitzweekend, or for any other *camp or technology event.

This has been a wonderful learning opportunity, since it was my 2nd blog, and was also started 2 months after I decided to try out the “blogging” thing.

The blog grew then from a little place on blogspot to a full-blown wordpress blog, with its own customized template and domain name. I especially have to thank every person in the Montreal Technology community for giving their time and offering the gift of reading and interacting with MTW.

After a while though, it stalled … or should I say, I saw more opportunities about the concept. With its mix of tech news, jobs, events, articles, and also user comments, I foresaw the possibility of having a public place where everyone could contribute.

Here is a screenshot of TechEntreprise, on the Montreal network:

Visitors can signup, have a profile, contribute to news and public forum section. There’s also dedicated sections for jobs, events, groups, and articles. I especially like the events page, where you can see who is going to an event, and then have a look at their profile in case you want to meet them at the event.

I’m planning to open up networks in Seattle, Cape Town, HK, and other places like Boulder and Boston. And yeah other cool places too.

Now, where does it lead us? Here’s a mission statement from the website:

… bet that any city can become a technology centre, and believe that TechEntreprise can be a key resource and platform for this to happen…

The sentence is for now a bit incomplete since the final mission goes much more beyond that, but it should be more than enough for now.

Now, before TechEntreprise officially launches, I want to use my blog to gather my thoughts and share the different aspects of the project to you, such as technology, product design, marketing and also monetization (drum rolling on this last one) That’s about 4 to 6 posts for the upcoming 2 weeks. Hope you’ll enjoy the ride!

A journalist from the New York Times asks the question: “Inside Nairobi, the next Palo Alto?”

This is a provocative title — maybe as sensationalist as the alarmist news reports that were published at the beginning of the year. While I’d do anything to see a technology boom in Nairobi (or in Madagascar), Nairobi has still a long way to go before comparing it to Palo Alto, such as solid infrastructure and mass adoption of technology.

There is something true though to the article; as it tells how the technology landscape and usage is radically different in Africa, compared to North America. As the reporter writes, people don’t use computers but cell phones as their main technology tool, with the example of mobile web payements. This is true in East but also in West Africa, confirmed by friends in Senegal and in Ivory Coast. A friend told me the example of fishermen getting real-time information about fish prices, allowing them to ask for better prices. Other novelty examples is news and alerts crowdsourcing, by the Ushahidi team.

With those 2 simple examples, it doesn’t take long to envision mobile services made for Africans. I’m brainstorming for instance with a friend on a new mobile social networking app for Mali. The service is to be monetized by sms, by usage, (via routesms if you are curious). It won’t also be sticky, meaning that usage should be ocassional and not pushed to users.

I get my news nowdays mostly from blogs RSS subscriptions. These blogs are around my centers of interests, and prove in the past to provide valuable insights. I also visit some time to time news from Hacker News or general websites like lemonde.fr.
I found out that those were valuable websites that filter the digital noise on the Internet, and allows me to keep-up-to-date with what’s important and meaningful for me.

The thing though is that it does not take into account serendipity, and of course I find myself overlooking some piece of news that were not reported in these selected news feed. And I find myself looking for a tool that would get all important news, but would also feature from some time to time a page or a post which might not be a high-profile blogger, but who would bring up a new idea or something meaningful.

Techmeme is known to sort technology blog posts, especially the startups/web2.0 “stuff”, and does a good job in doing so. From what I know, it features on its homepage new items that gets lots of trackbacks or mentions in other blogs, a sort of social validation much alike Google’s Pagerank algorithm. I also noticed it also takes into account keywords used in the headline.

Techmeme is an interesting project, although in my opinion, it encourages “memes”, and I’ve seen many posts that were just paraphrasing a featured blog post. It’s also a firehose of information, and you will see yourself loose a lot of time if you decide to take your technology news from that website. And as I said, there is no serendipity or “small blogs” in techmeme.

I’ve been thinking about this, and there are some tools avalaible out there (AideRSS or Technorati’s API come to my mind), I’ve done a quick architecture of the whole thing, and it seems trivial to create a blog aggregator that would do what I describe. And I thought it would be great to do a Québec-theme blog aggregator, or one around Madagascar.

Of course, this is just an idea stage. I know it’s technically feasible, I only need to find the time. And yes, get a web server. But yes, finish those other ruby on rails projects. But in a time where everyone and their pet has a blog and is media, I think this would be a tool that many would use.

Malagasy Ltd is an emerging company which was labelled “startup business of the year” in the U.K. last year. 

They are selling produce from Madagascar, and specifically target products that can be reselled with a high markup, namely coffee, chocolate, and spices from Madagascar. These are bought locally, for a fair price, and then transformed and packaged in a local manufacture (say instead of doing it in an European factory).

Products are then sold in a health and fine food store.

I really like the approach taken by the business’s founders. This is not a NGO or a non-profit but a business which analyzed the value-chain and pinpointed key products that could be sold successfully in european markets. The marketing approach is great too, by telling the story of the Island. Of course, everything is done according to trade fair principles.

I wish they’d sell some in Canada. I know a few people who can help them make it an instant success.

Congratulations to the founders, namely Tsiry Wilkinson, Nel Kelsall

I lived for 7 straight years in Kenya, and this shaped most of my personality, my music tastes, my view of the world. I also learned how diversity can enrich a nation, but at the same time, each group keeping its own culture and characteristics.

In this sense, Nairobi with its diverse population coming from the Europe and North America, from South-East Asia, all over Africa, and of course the infinite diversity of Kenya ethnic group was a symbol, an oasis compared to the continent. When the Rwandeese genocide erupted, at the other side of the Great Lakes, people would thought that it would create instability in Kenya. Indeed, Kenya and its neighbors received its share of refugees, adding up to the contigent from Somalia, but stability and good life prevailed.

One of my “real” souvenir would be watching The Lion King with its “hakuna matata” motto; and I think it captures one part of the kenyan spirit.

The events that started in Kenya from 24th December are very sad, and the saddest thing here is that they were mostly started by a tiny group of politicians (I could count them on 2 hands). I know most kenyans don’t have any problems at all living with other ethnic groups. Politicians whose only sole envy (ego) is to be in power are ready to sacrifice the soul of their country just to get 4 more years.

This is is important because as history showed, they might just succeed (cf Zimbabwe)

Nevertheless I am confident in the turn of the events. This time, it will somehow get solved, as there is too much in stake. And more importantly, I believe in the Kenyan spirit. I saw just a few days ago about a documentary about a Canadian-Somalian-Kenya singer, named K’NAAN, who authenticity and generosity is inspiring.

A photo of my mother, about 30 km from the capital

I received this photo by email today. I don’t know why but I found it so cool. It somehow revives childhood memories, and scream “real” to me — after a weekend talking about MVC, ruby arrays, and other virtual stuff.

I hate blog memes. I also hate assimilating countries to dictatorships according to what you hear in the media. One man’s dictator is often the country’s hero, and if you don’t experience what is going on in the country, it doesn’t make sense to support either party. For instance, the sandinists in Nicaragua were labelled rebels in the early 80’s, and that was the US’s excuse to actively support the previous governement by sending weapons and CIA field officers. However, if you go to the country, the story is totally different as the sandinist movement was a grassroots movement that was spurred by pretty much every Nicaraguan. The same thing is hapenning in Zimbabwe and in Iran, although the situation is much more complex.

As such, I don’t really want to have a judgement about what’s happenning in Burma. The country was closed to foreigners since the current governement took power and we can only guess what burmeese people are experiencing. I know too well this exercise will bring stories of torture, abuse, ignorance, violence etc. even though it’s mainly second-hand information that back them up.

As such, I cannot judge the current governement until I go there. Visit the website about Free Burma, International Bloggers’ day

But I can do one thing though, and it’s wishing freedom for the Burmeese people, against whoever is threating their freedom. I wish they have the strength and willpower to stand up.

Beyond Burma, I also have a thought today about North Koreans, Kurds, natives of Darfur.

I found this video of Hans Rosling breathtaking - especially in the 2nd half of the video. Favorite quotes:

Culture brings joy to life. It’s the value of living

my experience from 20 years from Africa is that the most seemingly impossible is possible