Group items tagged

Africans are active participants in the social media industry, here are a few examples: Motribe - This South African company enables you to create your own mobile social network with speed and ease and offers you great social tools to power your mobile social network MXit - A South Africa-based mobile social network. Over 27 million registered users, adding over 40,000 every day. Check out this cool infographic about MXit Adloopz - An innovative Nigerian startup that puts a social twist to advertising on the internet Personera - Personera lets you create custom artifacts from your content on social networking sites like Facebook Nikohapa - A Kenyan startup that offers Foursquare-like checkins made simple and that reward you with discounts for checking in to partner stores Ushahidi - Crowdsources information using multiple channels including social networking platforms like Twitter  Swift River - An Ushahidi project that adds super data processing to data coming from sources of unstructured information such as a twitter feed Zoopy - Another South African company that focuses on mobile video ForgetMeNot Africa: bridges the huge gap between the internet and mobile messaging worlds allowing any mobile phone to send and receive email and chat message on any carriers network. Quirk eMarketing - A digital marketing agency that also helps companies make use of social media for great results. Quirk has also spawned other cool companies in social media such as BrandsEye that creates great tools for online reputation management and crowdsourcing company IdeaBounty. And as far as group buying is concerned, Groupon has inspired many an African groupon clone. There are numerous African companies playing in this area - Rupu and Zetu in Kenya, DealDey in Nigeria, and a whole lot of others in South Africa

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At the end of the week, there was a business competition.The four winning companies were: Bey2ollak - An iPhone app that provides live user-generated reports of traffic conditions on the streets of Cairo. It already has more than 50,000 subscribers and a partnership with Vodafone -- one of the largest mobile phone operators in Egypt. Inkezny (translation: rescue me) - An iPhone app enabling travelers to make emergency calls in any location in the world without having to know the local emergency phone number, as well as seeing GPS directions to and phone numbers for the nearest hospitals  Crowdit - A digital collaborative storytelling platform using real-time pictures, video, and social media reports to reinvent the way stories are told and shared online SuperMama.me - The iVillage of the Middle East, creating a community of mothers designed to connect and empower the women of the Middle East/North Africa region

I'd like to take a moment and recognize 20 people who I believe to be the PR and digital A-listers of tomorrow. Granted, there are a number of others I could have added to this list, but this was just intended to be a start.

The merger of globalization and I.T. is driving huge productivity gains, especially in recessionary times, where employers are finding it easier, cheaper and more necessary than ever to replace labor with machines, computers, robots and talented foreign workers. It used to be that only cheap foreign manual labor was easily available; now cheap foreign genius is easily available.