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francispisani

Developing Telecoms | Joining the dots in Africa - backhaul investment will capitalise ... - 0 views

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    It's foolish to compare African markets holistically to say Europe or Asia, but in some characteristics - such as the optimal number of operators in a territory to guarantee sufficient competition and economies of scale, it's clear that Africa has far too many operators in many of its countries. Uganda for example has seven operators - from a total market revenue perspective, it's over capacity. Because ARPUs are so low, one of the key things that companies need to do - both within a territory and on a pan-Africa basis - is consolidate some of the back office functionality. For example, inter-continental minutes clearing; it's expensive for a small operator in a country like Uganda, but if you can consolidate that into a group like Zain or MTN, then it makes a lot of sense. It's still early days, and in most of the major markets it can be advantageous to be small, agile and commercial, and to let the consolidation happen at a later date. It can be difficult for large telecoms groups to come into markets like that and effect change that is positive and doesn't impede the process of customer acquisition. DT: So the investment that a larger player would bring to the market is not necessarily the right move for now? MG: Potentially, some of the economies of scale of a larger group - i.e. an operator working at 35% - 40% market shares - or the capabilities that it can bring will be advantageous. However, there are relatively few markets where that's true; South Africa and to a lesser extent Ghana and Kenya all have the foundations of competition established, but in the majority of areas that isn't the case.
francispisani

Thinking about curation in the enterprise - confused of calcutta - 0 views

  • Content may be considered king, but distribution has always been the hand that rocked that particular cradle and ruled that throne.
  • curation. The SOP of curation, to paraphrase Rosenbaum, is Selection Organisation and Presentation. Curation is about human beings adding their passion to the filtering process, in order to select what should be experienced, put the selections into some cohesive order and then to make those selections accessible to the relevant audience.
  • Esther Dyson, whose writings about the future of search have been at the back of my mind all through my thinking about this. In Curation Nation, Esther quotes Bill Gates as saying (at a private dinner) “The future of search is verbs”. She then goes on to explain that “when people search…they are looking for action, not information….they want to find something in order to do something”. If you get the chance, you should read Esther’s writings on the future of search, just google it. In fact there may still be a YouTube video summarising her views
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  • Information flows in the enterprise should always enhance the ability of participants to do the right thing in the right place at the right time. Which lets me segue neatly into the crux of this post, curation in the enterprise. Every enterprise has its own variant of curator, people who help decide who sees what, when, and in what shape. Information overload is everywhere, the Shirkyian filter failure is everywhere, and into the valley ride the usual six hundred, theirs not to reason why. So in order to understand how enterprise curation should take place, it’s worth looking at some extreme forms of enterprise curation as practises today. There appear to be four main forms: The Signal Booster The Spreadsheet Jock The Soulmate The Sidler
  • The Signal Booster obtains power by PowerPoint, thinks in bullet points, rarely knows more than what’s on the slide. Acts as a mediation layer between those that do and those that decide.
  • The Spreadsheet Jock believes there’s safety in numbers, that firms can be managed by algorithmic trading. Runs the risk of past-predicting-the-future
  • The Soulmate is a crony of the powers-that-be, using that association to derive second-order power, and has an unusual effect: an inadvertent tendency to ensure that anything the CEO doesn’t want to hear doesn’t make it to the CEO.
  • The Sidler is a rare beast, someone who can only thrive in the rarefied environment of “briefing” cultures. They are often seen alongside the CEO, whispering in their ears, advising and commenting on the status of things they aren’t involved in. Sidlers are chameleons, sometimes boosting signals, sometimes driving spreadsheets, sometimes being soul mates. But always sidling.
  • All these are extreme forms of enterprise curator, responsible for deciding what information is accessible, to whom, when, and in what shape.
  • And all these are fundamentally inefficient models of curation in the enterprise,
  • Linus’s Law (“given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”) plays out very well in any community that is built to scale. So every staff member is empowered to solve problems. Every trading partner. Every customer.
  • In large hierarchical organisations, some form of summarising and filtering takes place in all information flows, from top to bottom as well as from bottom to top.
  • A web rather than a chain, the social enterprise is somewhere where everything and everyone is a node on the network.
  • Everyone’s not just a curator… Everyone’s not just a designer… Everyone tries out products and services, and provides active feedback.
  • This ability for two-way communication means that conversations take place without any loss of detail. The need for summarising is reduced, since the cost of hanging on to the detail is low.
  • Drilling into the detail was historically complex for reasons other than just the cost of doing so, or for that matter the distance expressed as the number of levels in the organisation, the divisional silos, and so on. We had the added complexity of security systems that did not differentiate between systems of engagement and systems of record, and as a consequence didn’t know how to handle entitlement safely and securely. Good social enterprise implementations solve that elegantly.
  • It’s not enough to have access to the information, that still doesn’t solve the overload problem. So we need access to expertise.
  • Find the people that are acknowledged rather than asserted experts, experts because of what they do rather than who they are.
  • As we move from the Hit Culture to the Long Tail of problem solving, we need more and more experts, “long tail experts”
  • The promise of the social enterprise is a remarkable promise.
  • Networked non hierarchical models. Involving everyone: staff, partners, customers. Two-way communications. Easy access to domain expertise. In an environment where aggregation takes place without any loss of accuracy or of the source data, where you can “follow an order or a complaint, safely, securely, efficiently, effectively”.
  • I’ve come to realise that the Social Enterprise is to traditional software what Skype is to traditional telephony, what Paypal and Square are to traditional payments. Quick and effective. Riding over the top of existing infrastructural investments. Focused on simplifying the customer experience, eradicating traditional frictions, reducing the distance between the customer and the firm. Engaging with the customer rather than with the back office.
francispisani

Beirut Spring: ❊ The Big Fat Guide To Lebanese Twitter Users - 0 views

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    a guide of some of the most interesting Lebanese users of Twitter.
francispisani

MediaShift . Social Media Plays Major Role in Motivating Malaysian Protesters | PBS - 0 views

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    Social media such as Facebook and Twitter have played a major role in motivating some of the demonstrators in the run-up to the rally, which went ahead despite a police ban and lockdown imposed on sprawling Kuala Lumpur on the eve of the July 9 protest. The demonstration organizer, Bersih 2.0 -- a coalition of 63 NGOs (non-government organizations) that wants changes such as updated electoral rolls and a longer election campaign period -- has its own Facebook page, attracting a similar number of "likes" as the page urging Najib to step down, with 190,000+ fans at the time of this posting. The latest notable update is another petition, requesting 100,000 backers for a Bersih 3.0 -- although organization head Ambiga Sreenavasan has said she does not foresee any similar protests in the immediate future.
francispisani

Meet Kenya's Bill Gates - Kamal Budhabatti - Mfonobong Nsehe - The Africa Chronicles - ... - 0 views

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    Craft Silicon provides bespoke, cutting-edge software in core banking, microfinance, mobile, switch solutions and electronic payments for customers on four continents. The company services over 200 clients in 40 countries spread across Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas. Clientele includes some of Africa's most successful financial institutions, and the company has offices in Kenya, India, Nigeria and the United States. Craft Silicon has an office in Silicon Valley - in Palo Alto, California - one of the very few Kenyan companies to achieve such a feat.
francispisani

Social Media All-Stars | ClickZ - 0 views

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    This list is comprised of people who are the luminaries and pioneers of the social media frontier. I plan to do this periodically and by no means do I feel I will get this 100 percent correct the first time, so please let me know your thoughts -- be social! Do I personally know some of these folks? Yes -- so voice your opinion where you feel there is bias and we will adjust accordingly moving forward. These are in reverse alphabetical order.
francispisani

Top 20 Social Media Experts | Socialnomics - 0 views

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    I had some fun this week in my ClickZ column by highlighting the best in brightest in the social media field.  You can find the detailed article here: Social Media All-Stars As the title showcases I selected 10 Social Media All-Stars for each team.
francispisani

Social Media Gurus, Real Work and Diversity - 0 views

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    The only real problem touching on diversity I see in the "social media space" is this: About four dozen assholes in the US and Canada making up an imaginary social media "industry," who suddenly realized a week ago that with all the navel-gazing and ego projection fueling their "thought leadership," they have mostly managed to cater to people who conveniently look and sound just like them. Wow. How did THAT happen? By the by, if they ever manage to pull their heads out of their asses long enough to get some oxygen back into their brains, they will either meet or remember having met - among hundreds of thousands of other social media users who are not pre-midlife crisis white dudes - Rohit Bhargava, Maz Nadjm, Jeremiah Owyang, Gabrielle Laine Peters, Karima Catherine Goudiam, Bonin Bough, Liva Judic, Monika Melsha, Guy Kawasaki, Chris Penn, Danielle Lewis, Peter Kim, Charlene Li, CD, Hajj Flemings, and many, many, MANY more who, last time I checked, contributed more to the social media world than all of their "white" social media guru blog posts combined, and managed to do so while being other than strictly caucasian.
francispisani

Inside Chungking Mansions with expert Gordon Mathews | CNNGo.com - 0 views

  • “Low-end globalization is globalization not as practiced by the big multinationals with their batteries of lawyers and their billion-dollar budgets,” says Mathews. “It’s globalization done by individual traders carrying goods in their suitcases back and forth from their home countries. That’s the dominant form of globalization here and that’s how globalization works for 70 percent of the world’s people.”
  • In "Ghetto at the Center of the World," Chungking Mansions is a Grand Central Station and Mathews traces the passage of people and goods from the building to destinations such as Dubai, Lagos, Mombasa, Nairobi, Bangkok, and Kolkata. 
  • Mobile phones figure at the center of Chungking Mansions’ global trade, and Mathews estimates that up to 20 percent of the mobile phones recently in use in sub-Saharan Africa had passed through the building at some point
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  • Mathews writes that some small traders can expect to make between US$400 and $1,300 per trip, but sustaining and building this income takes intelligence, business acumen, and luck.
  • “For 20 years, Chungking Mansions has been up and down,” he says. “It’s been a good place to do business, but these days, it has also become a community center, offering services for all people in the building.” Indeed, a community of sorts does exist, and many other constituencies walk the halls of Chungking Mansions.
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    Chungking Mansions, 36-44 Nathan Road. Tsim Sha Tsui, Kowloon, Hong Kong. "Ghetto at the Center of the World: Chungking Mansions, Hong Kong" by Gordon Mathews, Hong Kong University Press. Available at English language bookstores in Hong Kong and Amazon.com.
francispisani

The Problem With Silicon Valley Is Itself - TNW Entrepreneur - 0 views

  • As a Brit who gave up cheerleading the European tech scene to make the pilgrimage to Silicon Valley to live, eat and breath the world’s leading hub for technology startup innovation, I’ve been largely unimpressed and disappointed by the quality of startups here.
  • there’s only two, out of two hundred, I think are game changers. Now, don’t get me wrong, Silicon Valley is an incredibly inspiring place to be. Everyone is doing something amazing and trying to change the world, but in reality much of the technology being built here is not changing the world at all, it’s short-sighted and designed for scalability, big exits and big profits.
  • I’ve come to the conclusion that entrepreneurship in the Valley has become productized
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  • It’s never about the technology or impact it’s having, it’s about the game of entrepreneurship; getting users, funding and exiting as quickly as you can.
  • From an investor’s perspective, it’s a clever model; you put a group of extremely talented and hard working graduates together, give them seed funding, keep them lean and they pivot until they get you a hit and you make your return. But I wonder if the model is counter productive, producing risk averse entrepreneurs who, if they follow the right procedure, are almost guaranteed success in the form of a talent acquisition or exit. Should this be what entrepreneurship is about? What happened to irreverence, thinking outside the box, wanting to make a difference in the long run?
  • the gold-rush mentality.
  • there is innovation happening around health care related startups
  • One of the reasons for lack of innovation in the Valley is that entrepreneurs are not exposed to enough real-world problems.
  • consumers in the USA clearly want to play Angry Birds, whereas in some African countries consumers are more likely to be searching for their nearest Malaria drugs clinic.
  • you wouldn’t even imagine
  • many entrepreneurs can’t get to the US because of visa issues
  • Startup Chile
  • There is one thing though, that continues to set Silicon Valley apart from every other technology hub on the planet and that’s access to finance.
  • But the funding landscape is changing due to the cost of innovation decreasing rapidly which means anyone with a laptop and a WiFi connection can get an idea off the ground for dirt cheap.
  • Geeks on a Plane
  • i/O ventures
  • more media should cover tech outside the Valley
francispisani

Egypt's Entrepreneurs Look Beyond the Revolution - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Six months after an uprising led by people like her ousted Hosni Mubarak and overturned the established order of the Arab world, Ms. Mehairy has joined the ranks of Egypt’s newest business class: the entrepreneurs of the revolution. Instead of leaving Egypt as she had planned, she is staying to nurture a start-up called SuperMama, an Arabic-language Web site for women that has 10 local employees.
  • “Everyone is worried about what will happen next,” said Marwan Roushdy, 20, a student at the American University of Cairo who is developing an app called Inkezny to locate hospitals anywhere in the world. The name means “rescue me” in Arabic.
  • Mohamed Rafea, 30, and his cousin Ali Rafea, 23, are also optimistic. They along with three other young relatives co-founded Bey2ollak, an app that lets users warn each other about congested traffic routes. “We are lucky that we don’t need the support of anything except good wattage, as opposed to manufacturing goods or opening a store. Those kinds of businesses need the support of the government,” Ali Rafea explained.
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  • Like many in their cohort, Mohammed and Ali Rafea, who won one of the internships at iContact, are trying to solve some of Egypt’s problems through technology — and hope to turn a profit in the process. After the revolution, they said, Egyptians were turning to Bey2ollak to pass along information about the safety of the roads. “We added a new status to say that a road is a danger zone and there are protests and thugs,” Mohamed Rafea said.
  • and Sawari Ventures, a Cairo-based venture capital firm,
  • Ahmed el-Alfi, the founder Sawari Ventures,
  • Seeing the potential in Egypt, Mr. Alfi left Southern California in 2006 to move to Cairo. “Most of my friends questioned my sanity for making that move,” Mr. Alfi said. “But I was very encouraged by what I saw.”
  • “These entrepreneurs are thinking big and globally, and they are creating Web apps that you could see in Dumbo or Palo Alto,” he said, referring to the neighborhood in Brooklyn. “They are building companies and products that can be very influential. I would invest 30, 40 or 50 thousand dollars in these young entrepreneurs.”
  • As Mr. Gerber, one of the American delegates, put it: “We were just so amazed by the business acumen we found in Egypt.”
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    Six months after an uprising led by people like her ousted Hosni Mubarak and overturned the established order of the Arab world, Ms. Mehairy has joined the ranks of Egypt's newest business class: the entrepreneurs of the revolution. Instead of leaving Egypt as she had planned, she is staying to nurture a start-up called SuperMama, an Arabic-language Web site for women that has 10 local employees.
francispisani

A Theory of Everyting (Sort of) - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • All of this is happening at a time when this same globalization/I.T. revolution enables the globalization of anger, with all of these demonstrations now inspiring each other. Some Israeli protestors carried a sign: “Walk Like an Egyptian.” While these social protests — and their flash-mob, criminal mutations like those in London — are not caused by new technologies per se, they are fueled by them.
  • So let’s review: We are increasingly taking easy credit, routine work and government jobs and entitlements away from the middle class — at a time when it takes more skill to get and hold a decent job, at a time when citizens have more access to media to organize, protest and challenge authority and at a time when this same merger of globalization and I.T. is creating huge wages for people with global skills (or for those who learn to game the system and get access to money, monopolies or government contracts by being close to those in power) — thus widening income gaps and fueling resentments even more. Put it all together and you have today’s front-page news.
  • the world has gone from connected to hyper-connected.
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  • “We are fighting for an accessible future.”
  • This is the single most important trend in the world today.
  • 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
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    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.
francispisani

How Governments Deal With Social Media - Alex Howard - Technology - The Atlantic - 0 views

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    In the years since the first social networks went online, the disruption had spread to government, creating shifts in power structures as large as those enabled by the introduction of the printing press centuries ago. "Connection technologies, including social media, tend to devolve power from the nation state and large institutions to individuals and small institutions," said Alec J. Ross, senior innovation advisor to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in an interview. "Nothing demonstrated that more than the power to publish and distribute at great scale by historically disempowered individuals with inexpensive devices."
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