Open Source

We expect internet usage in Africa to double in the next few months and that gets us thinking of a few things we need to work on to tap some profitability before the Internet becomes another way of taking the African resources to the west because they already have systems in use. I have had my share of life on the web and I am in a position to advice on open source and free systems that may be profitable to the community and business minded African if well implemented. I will go through a few here.

Magento
The launch of Magento Open Source last year changed the e-commerce software industry, with magento coming out as one of the biggest and the most well structured software even when compared to most commercial scripts. Magento is built on the Zend Framework and is stable, user friendly and open source, meaning there is more to it coming. OS-Commerce is also a good system.

Laconica
With this age of micro-blogging, this free software comes in handy, its a tweeter clone built on PHP. Just so you know, tweeter is built on Ruby on Rails. While researching on this, I found this list as a top 10 for free micro-blogging software from Honeytechblog

1. http://chyrp.net/
2. http://twoorl.com/
3. http://www.revou.com/
4. http://www.folkstr.com/
5. http://www.gelatocms.com/
6. http://smob.sioc-project.org/
7. http://sweetter.net/
8. http://laconi.ca/
9. http://jisko.net
10. http://www.floopo.com/

OS-Date
I dont know how much online dating works these days but this is a good free system by Darren Gates. The best thing is the 5 dollar shop that offers plugins, themes and components of this system at only $5.

Dolphin Social Networking
This group of free software is the most amazing thing I ever came across. It offers more than a social networking website and all for free!

Joomla
So far this is the largest free CMS and I guess the most widely used in Kenya. It offers a host of modules and plugins and it can get quite professional. Give it a try if you havent. Joomla geeks you can also leave a comment with a link to a Joomla site you have made.

You may know a host of others that I havent meantioned, this blog post allows comments so please extend it!

Good job done by Seacom so far is commendable. So I take a moment to try and figure out who Seacom is and according to their website, “SEACOM is a Mauritian company owned 75% by African investors as a collaboration between East and Southern Africans and owns 100% of the SEA International Cable. A small group of Investors with proven access to both debt and equity, were selected specifically because they were not national telecommunications operators thus avoiding value chain interference by to separating the ownership of the asset from its use” That is good for PR. Just before that paragraph, there is a small chart of cable ownership and it leaves me wondering why Kenya and Tanzania has to own only 35% of the cable in our countries while Seacom owns the other 65%. Looking at all the other countries where Seacom is present, the country owns 100% of the cable.

I just have questions, why cant we be 100% owners? What are the direct implications on cost to the consumer for that? What were the ownership options and is it that we didnt have investors with the capacity or was it dictated or politically “arranged”?  So far, Seacom cant even release the list of ISPs buying bandwidth from them something that makes me even get more questions.

Lets move from looking for blames and excuses to finding solutions with the resources that we have.

There is an old Kikuyu saying that goes …”You cannot take a donkey to the river and force it to drink the water”. So Seacom has delivered proper bandwidth at our doorsteps. Soon retailers will be giving us a share of the affordable and better internet. Question is, what are we going to do with it? We had our previous connections and as slow as they were or expensive as they were, they gave us a way to communicate with the world, infact, they still are until we get proper retail services from the ISPs.

I would like to challenge us to be innovative as we await the price drops and service delivery from our ISPs. What can we do to change our Nations? What can we do with better connectivity to increase the quality of education? What can we do to deliver better services at our jobs? What can we do to save time with the capacities that come with good connectivity? How can you make your children’s life better than yours using the new opportunies presented by this connectivity to the rest of the world?

Africa has waited too much for guidelines from the west and this is time we take the road South Korea took in the early 90s. We need to be creative and support our own. We need to start creating and innovating. We need to invent something that the west can adopt. We need to be leaders in something other than corruption, poverty, greed and war. We need to have IT managers lead our Nations and avoid the likes of most of our current leaders. Am specifically ashamed to say I come from Kenya when I look at our situation. Am looking for the young people who can identify with what am talking about, lets change our lives. Africa, wake up, you have the chance to make the world turn round and ask “Is this really the Africa in History Books?”

Lets move from looking for blames and excuses to finding solutions with the resources that we have.

Just thinking, I want to play a role in the Internet revolution in Kenya and also make some small dime. We all most likely have blogs running on either wordpress, blogspot or self hosted. I am offering to register a domain name of your choice (.co.ke, has to be available), offer you hosting and install a blog and customize it to your looks at only Kshs. 7000. From this, 4500 will recur yearly to take care of the domain renewal and hosting. Domain prices might go down if kenic decides to offer the fiber advantage to Kenyans. By the way, if you decide to use a .com or any other TLD, you get all the above for Kshs. 5,000/=

This blog can be used as an example of what there is to offer.  All the above is achievable within 6 hours.

Students who witnessed the shooting speak to the Inspector General of Police Major General Kale Kayihura at Mulago Hospital in Kampala.

I will never stop being amazed by some of the things we wake up to read in the news. This morning am shocked at a news item about students being shot by police while on riot at a Kampala international school. Student riots can get ugly and I have no doubt about that but my question still remains, is live bullets the only way? Police brutality seems to be a common thing in Africa and its really unfair that the people supposed to be protecting us are the same people who we are afraid they would kill us the next minute.

In the streets on Nairobi, there is no difference meeting a police officer and a thug. In fact, its better to meet a thug because if you are lucky, you will be sleeping on your bed. Police will take your money, beat you up and you end up sleeping with drunk people in dirty cells. I wonder what our political voices are doing about this, its a pain that everyone seems to be doing the wrong thing at all public offices.

Back to the point, student riots can be solved in other ways, tear gas is enough to disperse crowds, live shooting will kill them and eliminate a future resource for the nations. Africa needs to train the policeman to be a helper and not a killer.

Use of Seacom's fiber optic connection goes live in Kenya

Seacom may have arrived in Kenya but the expectation that people had on 23rd July were way beyond reality. People, including those with little use for the internet expected a complete U-Turn which basically takes time, resources, will and the correct planning. Good news though, Safaricom has gone live on the Seacom link.

Am currently using my 3G connection from Safaricom and I tell you this for sure, there is atleast 3 times better speeds in town now! Thanks once again Safaricom for proving that besides the bitter options, you are still the better option. Now I hope the 600mb data remaining on my account will be trippled as well, or should we not expect price changes?

Michael Joseph is a man who knows what brought him to Africa, congrats again. Lets all get busy with the good speeds!

This is the first post on Majibu.com. Majibu is Swahili for answers. So yeah, you can expect answers to most common questions in picked categories. Basically its based on my experiences on the web and in life. You can call me Dr. Charm, I live in East Africa where internet just landed via the under sea cable so this means you can expect an answer to a life problem every once in a while. Besides this blog, we shall have our community Question and Answer website at Majibu.com launching in a while.

You are welcome to share in the solutions to the issues of life in the streets of Africa. This is dedicated to everyone who has used a problem to discover some new way of helping others. Welcome and lets take this journey together.