TechMasai

The TechMasai Brand Is To Be Laid To Rest

Munashe Gumbonzvanda — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 02:39:40 +0000

It is with regrets that I have to inform my readers that the TechMasai blog will be shutdown. I decided to shut down the brand after much thought. They are plenty of reasons but the main ones include

The TechMasai name, it is not the most politically correct term to use for a pan-African technology blog. In actuality the reference to the Masai people from Kenya, on a blog founded by a Zimbabwean is plain weird.
The challenging and nature of researching the stories, and finding relevant sources aka journalism

It is with regrets I shut TechMasai down, and I thank the few readers we had for taking the time to pay attention.

One Of The Founders Of Ushahidi Is Interviewed At CNN Voices

Munashe Gumbonzvanda — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 13:57:45 +0000

Ushahidi the start-up based in Kenya which crowdsources crisis information has had a cool media rise. One of the founders of Ushahidi, Kenyan Ory Okolloh was recently interviewed on CNN voices.

Ushahidi rise to fame is based on its innovative solution in enabling citizens and organizations to track crisis situations in an easy, efficient manner. Their unique system has been used in Kenya and more recently in Haiti.

The interview of Ory Okolloh on CNN Voices is below.

Yola Had An Short Outage After Their Servers Were Attacked By Hackers

Munashe Gumbonzvanda — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 17:52:32 +0000

Yola the South African based website creation tool with an international userbase, we profiled here was recently attacked by hackers. The motive of the attack on Yola is still unclear since to the best of my knowledge Yola does not have any social or political agenda which might negatively affect people.

The compny released an e-mail to all its users explaining the details of the attack and what form the hack was performed. The hackers it seemed tried something called a Denial of service attack “Dos” with the aim of halting Yola servers from performing normally. This means they weren’t after data but to hinder basically.

This attack is surprising since hackers usually ignore African start-ups.

The e-mail from Yola is below

Yesterday was a very difficult day for Yola and our customers. Yola’s servers were attacked unexpectedly and maliciously by as yet unknown individuals and/or groups, bringing down all of our hosted websites as well as our service provider’s entire datacenter.

The thing Yola cares about most is providing a world class service to all our customers, and doing so consistently and reliably. When our servers are attacked, your website is attacked. We don’t take this lightly. We worked around the clock to bring the service back up, and talked to you in our , , and email during the outage to answer your questions and keep you up-to-date.

We’re now sending this email to tell you what happened, what we’re going to do about it in the future, and, most importantly, to apologize. Regardless of the reasons, your website was down. Please know that however frustrated we were with the situation, we understand you were more so. We’re very sorry.

Here’s what happened and what we plan to do about it:

What was attacked?
The IP address of our hosting service came under a vicious (“DoS”) attack, affecting all of our hosted sites. The attack consisted of an enormous amount of nonsense data aimed at our servers. With all of this junk flowing through it, it was impossible for legitimate traffic to get to your sites.

What happened to my website? Is it secure now?
Your website is safe. It was secure during the attack, but impossible to get to (kind of like a roadblock). We’ve created another route to your site, and have been updating all the domains we control to use this route.

What do I need to do?
If you bought your domain from Yola or you use our yolasite.com subdomain, your site is already fully functional and you don’t need to do a thing. We’ve already done everything to move your site to the new address, and everything should be up and running normally.

If you bought your domain elsewhere (i.e. through a different domain registrar) and are pointing it to our service, please see these instructions for reconfiguring your DNS: .

Why did this happen to Yola?
This unfortunately happens to many companies on the web. There are just people who like to do malicious things. We’re not the first site to experience this, and we won’t be the last. We’ll continue to do everything possible to protect our service and our customers from these kinds of attacks in the future.

On behalf of the entire Yola team,

Vinny Lingham
CEO, Yola.com

AfricaDiscuss Is A Forum With A Pan-African Perspective

Munashe Gumbonzvanda — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 13:33:41 +0000

Africadiscuss is a pan-African forum founded by a Ghanaian called Chris-Vincent with the motto, “denying ignorance through discussion.” The idea behind the forum seems to empower people to further engage in a debate about the motherland over topics which uniquely affect people who live here.

The idea behind Africadiscuss is both unique and useful, but whether it will translate into success is in question. They are very few popular forums in the African cyberspace, with people tending to gravitate to social networks to engage on an online dialogue. Also the general popular forums in Africa utilize national solidarity like with Mashada forums.

Africadiscuss has however created somewhat of a buzz around their brand, with an interview of the founder on David Ajao’s blog. The post is orth reading to better grasp the general idea and plans the founder has for a forum which targets the whole Africa.

Screenshot

iJol Is A South African Online Based Event Finder

Munashe Gumbonzvanda — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 14:31:56 +0000

iJol is a South African event finder.At iJol you can search and find concerts, shows and listing of the top entertainment based events in South Africa.

Have you ever had the feeling that there is cool stuff going on, but you just don’t know about it? Ever wished you’d been at that awesome party that happened last weekend, that secret gig only a select few knew about, or that once-off movie screening your mate at work raved about the next day?

Well, here’s your chance to stay informed.

Stay in the know.

iJol allows you to scan through a summary of all kinds of events happening in your area, and even to see which of your buddies are planning on attending.
Contribute. Share. Interact.

iJol is all about the community, as events and photos are added by the users. You can make comments on events and photos, and leave messages on your buddies’ Profile Pages.
Plan. Remember.

iJol allows you to mark whether you’re attending, or have attended an event, so your profile page lists the events you’re going to, and the ones you’ve been to.

The concept behind iJol is both useful and cheap.The community is avery welcome alternative to newspaper or listing which cost cash both for the consumer and publisher.

The Ushahidi Team Have Launched Crowdmap, A Tool To Crowdsource And Visualize Info On A Map

Munashe Gumbonzvanda — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 12:55:36 +0000

The Ushahidi team – based in Kenya- have created something called Crowdmap, a service which allow people to gather information and visualize it on a map in realtime, and for free. In their own words

Crowdmap is a tool that allows you to crowdsource information and see it on a map and timeline. It is the Ushahidi platform, built by the team who created Ushahidi as a way for anyone to run their own crowdsourcing site without having to know the intricacies of running their own server. It’s free and it’s yours to use.

Crowdmap about

The idea which is basically an extension of Ushahidi allows people to use the original Ushahidi concept in many different avenues personally.

They are many potential uses of crowdmap, from mapping crisis events, putting local data about health or illness; anything which makes use of location based info basically. The idea to make the original Ushahidi platform accessible to anyone is good.

Opinion Piece: A Few Great Ideas Would Include Camps, Competitions And Conferences Targeting Africas’ Future Techies

Munashe Gumbonzvanda — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 12:39:49 +0000

Note: The below piece is an opinion piece written by Munashe Gumbonzvanda. The post solely reference the personal ideas of the writer.

Not to generalize, but a little more probably needs to be done on a government and social level to empower the youth to engage tech and entrepreneurship to a greater extent. The education system as I stated previously is tailored to create educated workers in the motherland.

A great place to start is to create more out of school stuff like camps, competition and conferences which are aimed primarily at people in high school and university.

These events are in actuality cheap to organize and host, the main hurdles to pass being laziness, and bad planning. The advantage of organizing such stuff is

Increased participation in technology
Relatively cheap publicity for local products, with the option of mentorship
Cheap publicity for the sector
Income to the people who host such events who can make money through the advertisements, food whatever

When you look at the after school options of many African kids they are severely limited since the society has not put much attention into the youth to help them become better entrepreneurs or at minimum better engage tech.

This as not manufacturing anything locally, is not ideal

Loy Okezie And Francis Oghuma Partnered To Form Sowambe, A Pan-African Social Media Brand

Munashe Gumbonzvanda — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 03:23:48 +0000

Loy Okezie the blogger/writer and Francis Oghuma the co-founder of Naijaborn and Camerborn recently partnered to create Sowambe.

According to a blog post by Loy Okezie, Sowambe which means “Are You there” in Yoruba, a language spoken in Western Africa will be a pan-African social media lifestyle brand. At Sowambe they will showcase pan-African social media trends, celebrities and culture. They will also track and give insight on social media, by a team which has been involved in the subject for a number of years.

The thing which makes Sowambe standout, is the founders. Loy Okezie and Francis Oghuma are two people who have been very active in the African cyberspace, building up a brand recognition both behind their names and companies.

This makes Sowambe worth following. However at this moment Sowambe has not yet launched; a quick visit to their website will take you to a temporary landing page.

Dukapress Is A WordPress Powered eCommerce System From The Motherland

Munashe Gumbonzvanda — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 22:16:36 +0000

Dukapress is a wordpress powered eCommerce system from the motherland. The start-up has not launched yet, but details and a screenshots has been released to the public via bloggers like Erik Hersman, who stated

DukaPress is a new customized WordPress eCommerce platform. It allows you to easily set up a fully featured online shop which can be used to sell digital or physical goods to customers all over the world.

I’ve been using WordPress for many years, and am a huge fan. When I saw DukaPress last week, I was at impressed to see that it was built locally in Nairobi,

Whiteafrican

Dukapress is a native African eCommerce platform in a market with very few locally designed eCommerce platforms. The fact that Dukapress is based somewhat on WordPress however takes a bit of the spark from the initial excitement concerning the start-up.

The main reason is that Dukapress is and will be somewhat tied and dependent on WordPress on their system, and that may have drawbacks.

Apart from the above the idea has potential. They are very few eCommerce platforms in Africa, which makes Dukapress a trendsetter of sorts.

Screenshot

Zinox Is A Nigerian Notebook Laptop Manufacturer With A Estimated 53% Local Market Share

Munashe Gumbonzvanda — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 00:42:51 +0000

Zinox is a Nigerian computer manufacturer which was founded about a decade ago. The company manufacturers a range of computers which are sold around the world, but their biggest market is Nigeria.

Zinox is strongest in the laptop market where it leads six other international brands, including HP, Acer, Toshiba, Dell, Lenovo and LG Electronics, with a 53.6% market share and a year-on-year growth of 799 per cent, while its closest competitor, HP, achieved a 23.6 per cent market share.

In 2005, just four years after launch, Zinox received the NIS ISO 9001: 2000 certification. Ever since, it had chalked up several international and local awards for technical integrity from professional associations.

It News Africa

The companys’ Facebook page states

Zinox Technologies Ltd is the foremost IT company to go into an uncharted terrain of Branded Computer production in West Africa, Zinox had Nigeria in mind as it debuted with the first ever Nigerian internationally certified branded computers with the Naira keyboard.

The new Zinox Technologies with its strong research and development backbone has developed a variety of uncommon products, that are internationally certified and enough local and international capacities, to support her future expansion and structured growth in other digital solutions areas other than Computer Manufacturing.

Zinox is a success story in their own right and an inspiration to a continent which rarely manufacturers any eletronics but is so ready to consume.

Note: TechMasai can not verify the validity of the market share of Zinox laptops, since the story is quoted directly from another source, without actual research by us. Any additional information on Zinox or the Nigerian notebook market will be welcome if anyone wants to submit it through our contact page.

Below is the Zinox Pride