Versatile Amphibian

I’m writing this post in the departure lounge at Nairobi airport, having spent most of this week in the city meeting various TMT companies. It’s been an eye opening few days, so I thought it’d be worth sharing a few experiences. The challenge that sub-Saharan Africa faces with infrastructure is apparent the moment you step out of Nairobi’s slightly ramshackle airport and into one of the ubiquitous vans, which almost instantaneously becomes another crawling, hooting part of Nairobi’s quite astounding “traffic”. Traffic is a word that comes up in pretty much every conversation. Kenya has only one major road, which links it to Uganda to the east and Tanzania in the south; teeming with well used trucks, tankers and vans it is as frequently gridlocked as the surface is pot-holed. “It breaks my Range Rover every time I drive on it” Bob Collymore, CEO of Safaricom told me, before going on to highlight the similar issues the country has with power supply and public transport. The almost...

It would be an understatement to say that we had an interesting night in London: buildings burnt out, 600 arrests (and counting) , probably to worst period of unrest in the UK since the 1980s. Without delving into the social context for this upheaval, what fascinated me last night was the way in which the power of the same social media that enabled the Arab Spring was demonstrated on the streets of a major European capital. Simple tools like BlackBerry Messenger and Twitter allowed an unconnected mass of hooligans to achieve an unprecedented form of self-organised co-ordination and thereby elude the (valiant) efforts of one of the world's best trained police forces . Whenever the police arrived, the mob simply moved on to an undefended area - classic guerilla tactics, but without the classic guerilla command structure. It is not hard to see why Middle Eastern police forces and particularly armies were unable to prevent small civil disturbances spiraling out of control. Th...

Over the last year I've been engaged on a number of projects in African technology and telecoms. As a result, I've started to compile a database of intra- and inter-continent investment into the networks that will enable the next phase of African growth. The map shows the location and size of the investments announced in July. As a disclaimer, in some cases (for example, network investment) I have estimated the scale of the investment based on my experiences operating in the territory and in the telecoms industry. The headline for July is that $790Mn of telecoms investments were announced in the Continent, with mobile ($499Mn) and ISP ($262Mn) the largest vertical markets for investment. Airtel's commitment of $400Mn for upgrades to its cell network in Nigeria was the largest single announcement, demonstrating the company's focus on enhancing the coverage and share of the Zain assets it acquired last year into Africa's largest mobile market.

Neilsen reported yesterday that in home streamers of content in the US under-index on total TV consumption. An interesting comparative data point for the UK comes from the BBC, which has been reporting steadily increasing use of the iPlayer for streaming live TV. In May, 115Mn on-demand streams were delivered by iPlayer, versus 17Mn live streams. The latter has increased 71% YoY, versus 16% for on-demand. If this trend is mirrored across the market, then perhaps the future is not as bright as anticipated for TV, viewership of which has been increasing steadily and currently stands at about 3.8hrs per person per day.