Versatile Amphibian

On Monday I was privileged enough to present a keynote at the SATNAC conference in South Africa, the slides for which can be found here . The presentation is a little less conceptual than my usual... in that there are significantly fewer pictures of cats off the internet. The thrust of my argument was as follows: Part 1 - setup We are in the early throes of a shift to a new economic system This means redefinition of the roles of individuals in society, businesses and governments in their lives Conceptually, some commentators believe that this new system will enable African countries to leapfrog over their developed world counterparts because they don't have the infrastructure, business model and cultural encumbrances of the Industrial Economy To examine whether that is true, we need to look at the ingredients for success at a macro (national or perhaps mega-corp level), which I'd describe as: Pervasive access to computing (because this is the general purpose technolo...

I had the chance to return to a topic that was very close to my heart for many years: that of the development of foundations for a digital economy in Africa. I'll drop a transcript of my keynote at SATNAC here in the next day or so, but for now, here's two high level figures on the investment over the last 5 years.  I'm planning to restart blogs on this topic (and in general) once I've completed my latest book, on the traits of a digital business, later in the year. In the interim, here's two figures: total investment in telecoms infrastructure, including international, core, MAN and access for all African countries, split by region. My summary of the figures is that although investment has been huge in African countries, on a per capita basis very few countries are even on par with the global average investment. Given where they're coming from, this means that African countries are effectively falling behind in terms of the foundational infrastructure th...

I was lucky enough to be invited by the Associated Press to speak at the annual Newsxchange conference in Barcelona. As you’d expect for the premier gathering of the broadcast TV news industry, Newsxchange attracts some great speakers. I therefore thought I’d try and summarise some of the best sessions from the packed schedule. First up, my thoughts on a session entitled “Africa: defying stereotypes”. As you can imagine I was really looking forward to this session; however although I found it stimulating I was a little disappointed by some of the points of view put across by the panel of African news people and journalists. The primary contention of the session was that global news media persists in reporting Africa as a continent in strife. The compere, Yvonne Ndege from Al Jazeera said that this was not an accurate portrayal, throwing out the implausibly speculative stat that by 2100 (!) half of the world’s largest economies will be in Africa as evidence that “Africa” should be ...

$388Mn of new African telecoms infrastructure investments were announced in March 2012. It’s too early to tell whether this is a sign of any kind, but the first quarter of this year has been the weakest for African telecoms investment for 3 years. On the flip side, it could just be that investment opportunities are now more difficult to come by – both MTN and Maroc Telecom made announcements this month that they were seeking to invest billions more in “bolt on” operations in African countries in which they don’t currently operate, however with nearly $8Bn of M&A done in the last 3 years targets are getting bigger and more expensive (and that doesn’t include the $10.75Bn Airtel spent on Zain, because it was officially done in Kuwait). The standout deal was actually the smallest. Movicel in Angola spent $10Mn to buy a stock of 100,000 3G enabled tablets from Datawind. By my estimation, there are fewer than half a million PCs in Angola, so this one order almost certainly means that Da...