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Writers’ rooms: JG Ballard Distrusting computers, the science fiction writer JG Ballard wrote the first drafts of his novels by hand before finishing them off on a typewriter: “On the desk is my old manual typewriter, which I recently found in my stair cupboard. I was inspired by a letter from Will Self, who wrote >>>
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“I’ve never seen a gold egg spoon, but I’m sure it would do. Whatever the material, the spoon has to have a small bowl with a fine edge on it: a thick edge can’t coax all the egg white off the inside of the shell. The handle is short, for good balance and easy handling. >>>
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As entrepreneurs spark change, Africa’s electricity future is getting brighter. Women working on solar lighting circuit boards.Photo Credit: UN Women/Gaganjit Singh With the blessing of global institutions increasingly worried by the prospect of climate change, entrepreneurs are hacking out a small-scale, low-carbon path to universal African electrification. What’s encouraging them is the enthusiasm with which >>>
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As Africa’s rush for broadband connection continues, Steve Song’s map of African undersea cables can’t help but get tangled up:: I am gobstopped again with the announcement of the BRICs cable. I struggle now to find ways to represent all the impending capacity on a single map without it looking like a dog’s breakfast. What >>>
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Africa’s got software talent… but for how much longer? What do African techies make of Silicon Valley? What might Silicon Valley make of them? No Prada suits, hoodies or flip flops. No algorithms stolen off dorm room windows. None of that Social Network, San Francisco stuff. Steve Mutinda’s award-winning mobile health app may be designed >>>
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Kenya’s plan for a 5,000-acre “Silicon Savannah” some 30 miles from Nairobi. >>>
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So Facebook hired a PR firm to plant negative stories about Google. What you gonna do about it? Get over it, already… although it isn’t right, obviously… MG Siegler on the latest Facebook “slimeball stunt”: Like it or not, Facebook is too integrated into the fabric of the web now for everyone to just walk >>>
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Find out what’s ahead: “Mobile Trends Africa 2020”. >>>
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By developing its developers, Africa’s tech sector hopes to go from ping to kerching. Time was when African software developers didn’t register on Silicon Valley’s radar. No undersea fibre optic cables meant that there wasn’t much of a digital infrastructure in most of sub-Saharan Africa and so accessing and developing its software market was tough >>>
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African countries are trying to “cheat history,” as one senior UN official I met put it. Barely literate people in the poorest villages, places where there are no schools and the life expectancy is under 50 due to lack of health infrastructure, use mobile phones to listen to the radio, send money, buy and sell >>>