Infrastructure
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Outage Africa?
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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Cable Commotion
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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African Tech Joins Up
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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Fast Company
With the arrival of broadband, sub-Saharan Africa’s tech entrepreneurs are on the verge of take off. Question is: to where? In Buea, southern Cameroon, the tech boys are pulling an all-nighter. Mambe Nanje Churchill’s fingers go hurtling across the keyboard. With his 20-year-old junior looking on, the 24-year-old self-taught veteran of the local cyber café >>>
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Comic Copyright Capers
Great new IP & Fair Use comic by Duke’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain: Bound by Law translates law into plain English and abstract ideas into ‘visual metaphors.’ So the comic’s heroine, Akiko, brandishes a laser gun as she fends off a cyclopean ‘Rights Monster’ – all the while learning copyright law >>>
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Harry Potter takes a TRIP
Impatient for the sixth Harry Potter? Why not try Harry Potter and the Trade Related Intellectual Property Agreement (TRIPS)? With demand outstripping supply, Muggles around the world have resorted to publishing their own stories about the teenage wizard. In China, there’s Harry Potter and Leopard-Walk-Up-to-Dragon; in Russia, Tanya Grotter and the Magic Double Bass; in >>>
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Rip, Mix and Desist
Develop an existing idea so that it becomes something new and you’ll be applauded for your creativity and genius. Unless you’re hit with a cease-and-desist letter first. The images and sounds in Illegal Art, currently at New York’s 313 Gallery, broke copyright law and so media corporations and their lawyers dragged the artists responsible to >>>