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 mobile phones have been taken up by many Africans and the new innovations and opportunities that this has opened up; the success of undersea fibre-optic broadband cables, the possibilities that this is opening up. In Soy, in rural Western Kenya, some 280 km from Nairobi,… >>>
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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 I thought was a clever innovation, using the width of the cable as an indicator of design capacity, has turned out to be a nightmare as cables like the SAEx cable announced a design capacity of 12.8 terabits/s, 10 times that of the Seacom cable which launched… >>>
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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 work. These days, with access getting easier, the African blip on the Silicon Valley screen is starting to ping somewhat louder: the world’s biggest technology companies can’t get enough of the right kind of African ideas. Seeking solutions to African needs, the kind not generally… >>>
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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 scene deftly reworks a website banner. It ain’t rocket science, but it pays. Popular with students at the town’s university, the 60 or so cafés straggling along the streets on the green slopes beneath Mount Cameroon have become informal centres for incubating tech entrepreneurs. The… >>>
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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 basics, including the line between fair use and copyright infringement. – Brandt Goldstein, The Wall Street Journal online >>>
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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 Belarus, Porri Gatter and the Stone Philosopher; in India, Harry Potter in Calcutta. Harry’s creator, JK Rowling, isn’t happy about this. Luckily for her, under the WTO’s TRIPS agreement, original authors ‘enjoy the exclusive right of authorizing adaptations, arrangements and other alterations of their works’.… >>>
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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 the courtroom. Not a familiar cartoon character by Ashley Holt Highlights include: Brian Boyce’s State of the Union: George W Bush lights up the Teletubbies Wally Wood’s Disneyland Memorial Orgy: Team pushups with Goofy and Minnie and the rest of the Disney gang Ray Belder’s… >>>