Mainstreaming ICT

For the last 2 years I have been actively following an open source project which is now called Open Object. It is a great Rapid Application Development platform (i.e. you can build applications using it very quickly compared to coding from scratch) written in Python. For the most part it is the platform used to [...]

I have recently released a South Africa Mobile Classified Site (called AdAd.co.za) which uses and greatly improves upon the Community Mobile Channels codebase.
Of course  it may seem strange that my efforts around creating a new open source mobile community platform should have currently morphed into a closed source mobile advertising site. But having been through [...]

The latest ‘State of the mobile web report’ produced by Opera was very interesting regarding its focus on Africa - http://www.opera.com/media/smw/2009/pdf/smw042009.pdf - If you consider that pageviews in africa increased by over 400% April 2008 to April 2009 you can be sure that this mobile internet revolution is happening and any statistics you see are [...]

Microsoft has announced the Microsoft Mobile Challenge for Development. It is great that this has been linked in with the Netsquared conference in May.
“The Microsoft Mobile Challenge for Development encourages you to help contribute to one of the eight United Nations Millennium Development Goals by creating a mobile solution designed to meet the needs of [...]

I’ve been a bit slow on the uptake on Twitter compared to many people by the looks of things. Neilsen reports Visits to Twitter have increased 1,382 percent since last year - from 475K unique visitors in February 2008 to 7 million in February 2009 . On top of this many of the blogs I [...]

Community mobile channels NEEDS YOUR VOTE so please head over to netsquared and register and vote.
Below is the registration link.
http://www.netsquared.org/user/register?destination=node
This is the voting instructions link
http://www.netsquared.org/n2y4/vote
This is the Community Mobile Channels Project Link.
http://www.netsquared.org/projects/community-mobile-channels
Please help highlight this project and build mobile orientated community empowerment in an open source way.
This image  was created by using the Wordle visualisation [...]

Over at Netsquared they have released the mobile ideas factory : a toolbox for developers & innovators alike!.
This currently contains the following sections

Platform-Specific Resources (including Android, iPhone, Symbian & Windows Mobile)
Information about Developer Networks
Net2 Challenge Collection (including announcements, interviews, news and more)
Critical Questions to help inform your work
Resources, Research and Information

There is some very [...]

There have been some excellent posts recently from some well known bloggers on ICT and development. Below are four articles of note:-
Ken Banks - the developer of Frontline SMS has a though provoking article regarding the way that ICT4D happens. He is an advocate of bottom up community orientated approaches which is certainly appropriate in [...]

Just in case any one hasn’t voted yet or is finding the process a bit odd - please vote and show your support for the great projects entered in mobile challenge. Visit netsquared.org and you will see this

If you are not registered go to http://www.netsquared.org/user/register to register. Then logon and go to the HRC project [...]

Although it is clear that the Internet will be increasingly mobile over the next few years, it is also the case that no standard pricing structure has emerged globally for providing mobile Internet. There are huge differences in how much people pay from country to country, provider to provider and data plan to data plan.It [...]