bitSIM, BitPesa, Africa

PIKETTY AND THE SITTING TRILLLIONS

The M-Pesa Concept Applied To Voting
Africa Deserves To Manufacture
Africa Can Save The World

MOVE OVER M-PESA, BITCOIN’S ZSIM IS THE NEW KID ON THE BLOCK

Globally, close to 2.5 billion adults remain unbanked. The vast majority of them live in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. However, the bitSIM would enable this huge market to be brought into the formal financial sector literally overnight ..... The emerging global financial stage will see increasing competition between telcos and banks for control of the market share. bitSIM being able to compete against one of them promises to become a third force that will eventually muscle out the first two. bitSIM might even go further. Since the technology is built on the block chain, it effectively eliminates the middleman that exists both in banking and in the telcos and potentially promises much, much lower fees for transactions. ..... For many developing countries, bitSIM could enable many other industries to really take off including mCommerce and mRemittance, or even mRebittance. Remittance has become one of the main sources of income in many developing countries ....... bitSIM would enable the reforms undertaken in Nigerian agriculture to be spread overnight to other countries around the world. ...... a dedicated agro-blockchain could be created that could be used to manage all aspects of the value chain including smart contracts, and even the development of a viable continental commodity trading for African regions or even the continent itself. Trade on this agro-blockchain would be enabled across borders via the bitSIM without the usual bottlenecks that are inherent in traditional banking. ....... Many of the applications that could be powered on top of the bitSIM may be unimaginable as at now. For example, what role would bitSIM have in powering an internet of blockchains or even an internet of things?

Kenya’s million dollar bitcoin startup BitPesa expands to Tanzania

“We’re the first company on the planet to link mobile money with bitcoin,” company CEO Elizabeth Rossiello boasted. “About 97% of the people in Kenya use mobile money. In Tanzania it’s even better.” ..... We call it mobile money 2.0, where they have three key operators using it instead of one company. ..... “Instead of sending bitcoin to another bank account or bitcoin wallet, you can actually send bitcoin to someone’s mobile wallet using their contact number in real-time” ....... “Banking infrastructure has fallen behind and money transfer services like Western Union have filled the void,” Rossiello said. “The bitcoin technology is in the cloud, which means that everyone has access to world-class infrastructures. For us it’s a very convenient, cheap, scalable, robust piece of software.” ...BitPesa’s CEO added that other countries like Ghana, Senegal, Burkina Faso, Romania, and Turkey all have very advanced mobile money systems and are potential markets for the company’s remittance services.

Reimagining Africa as innovator

He travels to Kenya this July for a “summit” on entrepreneurship and hopes to show what the United States can do for the continent...... When he gets there, however, Mr. Obama may be surprised to discover what Africa is already doing for itself. In recent years, its young inventors and entrepreneurs – two-thirds of Africans are under age 35 – have begun to reverse the narrative that the continent is mainly a recipient of foreign technology and a backwater for ideas. ...... Kenya, for example, which is the birthplace of Obama’s father, has become a world leader in mobile money systems – far ahead of Apple Pay. Across Africa, software such as M-PESA is revolutionizing daily financial life for people with little access to banks or credit. About 1 in 7 Africans now uses a phone for banking, a ratio higher than anywhere in the world. Kenya is also home to an IBM research lab and has plans to become a “Silicon Savanna.” ....... Africa has more mobile-phone users than the US or Europe. This pool of 635 million devices provides a giant digital platform for innovation that fits Africa’s culture and its unique needs. Technology is lightly regulated, which gives innovators more freedom to try new products. ..... The continent’s big tech hubs – Nigeria, South Africa, Ghana, Uganda, and Senegal – are starting to draw global attention as potential exporters of new technology. One Ghanaian start-up, for example, has done well in California with an online tool, Dropifi, that helps businesses manage customer feedback. ...... Last year, the African Union drew up a 10-year strategy to drive technological innovation as a way for the continent to move beyond exports of raw materials. ..... An innovation expert in South Africa, Mammo Muchie of the Tshwane University of Technology, says Africans must destroy the “false narrative” that other races are better at innovation. Africa can build on its special strengths – its large population of young people, its ancient cultural traditions, and its large market for inexpensive solutions to poverty. Innovation, after all, first requires imagination. Reimagining Africa seems to have already begun.

Barack Obama Africa Foundation
Barack Obama And Africa

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Idiots From The Future

Here's a quote from an idiotic article in The Boston Globe. If they had called it comedy, I might have let them go. But this dude is peddling the piece as punditry.

The Boston Globe: Bubble? What bubble? Things are great. Unless ...: November 2011: Y Combinator, a “finishing school’’ for promising start-ups in Silicon Valley, announces a partnership with Wendy’s. Every Wendy’s restaurant will designate two booths near the bathrooms for tech start-ups. Y Combinator will supply $30,000 to each start-up, with Wendy’s providing unlimited baked potatoes and Frosties, in exchange for a 5 percent equity stake. ....... At the end of the program, Nigerian investor Dr. Hassan Dagogo promises (via a polite-but-urgent e-mail) to support each start-up with a follow-on investment of $500,000, wired directly to their bank accounts. Things go awry, and most entrepreneurs in the program end up living in Wendy’s parking lots.

The Nigerian Dictator Has Mutated

Reimagining The Inbox The Simple Way

2010: Location, Random Connections, The Inbox, Frictionless Payments

If You Like Your Inbox, Keep It

Like Obama never tired of saying on the campaign trail for health care reform, if you like your current coverage, you get to keep it. So if you like your current inbox where you get emails from your friends and family and those dictators in Nigeria, you get to keep it. You actively would have to choose to go for the multi inbox option. (Obama's Got Momentum: He Could Defy History In November)

The Inbox As A Spectrum

All human beings are created equal, but that does not apply to emails. All emails are not equal. And the inbox has to reflect that.

Inbox 1

This is the inbox that you see when you log in. These are emails sent by people whose emails you have saved as contacts. These are emails sent only to you and not to a group of people.

Inbox 2

Emails sent by people whose emails you have saved as contacts, but these emails have also been sent to other people at the same time.

Inbox 3

Emails from mailing lists I might have subscribed to.

Inbox 4

Emails from everyone else. This is not the folder for the spam emails. The current spam folder gets to hold ground.

Addendum

An email that should have showed up in inbox 3, if it shows up in inbox 1, you get to tell the system it belonged in inbox 3, and all future emails from that address would end up in inbox 3. You teach the system as you use it.

Also you get to set an expiry date on the various inboxes. All emails in inbox 3 that are more than a month old, please delete them without asking, something like that. Because even Gmail has a space limit.

And there should be an easy way to delete contacts. If you ended up saving an email address you did not mean to save, delete. Free the soul.

I think with this simple change, the inbox could see new life. Inbox 1 could again become something to always look forward to. And this suggestion is not to displace the already in place concept of threaded conversations and the other goodies.

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The Inbox Could See New Life This Year

Fred Wilson: Social Networking Vs. Email

(I was writing this as a comment at his blog, but it became long enough that I decided to make a blog post out of it.)

Social networking has surpassed email, search and is doing great in the news department. Those three were just three of the biggest web activities before these social networks came along. That is really something. (Email, Search, News)

But don't count out the inbox. I'd say location, random connections and the inbox are the three big things to look for this year. There is some interesting stuff going on in the inbox territory, I just have not had the time to figure out who the leader there is.

The inbox will rebound. That is not to say it will take back its lead. China was once the leading country on the planet.

Curiously Twitter might lead the revival of the information graph. But not the Twitter of today. (Twitter Needs To Eat Into Its Ecosystem)

The email inside Facebook is still Facebook. It is not email. Only people in your network can email you, for the most part, and do. And they do so rarely.

I don't mind being on mailing lists as long as they have a one click unsubscribe option at the bottom of each email they send out. If I am going to delete without reading anyway, why bother sending it to me? But then those dictators in Nigeria just seem to need 0.1% to respond, and that keeps them in business. So.

Even in social networking I don't believe Facebook has the final word. I have a feeling we will see a swing from the we to the me in a few years. (The Next Big Thing In Social Networking)

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