ICTworks by Inveneo

The World Summit Youth Award (WSYA) - selects and promotes best practice in e-Content and technological creativity, demonstrates young people’s potential to create outstanding digital contents and serves as a platform for people from all UN member states including Nigeria to work together in the efforts to reduce poverty and hunger, and to tackle ill-health, gender inequality, lack of education, lack of access to clean water and environmental degradation.

The WSYA Events in New York are over and I am truly inspired by the young leaders of tomorrow who have decided to take action today by developing high quality and interactive e-content focused on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The World Leaders met in New York last week to talk about the MDGs and whether they can realistically be implemented by 2015.

Stop Mr. HIV!

In the mean time the 2010 WSYA Winners plotted new ways of implement the MDGs using their skills in social media, digital media, animations, blogging etc. Taking action and standing up for the implementations of the MDGs.

This is what Leung Chun San from China did with his project ANTI HIVIRUS in the WSYA Category "Fight Hunger poverty and Disease" . This is my all time favourite project and even though I have looked at it a million times I still get excited about the quality and the innovation behind this amazing project.

What is sad is that the project is from China and not from Africa or more specifically Nigeria. I wish the Nigerian and African youth would take more action, stand up for their rights and show the world what they are capable of, that they too have skills and access to the tools needed to create fabulous local content.

As an ambassador of the WSYA I have made it my quest to do more than my usual call for submissions and awareness campaign when the 2011 WSYA approach us. I will try my best to share my knowledge and experience with Nigerian youth and equip them with the knowledge, skills and most of all tools (which are mainly open source and freely available).

I hope to see more Winners from Nigeria in 2011 (this year there were 2 Winners from Nigeria). Let us take the MDGs into our own hands today!

The tech publication Ars Technica warned recently that Android’s proliferation in China might not lift Google’s image in East Asia–many parties there are vivisecting it into a clone called OPhone.

I want to take the other side on this development: As the freely available and high quality mobile operating system becomes workable on most phones, the Chinese knock-off phones are now much more likely to be using Android/OPhone. It is the low-hanging fruit option. We should celebrate that! Those knock off phones are the present reality of many targetable markets today, including East Africa’s. Android fragmentation is replacing complete fragmentation.

A Chinese-make fake blackberry

Right now, those same high-end knock-off N0kia/B1ackb3rry phones are making their way into the East African dukas. They are generally using obscure operating systems (OS) soldered together using half-hardcoded bitmaps and quirky keyboards made for Chinese. They are utterly “fragmented” and impossible to code for. As a programmer, sometimes I wonder at the question: who were the lucky anonymous code monkey team that was given such a job: make this phone work (mostly).

You can just imagine the generation of Chinese Operating System (OS) programmers cutting their teeth, becoming experienced by solving the OS problems again and again for every new knock-off phone. But now, consider how easy Android is to use on arbitrary mobile hardware: one coder, in a month or so of bedroom hacking was able to bring it onto the iPhone. Just by that feat, it seems obvious that Android/OPhone is bound for the knock-offs in some substantial form.

The mobile computing revolution is happening already in rural Tanzania, in some sense. Every few days, a new teacher colleague of mine would come in with slick-looking phone with the requisite multiple SIM card support and big touch screen, but their phones didn’t enable anything really new. There were no apps, no stable browser. No way to make apps for that.

I visited AppfricaLabs in late 2008 and talked with Ugandan @VicMiclovich about their work developing locally relevant apps for Nokia, Java midlets, and various other prevalent phone dev targets. Still, at the end of the discussion we had to admit that, for the moment, there was very limited impact opportunity in the market, outside of savvy tech users because of this unprogrammable Fake-OS problem. Maybe the OPhone can be a second chance?

Returning to one of the thread in the original article, though the Google Android App Store might not be relevant to the hundreds of millions of users in China, it may be more useful than the OPhone Store to the unmentioned millions of users of these phones as they trickle out into other Asian and African markets, if the store can be added by vendors without much trouble. The common foundation offers new possibilities.

While on the subject, the originally noted article was a follow up to a another Ars Technica report several months ago on Android Fragmentation. It was wisely noted there that the catchy term should be used careful. It can refer to any of the panoply of versions, devices, OS repackagings, or device designers of Android. It has been thrown around a lot and is pretty beat up:

“Because it means everything, it actually means nothing, so the term [fragmentation] is useless,” he wrote in a blog entry. “Stories on ‘fragmentation’ are dramatic and they drive traffic to pundits’ blogs, but they have little to do with reality. ‘Fragmentation’ is a bogeyman, a red herring, a story you tell to frighten junior developers. Yawn.”

We should invite Android Fragmentation over the status quo, obscure, impossible to develop-for custom OSs in today’s knock-off phones. It is something tactile to code for and it extends the audience to share digital services with.

With the news that Huawei Technologies' fiber optic network for Uganda - the National Transmission Backbone Infrastructure - is turning into a $106 million dollar white elephant, I thought Columbia School of International and Public Affairs' report on China and ICT Investment in Africa to be telling.

Just look at the Huawei Technologies activities across the African continent:

Huawei Technologies, one of China's leading networking and telecommunications equipment suppliers, has been notably active. In 2006, Huawei won a $100 million contract to become the leading CDMA network provider for Nigeria's Multi-Links, a Nigerian private telephone operator.

The same year, Huawei announced that Starcomms Nigeria Limited, Nigeria's largest telecom operator, would deploy Nigeria's first 1xEV-DO-based mobile broadband network. The network will enable subscribers to watch streaming video, movies and short broadcasts over their 3G mobile handsets. Huawei opened its new Technology Support Centre and the expanded its Training Centre for Western Africa in Abuja, the capital city of Nigeria, constituting a $10 million investment. Huawei also announced a US$ 200 million memorandum of understanding towards the Phase II rural telephone network.

Also in 2006, China drafted a deal with the Ugandan government to loan $120 million for national ICT backbone infrastructure. The completion of the national ICT backbone would compete with the current link provided by the two national operators, MTN (256/512Kbps) and UTL (1.024 Mbps/2 Mbps). The State Minister for ICT, John Alintuma Nsambu, said the Chinese government agreed to takeover a five-year project which would help to overhaul the ICT sector.

In 2007, three Chinese companies -- Sagem, ZTE, and Huawei -- were awarded contracts to lay down fiber optic cable in Kenya, creating a terrestrial network that will be connected to the planned undersea East Africa Marine Sytem cable due for completion in 2009. This new national network will alleviate Kenya's current reliance on expensive satellite service to route international and local traffic. Chinese companies won a similar infrastructural contract with the Ethiopian Telecommunications Corporation for $2.4 billion. ZTE, Huawei, and China International Telecommunication Construction Corporation will extend the fiber cable in Ethiopia from the current 4000 kilometers to 10000 kilometers before 2010.

In October 2007, Huawei donated Chinese telecom equipment worth US $130,000 to the Rwandan government. At the donation ceremony, Lou Qinjian, Deputy Minister of Information Industry, stressed China's mutual benefits and interests with African countries.

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The Good News:

China's direct investment in Africa rose 81 percent in the first half year from the same period last year to US$552 million. Chinese enterprises signed US$22.45 billion of new labor service contracts in Africa, up 25 percent year on year, and completed US$11.53 billion of business volume, up 61.1 percent year on year.

The Bad News:

Trade between China and African countries, however, slumped 30.5 percent to US$37.07 billion in first six months because of the global economic downturn, according to a report released by the Ministry of Commerce (MOC) Tuesday.

http://www.lawinfochina.com/News/News_Detail.asp?Id=7626