ICTworks by Inveneo

To global search giant, Google, Africa is the next Internet hotspot. Globally, there are 94 domains registered per 10 000 users. However, in Africa, there is only one domain per 10 000 users. As such, there is tremendous potential for growth on the continent in the web space.

Through its Africa programs focused on getting more Africans online, the company is betting that by developing an accessible, vibrant and self sufficient Internet ecosystem on the continent many more Africans would come online.

Key among its strategies to develop the continent’s Internet ecosystem is to increase the amount of local African content online. “If you want to be successful you have to do a good job at localising content,” said Nelson Mattos, Google’s VP of Development for Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) at a Google event in South Africa.

To do this effectively, the company has launched initiatives such as the Get African Business Online (GABO) initiative last year as a pilot to a select number of businesses in Nigeria. The initiative targeted small and medium scale enterprises and empowered them to set up an online presence for themselves to promote their goods and services.

In addition, the company is working with Universities across Sub-Saharan Africa to help expand their bandwidth capacity through its University Programs providing much needed Internet access to student populations across the continent. For instance, last year, the company launched its university access initiative at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka where Nigeria’s Vice President Namadi Sambo launched the campus’ new wireless network, intra-campus fibre and trans-national fibre connection to MainOne, an under sea cable system in West Africa. Baraza, its free question and answer service for the continent, its search products in local African languages and its free SMS health and agricultural tips in places like Uganda among others.

Interestingly, thinking local has started to pay off. According to Google’s Program Manager for African Languages, Denis Gikunda, Google Inc.’s search requests from sub-Saharan Africa are growing more quickly on African language pages than those in English, French, or Portuguese.

“For so many people in Africa, with technology, there’s this idea that I have to master English first, and then I can be good at it,” he said. “But if you see a user interface in Swahili, you feel like you understand the product more, and understand what you can do with Google search,” Gikunda said.

Thinking local has also involved thinking of creative ways to market Google products to an African audience. Last year, the company launched its sms and web based classified ads product, Trader in Ghana having launched it earlier in Uganda.

To reach out to Africans, the product was launched using flash mobs and a musician singing a catchy jingle about Trader on the streets of Accra.

Despite the prospects, the continent poses its unique challenges. Problems such as low literacy rates, high levels of poverty, low levels of power supply in some African countries and lack of awareness about the Internet by majority of Africans pose as impediments.

However, the company has continued to launch its projects in Africa’s challenging terrain, launching tech events in various African countries aimed at strengthening the continent’s burgeoning tech ecosystem and building a passionate community of developers and tech enthusiasts.

To read more about Google’s Africa initiatives, read this post on its recently launched tech incubator, Umbono.

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Across much of the developing world, Internet bandwidth is still rare and costly. Even the seemingly ubiquitous mobile data is actually pretty slow. So how can you optimize a website for faster downloading for low-bandwidth environments? Enter Page Speed Online from Google Labs.

Page Speed Online analyzes the content of a web page, then generates suggestions to make that page faster. Reducing page load times can reduce bounce rates and increase conversion rates.

Best of all, Page Speed prioritizes what efforts will produce the biggest gains in page load speeds, with a percentage amount so you know where to concentrate your website coding efforts. And yes, they even have mobile and Chrome optimization options.

Estelle Akofio-Sowah, Google Ghana’s Country Manager, shares her opinion on IT Entrepeneurship in Africa and Google’s strategy to spark innovation in Africa.

Are you an IT professional? Do you rock at your work? Then you might think about moving up to the big leagues - as Business Daily reports, big name companies are hiring.

The companies have embarked on a massive recruitment drive in Africa in search of new growth opportunities in the ICT sector.

Over 100 vacancies are currently open at high tech firms such as IBM, Google, Facebook and Microsoft, promising to increase focus on the African talent pool in coming months. Among the firms that are aggressively pursuing talent are IBM and Google, who are collectively seeking to fill over 60 vacancies. Other firms such as Oracle and Microsoft seek to strengthen their existing position on the continent, while relative new-comers such as Internet advertising firm InMobi are on a quest to deepen their presence regionally with management expertise.

Facebook, the most successful social media network that currently has over 27.4 million African users, is recruiting a Growth Manager for Africa who will be based in either Kenya or Nigeria. Research carried out by Business Daily indicates that the companies are mostly seeking personnel with strengths in business development, marketing and sales, as well as those with technical skills who can tweak the products that the firms offer to suit the African landscape.

Kenya, South Africa and Nigeria are attracting the most demand for talent, with two thirds of vacancies required to fill posts in Nairobi, Cape Town and in Lagos; cementing the three countries status as technological hubs on the continent.

May 4 (Bloomberg BusinessWeek) -- Google Inc. is helping to expand Internet access in Africa, the world’s poorest continent, laying the groundwork for revenue growth, said Joe Mucheru, the company’s head for sub-Saharan Africa.

The owner of the world’s most popular search engine is investing in infrastructure, creating search pages in local languages and helping universities adapt their curriculum to changing technology across Africa, Mucheru said in a phone interview on May 2 from Nairobi.

“It’s more about getting more people on the Internet,” he said. “At the moment revenue is not our focus. In the next few years, we could be looking at revenue.”

Africa, with about 1 billion people, has 15 percent of the world’s population and only 2 percent of its Internet users, Mucheru said, citing figures from the International Telecommunications Union. While Google’s revenue from the continent isn’t “a significant number,” the company sees a good investment opportunity in helping close the gap and getting more people to use the company’s products, said Mucheru.

Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country of 150 million people, where Google opened a two-day conference yesterday for local entrepreneurs and developers in Lagos, the commercial capital, is central to the company’s Africa policy, he said. Google’s engineers have flown in from around the world to provide training on the use of its applications for business and advertising, the company said.

Local Languages

Nigeria’s Internet users now make up about 29 percent of its population, a fourfold increase since 2008, according to the International Telecommunications Union. Google’s efforts to increase access include an arrangement with six universities in the country whereby it provides a link to the Internet and the institutions provide their own wireless network.

Google, based in Mountain View, California, has developed search engines in three Nigerian languages and is working on others to ensure that “language shouldn’t be a barrier” to the Internet, said Mucheru. The company is currently focusing its Africa efforts on South Africa, Kenya, Uganda, Senegal, Ghana and Nigeria, with plans to add Cameroon and Ethiopia later this year.

New submarine fiber-optic links to Africa that have been completed or are being built promise an “abundance of cyber- connectivity,” said Mucheru. In anticipation of growing broadband capacity, Google is working with telecommunications companies, including Internet service providers, equipment manufacturers and software developers to take advantage of it, he said.