Recently, Google put on the hyped G-Nigeria Day, which was actually a 3-day Google-fest in Lagos. Reading the impressions others had about the event was telling - most Nigerians seemed to be ambivalent about its worthiness to their efforts.

Yet Oladejo Fabolude over at Digital Crossings seems to have found the real essence of the event in his post I Went For Google’s G-Nigeria Day And All I Got Was A Lousy T-Shirt:

What Google need to take away from this experiment, get a bunch of techies into a room, provide Wi-Fi, provide them a little prodding to get them headed where you want them to go, move out of the way and watch them at work. Kind of like the Indian experiment that put a computer in a wall and just let street children do what they wanted – with amazing results.

From that event, I got to meet several Nigerian tech bloggers, exchanged a couple of phone numbers, blog addresses, followed and was followed by some more people on Twitter. I got a few answers to some tech issues from the audience and had some deficiencies about my blog pointed out. In order words, I connected with people – and that was the success of G-Nigeria Day. That was just me, I could see many other people connecting much better with the Google personnel and each other.

And that's the brilliance of Google's efforts in Africa - get ICT implementers together where they can talk about technologies and methodologies, give everyone access to them, and build relationships with people creating solutions.

Now I hope they capitalize on the Nigerian enthusiasm, before Ghana lives up to its title as the ICT hub of West Africa.

Dix jours après le violent séisme en Haïti, deux techniciens d’Inveneo, CIO Mark Summer et Andris Bjornson, sont arrivés sur place pour le déploiement d’un réseau wifi longue distance dont bénéficieront les organisations partenaires de NetHope situées à Port-au-Prince. Ce réseau permettra à ces organisations humanitaires d’accéder à l’Internet, d’utiliser la téléphonie VoIP, de collaborer et de partager l’information.

Après une catastrophe naturelle, la restauration de la communication est essentielle et plusieurs organismes comme Inveneo sont en train de mettre en place leurs propres solutions TIC afin de soutenir les efforts de la reconstruction en Haïti :

• Dons par SMS : Les opérateurs mobiles dans différents pays ont lancé une collecte de dons par SMS en faveur des organisations comme la Croix-Rouge qui viennent en aide aux victimes du séisme.
• S.O.S. par SMS : Suite à une collaboration entre plusieurs organisations y comprises Samasource, Ushahidi, FrontlineSMS, CrowdFlower et le départment d’Etat américain, les abonnés de Voilà, le principal opérateur de téléphonie mobile en Haïti, peuvent envoyer gratuitement un texte au 4636 pour appeler à l’aide.
• Recherche de Personnes : Google a mis en ligne un outil permettant de rechercher une personne ou de donner des informations sur une personne trouvée.
• Bénévolat Virtuel : Samasource recrute les bénévoles pour traduire les textes en créole vers l’anglais et The Extraordinaries a tenté d’utiliser les bénévoles pour identifier les personnes perdues dans les photos.
• Kijan mwen ka ede ou? : Comment est-ce que je peux vous aider ? Google vient de lancer son traducteur créole.

Qu’il soit une solution qui connecte les donateurs à l’étranger avec les organisations sur place, une solution qui connecte les bénévoles avec les actions humanitaires virtuelles, ou une solution qui permet aux gens de surmonter les barrières de la langue, les gens peuvent se mobiliser et répondre aux besoins locaux dans une façon informée et efficace grâce aux TIC. Malgré ses coordonnées géographiques, Haïti n’est surtout pas isolé.

Tanzania, this is your opportunity to bring Africa's information online by creating Wikipedia articles in Kiswahili.

You are the wellspring of Kiswahili in East Africa. Show your paossion for the language by translating English Wikipedia articles into Kiswahili or by writing your own articles from scratch, building a richer online experience for 100 million African users who speak Kiswahili.

Prizes includes laptops, mobile phones, prepaid internet access modems, Google T-shirts, and more. Participants will also receive certificate of participation.

But you better hurry - it looks like Kenya is already dominating the contest.

Learn more here: Kiswahili Wikipedia Challenge, sponsored by Google

Are you looking for a new information technology job in Senegal, Ghana, or Uganda? Then check out Google's openings across the African continent:

Google Africa Jobs

Google is expanding our Business Development team in Africa. Associates are self-starters who will work closely with the wider Google team on new product initiatives and key strategic relationships.

In order to succeed in this group, you must be entrepreneurial, creative, open-minded, and adaptive. When interacting with internal and external clients, you need to be persistent, action oriented, and highly collaborative. You are a top performer who possesses good judgment and has a deep interest in the internet technology industry, Google products, and Africa.

• Account Strategist - Johannesburg
• Agency Relationship Manager - Johannesburg
• Business Development Associate - Accra
• Business Development Associate - Dakar
• Business Development Associate - Kampala
• Geographic Supervisor - Nairobi

.

No matter how much bandwidth comes via the new fiber optic cables, there still will be massive offline areas in Africa. So there will still be a great craving for the world's knowledge in classrooms and living rooms from Accra to Lusaka.

Openmoko has just released what might be the killer app to supply a large portion of that knowledge to offline areas - the WikiReader. This $99 device has the 3+ million Wikipedia articles at your fingertips with only a micro-SD card and 2 AAA batteries - no Internet required.

Intrigued? Then listen to Pat Meier-Johnson explain it in this exclusive ICTworks Interview:

Openmoko has been behind large open-source initiatives such as the openmoko opensource wireless phone, and have a greater purpose for the WikiReader. They say:

NGOs and governments in emerging countries are key to the core value of the WikiReader. We believe an uncomplicated device with long battery life and no strings attached could bring this vast repository of knowledge to many people around the world who otherwise could not access it.

I can see this being an amazing resource for educators in rural schools. They would now have access to the Wikipedia's wealth of knowledge at a fraction of the cost for computers or Internet access. In addition, with the Parental Control feature, they don't have to worry about young prying eyes seeing too much.

Like what you read? Then subscribe to ICTworks updates via RSS, Email, or Twitter

It's our learned opinion that the best power source for rural ICT implementations is solar panels feeding deep-cycle batteries. But solar is expensive, $10-14 per Watt installed (see Mat Berg's Solar Calculator), so we're excited by any technology advances that can reduce initial costs.

Solar panel maintenance

Currently, the Economist reports on two advances that can give us more competitive solar power production.

Use Less Silicon

GreenSun Energy, has figured out how to diffuse light sideways to the edges of solar panels. This means that their solar panels only need silicon at the outer edges of the glass plates. GreenSun Energy does this by coating the glass with a combination of dyes and sprinkling it with metal nano particles.

Don't Use Any Silicon

3GSolar skips silicon altogether, using "dye-sensitized" solar cells with titanium dioxide and ruthenium dye molecules to generate electricity via sunlight. This process is not as efficient as silicon-based methods, but dye-sensitized cells are much cheaper to make.

Wash Whatever You Have

From the solar-powered Googleplex, we learn that washing solar panels has a significant impact on performance.

Google has flat and tilted solar panels on their offices in Silicon Valley, and after analyzing the power output they've come to an obvious conclusion. Their tilted panels are washed enough by rain, but flat solar panels need additional cleaning. In fact, washing flat panels can doubled energy output overnight.

Tilt It When Away From Equator

Google also found that tilting solar panels increased performance of panels at 37° North. With a 15° tilt, solar panel produce more electricity than flat panels. Add in the rain washing effects, and solar panel tilt is a recommended installation action.

Like what you read? Then subscribe to ICTworks updates via RSS, Email, or Twitter

If you're used to the poor selection of maps for African cities, let me show you the future, today. Google Maps has an amazingly accurate and detailed map of Nairobi, Kenya, where you can do detail searches, for restaurants or computer stores for example, and you'll get almost exact locations.

This is a great resource that apparently got its start when Google opened an office in Nairobi and realized the office couldn't be found on Google Maps. From there, Google added its own map points and then opened up Map Maker to users who want to add their own data to more than 122 countries, including most of Africa.

Now you too can make a little difference - create or edit your own Map Maker data for places you know in African. Even big cities like Lagos, Nigeria could use the love.

As Google says, "Let's map Africa!"

I'm very excited to see that Google is taking a serious interest in Africa. From offices in South Africa and Kenya, to an open call for Africans to expand Google Maps across the continent, they're serious about actually testing and rolling out services directly targeted to Africans. And now they've outdone even this level of engagement.

With the explosive growth of mobile phone usage (but not always smart phones), Google is looking at brining the power of the web to SMS users. And they've just rolled out Google SMS for Uganda, a suite of mobile applications which will allow people to access information, via SMS, on a diverse number of topics

• 6001: Google SMS Tips - Health tips, ClinicFinder, Farmer’s Friend (agriculture tips & weather)
• 6006: Google SMS Search - News, sports scores, stock quotes, horoscope, glossary, currency converter, religious texts, translation, flights, Q&A, calculator, and local time
• 6007: Google Trader Buy and sell on your mobile. Use Google Trader to find anything that you need to have, or want to sell or trade

While Google is particularly excited about Google SMS Tips, an SMS-based query-and-answer service, I'm thinking that Google Trader is going to be the killer app. I see a blossoming of person-to-person sales of all manner of products and services, that will quickly also absorb the nascent SMS-based agricultural pricing, becoming something of an African Craigslist.

And while the businessman in me is interested to see what items sell the most and the most profitably, the arm-chair sociologist wonders what search terms said items will be organized around - will they be anything you'd expect or will Ugandans organize their lives on whole other terms.

For years, low-power computer buyers have had only two choices in operating systems: Linux or Windows. And the comparison and competition between the two systems is sometimes tiring, with near religious overtones.

So its with great relief and much excitement that I see Google is developing its own OS Google Chrome Operating System

It's our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be. Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010.

And here's the real promise. Even though Google Chrome is focused on netbooks and cloud computing, the needs of connected netbook users are very similar to low-power computer users in low-bandwidth environments.

• The need to be very processor efficient
• No need for high-end graphics
• Very effective use of bandwidth

My only concern is how well Google Chrome will work on low-to-no bandwidth. I know Google Gears is their current offline offering, but even it is a little buggy and needs regular Internet connectivity. I think Chrome will really shine in the developing world if they can get it to work of an Intranet as well as the Internet.