The latest deal struck by his team is a big one. C&W is working as part of an 11-strong multinational consortium of telecommunications companies to bring a new cable to west Africa. When the West Africa Cable System (WACS) is up and running in 2011, it will boost total international bandwidth capacity into Africa by more than a hundred-fold, according to estimates from Johannesburg-based IT market research company, World Wide Worx.
This is the infrastructure of the 21st century. Like buying land before the railway arrives, investing in West African businesses that can leverage off this sea change in connectivity is probably something worth looking at seriously.
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For me there is no question that a flurry of digital innovation could lead to both the better public outcomes and economic vibrancy we need to create new jobs and wealth. First, though, government needs to understand that digital is not about content. Thus far I think they have thought about it as a form of media, like television or the radio. It isn’t. The internet is becoming primarily a tool for organising the real world, not a new form of distribution for content. A digital strategy that focuses on content will be out-of-date the moment it is published. The next generation of innovators may not be the usual kind of suspects but rather bored public sector graduate trainees unwilling to climb slowly up the greasy pole before they’re allowed to make a difference. And they might be the next generation of technological innovators too. The dot-com stars of this generation may come from the public sector rather than the business and engineering schools of the world because there’s massive financial value in changing the world for the better as well.
Delayed gratification as an indicator of success. I’m going to start using this in our interview process. ;)
game theory and predicting human behaviors.
On the other hand, when asked about whether there’s data showing real cloud adoption, Benchmark’s Peter Fenton offered the startups that Benchmark has invested in as evidence. Every company in Benchmark’s portfolio uses Amazon’s cloud infrastructure in some way, and about one-third of them operate entirely on web-based services and infrastructure. Billing startup Zuora, for example, is doing well despite having “not a single IT guy, not a one,” Fenton said – and that’s more meaningful than an analyst’s report.
…well we do, called eating your own dog food. Good for discipline: gotta have skin in the game.
With interest in health games rising, the fifth annual Games for Health Conference in Boston expanded to 390 people this year from 100, including developers, investors and medical experts, while numbers at many other conferences are down up to 40 percent. “Healthcare is 18 percent of the GDP of the United States and so games for health is probably the largest sector of activity in the serious games field long-term,” said Ben Sawyer, co-founder of The Games for Health Project. “If you add up the 18 month sales of “Wii Fit” and the sales of “EA Sports Active,” Konami’s “Dance Dance Revolution” and other healthy games, the worldwide retail numbers are over $2 billion.
Swift hopes to expand this approach into a general purpose toolkit for crowdsouring the semantic structuring of data so that it can be reused in other applications and visualizations. The developers of Swift are particularly interested in crisis reporting (Ushahidi) and international media criticism (Meedan), but by providing a general purpose crowdsourcing tool we hope to create a tool reusable in many contexts.
Jean-Baptiste Say, a French economist who first coined the word entrepreneur in about 1800, said: “The entrepreneur shifts economic resources out of an area of lower and into an area of higher productivity and greater yield.” One dictionary says an entrepreneur is “one who undertakes an enterprise, especially a contractor acting as the intermediary between capital and labour”.
Unfortunately, despite their intent, my guess is that the new regulations will most severely impact smaller firms, like my own, that never engaged in reckless behavior. This will further reward those “too big to fail” firms, whose economies of scale and cozy relationships with regulators leave them better positioned than their smaller rivals to absorb the costs of the added red tape.
Currently, about 3.5 billion people, more than half the world’s population, have no access to banking services. However, 1 billion of those people do have mobile phones and the GSMA sees that figure rising to 1.7 billion by 2012. Access to financial services could not only remove the need for long, costly and risky journeys to move money around, but also reduce the burden of constant, active money management endured by those living on tiny amounts and in constant danger of financial crisis. “Poor people are doing a tremendous amount of financial transactions just to survive,” says Stephen Rasmussen, who runs a mobile banking program for CGAP, an association of non-profit organizations under the auspices of the World Bank that seeks to help to increase financial access for the poor. “People at the very bottom spend far more energy and mental time on managing these systems than we do,” Rasmussen told Reuters. Mobile money deployments have huge momentum, with the number expected to double to 120 by the end of the year, according to the GSMA.
