Coding south of the sahara

Suspended Web Hosting

2008-02-08T12:25:00.000+03:00

I seem to be the victim of an evil web host lord who has decided that I must pay for their mistakes. As I explained in my previous post. my blog on peupe has been down for the past 2 weeks as a result of broken code after the rails version was upgraded without any notification, now in what I can only describe as "gremlins at work" my web hosting account has been suspended apparently due to a memory bloat caused by rails applications. This action doesn't even make sense, considering the fact that my rails web apps, a total of 3, have been down for over 2 weeks so how could I have a memory bloat? I don't think this action was justified bearing in mind the hell they have put me through.

So where does this live me? well I can't backup my database, download my websites, in a nutshell I'm screwed. I now have to put into action a plan to migrate my web apps to a more reliable ROR web host, a few names come to mind such as Rimuhosting and Slicehost.

Peupe blog brought down by web host

2008-02-01T14:46:00.000+03:00

It's official my blog on wesonga.peupe.net is down and will be for the next few days as I try to refactor my code. My web host Bluehost (Cheap but terrible customer service) decided that it was time they upgraded their rails version from 1.2.6 to 2.0.2 without notifying their customers, the result is that about 90% of my code is deprecated. Rails 2.0 is a major leap and is not backward compatible, in fact very many aspects have been removed and so any move to it needs some major planning even if the app is as small as Peupe.

So for now my home is back to blogger under my pseudonym subsaharancoder.

Back from vacation

2008-02-01T12:34:00.003+03:00

I didn't want to leave Aruba, but I ran out of money :(

Peupe: IE6 issues

2007-06-09T11:58:00.001+03:00

IE6 seems to be the browser that will truely put me to the test when it comes to peupe. I developed and deployed peupe on a mozilla and IE7 browser having forgotten that IE6 is quite nasty when it comes to certain design issues. Take for example my mast head which is a transparent PNG, IE6 shows a blue/green background on the section that is meant to be transparent, I didn't notice this till when I viewed peupe on the campus browser, what this means for me now is that I have to design for IE6.
Resolution:Redo all the mast heads with white backgrounds

Another issue is the rich text editor (TinyMCE) that we using in the admin section of the app, it loads okay on Mozilla but doesn't load on IE6 and IE7. This obviously isnt a good thing bearing in mind that most of the time the app will be accessed from a cyber cafe where the majority of browsers used is IE6.
Resolution: Work backwords and discover why the tect editor isn't loading in the admin (just viewed tinyMCE's website on IE6 and the demo page loads okay)

This might seem like a few issues but trust me when your product/application is public its pretty crazy dealing with 2 major aspects.

I'm going to be doing most of my blogging now on Peupe (wesonga.peupe.net)

Peupe:Browser compatibility

2007-06-09T11:48:00.000+03:00

Browser compatibility issues seem to be a bulk of the issues that I'm dealing with right now with regards to

Peupe: Pushing it out

2007-06-08T23:08:00.000+03:00

Yesterday marked a major milestone for our company, we finally pushed out our first "public" release of peupe accessible via alkags.peupe.net But it was by far not a small feat, I had to code and debug several issues that arose and I'm still on them. One of the major challenges has been speed of the application, a few people have complained that the app is to slow and so I've been going through the code with a tooth comb trying to see where the bottlenecks are, implementing caching on several areas of the blog (using Ruby on Rails this isn't difficult). I finally managed to finish most of what I'd set out to do at around 6am and headed to bed.

In the evening I got online and started getting feedback from people, i actually asked a friend of mine to see if they could post a comment on the blog and to my disappointment an error popped up which I addressed immediately woohoo!! :-)

As of friday evening I had pushed out the following features and bug fixes:

Error on posting a comment which had to do with lack of appropriate IDs.
Search engine friendly URL's: the posts now have permalinks that give them very nice and neat URLs (thanks to permalink_fu a great RoR plugin). I now have
Delicious and Technorati submission: I had an issue with this as it wasn't giving urls that could be tracked back to the blog.
Tags: The tags associated with posts can now be viewed.

There are few more other things I'm working on, my focus now being on errors and optimisation but its a good feeling when you can see the value of your work coming to the surface.

Peupe: A corporate blogging platform

2007-06-03T20:25:00.000+03:00

I've been underground for the past couple of weeks coding like crazy (Technology director and still writing code) and dealing with deployment issues (Ruby on Rails deployment is a major challenge) that could drive any reasonable person into a frenzy. So whats been keeping me that busy you might ask? well one word Peupe. Peupe is a corporate blogging platform that our company has developed specifically targeted at professionals and CEO's, our objective is to build communities and content around business and corporate leaders in their respective leaders.

As a business we feel that there is a large demand for people to want engage captains of industry in meaningful discussions unfortunately this isn't easy due and as such a corporate (CEO) blog where the industry leader can share his/her thoughts, books of interest, websites of interest and even photos, think of Peupe as wordpress+flickr. The application is currently in beta version and we aptly named Madaraka since it was in essence launched on June 1st, 2007.

Peupe..why the name?

I'd be lying if I said that the name was inspired by me, this was all Al's brainchild with me as the "realiser of dreams" if you'd like to call me that. Peupe is a swahili word that means slate or white, they were commonly used as writing tablets in olden times. Apparently the word isn't just swahili but also belongs to some european country, this I discovered when I typed it on google but nevertheless we will still push on.

Under the hood

Peupe is developed using Ruby on Rails by our own Kenyan development team.

So what next?

Well I'm currently still working on addressing a few bugs on the application but so far so good. There are several features we would like to add to it but the main ones include:

Internationalisation- We would like to translate the blog into several languages with Kiswahili and French being the first then other languages to follow.
Feed Aggregator- A simple feed aggregator to allow for users to manage their favorite RSS feeds.
Blog Migration-You have a blog on blogger, wordpress or moveable type and need it moved, will give you tools to do that.

Thats just the tip of the iceberg, there's so much more we've planned that I'm sometimes overwhelmed. Just watch this space :-)

With all that I plan to migrate this blog to peupe just as soon as I can stabilise it on our deployment server. Will keep you posted.

Journey of an Afropreneur:Buggy code, killer mosquitoes and the phoenix

2007-05-17T00:12:00.000+03:00

I finally managed to move house about two weeks ago but since the internet connection in my new neighborhood literally "sucks!!" I haven't managed to do much, I even went as far as giving Al my laptop for close to two weeks as I cleared the boxes. With the boxes cleared and my body having recovered, I have now discovered that even with an internet connection I can't connect from the bedroom, the signal is just too weak, so now I've shifted base to the sitting room where the connection is much better and the mosquitoes really kick butt!! Seriously the mosquitoes in this new place put the amazon to shame but I will survive.

Today we had a meeting with the same CEO who had wanted to build an online business, but this time I went there with Al and the other guy who was to be a partner in the business. The meeting went pretty well but as usual left me tired like a mexican mule. The next few days will be critical as we solidify the requirements and prepare to build another online business.

Right now I'm dealing with a buggy PHP code base for an app that a contractor developed for us. The error I keep getting is this:

"Error unable to connect to database server Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock' (2)"

Nothing major based upon my experiences but somehow escaping me at midnight after a long evening.It's amazing that when you look at somebody else's code it doesn't matter how good you are in the particular language it all looks like gibberish and you keep going like this "duh!aah!uuuh!oooh!!.." until you realise that in time you'll figure out the errors and finally prevail.

I decided to change my gmail status message to Phoenix I think because I simply love the name and it exudes with confidence and hope, at this point I need hope and faith to push me through the tough times.

Academia is back

2007-05-15T15:57:00.000+03:00

I'm back in school this time with another crazy course load consisting of:

Business law
Introduction to Macro Economics
World Civilisations
Advanced Networking Concepts
Computer Graphics

I hate academia.....

How to Start a Startup

2007-05-04T12:00:00.000+03:00

I stumbled upon this article while surfing techcrunch.com I hope it gives you invaluable insight as you venture into the world of entrepreneurship:

How to Start a Startup

You need three things to create a successful startup: to start with good people, to make something customers actually want, and to spend as little money as possible. Most startups that fail do it because they fail at one of these. A startup that does all three will probably succeed.

And that's kind of exciting, when you think about it, because all three are doable. Hard, but doable. And since a startup that succeeds ordinarily makes its founders rich, that implies getting rich is doable too. Hard, but doable.

If there is one message I'd like to get across about startups, that's it. There is no magically difficult step that requires brilliance to solve.

The Idea

In particular, you don't need a brilliant idea to start a startup around. The way a startup makes money is to offer people better technology than they have now. But what people have now is often so bad that it doesn't take brilliance to do better.

Google's plan, for example, was simply to create a search site that didn't suck. They had three new ideas: index more of the Web, use links to rank search results, and have clean, simple web pages with unintrusive keyword-based ads. Above all, they were determined to make a site that was good to use. No doubt there are great technical tricks within Google, but the overall plan was straightforward. And while they probably have bigger ambitions now, this alone brings them a billion dollars a year. [1]

There are plenty of other areas that are just as backward as search was before Google. I can think of several heuristics for generating ideas for startups, but most reduce to this: look at something people are trying to do, and figure out how to do it in a way that doesn't suck.

For example, dating sites currently suck far worse than search did before Google. They all use the same simple-minded model. They seem to have approached the problem by thinking about how to do database matches instead of how dating works in the real world. An undergrad could build something better as a class project. And yet there's a lot of money at stake. Online dating is a valuable business now, and it might be worth a hundred times as much if it worked.

An idea for a startup, however, is only a beginning. A lot of would-be startup founders think the key to the whole process is the initial idea, and from that point all you have to do is execute. Venture capitalists know better. If you go to VC firms with a brilliant idea that you'll tell them about if they sign a nondisclosure agreement, most will tell you to get lost. That shows how much a mere idea is worth. The market price is less than the inconvenience of signing an NDA.

Another sign of how little the initial idea is worth is the number of startups that change their plan en route. Microsoft's original plan was to make money selling programming languages, of all things. Their current business model didn't occur to them until IBM dropped it in their lap five years later.

Ideas for startups are worth something, certainly, but the trouble is, they're not transferrable. They're not something you could hand to someone else to execute. Their value is mainly as starting points: as questions for the people who had them to continue thinking about.

What matters is not ideas, but the people who have them. Good people can fix bad ideas, but good ideas can't save bad people.

People

What do I mean by good people? One of the best tricks I learned during our startup was a rule for deciding who to hire. Could you describe the person as an animal? It might be hard to translate that into another language, but I think everyone in the US knows what it means. It means someone who takes their work a little too seriously; someone who does what they do so well that they pass right through professional and cross over into obsessive.

What it means specifically depends on the job: a salesperson who just won't take no for an answer; a hacker who will stay up till 4:00 AM rather than go to bed leaving code with a bug in it; a PR person who will cold-call New York Times reporters on their cell phones; a graphic designer who feels physical pain when something is two millimeters out of place.

Almost everyone who worked for us was an animal at what they did. The woman in charge of sales was so tenacious that I used to feel sorry for potential customers on the phone with her. You could sense them squirming on the hook, but you knew there would be no rest for them till they'd signed up.

If you think about people you know, you'll find the animal test is easy to apply. Call the person's image to mind and imagine the sentence "so-and-so is an animal." If you laugh, they're not. You don't need or perhaps even want this quality in big companies, but you need it in a startup.

For programmers we had three additional tests. Was the person genuinely smart? If so, could they actually get things done? And finally, since a few good hackers have unbearable personalities, could we stand to have them around?

That last test filters out surprisingly few people. We could bear any amount of nerdiness if someone was truly smart. What we couldn't stand were people with a lot of attitude. But most of those weren't truly smart, so our third test was largely a restatement of the first.

When nerds are unbearable it's usually because they're trying too hard to seem smart. But the smarter they are, the less pressure they feel to act smart. So as a rule you can recognize genuinely smart people by their ability to say things like "I don't know," "Maybe you're right," and "I don't understand x well enough."

This technique doesn't always work, because people can be influenced by their environment. In the MIT CS department, there seems to be a tradition of acting like a brusque know-it-all. I'm told it derives ultimately from Marvin Minsky, in the same way the classic airline pilot manner is said to derive from Chuck Yeager. Even genuinely smart people start to act this way there, so you have to make allowances.

It helped us to have Robert Morris, who is one of the readiest to say "I don't know" of anyone I've met. (At least, he was before he became a professor at MIT.) No one dared put on attitude around Robert, because he was obviously smarter than they were and yet had zero attitude himself.

Like most startups, ours began with a group of friends, and it was through personal contacts that we got most of the people we hired. This is a crucial difference between startups and big companies. Being friends with someone for even a couple days will tell you more than companies could ever learn in interviews. [2]

It's no coincidence that startups start around universities, because that's where smart people meet. It's not what people learn in classes at MIT and Stanford that has made technology companies spring up around them. They could sing campfire songs in the classes so long as admissions worked the same.

If you start a startup, there's a good chance it will be with people you know from college or grad school. So in theory you ought to try to make friends with as many smart people as you can in school, right? Well, no. Don't make a conscious effort to schmooze; that doesn't work well with hackers.

What you should do in college is work on your own projects. Hackers should do this even if they don't plan to start startups, because it's the only real way to learn how to program. In some cases you may collaborate with other students, and this is the best way to get to know good hackers. The project may even grow into a startup. But once again, I wouldn't aim too directly at either target. Don't force things; just work on stuff you like with people you like.

Ideally you want between two and four founders. It would be hard to start with just one. One person would find the moral weight of starting a company hard to bear. Even Bill Gates, who seems to be able to bear a good deal of moral weight, had to have a co-founder. But you don't want so many founders that the company starts to look like a group photo. Partly because you don't need a lot of people at first, but mainly because the more founders you have, the worse disagreements you'll have. When there are just two or three founders, you know you have to resolve disputes immediately or perish. If there are seven or eight, disagreements can linger and harden into factions. You don't want mere voting; you need unanimity.

In a technology startup, which most startups are, the founders should include technical people. During the Internet Bubble there were a number of startups founded by business people who then went looking for hackers to create their product for them. This doesn't work well. Business people are bad at deciding what to do with technology, because they don't know what the options are, or which kinds of problems are hard and which are easy. And when business people try to hire hackers, they can't tell which ones are good. Even other hackers have a hard time doing that. For business people it's roulette.

Do the founders of a startup have to include business people? That depends. We thought so when we started ours, and we asked several people who were said to know about this mysterious thing called "business" if they would be the president. But they all said no, so I had to do it myself. And what I discovered was that business was no great mystery. It's not something like physics or medicine that requires extensive study. You just try to get people to pay you for stuff.

I think the reason I made such a mystery of business was that I was disgusted by the idea of doing it. I wanted to work in the pure, intellectual world of software, not deal with customers' mundane problems. People who don't want to get dragged into some kind of work often develop a protective incompetence at it. Paul Erdos was particularly good at this. By seeming unable even to cut a grapefruit in half (let alone go to the store and buy one), he forced other people to do such things for him, leaving all his time free for math. Erdos was an extreme case, but most husbands use the same trick to some degree.

Excerpt Taken From …>>>

http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html

Bad events and preparing for some of them

2007-05-03T11:47:00.000+03:00

This week has been rather tough on me, for the first time in the last years I have to move houses even though this isn’t anything major it is quite demanding considering that I have to co-ordinate issues in the current house and also ensure that the next house is sorted so that when I move in everything is okay. Take for instance the issue of electricity, if you’ve ever moved house you know that you have to get the electricity connected in your new place, especially in the case where your moving into a full house compared to a block of flats where electricity bills usually come in the name of the landlord who then forwards them to the respective houses, so today after trying to sort out issues with the vacating tenant I discovered that I now need to sort out the electricity and ensure that by Saturday (the day I’m moving) I do have electricity. Hopefully all this stuff will fall in place in the next few days.

I’ve talked about our cat before Peeps, well off late she’s been behaving rather strangely, in fact her movements and regular activities have almost come to an end. On Sunday as I prepared lunch (vegetables, meat and ugali) with my better half, we both noticed that she wasn’t really making the point of ensuring that we gave her the meat to eat and this was strange because usually she gets on our case about the meat even before we un-wrap it, well this time she didn’t. So after we had eaten our lunch I proceeded to serve her with the juiciest bone I could get my hands on, she didn’t eat the meat and later on I couldn’t find her (she’s been known to go missing for days). Well today I found her actually my baby sister found her at the corner of the house on a pile of old papers dead, it came as a shock to me and despite my tough exterior I was truly saddened. It’s amazing that I had grown so attached to her over the past few months that now that she’s dead it truly affects me. I took her body and buried her at the corner of our backyard in the evening.

Peeps(2006-May 2007) R.I.P

On the other side of town Al my partner was having his share of troubles, his hard disk had crashed on Monday evening so whenever he tried to boot the machine it would display the unnerving message UNABLE TO LOAD NTLDR. Now this kind of message doesn’t scare you much when your hard disk is filled with nothing more than several gigs of music and a few video games but when it has your business plan, financials, project proposals and God knows everything business related it is cause for concern. Never you mind that just a few months back, Al was robbed of his tablet PC which also had a lot of business material. I’m no hardware/software guru so when he made the point of calling me when he discovered this and the little knowledge that I knew pointed towards the solution being a repair of the current operating system using a bootable version of Windows XP CD. I didn’t have the CD with me so we attempted to repair it using a bootable USB version of WinXP on labour day which didn’t work. I eventually managed to get the CD to Al on Wednesday evening and he was to later on inform me that the repair didn’t work and that he was forced to format the hard disk!!..What?!??!...yes format the hard disk. At this point I need to point out that a potential client had just told Al to mail him the proposal he was working on for them and that another potential client would probably be asking for a meeting where Al would present the proposal he had been working on. Now do you see why I’ve had a tough week? The implications of this on our business cannot be overstated in fact it puts as in a rather bad situation as well as in a vulnerable position. One hopes and prays that these things never happen to you but they do, the lesson to be learned from all this is always prepare for the worst.

In a totally related news kind off, the May edition of Business 2.0 (read this magazine if you’re serious about business) was accidentally deleted from the servers and no backups were available. The only good thing is that there were copies of the content available as email but the layout was lost completely.

If the two stories above aren’t a good case for backing up your data then I don’t know what is. In case you’re wondering how you can store most of your important documents online check out the following great and free services:

Box.net (I have an account with these guys and the service is excellent plus they have this embeddable widget that practically allows you to display some of your backed up/uploaded documents on a website (preferably your blog) for other people to download) plus the interface is pretty tight. I give these guys a rating of 8 on scale of one to ten.

Badongo.com –I haven’t used this service but AL has, I did have a look at the website and it looks pretty cool, I can’t seem to get the name though but who cares as long as it works.

If none of these work for you then go the old fashioned way and buy an external USB hard drive preferably 100GB and above. I got mine last year and so far it’s proved invaluable; it’s slightly larger than a cigarette pack in length so it easily fits in the pocket and is light to, contains 120GB of storage and cost just about Ksh8000 ($115 USD) from amazon.com.

Let me see how the weekend will be.

Journey of an Afropreneur: Optimism , Pessimism and the Entrepreneur

2007-05-02T11:43:00.000+03:00

I often ask myself whether an entrepreneur can afford to be pessimistic, the reason I ask myself is because one of the biggest assets as well as liabilities to any entrepreneur is optimism. Optimism is what makes you believe that the worst is over and that better days lie ahead, optimism is what gives you the assurance that you’re on the right track even when other people think differently, and it’s what wakes you up in the morning and gives you the strength to face the challenges of starting and running that business.

On the other hand optimism can blind you from the fact that may be just may be your dead wrong and you need to change course quickly before you and your idea are confined to the annals of history. In fact during my entrepreneurship class in university last semester, we were told that a large number of entrepreneurs suffer from too much optimism which can lead to depression especially in cases where the business does fail. So is optimism really a good thing? Well that is debatable in my view and I cannot discount the fact that in most cases optimism will open more doors then close them, but is there room for a pessimistic entrepreneur in the business world?

As a self confessed and proud pessimist (I just stumbled upon the word pragmatist in the dictionary and I think that is more fitting of who I am), I often tend to focus on pointing out the problems (translated as challenges) of any idea before I pounce on it. Al my partner is a serial optimist and as such is a complete opposite of me which is a very good thing because we almost complement each other. On one hand he sees the endless possibilities of one idea while I see the enormous challenges within the idea, this is good because as I see the problems I also attempt to visualize the possible solutions.

In my view pessimism is the little guy on your shoulder who keeps telling you to stop dreaming and get back to reality, and I don’t mind having that guy around in fact I think the role he plays cannot be overstated. The challenge comes in striking a balance between the optimism and pessimism, if one outweighs the other there is bound to be chaos.

Journey of an Afropreneur: Focusing on the dream,

2007-04-30T12:28:00.000+03:00

It's been almost 4 months since I made the leap into the business world and I've learned so much. Many times when I meet people they ask me what I'm up to and I tell them that I'm the Technology Director at a communications (web) company, they get all excited and start asking me for jobs (the good ones do that) the nasty ones just ask me for money, but what most people never seem to listen to or bother to hear is the challenges (financial and social) that are part of starting a business and getting it to actually make money.

I remember a few years back I had the opportunity to pick my friend Harry's(Startups In Kenya) brain on the important points of running a business. At that time I had no intentions or plans to venture into the unknown in fact I was content with "mediocre employment existence" and was happy getting a pay check and smiling for the boss and the clients who walked into the office. On the most important points I picked up from the whole conversation was the "Always have cash available (liquidity) for your operations, all the projects in the world will not help you if you don't have cash to pay your bills" that point stuck in my head through out the whole conversation and little did I know that a few years later I would need to apply it practically in a business I'm now trying to build.

Business has been quite slow almost non-existent the last couple of months and so our cash flow has really suffered. If you look at the bigger picture, the lack of cash for our day to day operations means that we can't focus on the issues that made as start this company. The way we've set ourselves up is that Product development is the core of our business, we build applications that we intend to sell and the only way to focus on that is to get one or two projects/clients out there to provide cash which will in turn fund the R&D aspects of product development. So far we've gotten a few good leads but nothing solid has come from it, any entrepreneur will tell you that leads/proposals don't pay your bills and a large number of them don't even translate into cash.

It's during times like this that one questions whether they made the right choice to leave the "comfort" and "security" (false comfort and security) of employment in order to pursue a dream and of late I have been pondering my decision. There is nothing wrong with doing this trust me, its human to question every decision especially the ones that radically change your life, and any entrepreneur will tell you they've been through this cycle several times some even go the step of filling out job applications, but what keeps me going is that currently our company is poised at the forefront of reaping the fruits of an ICT enlightened society and that change takes time. I'm not the most optimistic guy in the world actually I'm a very strong believer in pessimism but you there are times when I can't help but just believe in the dream. I can't help but think that even the most successful businesses went through times of drought but like the mythical phoenix arose to glory (sounds like a line from a movie).

The question is "What do you do when you feel like you can't go on?" well I'm no psychologist (Dr.Frank Njenga kando) but in my view its important to do the following things, they've helped me a lot:

Read the mission of your company every morning when you wake up and at night time before you go to bed.It helps to remind you what your fighting for and living for.
Goals and Results. Set the goals and always measure the results, just to see where your coming from and where your heading.
Never be to proud to admit that the you need a break, after all building a business can be likened to running a marathon the pace at which you run is very important, if you sprint you burn out.
Focus on the bigger picture and then break it down into the small pieces that help build the masterpiece. It's easier for you to deal with stuff when you break it down into smaller and manageable tasks.

There probably a few more other things you can do, and I do welcome my fellow afropreneurs to throw in their 2 cents on this. Success comes with blood and sweat and don't be fooled into thinking there is any other way.

Internet no more

2007-04-30T11:56:00.000+03:00

I guess before I even go on I'd better explain the reason for my absence on this blog, nothing major just the fact that I no longer have an internet connection at home :-( why lord!why lord?!?..why.... guess it was bound to happen bearing in mind that I had acquired it in a rather sweet deal (No details will be divulged). I guess nothing lasts forever but it was great being able to access the internet from home and do all my work with minimal interruptions with the occassional down time. I can't wait for next year when the infrastructure will be up and running and costs will go down by as much as 80% (for once in my life I'm optimistic about a government driven initiative).

So now I'm back to the good old days of walking to a cyber cafe to get my mail and work, but I'm hoping that this loss of freedom and independence will not last for long. I'm not one to complain (actually I am), but I had the rather nasty experience of trying to attach 2 documents (PDF and Ms-Word) on saturday from a local cyber and "By the beards of zeus!!" the connection was terribly slow to the point that I just gave up, I actually left the place pissed of and the cursing but later on I realised hmmm.."Mate you'd better get used to this until you get another set up at your home" and that humbled me.

Dell laptop cracks on me

2007-04-23T22:26:00.000+03:00

About a week ago I noticed a rather peculiar and frightening crack on the front right hand corner of my Dell Inspiron E1505 laptop at first I thought it was one of pens that had put a line as I was writing so I did what every computer owner does, I took a piece of cloth and tried to wipe it off :-)

Anyway I racked my brains trying to find out how the crack could have been caused but I couldn't pinpoint an instance where I had hit the laptop at that particular point but then again since 3 out of 7 days of the week I usually lag it around from my home to our company meeting place (Al's home) it wasn't unlikely that in all that movement I could have hit it against some surface. I was content in believing that until when I went to college today and met my classmate George who has a similar laptop to mine, in fact he bought his a month or two before mine, he was busy trying to read for the Artificial Intelligence paper we were to site for at 6pm and the first thing he pointed to was a crack at the exact corner where mine was also cracked, Coincidence?No, I don't think so...Could this be one of the weak points of the Dell Inspiron E1505? I'm not sure about that but a crack appearing on the same corner of two different laptops leaves a lot to be desired and I intend to investigate this further.

I'll post the pics of the crack soon

Comments are welcome :-)

Stockskenya.com takes another tumble

2007-04-23T22:15:00.000+03:00

With the recent IPO of a leading internet service provider in Kenya in the market I decided to head over to my favorite stocks information website Stockskenya.com to hear what the community had to say about this latest IPO (off late we've had several and it helps to feel the pulse of the common man) and boy was I disappointed to discover that the site is down again. This is the 2nd time this is happening in as many months and it makes wonder whether my friend Duke is serious with managing it as a business.

We all know that all websites have downtime but at least have the decency to inform users via a message of sorts like "Oh Shit!!..Down For the Count". I've sent Duke a mail and I'm sure he knows that the site is down, but in case he doesn't I'll shoot him a text message early in the morning (approximately 10am for me).

Update:The website is finally up which is a good thing, according to Duke it was a routing issue that he cannot explain. From a business perspective the team behind this app cannot afford for this to happen if they intend to keep a loyal following.

Journey of an Afropreneur: Changing the mindset

2007-04-19T14:44:00.000+03:00

As technology director at our company one of my key responsibilities is to identify talented and eager web enthusiasts the objective of which is to train and mentor them in two key areas Technology and Business. As a company we are aiming to set a standard not only in the technologies that are used but also in developing applications that make business sense within this part of the world, what this means is that the people we identify need to be innovative not necessarily entrepreneurs but they must possess a degree of creativity and I'm sure you'll agree with me that in order for you set a standard innovation is key. I once told a techie that we don't want to reinvent the wheel all we need to do is find one aspect of the wheel that we can improve and make it work for this part of the world.

The biggest challenge I'm facing when it comes to the identification of these extraordinary people is the mindset that the IT community in Kenya has in general, I cannot speak as though I don't belong to that community but it does sadden me when I have a discussion with somebody and I realise that they have no true skill in what they do. What do I mean when I say "true skill"? well, a large percentage of web developers in Kenya (including designers and producers) have perfected the art of download,customise and call it my own, which though works when one is trying to learn cannot really be equated to a true skill.

I had a chat with one lady who said she was very good in production which basically means that she can translate a design into a fully functional HTML prototype, what this requires is skill in use of graphics packages, HTML and Javascript. I then proceeded to ask her if she could do a full CSS concept compatible across several browsers and she responded by saying that she downloaded templates and customised them (download,customise and call it my own). This kind of "skill" cannot be truly put to the test and is absolutely devoid of any creative process.

Taking the example of learning a programming language, Al had the opportunity to interview a developer I've known for a few years, upon explaining to him that the technology we aim to use is new and would require one to commit themselves to learn and apply the developer was quick to point out that he couldn't do this until he'd had a chance to look at the language. That kind of fear is borne out of a culture of non-innovation and reuse.

Africa and Kenya specifically cannot be empowered using technology when the mindset we have adopted is one of reuse rather then revolution. If we are truly to be the next frontier of untapped technology then we must strive to build skill and nurture innovation from the onset. I don't mean to belittle my fellow web techies but the era of plug and play must come to an end, there is nothing wrong with downloading an application to learn the code base but only true knowledge is acquired when I use what I have learned to build something on my own. If we are to mentor and build the coming generation of techies then our skills need to be strong. If we are to be truly the next source of technology talent then we must move past this mindset.

The aspiring developer, designer must see pride in innovation even when recognition from ones peers isn't forthcoming. I am always impressed by the story of Google and its founders, when they built their search engine the venture capitalists and other companies that were around at that time including Yahoo saw no need in purchasing the search engine yet this two guys stood beside their application because it was theirs and they believed in the innovation, that is what we need in Kenya. So what if everybody else is taking the easy way out, we must make the conscience decision that we will stand and be counted as the innovators and not as the imitators.

I hope this inspires my fellow techies and brings about change, if not then at least the voice was heard.

Journey of an Afropreneur: Exams the bane of my existance

2007-04-17T22:53:00.000+03:00

This week and part of next week I'm sitting for my university exams most definitely a very tiresome and boring week. I've got five papers to do:
Entrepreneurship Skills (Did it today, glad it's over)
Ethics 2
Probability and Statistics
Artificial Intelligence
Accounting Information Systems

As you can see my life is filled with such joyous activities....:-(

Easter break, Car trouble and Just to much rails

2007-04-13T20:14:00.000+03:00

The easter break came to an end on monday and for most people it was back to work on tuesday although I'm sure the thought on everybodys mind was when will the next long weekend come along so that I can sleep, eat, drink, dress up funny (the funky shorts you love to wear on weekends are unleashed) and scratch my battered up body, but for those of us with startup companies all it offered was a chance for us to totally focus on what we needed to do before the weekend came to an end.

I was to be out of town during the weekend so I made my internet connection available to Al Kags (he was robbed a few months back and the muggers happened to wander of with his wireless unit) so that he could partake of the pleasures and vices of the internet, that meant that for the 4 days I would be away I wouldn't access mail, check up on my favorite feeds and websites (Techcrunch, Guy Kawasaki, Mashable) which I was okay with you must be wondering why I didn't say I would be of Chat/IM well thanks to a wonderful application called Reporo (www.reporo.com) I can chat on Google, Yahoo and MSN from my trusted Motorola L6 and that my friend is the power of technology considering that just a few years back we all had cellphones the size of Steve Madden shoes.

So while deciding on whether to go out of town or stay in the hectic city of Nairobi, I got a text message from my favorite group of ladies, they call themselves MindsEye Travels informing me that I had been excluded from the easter road trip aptly named RandaRanda. Needless to say I was dissapointed but since I'd been pondering for days whether I had the finances to part with the Ksh6,000 ($USD 87) the text message kindoff put my mind at ease, it saved me from having to tell them I couldn't make it and thus disappoint the people who were looking forward to seeing me. With my fate sealed I decided that whatever I was going to do during the weekend should not reach the Ksh6000 limit (the guilt would have killed me) so I holad at my "partner in crime" and we had ourselves a nice evening filled with drink and dance.

Our night of carousing landed us in the city center where we found other "like minded" friends who encouraged us to party until 3am. At this point I have to mention that our financial usage was low, no more then Ksh500 ($USD7.10), which was a very good thing. If I can be allowed to digress, a few weeks back I had a puncture on the left front wheel of my car and had replaced the wheel with what is commonly known us the "doughnut" as I pondered my next move. The "doughnut" is a small, yellow-orange, tubeless wheel that is meant to be used in an emergency situation, in theory you shouldn't drive with it for me then 4 miles but many people use it for weeks on end me included.

"Two came in Five left", that was the number of people in the car as we left the club. On the way home i began to notice that the car was dragging to the left side, since we were in a hurry all I did was increase the speed and occassionaly slow it down, all of sudden the car leaned to the left side and I realised that my spare wheel now had a puncture in the middle of one of the most dangerous roads (it's now very well lit but that doesn't change the fact that you can get robbed silly along the road). So this put me in my compadres in a rather precarious predicament, if we stopped we get robbed, if we continue we ruin the rim, oh what to do??..drive on oh yeah soldier. We snaked our way home and finally got to a petrol station where the nightguard did his best to chase us away so we decided to drive on all the way to my humble abode.

On the other end of town Al Kags was busy doing research and writing a white paper on Blogging as well as torrenting the hell out of the internet connection I had loaned him, I was to find out this over, never you mind that I had warned him several months ago about the practise and its implications on the account we were using, Damn You!!Curses!!Curses!!...

To think that just because it was an easter weekend work had to come a standstill was silly on my part, Al informed me that the CEO of a leading ISP in the country wanted to see us on thursday and would like to see the project we had been working on, that put the pressure on me to deliver so I had to boot up the laptop and start hammering on the ruby application. That put a damper on my weekend but what could I do? By the time we had the meeting on thursday at 10am I had been doing close to 14 hours coding and that wasn't fun. The meeting went well and a lot came out of it.

Journey of an Afropreneur: Preparing for a presentation

2007-03-30T20:33:00.000+03:00

I've never been the most bold person especially when it comes to standing infront of people and expressing myself, in fact I had a rather bad experience when I was in secondary school and I was forced to play my music instrument in front of the whole school including the principle but that is another story for another day :-) This week I found myself in a similar situation where I had to do a powerpoint presentation to some senior people and one of my partners had already said that he wasn't cut out to do it. The 1st thing that went through my mind was how do I handle this? and so I decided to read up first on how to make successful ppt presentations.

My first stop was Guy Kawasaki's blog, where I brushed up on his "30/20/10 rules for power point presentations" (I've mentioned it before in previous post) this helped me develop a simple yet straight to the point presentation that was low on useless content but high in rich content. I then proceeded to head to www.presentationzen.com where I read up on his very helpful tips on Presentation (you seriously need to bookmark these two sites if your serious about what you do).

One interesting file I managed to download and partially listening to (it was about 2am when I was listening to it so I had to sleep) was one entitled "Pitching" from Guy Kawasaki which I downloaded from garage.com where Guy gives you some very helpful tips on how to pitch to a team of potential investors. The tips I got from him were really interesting, one that really stick to me was "Always answer the little man" the little man is the person who sits on your shoulder and asks "So What?" whenever you present a point Example: We develop applications that allow you to access all your mail from one interface "So What?" This eliminates that problems associated with logging into multiple email accounts using different usernames and passwords, this tip proved to be the most helpful especially when I had to explain a point, at one time I actually looked at my shoulder to see the little man :-)

Once I completed reading up on presentations, I decided to load up on "building successful online brands" as well as "Building online social communities", since the project we want to undertake is inline with this it meant that I had to up my knowledge on this so that I could answer the questions posed my way.

On the day of the presentation I dressed smartly but casual (no tie, yes no tie) and headed with my team to do the presentation. One of the most important lessons I learnt was to focus my attention on everybody irrespective of who they were, view people not as CEO's and Managers but as normal regular people just like you, trust me it works. I did the presentation in no more then 25 minutes, answered all the questions and left there confident.

Just to summarise what i got from the whole day's events:

Read up on what your going to present.
Be confident at all times.
Speak to the audience never at them.
Drink water just before you present :-)
Never picture your audience naked despite what all the comedies say :-)
And finally remember that titles and suits aside they are just ordinary people like yourself.

Have a good weekend my people

Folding, Blogs,Bugs and Cleaning House

2007-03-28T01:25:00.000+03:00

Ode to the dead

The "Dead pool" apparently is the place where web 2.0 companies go when they run out of steam and fold up like beach chairs. I learnt tonight that Riya finally folded, I blogged about Riya.com a few months back and it was a really good web application that allowed for visual and facial recognition of pictures, lets just say if you went into Riya.com and typed up Shakira, it would recognise all the lovely pics of the latina heartthrob, but it now seems to have run out of steam and headed towards the dead pool, the company does have another product like.com but for me it seems like a shopping website rather then the initial approach it had. The really interesting thing about Riya.com is that the CEO talks about it's failure and doesn't hide from it, now that is really something. If you want more information check out the CEO's blog on http://munjal.typepad.com/, I always make it point to read the blogs of every web company that interests me just so that I can get to understand the workings.

One time I was reading the blog for Eventful.com and I headed straight to their initial posts where they talk about releasing the application to the public and then addressing the bugs and I was truly impressed, for the very reason that the issues that I face as an application developer such as "date validations" were the same issues they were facing when they released the initial application. We often think that this large web applications face very mind boggling bugs but we later on find out that bugs are just bugs whichever way we look at them.

Friendster Messages=Spam=Porn..endless cycle

Despite the fact that I have a friendster.com account I never really use it despite the fact that it is the father of all social networking sites (at one time it was the most successful social networking site, but alas myspace.com has crushed all of its foes). So this week I was surprised when I started getting messages from users in friendster, excitement was the first reaction later on replaced by rage when I realised that all the messages were basically women advertising their porn web cam sites. I'm not surprised at the lengths people will go to drive traffic to their websites, infact last week I went to Yahoo Groups and searched for "Kenya" well one of the 1st results I got was a porn group that automatically linked its profiles and pictures to another porn website (won't mention the name but its pretty famous and it's probably popped up when your torrenting for files).

Cleaning House

About a week ago news broke on the grapevine that one company I used to work for had "cleaned up house". That's the polite way of putting it, basically they fired 3 people in one swoop now that my friend is called "radical surgery". What I keep asking myself is "Why cut off your nose to spite your face?" but then again this things are inevitable.

...........................THE END................................

Mind Blow

2007-03-28T00:31:00.000+03:00

The mind is a terrible thing

The mind has given in and it is no more....

Journey of an Afropreneur: Running the show

2007-03-23T19:46:00.000+03:00

Rails!Rails!why do you punish me so?!

That was my status message on google for most of this week as I worked on a project that was long overdue (try 6 months overdue). Don’t get me wrong Ruby and Ruby on Rails is great to work with but there are times when you just hit a dead end and you start asking yourself “why me lord?” then later on you realize by posting your problem on a forum or two (thanks railsforum.com) that the problem isn’t the language or the framework it’s actually you (Sounds almost like one of those cliché lines in a movie when a lady is breaking up with a guy “The problem isn’t you it’s me…”).

To give you a brief history of what I was working on, it’s a project that I started last year when I was contracted by my current company. The project didn’t go smooth and so now that am part of the company we’ve been trying to attack the project from a different angle and as such the improve the product, am tired the client is tired. So one of the suggestions I came up with was to redo the application using Ruby on Rails, needless to say it has proved to be a challenge but also a good learning experience. Unfortunately as I engage in the “Rails Mambo” I have about 25 other things that need to be done which makes my days even more stressful and hectic. Look at it like this, one hand am coding on the other I have to develop frameworks, build teams, organize sit downs with potential developers, at some point the mind and body gives in and you find yourself sitting in a dark corner cursing at your own existence.

12 hour marathon

I found myself this week sitting on my rather uncomfortable sit for close to 12 hours trying to develop an application. I keep reading about Kristopher Tate of Zooomr.com who spends close to 19 hours developing zooomr.com into the application it is now and am impressed, but then again I wonder if he does it on a sit like mine?

I tell you 6 hours on this sit and even the thought of sitting on a cactus plant is welcome. By the way as I took this pic a few pieces of timber fell of the "Death Sit" :-)

CEO of the week

A few weeks back after Al had expressed his frustration at how things were moving in the company (attitude) I made a rather funny suggestion which I labeled “CEO of the week”. Basically to ensure that we all felt the challenges of running a company, we had to assume the CEO role for 7 days on a rotational process, to solidify this Al gave us his heirloom (a silver ring that belonged to his grandmother), he said it had significance and I bought into it, Charo (iron yet warm lady) on the other hand didn’t but since she was to be CEO she took the ring.

This week it was turn to run the show and I started by setting up my objectives and communicating it to the team.6 days later as I look at my list, I notice that may be about 3 items have been addressed. It's not easy running a company, even when it only has 3 full time employees, I guess that's why people hire another person to deal with all that.

Return of the peeps

Despite what you think this story has nothing to do with being a peeping tom. Peeps is my/our cat which of late has taken quite a liking to roaming the bad lands like a wild animal. On Sunday evening as I was recovering from a rather nasty attack of gastritis (phone diagnosis by the way) peeps walked out and did not return for almost 3 days. On Wednesday she returned and was rather badly beaten up, my suspicion is that it was a human inflicted injury bearing in mind that there are no scratches on her. I think it’s really sad when people decide to hurt animals.

Journey of an Afropreneur: An exam and getting things done

2007-03-17T00:34:00.000+03:00

This doesn't truly qualify as an afropreneur post but I figure that since part of who I am is a student I have to chronicle even the most academically annoying experiences, so please do bear with me.

This evening I had the rather painful experience of sitting for a Probability & Statistics CAT (Continuous Assessment Test) at the university, needless to say despite the many attempts by the lecturer to impart all the knowledge into our thick skulls, even going as far as far as taking as through the topics she was going to examine us I still managed to loose a major cache of brain cells, oh well what to do?..

Mathematics has never been my forte, I cruised on rather mediocre grades in high school and if there is one place that can show you that you have no inclination towards math it must be high school. With my mediocre grades I somehow managed to convince myself that I wanted to be an engineer. Now you don't have to be a genius to know that engineering, all forms whether mechanical, chemical or even civil requires a strong grasp of math, eventually my bubble was burst and I almost found myself becoming a "domestic engineer" (househelp) as I spent the better part of 2 years at home while deciding which direction my career was to take. Actually when I think back to that period (1999-mid 2000) I laugh at myself not because I've lost my mind (I figure I lost it a long time so I honeslty cannot tell the difference) but because it was a period of indecisiveness for me.

I jumped from one career choice to another, luckily no one was bothered with all this jumping since after all it didn't involve any money being spent, at one time I was sure I wanted to be a chemical engineer then an aeronautical engineer, the engineering phase ended when I realised that whichever country I went to study I couldn't escape the dreaded mathematics that is the basis of engineering. Soon after my engineering phase I moved into the financials phase, this time I wanted to become the leading stockbroker having spent many hours watching Money Line on CNN (that Lou Dobbs character really made the stock market sound like the place to be), I then moved to becoming an accountant (too much calculations) then finally a certified financial analyst CFA (that acronym has meanings in university circles that I cannot get into right now but needless to say it involves being promiscous :)..).

Mid 2000 I finally settled down to information technology as a way of keeping me busy, well its been almost 7 years now and IT has not only kept me busy, it's made me some money albeit in modest amounts, made me a lot of friends and quite a few enemies.

To much technology and very little business

Those are the words Al used to describe me a few days ago. It seems I am more engrossed in technology rather then business and that doesn't go down well with my role in the company as a Technology Director. I honestly don't know what to do on this one, It is true I am more inclined towards using technology to build applications rather then seeing the business opportunities for our company. So Al keeps sending me this business articles and interesting reads so that I can work on my "corporateisation" if there's a word like that, and occasionally I do read them which isn't enough since I have to apply what I've read otherwise it does me no good, it's almost like programming you either apply it or its useless.

Kwangoo???Kwangoo??Where art thou?

My friends keep asking me what's happening to Kwangoo and despite my eternal optimism (am a natural born pessimist) even I can't seem to convince myself that it will ever take off. It's becoming clearer to me everyday that Kwangoo is now an Army Of One venture, Bluefi5h has failed to deliver and I had so much faith in him. About 4 weeks ago, he assured me that he would deliver the concept in 7 days, well that 7 days has come and gone just like all the other deadlines that I had given him. I've learnt a lot a few things from this whole experience, and I would like to share a few of those lessons with you oh dear reader:

People will let you down even when they don't mean to.
The dream is yours and most people will never understand it or appreciate it no matter how many times they tell you they "get it and feel it".
All the talent in the world doesn't mean anything if you can't be reliable.
Failure though not an option is an acceptable outcome.
A little bit of money can really go a long way in getting things done.
If you can do something on your own do it.
A large number of those free offers from your friends rarely come to fruition.

I had a chat with a friend of mine Anne and she really did give me the energy to push on. So I've decided to do what it takes and get Kwangoo up and running no matter the setbacks I've faced, if it means I'll have to spend some money getting somethings done then I guess I'll have to.Will keep you informed on how it goes.

Cheers

Journey of an Afropreneur: 26 year journey that continues

2007-03-14T00:18:00.000+03:00

The 13th of March marked my 26th year on this planet and boy do I feel old. Sometimes I can't believe that it was just a few years ago I was heading to primary school to attend my first class (I'm not counting Kindergarten) and beginning the journey to be the man I am today. I consider myself favored since I developed a keen interest in technology while doing absolutely nothing at home after the completion of my secondary education. It was during my stay at home that I picked up the book that would eventually chart the direction my life and career would take, the book called Creating Cool Web Pages Using HTML was an eye opener for me since it opened my closed world to the power of the web, even though the book was basic in terms of what it had to offer it planted the seeds that would eventually lead me to become a web developer.

Once I joined college (Strathmore College though now a university) in June 2000 I lost my "HTML energy" as I got caught up in the chaos of doing a course that combined business and Information Technology, the energy would eventually return when I picked a web based project for my diploma class. The project taught me about Active Server Pages (ASP) and gave me the foundation to start building interactive and dynamic applications. I submitted my first web application in late April 2001, a system for students to build their resumes online and have them searched by the college placement office. The application was never implemented (I don't blame them it really was just a series of many add,edit and delete forms) but it would form the evidence of my knowledge when I walked into a leading web development company and asked them to give me an internship.

A lot has happened since that internship and all of it has eventually culminated in me getting out there and trying to change the way technology is used in this country as well as this continent. I look forward to another 26 years on this country and on this continent.

Journey of an Afropreneur: Pursuing and Living the Dream

2007-03-08T17:55:00.000+03:00

A few words of advice before and after you decide to quit your day job and become a freelance techie or an entrepreneur whatever comes first.

Build a trust network, a reliable network of people who can recommend you for projects that will ensure that you always have business coming in even when things seem very dry for other people. Trust me this is a must have.
Do the leg work even when you don't want to for the very reason that you need to. Go out there and talk to people, even volunteer to do work for free in exchange for your name/company being mentioned in the next issue of a technology/business magazine.
Always do the research for any major product/service. If your going to pitch for any contract, facts and figures will always win the day since they show a serious commitment to the bottom line which is what all managers care about.
Don't be afraid to outsource some of that excess work you have even if it means it will reduce the size of your pie. Look at like this if you have 6 projects and your constrained for time, outsource 3 and deliver all 6 on time, at the end of the day you have happy clients who then give you more work in the long run your pie gets bigger.
Form mutually beneficial partnerships with individuals and groups. At the end of the day they are the same people who will refer business to you and vice versa.
Pick a mentor who will help you focus and work on your weaknesses as well as help you build that business.
Don't be afraid of meetings (my techie friends will hate me for this). Despite what people say or think, meetings do yield a lot, but only well planned meetings that address the key issues.
Take time off to enjoy the fruits of your labour, "All work and no play makes jack(jane) a dull boy". Take a drive to the countryside or even just go for a swim, release the steam and when you get back to the hustle of building that business you'll be better at what you do.
No project is ever too small to undertake. On many occasions people will approach you with projects that may not offer large financial rewards and you might be inclined to turn them down but remember for every project that you do you build a portfolio and gain mileage in the industry they also go a long way towards paying your bills.
Take time to plan and strategise. A leading CEO of one of the most successful companies once told me "80% planning and 20% execution" what this means is that planning well gives you a strong foundation and will sustain through some of the most challenging times.
Last one is don't think too long about making that "giant step" or big decision as to whether your ready to go solo, sometimes you just need to do it even when you see no light ahead, may be the reason there is no light is because its waiting for you to come with your ideas and light the place up.

I guess that's all I have for now, I'll be sure to add some more as I learn new lessons.

Journey of an Afropreneur: 10 days and counting

2007-03-05T22:36:00.000+03:00

I honestly can't believe its been more then a week since I last blogged but in my defence I can say that about a week ago I did submitted a post but when I checked the blog the following day it wasn't there which made me go hmmm..then grrrr...then w*&^f&**((..k but it's all good for now I have reason to post even some more.

I was just going through my daily updates when I saw an interesting blog post Zdnet, apparently Wordpress server was hacked and a malicious code inserted in the wordpress download. Now you don't have to be a genius to realise that this is a really bad thing, not catastrophic, but bad enough to make you think twice before downloading wordpress, considering that wordpress is the number one blogging software in the world that means that the malicious code could be on a couple of thousands of machines out there may be even more but whose counting? Earlier on today I was trying to access a few wordpress blogs and none seemed to be opening could this be a side effect of the hack?

Last week Al and I spent the better part of a whole evening trying to come up with a proposal in response to an RFQ (Request For Quotation). I left Al on thursday night (2am friday morning) working on it and returned to his place in the morning to finish up what was left. We finally managed to send it.

On friday I decided to pass by my former employer (the sweatshop) and drop off my office identification card. It felt really weird being back there but it was good to see some of my friends and just catch up. I made it known to them that I had no intention of coming back. I got a lot of questions related to what i was now doing and I answered them as candidly as possible "I'm now engaged in private business (entrepreneurship) and am currently building a company with 2 other people" now when you tell people you are building a business they get all excited and don't be shocked when you hear many of them saying "Now that's the thing to do..I also want to do that..." trust me you'll hear it so many times your ears will bleed.

I realised something rather funny last week, when you aren't looking for somethings they find you. Taking the example of a job, right now am not looking for a full time job but occasionally some guy or company will pop up, call me and say "Join us..". A job is like a relationship, when you don't have one you always looking for it but when you get it you keep hoping you could get something better or end it. That's where I am right now the only difference is that for me am not looking but people are offering.

I think this week will be very exciting and may be very boring at the same time since on one hand I'll be following up on some proposal while on the other hand I have CAT's (Continous Assessment Tests) at the university, but only time will tell.

Journey of an Afropreneur: Managing, Bears and Rails

2007-02-22T14:42:00.000+03:00

Managing myself and others

I count a total of 5 days since my last post I guess I really haven't had much to say even though a lot has happened.I'm currently leading/managing the development of our main products and that has been and continues to be a challenge for the very reason that I have to shed the "coder" image and become a "manager" in the words of Al I need to become more corporate and less of operational. Almost 5 years of web development you realise that writing code is easier then getting a contractor to work and deliver a product that meets the standards your business is targetting. I now have to organise meetings, deliver progress reports, develop product standards, formulate budgets, negotiate costings and sell the idea to new people whom we would like to join the team. A herculean task whichever way you look at it considering that managing myself is already hard enough, I am always tempted to just push away the developer of our current product and get my hands dirty, that's the natural thing for me, but I am always reminded by Al that I am now a manager and I have to lead and manage people, try telling that to a person who gets excited when they hear such words as Python, REST, Web Services and you'll see what I mean.

It constantly is a series of personal improvements on my part as I try to learn and put into practise at the same time the lessons of being a manager. I keep focusing on the bigger picture and try to focus on my strengths while constantly working to overcome my weaknesses. I must admit that occasionally I do give into my weaknesses almost like a little child who can't control their desire to consume large amounts of candy, I find myself spending hours trying to learn a new language or to brush up on those I touched a long time ago, instead of seeing it as a chore or a duty that I must fulfill I view it like a retired athlete who keeps on going to the track to practise even though they know that they have now become a coach.

"Why would you put yourself through the agony of learning a new language?" I think because it keeps me fresh and upto speed, If we ever get a client who insists on having an web app developed in a certain language I'll be in a better position to quantify how long it will take, how many developers we need and how much it will cost based upon my experience and knowledge and that isn't such a bad thing considering that I now have to focus on the "bottom line".

StocksKenya.com goes "Bearish"

On another front, our favorite stocks portal www.stockskenya.com seems to have gone down. I'm informed by reliable sources that it's a database issue which will be resolved soon. I hope they address the issue fast enough since they do have a loyal fan base which I'd hate to see die.

RoR-Sailing using Rails

I'm not sure that's a fitting heading but for now it will do, I spent a couple of hours last weekend reading up and trying out RoR Ruby on Rails. I had earlier on started reading Agile Web Development with Rails and was eager to put what I'd learned into practise, so I decided to develop a blogging application just to see how far I could go. It really is interesting to see how Rails makes it so easy to do stuff with the minimum effort. Hopefully when am done I will put it up so that my people can see :-)

Strategising

On tuesday we had our first full day strategic meeting at MultipleChoices, demanding on the mind but necessary for any successful business.

Let's see what the next few days will offer

Journey of Afroprenuer: Office,Laptop and Security Issues

2007-02-17T15:26:00.000+03:00

This past tuesday I had a meeting with Al and Charity, a sought of brainstorm right before Al and I headed for a presentation at one of the Blue Chip companies. We usually meet at the 5th floor in a cafe at Teleposta Towers which happens to be where the General Post Office and where the Ministry of Trade & Industry is located there. Since we needed to review our concept and presentation I had carried the laptop with much trouble all the way from where I alight to the meeting point, Al arrived late despite the fact that he had insisted that I arrive at 10am sharp!!.

The meeting started at around 10:45am and I proceeded to remove my laptop from the safety of its bag and place it on the table so that Charity could look at the document Al had come up with, while into the discussion of the contents of a document a young man approached us and informed us that we couldn't continue to use the laptop for the following reasons:

It would turn the cafe into an office.
Security....yes my friend no explanation on the security aspect.

Now your probably wondering how we could turn a whole cafe that occupies half of the 5th floor into an office during a short meeting consisting of only 3 people!!??..But what left as all baffled was the whole "Security" issue which the young man so no reason to explain, he informed us that he was the manager of the establishment. By the way there is no Wi-Fi hotspot located in the building and even though we had no intention to access the internet it was shocking that a building that represents the GOK (Government Of Kenya) move towards the 21st century and its intention to embrace technology would not allow us to use a laptop for a short meeting.

It makes one question how serious the government is towards embracing technology particularly internet access for the masses.

We proceeded to shut down the PC and leave the premises with questions still lingering in our minds.."What is this security thing?"...

Journey of an Afropreneur:Loads of Rails, A bit of Java and a couple of methodologies

2007-02-12T00:08:00.001+03:00

It's been one of those rare weekends where I get to code and learn at the same time but with my car down for the count I didn't have a choice, combine that with the fact that our weekly management meeting for MC was cancelled it gave me the perfect opportunity to read up and stack up on a few new things plus brush up on the old. With all that free time I decided to pick up Agile Web Development with Rails and just go through it and pick up a few concepts about rails, that proved to be very exciting for the main reason that the Rails framework really makes web development very easy.

At some point I decided to brush up on my Java just a little bit by opening up a few of my ebooks, I decided to start with Struts for Dummies just to refresh my brain on the workings of Struts that proved to be a bit of a bore (the configuration details are just to much sometimes) so I headed over to Agile Java Development with Spring, Hibernate and Eclipse which was way better then the Struts book but still so much to learn and so little time. It was while I was reading this book that I began to really get interested in Agile Modeling and Extreme Programming (If you don't know what they are I suggest you head over to the following links and read up on them http://extremeprogramming.org/ and http://agilemodeling.com/).

I sometimes get the feeling that after all that learning when it comes to a project I'll always go for the language that I have more experience with, in this case that will be PHP, but of late I've been thinking that if I never experiment with any of my new projects I'll never acquire the experience I need. May be I should just stick to PHP and leave the rest for everyone, you tell me..

Journey of an Afropreneur:Loads of Rails, A bit of Java and a couple of methodologies

2007-02-12T00:08:00.000+03:00

650$ Madaraka or 100$ Green PC

2007-02-08T12:54:00.000+03:00

One of the initiatives the Kenyan government has embarked on is the development of a high quality, affordable and locally assembled PC to wade of the influx of clones and give people access to affordable computers. I guess the reasoning behind it is that all the internet connection in the world isn't worth anything if people can't afford PCs to access the facilities. The computer is named Madaraka (Independence in Swahili) and is a collaboration consisting of 3 educational institutions and the government, a week before the expo began the Permanent Secretary had made it known that the PC would sell for about 200$ which made a lot of sense, considering that a clone can be acquired for about the same price and with a focus on functionality rather then aesthetics this would prove to be a good even not better alternative.

So yesterday while at the expo I headed to the Madaraka stand and to my dismay I found that the PC was retailing at price of Ksh40,000 about $650USD which was a far cry from the $200 USD (ksh15,000 equivalent) I had so hoped for, my sentiments were later on echoed by a Professor from USIU(Kenya) during the afternoon session. The specifications of the machine consisted of 192MB RAM (apparently they can add that if you ask), 15inch TFT LCD and I think 40GB hard disk although I need to confirm that. The question going through my head was "Why is Madaraka so expensive?" the PS later explained that it was a high quality PC with a very good warranty.

Today while going through my mail, I stumbled upon a post that really got me excited, the post was entitled High Security for $100 Laptop when I read it further I learned that there was an initiative to provide cheap $100 PC to children all over the world (Africa being a major beneficiary). The PC is green in color and is aptly named Green PC :-)

A left wondering will Madaraka do it for us or should we just wait for the Green PC?

Check out the specs here:
http://www.laptop.org/laptop/hardware/specs.shtml

Journey of an Afroprenuer: ICTExpo 2007

2007-02-07T20:04:00.000+03:00

So today was a rather interesting and tiresome day, I was at the ICTExpo 2007 being held at the KICC(Kenyatta International Conference Center). The ICTExpo 2007 is meant to be a showcase of Kenya as a region of ICT and a hub for outsourcing. The government is eager to position Kenya as the prime destination of ICT investment in the region, and several initiatives such as submarine fiber cable is one such initiative, think of it like this, it costs a call center in Kenya $7,000 USD to purchase 2MB of bandwidth yet the international rate is about $200USD for 2MB, this means that it's almost not cost effective to build a business whose backbone is internet bandwidth.

The event was scheduled to start at 8am, but true to my nature I reached there at 10am sharp just in time to watch the Safaricom CEO Michael Joseph aka Sir Mike finish up on his speech which from what I got had something to do with lowering of taxation on calls from the current 26% to 16%, in his view this would translate into more people calling and as such spending more money which would then cover the 10% reduction in tax collection Government Wins, Consumer Wins and Private Enterprise wins. Next on the podium being introduced by the ever imposing Permanent Secretary (PS) in the Ministry of Information and Communication, Dr.Bitange Ndemo(a true ICT visionary) was the Microsoft Africa Director, Dr.Chieck Diarra , who went on to tell us that Microsoft was behind us all the way as a country and as a continent as we venture to use ICT to change lives and empower societies. The speeches would not be complete without the Minister of Information and Communication, Mutahi Kagwe, putting in his 2 cents on the matter.Eventually it was concluded by the Chief Executive of Telkom Kenya Eng.John Waweru, who assured as that good things were on the horizon.

The tea break gave all of us the much needed opportunity to schmooze with the captains of industry and I did my best to exchange cards and build contacts with a few people. We then headed to the exhibition hall where we had the opportunity view various products and services being offered in the market. One particular stand caught my eye, the OpenSource stand which featured certain opensource products, what caught my eye was the presence of Google and a CD they were offering called OpenCD which contains open source software, I've just inserted into my machine and it contains some really good stuff like OpenOffice, 7Zip and a couple of other applications. There was also the Madaraka Stand, which was a showcase of the first ever locally assembled branded computer, the computer was developed in collaboration with Strathmore University, Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology, and KCITI.

The afternoon session proved to be the most interesting when different speakers talked about what they were offering. The Permanent Secretary outlined the governments plan and vision and asked us to come on board as entrepreneurs and partners. All in all it was a good day well spent.

Journey of an Afroprenuer: Dreams, Determination and Fear

2007-02-05T21:09:00.000+03:00

So today was my 1st day since I resigned on Friday 2nd February 2007, and the realisation that I had no guaranteed source of income began to sink in. I don't know how to describe it but it's a combination of excitement and fear as I realised that for the 1st time in a long time I wouldn't be going to an office and putting in the hours and then demanding a salary at the end of the month. The last time I was unemployed was back in early 2002 when my internship had ended and I was left asking myself "Where do I go next?" but that didn't last for long because after a week I was able to land a job at a small design firm where we worked like the survival of mankind depended on us.

A lot of people will tell you that always have a plan before quitting your day job to pursue your dreams, but that isn't always the case because if you look around you realise that its taking you more effort to come up with that plan then it is to pursue your dreams. In the last few days since I resigned many people have asked me "Did you have something better?" and I always answer YES!!becuase nothing can be compared to waking up every morning in pursuit of a dream, nothing can replace passion, even when faced with the realisation that you might not be able to feed yourself in the next few weeks you push on.

I believe am up to the challenge, and I will succeed not because am smarter then everybody else but because I see where I am and where I want to be. I am surrounded by people who question my decision but am also guided by people who understand my decision and are willing to back me up. I am determined to see this to the very end.

Journey of an Afropreneur: YouTube vs Viacom

2007-02-03T00:52:00.000+03:00

It seems that Youtube (bought by google for $1.65 billion) isn't rubbing some people the right way. We all know that youtube contains thousands of pirated videos, in fact just a week ago FOX sued Youtube because it aired episodes of the famous 24, so it was no shock when I read a post on ZDnet that Viacom also wanted Youtube to pull down pirated clips.

Read it all here:

Viacom to YouTube: Take down pirated clips

Journey of an Afropreneur: Just about anything

2007-01-24T20:52:00.000+03:00

Late Nights..

Last week was rather interesting for me and the tech/comm startup am involved in, mainly because we got leads on several new projects that will most definitely boost our profile and also ensure that we have some money coming in to help us focus on our other projects (Our other projects form the basis of the company). So we spent a few evenings with Al Kags brainstorming on one or two projects infact the last time we brainstormed we finished at 2am (I then have to drive a few kilometers home) but its all good because as you know every successful business built on sacrifice.

Losing It...

On a sad note I lost my 3 year old trusted leather wallet :-( so that puts me in the dog house in terms of money and identification documents but I''ll survive.

M-Banking..

I was listening to the radio today on the way to University when I had an interesting news item, that Mobile Banking was on its way to Kenya, actually it was going to be a reality by february. Now that is interesting because that opens the door to many services, web applications and services could be built to leverage this new service, the possibilities are limitless.

Ten Tips for Effective Meetings

2007-01-23T11:20:00.000+03:00

Here are ten things that you can do to hold more effective meetings.

1) Avoid meetings. Test the importance of a meeting by asking, "What happens without it?" If your answer is, "Nothing," then don't call the meeting.

2) Prepare goals. These are the results you want to obtain by the end of the meeting. Write out your goals before the meetings. They should be so clear, complete, and specific that someone else could use them to lead your meeting. Also, make sure they can be achieved with available people, resources, and time. Specific goals help everyone make efficient toward relevant results.

3) Challenge each goal. Ask, "Is there another way to achieve this?" For example, if you want to distribute information, you may find it more efficient to phone, FAX, mail, e-mail, or visit. Realize that a meeting is a team activity. Save tasks that require a team effort for your meetings.

4) Prepare an agenda. Everyone knows an agenda leads to an effective meeting. Yet, many people "save time" by neglecting to prepare an agenda. A meeting without an agenda is like a journey without a map. It is guaranteed to take longer and produce fewer results. Note, without an agenda, you risk becoming someone else's helper (see tip #6 below).

5) Inform others. Send the agenda before the meeting. That helps others prepare to work with you in the meeting. Unprepared participants waste your time by preparing for the meeting during the meeting.

6) Assume control. If you find yourself in a meeting without an agenda walk out. If you must stay, prepare an agenda in the meeting. Collect a list of issues, identify the most important, and work on that. When you finish, if time remains, select the next most important issue. Note: you can use a meeting without an agenda to recruit help for your projects.

7) Focus on the issue. Avoid stories, jokes, and unrelated issues. Although entertaining, these waste time, distract focus, and mislead others. Save the fun for social occasions where it will be appreciated.

8) Be selective. Invite only those who can contribute to achieving your goals for the meeting. Crowds of observers and supporters bog down progress in a meeting.

9) Budget time. No one would spend $1000 on a 10¢ pencil, but they often spend 40 employee hours on trivia. Budget time in proportion to the value of the issue. For example, you could say, "I want a decision on this in 10 minutes. That means we'll evaluate it for the next 9 minutes, followed by a vote."

10) Use structured activities in your meetings. These process tools keep you in control while you ensure equitable participation and systematic progress toward results.

http://topquicktips.metrolity.com/20655.php

Journey of an Afropreneur: A haunted house and 1 or 2 good things

2007-01-18T22:37:00.000+03:00

So after much lobbying and literally having to beg I managed to get internet access at home ..woohoo!!..that might not seem like such a big thing if your from a country where internet access is like electricity (You just need to have it) but it is quite a big deal where am from, we all hoping that with the Fibre optic cable that's supposed to be running under the sea will be put in place by the end of the year so that my fellow Afropreneurs can work from the comfort of their home and blog until the sun comes up :-)

So I've taken advantage of the access to the internet and started doing all those things I couldn't do from the office (No it's now what you think..porn..torrents..streaming..) I actually decided to use the Riya Uploader and just upload my pictures to my Riya profile. For those of you who don't know Riya its a image search and repository that identifies faces in a picture and allows you to put a name to it,eventually it does it automatically for all other pictures that match the facial features, that way next time somebody can search for me and it will bring all photos that have me in them, I think it's pretty cool you should check it out.

Last Sunday 14th January 2007, I had to meet up with a few other Afroprenuers and go look at a house we had been offered as an office by the "prolific CEO" . I was so excited but the further we drove into suburbia the more scared I got, so we eventually pull up into this compound and 101 thoughts are going through my head "What if its a dump?..What about access to the main roads?" not to worry my questions were answered once the gates were open by a rather scrawny looking security guard who didn't look like he could protect a rock let alone a compound of that magnitude. Calling the house a dump would be an understatement, I made a point of taking pictures :-) for this very moment, I tried to be open minded but I kept looking at the ceiling and the floors and the kitchen and finally I just gave in and my mind just rejected the place. You must be thinking that am not a very sharp person, after all how many people are given a 5 bedroomed house rent free to use as an office for a startup? the answer is not very many.

This was just the outside the inside was a site to behold, kinda reminded me of "House on Haunted Hill" (I've never watched the movie..just think of a haunted house...:-)...) We finally decided that this wasn't the best place to run a small company considering the amount of repairs needed (the house is to be pulled down so no one is willing to part with money to fix it up)

Journey of an Afro-preneur: Leap of Faith

2007-01-15T14:26:00.000+03:00

Faith along with Passion are one of the most important ingredients towards starting and running a successful business. If your not passionate about what your doing you'll never strive to make it a success, if your business is a "tedious chore" then like any other chore it will lack the perfection and attention it deserves. Faith and an absolute belief in what your doing will go a long way in ensuring the success of that idea, you have to believe that it's a brilliant idea even when the naysayers crowd you with negativity, but the faith just like anything needs actions to accompany it.

I believe and am passionate in the ideas I have and in the projects am involved in, and my faith in turn deserves an act that solidifies it and ensures that I not only stand beside my words but also act up on them. Lately I've been overwhelmed with the demands of the projects I have undertaken on my spare time, sometimes I wish the day was about 48 hrs so that I could get more done but I know that won't happen. My fulltime job takes away about 8-9 hrs of my day meaning that am left with about 6-7 hours (by the way am still in University so I have classes to attend) to handle my projects and this has proved to be hard, so last weekend I made the decison to leave my current fulltime job and pursue the projects I'm, passionate about on a fulltime basis.

I know this is a risk am taking but again faith requires that I stand beside what I have preached for the last few months, Spirit of Entrepreneurship.What does this mean to me?:

Loss of "steady" income (please note am not using the word guaranteed in this because a paycheck can never be guaranteed).
Full time concentration and focus on projects.

On one hand I lose the income on the other I get to concentrate on several streams of income, I think that's a leap of faith am willing to take...

Building,Tearing,Cracking,Shaping..The Idea

2007-01-12T11:58:00.000+03:00

I think yesterday Thursday 11th January 2007 will have to go down in my journal as one of the most interesting days in my life. A few months ago I had posted an entry about a business idea that had been presented to me by a colleague of mine, basically the CEO of one of the largest manufacturing companies in this region had the idea of building an online brand and he wanted us to be the team to lead this idea. The idea wasn't new but it had died a very unatural death at the hands of another team and as such he felt that with the upcoming technology boom (apparently an underground fibre optic cable is being setup and its bound to significantly lower the price of bandwidth within the region) he needed to be in the forefront in harnessing the internet as a medium of communication. The CEO is a visionary in his field interms of embracing ICT as a key component of any business, infact his company was once recognised for its cutting edge adoption of technology for its day to day running, I'm told by close sources that as the CEO he leads in the adoption of technology and the rest of the organisation follows and that my dear friend is a recipe for success, rather then the small people of the organisation trying to convince management that new technology needs to be adopted it is the CEO who spearheads that vision and as such the organisation is well placed.

Anyway for the better part of the night, 5 hours to be exact, we discussed sustainable and profitable business models for the web that would work in a market like ours, we don't have the luxury of having internet penetration at high levels and as such before you launch any business that uses the web as a platform it is important to take into consideration the current and future trends within the region. A sticking point in every business model is "How will you make money?" I think that question is even harder to answer when dealing with the web where a hot idea today is cold in the next few months, just look a the number of web 2.0 companies that have closed (Techcrunch Dead Pool) down in the last 1 year or so the numbers are quite shocking which almost brings me to another major question "Are we on the verge of another tech bubble burst?" but thats another point for another day, we had to go through all possible avenues of generating revenue all of which were pegged on us attaining high amounts of traffic which then led to another question "How will you attain the large and active numbers?"...

The Numbers Game

Every business is built upon the "numbers game" which basically means that they all attempt to gain the largest numbers out there based upon the target market they had in mind (am no Harvard business school graduate so you'll forgive my rather layman approach). With the web as your business platform attaining the numbers is key, just look at Myspace.com, the challenge comes in growing and sustaining the numbers, it's one thing to get 100,000 registered users but its another thing to keep them coming back and participating. Our business needs to keep the numbers growing and how do we do this? "addressing a common need identified by the users and adding value to a product that makes it easier to achieve a key objective" we aim to highlight the value of being part of the web community by giving users access to value add that makes them want to come back everyday.

How do you know what users want?by asking them what they don't want..

I was reading the book written by the team at 37signals.com, the developers of the famous project collaboration tool Basecamp, where they say always find out what users don't want from the application, they argue that we spend to much time asking users what they want and forget to ask them what they don't want. A barrier to adoption of any technology has always been the features that make it harder for the user to gain access, this could be in the form of very long registration process, so we decided that we would ask the users what they want and didn't want :-) that way we can build an application that works for them.

I can't go into details of what the business will entail but I can tell you that the social aspect will be a core aspect of it. The CEO even coined an acronym that went something like Building Internet Communities (BIC) :-)

I will keep you posted on the progress of this idea..

Embarking on a new journey

2007-01-08T18:04:00.000+03:00

As 2006 was coming to an end I began to really consider what 2007 had for me in terms of challenges and the general direction of my career, one thing was obvious to me that is I didn't want to be in the same place I was in back in 2006 and as such I had to set things in motion to ensure that the general direction of my life was heading towards a place where I would grow.

I kept asking myself "What do you want do?" the same answer kept coming back to me "Develop applications that set trends in this part of the world by showcasing the power of the internet" I know that sounds like a line from a company mission/vision statement but it kindoff captures where I would like to be, the bottom line (money) for me at this stage seems to be irrelevant (that doesn't mean I have more money then I need), the chance to be part of something that changes the way people work, communicate or just lets them share who they are (kwangoo) is my driving force.

I had already decided that working 9am-6pm in a commercial environment wasn't the best place to be but at the end of the day bills need to be paid and even the most boring full time gig allows one to do that.

So i began networking with people who would ensure that my vision was achieved, as the year ended I met up with Al Kags(he runs a small technology startup) who contracted me to develop a web application (by the way it's still under development although the core is done) , to say he challenged me would be an understatement. At one point I thought I would crack, I had already gone past the stated timelines which can be attributed to many factors one of them being the lack of a proper understanding of the application and its objectives, It took a 4 hour sit down at a local food place to get me to understand the objectives of the application. I would eventually do a presentation at the client's premises and despite a few hiccups I managed to pull it off and then head off to the University for my final exams.

It's at that point when I realised that Al Kags was onto something, he had explained to me his vision for the company that he was heading and despite my interest i always shrugged him off since I had and still have a lot on mind. In him I saw a person who was willing to go the extra mile to do what others had obviously run away from, you rarely meet people with that kind of drive and when you do they scare you silly because they challenge you to think "outside the box" in a world where conforming to conventional ideas is the norm.

I'll leave Al Kags to explain his vision which is herculean in nature but in a nutshell it aims to change the way Kenya and Africa use the internet, if I may quote him "we must drive people to the internet and develop a culture of using the internet as an information repository.." in other words we haven't in this part of the world seen the internet as way of sharing information we basically check mail and log off and this needs to change, if applications like kwangoo.com will grow and thrive then we need to drive people to the internet to share and contribute information.

When Al offered me a chance to be part of his team I'll admit I was practically scared shitless but I was also excited because here was a guy who saw something in me that I probably couldn't see and was willing to take a chance at working with me, It would have been foolish for me to say no, I accepted his offer without thinking of the monetary aspect (yes I did) because for me its all passion and the challenge that lies ahead.

I haven't quit my day job just yet..Billz..Billz..

I'm sure your wondering what does this mean for Kwangoo.com?...welll kwangoo.com is my baby and it doesn't matter whether am working at "The Sweatshop" or with Al, it is something I started and I must finish even if it kills me. Even as I embark on this new journey, I must conclude all other areas that contributed to making who I am.

As I embark on this Journey with all of its challenges I pray that I am able to rise up to the occassion and be part of something that changes this continent...

Getting the best of what's out there...

2007-01-05T16:19:00.001+03:00

Occassionally when am pretending to be working in the office (which I do very many times) I stumble upon blog posts that really make an impact on me. I'm a very big fan of absorbing knowledge from the captains of industry (boy would I love to meet Mark Zuckerberg of facebook.com) so when I do get to this posts I make a point of pasting most if not all of it onto my blog while making sure I give credit to the original author.

I enjoy reading Guy Kawasaki's blog and I've even made several references to his articles here, a couple of minutes ago I saw a post on his blog really got me pumped up, no details and descriptions from me but I've pasted here for all your eyes to feast on...enjoy..:

The 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint

I suffer from something called Ménière’s disease—don’t worry, you cannot get it from reading my blog. The symptoms of Ménière’s include hearing loss, tinnitus (a constant ringing sound), and vertigo. There are many medical theories about its cause: too much salt, caffeine, or alcohol in one’s diet, too much stress, and allergies. Thus, I’ve worked to limit control all these factors.

However, I have another theory. As a venture capitalist, I have to listen to hundreds of entrepreneurs pitch their companies. Most of these pitches are crap: sixty slides about a “patent pending,” “first mover advantage,” “all we have to do is get 1% of the people in China to buy our product” startup. These pitches are so lousy that I’m losing my hearing, there’s a constant ringing in my ear, and every once in while the world starts spinning.

Before there is an epidemic of Ménière’s in the venture capital community, I am trying to evangelize the 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint. It’s quite simple: a PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points. While I’m in the venture capital business, this rule is applicable for any presentation to reach agreement: for example, raising capital, making a sale, forming a partnership, etc.

Ten is the optimal number of slides in a PowerPoint presentation because a normal human being cannot comprehend more than ten concepts in a meeting—and venture capitalists are very normal. (The only difference between you and venture capitalist is that he is getting paid to gamble with someone else’s money). If you must use more than ten slides to explain your business, you probably don’t have a business. The ten topics that a venture capitalist cares about are:

1. Problem
2. Your solution
3. Business model
4. Underlying magic/technology
5. Marketing and sales
6. Competition
7. Team
8. Projections and milestones
9. Status and timeline
10. Summary and call to action

You should give your ten slides in twenty minutes. Sure, you have an hour time slot, but you’re using a Windows laptop, so it will take forty minutes to make it work with the projector. Even if setup goes perfectly, people will arrive late and have to leave early. In a perfect world, you give your pitch in twenty minutes, and you have forty minutes left for discussion.

The majority of the presentations that I see have text in a ten point font. As much text as possible is jammed into the slide, and then the presenter reads it. However, as soon as the audience figures out that you’re reading the text, it reads ahead of you because it can read faster than you can speak. The result is that you and the audience are out of synch.

The reason people use a small font is twofold: first, that they don’t know their material well enough; second, they think that more text is more convincing. Total bozosity. Force yourself to use no font smaller than thirty points. I guarantee it will make your presentations better because it requires you to find the most salient points and to know how to explain them well. If “thirty points,” is too dogmatic, the I offer you an algorithm: find out the age of the oldest person in your audience and divide it by two. That’s your optimal font size.

So please observe the 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint. If nothing else, the next time someone in your audience complains of hearing loss, ringing, or vertigo, you’ll know what caused the problem. One last thing: to learn more about the zen of great presentations, check out a site called Presentation Zen by my buddy Garr Reynolds.

Written at Atherton, California

http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2005/12/the_102030_rule.html

Reading up..Stacking up..

2007-01-05T11:57:00.000+03:00

So last year I decided to buy a few books and read up, I've always enjoyed reading but have always been skeptical of buying books from the shop, I keep asking myself "what if I don't like it?what if it doesn't meet up to my expectations?" with those kind of questions in my mind you can imagine how many books I've purchased so far :-) (I think about 2 in the last couple of years)..

Amazon.com to the rescue..with the comments and reviews I get from Amazon.com I decided to take a leap of faith and purchase three books that I felt were going to be good starters:

The Search
Google Story
Small is the new Big

So far I've only read The Search, authored by John Battelle, and I can assure you it was worth the purchase. It has really opened up my eyes on the history of search engines, current trends and the future of search, I would most definitely recommend it for any serious web savvy person. I'll be finishing it in the next few days then I can start on the Google Story.

Now that I'm about to finish that book, I've embarked on learning Ruby (not RoR (Ruby on Rails)because I want to learn the language before I start on the framework) I downloaded a few ebooks which have gone a long way in helping me understand Ruby as a language and I must say it is quite interesting. The language is lighter but the perl like structure makes it a mouthful sometimes, I'm currently stuck on Regular Expressions chapter which I keep reading and re-reading just so that I don't miss anything. Weird thing is once I finish a chapter I go back to the starting of the book and start from scratch almost like I'd never read the book before, I think its because I really want to understand every facet of the language even before I start writing any applications. Lately I've been thinking of developing an application using RoR but am still not sure if I should go down that road, I'd hate to think that am abandoning PHP when it still offers me so much, in fact so many frameworks have been released in PHP that attempt to mimic the MVC (Model-View-Controller) structure of RoR that am beginning to wonder which way to go in my next application development.

Let's see how it goes..who knows..may be I'll end up learning 2 powerful languages (by the way I kindoff gave up on learning Python for web dev since I valued my brain cells but I've installed it on my new laptop)..time will tell..

New Year New Challenges

2007-01-03T12:00:00.000+03:00

The fact that am posting this means that I survived the crazyness of the Christmas and New Year Break and believe you me it was crazy (damn hangovers!!).

A couple of resolutions were made and am hoping I'll stick by them, the main ones had to be included:

Loose the extra 2 inches I gained in 2006.
Make peace with my enemies..hahahaha!!..
Spend more "me time"

I've always said that our modern life is driven by two masters Bills and Dreams, we choose who has more control..2007 will be the year of Dreams...

Christmas break

2006-12-27T17:11:00.000+03:00

So I've been offlien for the past couple of weeks doing exams as well as finishing some of the other projects I was doing.

Tired like hell after a crazy :-) christmas break,looking forward to the new year 2007....See you then..

P.S. Kwangoo.com is not dead :-)

Journey of an Afro-preneur: Making my way back..

2006-11-27T18:40:00.000+03:00

It's such a refreshing feeling to be able to blog again after such a long time, I think its been almost 3 weeks since my last post and the few people who actually read it have been asking me "what's going on?.."Well to answer my "fans" :-) a lot has been happening :-) and that's all I'll say...I'm just kidding, well in the few weeks I've been off the blog I've been designing the Kwangoo.com database (alone) and its been really interesting, I basically have to think of every possible feature to have in Kwangoo and then come up with a suitable and optimised structure, sounds boring, well it can be but its not like I have a team behind me.

Last friday, 24th Nov, was interesting, I called up my friend TK and she informed me that the people on the TV show she's shooting were interested in featuring kwangoo.com, that was exciting news for me but also scary since so far kwangoo.com is just a splash page, this put me into overdrive and I holad at Bluefi5h to setup a meeting for the weekend which unfortunately didn't materialise, but we meeting today and hopefully will cover a lot of ground.

Working on kwangoo as well as other projects hasn't been easy, sometimes I just want to quit it all (work, school and God forbid kwangoo) but I can't, I need the day-job to pay my bills, I'm not sure I need school (You tell me...) but I figure I can go on another day and even though it's breaking me physically I'll push on.

On saturday, while on my way to a wedding party (which by the rocked like krazy), I met a friend of mine blacksheep (the guy is one dark-skinned brother :-) ....) and we had a rather lengthy discussion about kwangoo.com. I told him what my vision was and the way I was going about it, I was surprised at his level of excitement which seemed to supersede mine, and I like that koz it gives me psyke or drive to go on.

I wish I had a team of developers to work with on Kwangoo.com but I don't so I work with what I have which in this case is an overburdened mind and body that could do with a major makeover.

Yesterday I tried to take a few pics of the kwangoo.com splash on my very wonderful Dell Inspiron E1505 (runs like a ferrari but has the most stupid OS on it...) but the pics were so unclear I decided to let it go. In time I'll setup a blog for kwangoo.com and I'll post all the pics :-)

Anyway, gotta go meet bluefi5h ....

Cheers

Journey of an Afro-preneur: Building the Kwangoo Brand

2006-11-14T09:36:00.000+03:00

I mentioned last week that our vision was to build the most prolific online social brand in the region and slowly by slowly we heading there. I need to mention that our budget for this whole project is currently standing at....let me look at my accounting books...zero 0Ksh 0$..sad but true..I think the lack of money makes as even work harder towards achieving the goal, it forces us to network even more, to pull resources together, basically it makes us put in the extra mile to ensure that we achieve it..

Last friday I decided to conduct a small "focus group" (The Apprentice got me on this line of thinking) to get users view on what they would like to see in a site of this kind, No I didn't go to the streets and ask people questions or hand them some questionnaires, I used the power of the internet and decided to IM them :-) cost cutting and efficiency of time is critical at this point dude to limited resources. The views I got were rather interesting and most weren't knew but I was glad to hear them from potential users and they will definitely be factored in.

Bluefi5h sent me the t-shirt concepts yesterday, although I wasn't in the office where I have internet access (I seriously need to hook up some internet at home) I still managed to access my mail on my phone (this wouldn't have been possible a few years ago when no one had a fixed line or even a mobile) and look at them on the small phone screen and I was impressed with what he had done. So today I rushed to the office and had a proper look on my mammoth 17 inch monitor (not flat ..aint that so sad..) and you can just imagine my excitement at looking at them properly. I did what I consider is always important, get user views on the look of the t-shirts, I got good feedback which I communicated to Bluefi5h immediately.

The plan is to use as much human resource and network associations to build the brand, let people be part of the online social move and move it from just a word of mouth brand to the brand that everybody wants to be associated with.

Journey of an Afro-preneur: Baby Steps

2006-11-09T16:26:00.000+03:00

This week has been quite exciting, I met up with Bluefi5h (those Kahawa hookups :-) God Blesss Capuccino) and had a talk with him about Kwangoo.com it really is amazing how much we have in common when it comes to creating an online brand but Bluefi5h took it to the next level when he explained to me what he would like this brand to be, the ultimate goal is to buold the number one online brand in the region. We know where we want to be in the next 5 years and we taking the "Baby steps" to achieve that vision one day at a time.

One of the most fruitful things to come out of our conversation was the development of a release schedule, we both pretty busy people so it's hard to come up with tight schedules and stick to them but I was glad that we both so the need to come up with a timetable. Bluefi5h is primarily going to focus on developing the brand and growing it, he has many contacts in the design field and they will come in handy when we need to really grow the brand. A clothing line was mentioned and it rallied a few ideas from the two of us. Such brainstorms make the whole idea exciting and worth the effort even with the challenges we face.

Since the "launch" of the splash page, a few of my friends have signed up and even though the numbers havent been record breaking the feedback and queries I've received have gone a long way in encouraging me to pursue this vision. In the last few months I've been working on a code snippet that could really enhance the registration process of new users as well as spread the word just when I thought it was hopeless the code has come together and is working woohoo!!am so excited and bearing in mind that Bluefi5h will come up with an exciting interface am rearing to go.

One of our core objectives is to set a trend that others will be daring enough to follow, they say "Imititation is the highest form of flattery" and I wouldn't be surprised if others followed :-) It's only fair that I mention that there have been other social networking sites developed and they definitely did blaze the way but its also important to note that what we are trying to do is indigenous and will encompass the latest trends on Web 2.0 (Javascript wil really work its magic..damn browser compatibility grrrr!!...)...

Everyday I learn something new, I follow the trends in social networking and pick as much as I can from every site that pops up or dies, all these lessons are applied in kwangoo.com

Journey of an Afro-preneur: Kwangoo.com so many questions??

2006-11-06T12:50:00.000+03:00

So the splash page for kwangoo.com has been up for about 5 days now, I've received some awesome reviews on the logo, people really associate with it and it gives them a desire to know more about the site and its features.

Duke looked at the splash page and said "i see a kenyan trying his luck with a myspace-ish idea" :-) well I have to admit myspace.com is a major source of inspiration but am not trying to be one.

I've received many questions from people asking me when will it be launched? and as much as I'd like to launch it yesterday I can't, kwangoo.com is still in the development phase and once I have something that can hold people in as I release updates I will, so for now I would urge my supporters to be patient :-) it will come...

I'm basically an Army Of One so you can imagine the load on my shoulders, but am enjoying it at the same time dreading it. On one hand I have a dream coming up and that is major adrenaline rush!! on the other hand I have the demands of life pulling me down and yet I have to deal with kwangoo.com as an online brand. But its an experience I wouldn't trade in for anything.

I want to thank a few guys for their support even with such a small step like a splash page, Major props goes to Bluefi5h, Gigi, Duke,Benoit, Gisty jeng and the rest whom I havent mentioned. Good things are on the way...

Journey of an Afro-preneur: Kwangoo.com Online

2006-11-02T10:43:00.000+03:00

Finally the child is being birthed, I finally managed to upload the site on Thursday 9am, am not a very good designer but I came up with a simple page which I'll redo in the next few days in the meantime go to www.kwangoo.com and marvel at the baby we are about to unleash to the world.

Journey of an Afro-preneur: A demanding week

2006-11-01T11:24:00.001+03:00

It's been a demanding week for me and despite me hoping for the best from every situation the "Murphyesque cavalcade" (I got that line from another blog which was talking about the string of problems they have been facing) of stumbling blocks seems to be getting to me. I have the rigours of full time employment to deal with, a string of projects I need to deliver, meetings with my contractors (basically people who have paid me to do for them work),family issues on my back and the occasional desire to just pick up a blunt object and go mass genocide on every living soul within 200 miles.

So the domain is ready and is aptly named Kwangoo (which is like a twisted version of the swahili word "Kwangu" which means "my place..") I like the name cause its catchy and easy on the tongue even for the non-bantu out there, I'm informed that non-bantus and caucasians would have a problem with the word "kwangu" and would pronounce it as "kwangyou" which would be so wrong in my view, so I twisted it at the end and added to letter O's.

So now am trying to get the logo up and running which seems to be the place where my patience will be tried to the core. Bluefi5h seems to be operating on another level of existence where the word "today" seems to mean something else, so am left hanging as he says his sending me the logo and when I check my mail I see nothing, now you know why I have visions if inflicting bodily harm to my lovely neighbours (bluefi5h lives about a km from where I live :-0...).

Jisty Jeng also seems to be on another parallel universe, he did the wrong concept despite me insisting on Kwangoo. Uganda is far if you look at it from a walking distance perspective but am sure I can organise for his arse to get a thorough beating.

I even considered having a company. Logoworks, do for me the logo but having looked at the cost about USD300 I had to shelve that idea after all I have no budget.

On a lighter note, I decided to pay the organisers of my "randaranda" a visit on Monday where I finally met the 6 beautiful ladies behind this exciting concept. I spent the better part of the vening talking and listening to them and they spent the better part of the time just being themselves and drowning me in so much humour I almost cracked up.

So now its thursday am a logo short, and am wondering is this the way it was all meant to be when this vision came about or does it get better with time?

Journey of an Afro-preneur: Just bought the domain name finally!!

2006-10-27T14:38:00.000+03:00

So after my bad experience with godaddy.com which even upto this day seems to be rejecting my Credit Card (yes I finally accquired one) I have finally bought the domain for my social web app. This signifies the most serious and committed step I've ever taken towards achieving this vision of mine.

In the next few days I'll put up the home page with an invites only form to build the buzz..come up with tag line and flood the blogosphere with speculative info :-) use the power of the internet to create a viral marketing campaign.

I've asked Jisty Jeng,who keeps posting comments on the blog using a different identity everytime, to also come up with a sharp,crispy looking Web 2.0 logo, I'll then choose between his and the one that Bluefi5h will have come up with.

Sad news was that another domain I wanted to purchase seems to have been bought by some Indian Sage or swarmi :-) but those are issues that will be dealt with in the future. The important thing is the first seeds have been planted.

Bluefi5h has offered me free hosting services on his megaspaced and ultra-bandwidth server, now how can I say no to that kind of offer? :-)

Inside Facebook

2006-10-26T13:51:00.000+03:00

A few excerpts from the newly published book "Inside Facebook" by Karel Baloun(his a dude by the way just incase the name conjures up images of a hot techie lady :- )). The book was available for 36 hours to online reading and I did my best to soak up all of its important message :

For every success, there are hundreds with the same or similar idea, who gave up, couldn’t find or keep the passion to succeed. Every one of them would have faced different challenges towards success, some being prepared in these ways, others having these strengths, others having help in these areas, but the passion which could have lead to success is a flower which withers in self-doubt, criticism and loneliness.

For even without those experiences of colossal, dramatic failure, for any good idea there are countless critics and numerous competitors. So we try to stay away from negative, critical people. But one of them is always with us - our inner voice can spew fear and self doubt, whenever we let it, if we don’t train it. Are my ideas worth anything? Maybe everyone whatever I’m thinking, other people know it. Maybe my best idea, some smarter guy at google is already finishing it.

Social networking needs to fulfill a purpose, or people will not go through the trouble..

If a service is useful, people will be loyal to it, and give up a lot for it, though less eagerly countable things like money.

The product needs to speak to the needs of its users and gain their trust

Even great famous people usually only did a few great things. So we need to choose carefully what that great Anything will be. Lack of focus means your power is divided. You will lose any race if you are trying to juggle at the same time. Your superior talent can only take you so far. If you are dividing your focus, it needs to be in hope that the synergy among your efforts will have greater power than either piece, otherwise you’d be better off finding a greater vision for either one of the two pieces, and just forgetting about the other piece. Not lowering the priority of that other piece, so it can continue to take up valuable space in your deeper mind, but actually cutting it away, as in “that would be great, but I’m not going to do it

"Anything great is overwhelming, so seeing it as small steps helps, if it is actually a staircase you are building and not a treadmill. And you can trust that help will come, exactly matching your passion; perhaps it will be someone like Sean walking by your house without a clear place to stay.

Keep focus and passion on a single, even if complex, vision. If it is a complex vision, you must find passion on a simple piece or two of it, and start running with that.

If you don’t have a vision yet, meditation, having a realistic idol/role model/mentor, time for deep, creative conversations, topical and inspirational reading, and other things can help, but maybe you are just not ready for your journey yet. Visions can take time63. So be patient, but remember that you won’t get far ahead without one."

"The internet has given us all incredible power. How will you use it? What’s your passionate vision? Can you leverage your online or offline social networks to launch you?"

"Your attitude determines your opportunities. The economy for you is what you personally think it is. Whether you believe you will succeed or fail, you’ll be right. As Abraham Lincoln said, “Most folks are about as happy as they set their mind to be.”

Journey of an Afro-preneur: Road Trips, Languages and Snakes

2006-10-23T14:11:00.000+03:00

I'm back from one of the best road trips (aptly named randa randa, which if my swahili serves me well means "move from place to place") I've ever had and I can assure you it was worth it, down to the last cent but more on that will be in a wordpress powered web log I'l be setting up in the next few days where all the guys who were on the trip will be able to share their own experiences.

TheVillager asked me what ever happened to the social networking site I was working on and I was left wondering what I should tell him, the truth of the matter is that it still is in the pipeline, I've faced a few obstacles here and there but they've only given me more resolve to push forward and get things moving.

So while that is happening I've been trying to learn the "language of snakes" :-) am sure your thinking I've decided to become a snake charmer :-) I wish!!..hahaha..I actually decided to open up that ebook and learn python. Why learn a new language??..you may ask..well the desire to learn something new in an ever changing environment is my driving force, ICT is the only field where everything changes everyday, several years ago Classic ASP was the wen development language of choice now we have more then 20 languages coming up each with a different syntax and all of them offering a different way to do the same thing. I think learning a new language gives me that extra edge and also helps me adapt easily when faced with new environments.

How much of the language have I learnt?..not as much as I'd like to since am not in a hurry to start getting my hands dirty with common web development tasks like Add, Edit and Deleting of records :-) Infact I've spent more time trying to understand the core of the language, the nuts and bolts, rather then the engine, that way I can master how it works before running head first into a web development framework e.g. django, and Turbogears.

Is it an interesting language?..any new language is interesting even the hard ones like Perl :-) The syntax is radicaly different from PHP where we have curly braces to signify the start and end of functions, loops, and conditional statements, with Python indentation is what denotes the start and end of the code..hmm..a new way of thinking..personally prefer the curly braces :-)..So i guess my answer is yes.nad yes its relatively difficult but so is any new language..

What's my plan after I learn the language?..well my take has always been look for its application to your current field, in my case it would be web development. There are a few python based web development frameworks out there with Django being the most prolific (The similarity between Django and Symfony PHP5 framework is remarkable), so I will try to use the frameworks available on one or two apps.

PHP still remains a favorite for me currently due to its ease of use and powerful features but it never hurts to up the skill levels.

The 18 mistakes that kill startups

2006-10-23T10:33:00.000+03:00

I stumbled upon this article by Paul Graham, which I thought would be an interesting read for my fellow afropreneurs:

If you would like the original web link go to http://paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html
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In the Q & A period after a recent talk, someone asked what made startups fail. After standing there gaping for a few seconds I realized this was kind of a trick question. It's equivalent to asking how to make a startup succeed—if you avoid every cause of failure, you succeed—and that's too big a question to answer on the fly.

Afterwards I realized it could be helpful to look at the problem from this direction. If you have a list of all the things you shouldn't do, you can turn that into a recipe for succeeding just by negating. And this form of list may be more useful in practice. It's easier to catch yourself doing something you shouldn't than always to remember to do something you should. [1]

In a sense there's just one mistake that kills startups: not making something users want. If you make something users want, you'll probably be fine, whatever else you do or don't do. And if you don't make something users want, then you're dead, whatever else you do or don't do. So really this is a list of 18 things that cause startups not to make something users want. Nearly all failure funnels through that.

1. Single Founder

Have you ever noticed how few successful startups were founded by just one person? Even companies you think of as having one founder, like Oracle, usually turn out to have more. It seems unlikely this is a coincidence.

What's wrong with having one founder? To start with, it's a vote of no confidence. It probably means the founder couldn't talk any of his friends into starting the company with him. That's pretty alarming, because his friends are the ones who know him best.

But even if the founder's friends were all wrong and the company is a good bet, he's still at a disadvantage. Starting a startup is too hard for one person. Even if you could do all the work yourself, you need colleagues to brainstorm with, to talk you out of stupid decisions, and to cheer you up when things go wrong.

The last one might be the most important. The low points in a startup are so low that few could bear them alone. When you have multiple founders, esprit de corps binds them together in a way that seems to violate conservation laws. Each thinks "I can't let my friends down." This is one of the most powerful forces in human nature, and it's missing when there's just one founder.

2. Bad Location

Startups prosper in some places and not others. Silicon Valley dominates, then Boston, then Seattle, Austin, Denver, and New York. After that there's not much. Even in New York the number of startups per capita is probably a 20th of what it is in Silicon Valley. In towns like Houston and Chicago and Detroit it's too small to measure.

Why is the falloff so sharp? Probably for the same reason it is in other industries. What's the sixth largest fashion center in the US? The sixth largest center for oil, or finance, or publishing? Whatever they are they're probably so far from the top that it would be misleading even to call them centers.

It's an interesting question why cities become startup hubs, but the reason startups prosper in them is probably the same as it is for any industry: that's where the experts are. Standards are higher; people are more sympathetic to what you're doing; the kind of people you want to hire want to live there; supporting industries are there; the people you run into in chance meetings are in the same business. Who knows exactly how these factors combine to boost startups in Silicon Valley and squish them in Detroit, but it's clear they do from the number of startups per capita in each.

3. Marginal Niche

Most of the groups that apply to Y Combinator suffer from a common problem: choosing a small, obscure niche in the hope of avoiding competition.

If you watch little kids playing sports, you notice that below a certain age they're afraid of the ball. When the ball comes near them their instinct is to avoid it. I didn't make a lot of catches as an eight year old outfielder, because whenever a fly ball came my way, I used to close my eyes and hold my glove up more for protection than in the hope of catching it.

Choosing a marginal project is the startup equivalent of my eight year old strategy for dealing with fly balls. If you make anything good, you're going to have competitors, so you may as well face that. You can only avoid competition by avoiding good ideas.

I think this shrinking from big problems is mostly unconscious. It's not that people think of grand ideas but decide to pursue smaller ones because they seem safer. Your unconscious won't even let you think of grand ideas. So the solution may be to think about ideas without involving yourself. What would be a great idea for someone else to do as a startup?

4. Derivative Idea

Many of the applications we get are imitations of some existing company. That's one source of ideas, but not the best. If you look at the origins of successful startups, few were started in imitation of some other startup. Where did they get their ideas? Usually from some specific, unsolved problem the founders identified.

Our startup made software for making online stores. When we started it, there wasn't any; the few sites you could order from were hand-made at great expense by web consultants. We knew that if online shopping ever took off, these sites would have to be generated by software, so we wrote some. Pretty straightforward.

It seems like the best problems to solve are ones that affect you personally. Apple happened because Steve Wozniak wanted a computer, Google because Larry and Sergey couldn't find stuff online, Hotmail because Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith couldn't exchange email at work.

So instead of copying the Facebook, with some variation that the Facebook rightly ignored, look for ideas from the other direction. Instead of starting from companies and working back to the problems they solved, look for problems and imagine the company that might solve them. [2] What do people complain about? What do you wish there was?

5. Obstinacy

In some fields the way to succeed is to have a vision of what you want to achieve, and to hold true to it no matter what setbacks you encounter. Starting startups is not one of them. The stick-to-your-vision approach works for something like winning an Olympic gold medal, where the problem is well-defined. Startups are more like science, where you need to follow the trail wherever it leads.

So don't get too attached to your original plan, because it's probably wrong. Most successful startups end up doing something different than they originally intended—often so different that it doesn't even seem like the same company. You have to be prepared to see the better idea when it arrives. And the hardest part of that is often discarding your old idea.

But openness to new ideas has to be tuned just right. Switching to a new idea every week will be equally fatal. Is there some kind of external test you can use? One is to ask whether the ideas represent some kind of progression. If in each new idea you're able to re-use most of what you built for the previous ones, then you're probably in a process that converges. Whereas if you keep restarting from scratch, that's a bad sign.

Fortunately there's someone you can ask for advice: your users. If you're thinking about turning in some new direction and your users seem excited about it, it's probably a good bet.

6. Hiring Bad Programmers

I forgot to include this in the early versions of the list, because nearly all the founders I know are programmers. This is not a serious problem for them. They might accidentally hire someone bad, but it's not going to kill the company. In a pinch they can do whatever's required themselves.

But when I think about what killed most of the startups in the e-commerce business back in the 90s, it was bad programmers. A lot of those companies were started by business guys who thought the way startups worked was that you had some clever idea and then hired programmers to implement it. That's actually much harder than it sounds—almost impossibly hard in fact—because business guys can't tell which are the good programmers. They don't even get a shot at the best ones, because no one really good wants a job implementing the vision of a business guy.

In practice what happens is that the business guys choose people they think are good programmers (it says here on his resume that he's a Microsoft Certified Developer) but who aren't. Then they're mystified to find that their startup lumbers along like a World War II bomber while their competitors scream past like jet fighters. This kind of startup is in the same position as a big company, but without the advantages.

So how do you pick good programmers if you're not a programmer? I don't think there's an answer. I was about to say you'd have to find a good programmer to help you hire people. But if you can't recognize good programmers, how would you even do that?

7. Choosing the Wrong Platform

A related problem (since it tends to be done by bad programmers) is choosing the wrong platform. For example, I think a lot of startups during the Bubble killed themselves by deciding to build server-based applications on Windows. Hotmail was still running on FreeBSD for years after Microsoft bought it, presumably because Windows couldn't handle the load. If Hotmail's founders had chosen to use Windows, they would have been swamped.

PayPal only just dodged this bullet. After they merged with X.com, the new CEO wanted to switch to Windows—even after PayPal cofounder Max Levchin showed that their software scaled only 1% as well on Windows as Unix. Fortunately for PayPal they switched CEOs instead.

Platform is a vague word. It could mean an operating system, or a programming language, or a "framework" built on top of a programming language. It implies something that both supports and limits, like the foundation of a house.

The scary thing about platforms is that there are always some that seem to outsiders to be fine, responsible choices and yet, like Windows in the 90s, will destroy you if you choose them. Java applets were probably the most spectacular example. This was supposed to be the new way of delivering applications. Presumably it killed just about 100% of the startups who believed that.

How do you pick the right platforms? The usual way is to hire good programmers and let them choose. But there is a trick you could use if you're not a programmer: visit a top computer science department and see what they use in research projects.

8. Slowness in Launching

Companies of all sizes have a hard time getting software done. It's intrinsic to the medium; software is always 85% done. It takes an effort of will to push through this and get something released to users. [3]

Startups make all kinds of excuses for delaying their launch. Most are equivalent to the ones people use for procrastinating in everyday life. There's something that needs to happen first. Maybe. But if the software were 100% finished and ready to launch at the push of a button, would they still be waiting?

One reason to launch quickly is that it forces you to actually finish some quantum of work. Nothing is truly finished till it's released; you can see that from the rush of work that's always involved in releasing anything, no matter how finished you thought it was. The other reason you need to launch is that it's only by bouncing your idea off users that you fully understand it.

Several distinct problems manifest themselves as delays in launching: working too slowly; not truly understanding the problem; fear of having to deal with users; fear of being judged; working on too many different things; excessive perfectionism. Fortunately you can combat all of them by the simple expedient of forcing yourself to launch something fairly quickly.

9. Launching Too Early

Launching too slowly has probably killed a hundred times more startups than launching too fast, but it is possible to launch too fast. The danger here is that you ruin your reputation. You launch something, the early adopters try it out, and if it's no good they may never come back.

So what's the minimum you need to launch? We suggest startups think about what they plan to do, identify a core that's both (a) useful on its own and (b) something that can be incrementally expanded into the whole project, and then get that done as soon as possible.

This is the same approach I (and many other programmers) use for writing software. Think about the overall goal, then start by writing the smallest subset of it that does anything useful. If it's a subset, you'll have to write it anyway, so in the worst case you won't be wasting your time. But more likely you'll find that implementing a working subset is both good for morale and helps you see more clearly what the rest should do.

The early adopters you need to impress are fairly tolerant. They don't expect a newly launched product to do everything; it just has to do something.

10. Having No Specific User in Mind

You can't build things users like without understanding them. I mentioned earlier that the most successful startups seem to have begun by trying to solve a problem their founders had. Perhaps there's a rule here: perhaps you create wealth in proportion to how well you understand the problem you're solving, and the problems you understand best are your own. [4]

That's just a theory. What's not a theory is the converse: if you're trying to solve problems you don't understand, you're hosed.

And yet a surprising number of founders seem willing to assume that someone, they're not sure exactly who, will want what they're building. Do the founders want it? No, they're not the target market. Who is? Teenagers. People interested in local events (that one is a perennial tarpit). Or "business" users. What business users? Gas stations? Movie studios? Defense contractors?

You can of course build something for users other than yourself. We did. But you should realize you're stepping into dangerous territory. You're flying on instruments, in effect, so you should (a) consciously shift gears, instead of assuming you can rely on your intuitions as you ordinarily would, and (b) look at the instruments.

In this case the instruments are the users. When designing for other people you have to be empirical. You can no longer guess what will work; you have to find users and measure their responses. So if you're going to make something for teenagers or "business" users or some other group that doesn't include you, you have to be able to talk some specific ones into using what you're making. If you can't, you're on the wrong track.

11. Raising Too Little Money

Most successful startups take funding at some point. Like having more than one founder, it seems a good bet statistically. How much should you take, though?

Startup funding is measured in time. Every startup that isn't profitable (meaning nearly all of them, initially) has a certain amount of time left before the money runs out and they have to stop. This is sometimes referred to as runway, as in "How much runway do you have left?" It's a good metaphor because it reminds you that when the money runs out you're going to be airborne or dead.

Too little money means not enough to get airborne. What airborne means depends on the situation. Usually you have to advance to a visibly higher level: if all you have is an idea, a working prototype; if you have a prototype, launching; if you're launched, significant growth. It depends on investors, because until you're profitable that's who you have to convince.

So if you take money from investors, you have to take enough to get to the next step, whatever that is. [5] Fortunately you have some control over both how much you spend and what the next step is. We advise startups to set both low, initially: spend practically nothing, and make your initial goal simply to build a solid prototype. This gives you maximum flexibility.

12. Spending Too Much

It's hard to distinguish spending too much from raising too little. If you run out of money, you could say either was the cause. The only way to decide which to call it is by comparison with other startups. If you raised five million and ran out of money, you probably spent too much.

Burning through too much money is not as common as it used to be. Founders seem to have learned that lesson. Plus it keeps getting cheaper to start a startup. So as of this writing few startups spend too much. None of the ones we've funded have. (And not just because we make small investments; many have gone on to raise further rounds.)

The classic way to burn through cash is by hiring a lot of people. This bites you twice: in addition to increasing your costs, it slows you down—so money that's getting consumed faster has to last longer. Most hackers understand why that happens; Fred Brooks explained it in The Mythical Man-Month.

We have three general suggestions about hiring: (a) don't do it if you can avoid it, (b) pay people with equity rather than salary, not just to save money, but because you want the kind of people who are committed enough to prefer that, and (c) only hire people who are either going to write code or go out and get users, because those are the only things you need at first.

13. Raising Too Much Money

It's obvious how too little money could kill you, but is there such a thing as having too much?

Yes and no. The problem is not so much the money itself as what comes with it. As one VC who spoke at Y Combinator said, "Once you take several million dollars of my money, the clock is ticking." If VCs fund you, they're not going to let you just put the money in the bank and keep operating as two guys living on ramen. They want that money to go to work. [6] At the very least you'll move into proper office space and hire more people. That will change the atmosphere, and not entirely for the better. Now most of your people will be employees rather than founders. They won't be as committed; they'll need to be told what to do; they'll start to engage in office politics.

When you raise a lot of money, your company moves to the suburbs and has kids.

Perhaps more dangerously, once you take a lot of money it gets harder to change direction. Suppose your initial plan was to sell something to companies. After taking VC money you hire a sales force to do that. What happens now if you realize you should be making this for consumers instead of businesses? That's a completely different kind of selling. What happens, in practice, is that you don't realize that. The more people you have, the more you stay pointed in the same direction.

Another drawback of large investments is the time they take. The time required to raise money grows with the amount. [7] When the amount rises into the millions, investors get very cautious. VCs never quite say yes or no; they just engage you in an apparently endless conversation. Raising VC scale investments is thus a huge time sink—more work, probably, than the startup itself. And you don't want to be spending all your time talking to investors while your competitors are spending theirs building things.

We advise founders who go on to seek VC money to take the first reasonable deal they get. If you get an offer from a reputable firm at a reasonable valuation with no unusually onerous terms, just take it and get on with building the company. [8] Who cares if you could get a 30% better deal elsewhere? Economically, startups are an all-or-nothing game. Bargain-hunting among investors is a waste of time.

14. Poor Investor Management

As a founder, you have to manage your investors. You shouldn't ignore them, because they may have useful insights. But neither should you let them run the company. That's supposed to be your job. If investors had sufficient vision to run the companies they fund, why didn't they start them?

Pissing off investors by ignoring them is probably less dangerous than caving in to them. In our startup, we erred on the ignoring side. A lot of our energy got drained away in disputes with investors instead of going into the product. But this was less costly than giving in, which would probably have destroyed the company. If the founders know what they're doing, it's better to have half their attention focused on the product than the full attention of investors who don't.

How hard you have to work on managing investors usually depends on how much money you've taken. When you raise VC-scale money, the investors get a great deal of control. If they have a board majority, they're literally your bosses. In the more common case, where founders and investors are equally represented and the deciding vote is cast by neutral outside directors, all the investors have to do is convince the outside directors and they control the company.

If things go well, this shouldn't matter. So long as you seem to be advancing rapidly, most investors will leave you alone. But things don't always go smoothly in startups. Investors have made trouble even for the most successful companies. One of the most famous examples is Apple, whose board made a nearly fatal blunder in firing Steve Jobs. Apparently even Google got a lot of grief from their investors early on.

15. Sacrificing Users to (Supposed) Profit

When I said at the beginning that if you make something users want, you'll be fine, you may have noticed I didn't mention anything about having the right business model. That's not because making money is unimportant. I'm not suggesting that founders start companies with no chance of making money in the hope of unloading them before they tank. The reason we tell founders not to worry about the business model initially is that making something people want is so much harder.

I don't know why it's so hard to make something people want. It seems like it should be straightforward. But you can tell it must be hard by how few startups do it.

Because making something people want is so much harder than making money from it, you should leave business models for later, just as you'd leave some trivial but messy feature for version 2. In version 1, solve the core problem. And the core problem in a startup is how to create wealth (= how much people want something x the number who want it), not how to convert that wealth into money.

The companies that win are the ones that put users first. Google, for example. They made search work, then worried about how to make money from it. And yet some startup founders still think it's irresponsible not to focus on the business model from the beginning. They're often encouraged in this by investors whose experience comes from less malleable industries.

It is irresponsible not to think about business models. It's just ten times more irresponsible not to think about the product.

16. Not Wanting to Get Your Hands Dirty

Nearly all programmers would rather spend their time writing code and have someone else handle the messy business of extracting money from it. And not just the lazy ones. Larry and Sergey apparently felt this way too at first. After developing their new search algorithm, the first thing they tried was to get some other company to buy it.

Start a company? Yech. Most hackers would rather just have ideas. But as Larry and Sergey found, there's not much of a market for ideas. No one trusts an idea till you embody it in a product and use that to grow a user base. Then they'll pay big time.

Maybe this will change, but I doubt it will change much. There's nothing like users for convincing acquirers. It's not just that the risk is decreased. The acquirers are human, and they have a hard time paying a bunch of young guys millions of dollars just for being clever. When the idea is embodied in a company with a lot of users, they can tell themselves they're buying the users rather than the cleverness, and this is easier for them to swallow. [9]

If you're going to attract users, you'll probably have to get up from your computer and go find some. It's unpleasant work, but if you can make yourself do it you have a much greater chance of succeeding. In the first batch of startups we funded, in the summer of 2005, most of the founders spent all their time building their applications. But there was one who was away half the time talking to executives at cell phone companies, trying to arrange deals. Can you imagine anything more painful for a hacker? [10] But it paid off, because this startup seems the most successful of that group by an order of magnitude.

If you want to start a startup, you have to face the fact that you can't just hack. At least one hacker will have to spend some of the time doing business stuff.

17. Fights Between Founders

Fights between founders are surprisingly common. About 20% of the startups we've funded have had a founder leave. It happens so often that we've reversed our attitude to vesting. We still don't require it, but now we advise founders to vest so there will be an orderly way for people to quit.

A founder leaving doesn't necessarily kill a startup, though. Plenty of successful startups have had that happen. [11] Fortunately it's usually the least committed founder who leaves. If there are three founders and one who was lukewarm leaves, big deal. If you have two and one leaves, or a guy with critical technical skills leaves, that's more of a problem. But even that is survivable. Blogger got down to one person, and they bounced back.

Most of the disputes I've seen between founders could have been avoided if they'd been more careful about who they started a company with. Most disputes are not due to the situation but the people. Which means they're inevitable. And most founders who've been burned by such disputes probably had misgivings, which they suppressed, when they started the company. Don't suppress misgivings. It's much easier to fix problems before the company is started than after. So don't include your housemate in your startup because he'd feel left out otherwise. Don't start a company with someone you dislike because they have some skill you need and you worry you won't find anyone else. The people are the most important ingredient in a startup, so don't compromise there.

18. A Half-Hearted Effort

The failed startups you hear most about are the spectactular flameouts. Those are actually the elite of failures. The most common type is not the one that makes spectacular mistakes, but the one that doesn't do much of anything—the one we never even hear about, because it was some project a couple guys started on the side while working on their day jobs, but which never got anywhere and was gradually abandoned.

Statistically, if you want to avoid failure, it would seem like the most important thing is to quit your day job. Most founders of failed startups don't quit their day jobs, and most founders of successful ones do. If startup failure were a disease, the CDC would be issuing bulletins warning people to avoid day jobs.

Does that mean you should quit your day job? Not necessarily. I'm guessing here, but I'd guess that many of these would-be founders may not have the kind of determination it takes to start a company, and that in the back of their minds, they know it. The reason they don't invest more time in their startup is that they know it's a bad investment. [12]

I'd also guess there's some band of people who could have succeeded if they'd taken the leap and done it full-time, but didn't. I have no idea how wide this band is, but if the winner/borderline/hopeless progression has the sort of distribution you'd expect, the number of people who could have made it, if they'd quit their day job, is probably an order of magnitude larger than the number who do make it. [13]

If that's true, most startups that could succeed fail because the founders don't devote their whole efforts to them. That certainly accords with what I see out in the world. Most startups fail because they don't make something people want, and the reason most don't is that they don't try hard enough.

In other words, starting startups is just like everything else. The biggest mistake you can make is not to try hard enough. To the extent there's a secret to success, it's not to be in denial about that.

Notes

[1] This is not a complete list of the causes of failure, just those you can control. There are also several you can't, notably ineptitude and bad luck.

[2] Ironically, one variant of the Facebook that might work is a facebook exclusively for college students.

[3] Steve Jobs tried to motivate people by saying "Real artists ship." This is a fine sentence, but unfortunately not true. Many famous works of art are unfinished. It's true in fields that have hard deadlines, like architecture and filmmaking, but even there people tend to be tweaking stuff till it's yanked out of their hands.

[4] There's probably also a second factor: startup founders tend to be at the leading edge of technology, so problems they face are probably especially valuable.

[5] You should take more than you think you'll need, maybe 50% to 100% more, because software takes longer to write and deals longer to close than you expect.

[6] Since people sometimes call us VCs, I should add that we're not. VCs invest large amounts of other people's money. We invest small amounts of our own, like angel investors.

[7] Not linearly of course, or it would take forever to raise five million dollars. In practice it just feels like it takes forever.

Though if you include the cases where VCs don't invest, it would literally take forever in the median case. And maybe we should, because the danger of chasing large investments is not just that they take a long time. That's the best case. The real danger is that you'll expend a lot of time and get nothing.

[8] Some VCs will offer you an artificially low valuation to see if you have the balls to ask for more. It's lame that VCs play such games, but some do. If you're dealing with one of those you should push back on the valuation a bit.

[9] Suppose YouTube's founders had gone to Google in 2005 and told them "Google Video is badly designed. Give us $10 million and we'll tell you all the mistakes you made." They would have gotten the royal raspberry. Eighteen months later Google paid $1.6 billion for the same lesson, partly because they could then tell themselves that they were buying a phenomenon, or a community, or some vague thing like that.

I don't mean to be hard on Google. They did better than their competitors, who may have now missed the video boat entirely.

[10] Yes, actually: dealing with the government. But phone companies are up there.

[11] Many more than most people realize, because companies don't advertise this. Did you know Apple originally had three founders?

[12] I'm not dissing these people. I don't have the determination myself. I've twice come close to starting startups since Viaweb, and both times I bailed because I realized that without the spur of poverty I just wasn't willing to endure the stress of a startup.

[13] So how do you know whether you're in the category of people who should quit their day job, or the presumably larger one who shouldn't? I got to the point of saying that this was hard to judge for yourself and that you should seek outside advice, before realizing that that's what we do. We think of ourselves as investors, but viewed from the other direction Y Combinator is a service for advising people whether or not to quit their day job. We could be mistaken, and no doubt often are, but we do at least bet money on our conclusions.

Thanks to Sam Altman, Jessica Livingston, Greg McAdoo, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.
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Journey of an Afro-preneur: Worth the tinker..

2006-10-17T14:27:00.000+03:00

It's been long since I posted on my journey as an afropreneur and just last weekend a special friend of mine pointed that out to me, so I felt it necessary to return back to chronicling this journey, although I am the view that some of my posts have been part of my journey I haven't titled them in the manner that would suggest that they are part of the journey. I think every experience worth remembering must be put down as an event that brings with it new lessons, successes and failures, triumphs and defeats, all must be given the proper attention.

As I seat here listening to one of Africas most distinguished musicians, Oliver Mtukudzi, whose music is amazing and a collectors item for any serious person, a million thoughts are going through my mind (honestly may be just one..When will I get more money?...:-) ..) am forced to focus on the current challenges am facing as web developer in a market where every "smart" university graduate and anybody who can write a program wants to undercut me on every project that pops up. I remember a time when one could survive on one project a month comfortably, the hourly rate for a project was strong enough to cater for my needs, a few years ago I used to get paid about Ksh45,000 (about 600$ USD at the current exchange rate) for about 5 days work (minimal effort required) without breaking a sweat now those were the good times. Now people approach me with figures which would make me run to hills like the freedom fighters (MauMau) of yesteryear.

I always thought that as you got better at what you do and honed your skills the more money you'd be able to command for work, just look at lawyers and almost any other profession, that belief has been crashed with the rise of "For 10grand I'do everything" breed of developers out there. Don't take me wrong, I understand that people need to eat and that we all can't charge high fees, but am also of the view that cheap is also bad for the industry because one day that ksh10,000 project will not be able to meet your current needs and you will want more but shock on you when you realise there's another coder standing behinding you telling your client "...I can do everything plus maintenance and even iron your clothes for Ksh5000..." and your left wondering "What have I done?.."

The Problem:

I'm afraid am part of the problem, having come from a culture of undercutting the competition on pricing we have spawned a breed that seems hell bent on giving more for less just to earn that shilling.

The Solution:

The solution, I don't think I have one, I could carry out mass genocide on "For 10grand I'do everything" breed of developers but that would only land me in court or worse death where I know I will never be able to renegotiate my way out of fiery gates of Hades (hell is real whether you believe in it or not) for now am thinking that an organisation or body of freelance developers could pool their resources and come up with a body that would ensure we maintain certain fee standards, guidelines that would ensure that we don't go cheap even in a flooded market.

The Exception:

There are projects out there that can only be done cheaply but careful consideration must be given before embarking on those projects.I have often found that "small" is usually big, because it tends to mean that the client hasn't properly thought out what they want and as such you end up doing more work for less. The exception must never become the rule.

The Rule:

Cheap is bad and it kills as all. I often say that "ignorance is good for business" :-) take web hosting and domain registration for example, charge a client 50$USD for a .com which could go for as little as 7$USD and 250-500$USD for hosting that can go for as little as 50$USD Why you may ask?greed..NO..the client is not only paying for the service his also paying for your time and the knowledge you have acquired over a period of time.

I am reminded of the story of the Ford motor plant, one time the assembly line had a problem that had resulted in the halting of production resulting in losses. Mr.ford attempted to solve the problem internally using all the manpower he had but to no avail, so he called in an engineer who came and looked at the machinery for about 10 minutes, keenly observing the workings, he opened up one section and twisted a knob and the machinery was up and running. The engineer then sends Mr.Ford an invoice of $10,000USD which was a tidy some in the 30's and 40's, Mr.Ford was shocked at this and proceeded to send him a note asking hwo he had come up with such a figure yet he had only "tinkered" with the machinery. The engineer then sent a rather smart response of a breakdown of his costs:

Tinkering 10$ USD
Knowing where to tinker 9,990$ USD
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10,000$ USD
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You are worth the tinker...act like it...

Is the grass truly greener?..

2006-10-13T10:54:00.000+03:00

"Is the grass truly greener?.." I keep asking myself that question everyday when I wake up in the morning and when am constantly bombarded by such questions as "will I ever break from this cycle of financial drought?"..

I think I'll just smoke the grass and let the forces of nature take their own course..:-)

Interesting ideas and the upcoming tech boom

2006-10-11T11:22:00.000+03:00

Africa is being touted as the next frontier and word on the ground is that by 2010 they'll be a tech boom in Kenya. All signs seem to point to this happening:

Explosive growth of the mobile industry
Internet penetration in most areas.
Economic growth of at least 5.5% ( hasn't trickled down to the common man "mwananchi" but am told that this takes time..how long?!?!..).
ICT sector becoming a major investment area for locals as well as foreign companies. Dimension Data, one of the largest It companies in Africa recently acquired a major stake in ICL a local IT company owned by the Sameer Group.
The recent visit by some Google directors which highlighted Kenya as a significant partner within the region.

With this in mind I had a very interesting discussion with a colleague (i call him Hoolio) of mine yesterday and what he told me really wet my appetite. We met in Westlands, a leafy suburb in Nairobi, at around 4pm and proceeded to head to K1 (Klubhouse) since Sohos (apparently a classy joint) was closed for the National Holiday (Heroes day).

On the way there we ended up talking about the YouTube/Google acquisition which had escaped me since I hadn't had the chance to access the blogosphere. We then sat down, and over a few drinks, Hoolio proceeded to explain to me what his vision was and where I fit in the whole picture, basically we are supposed to form a team and grow a web based brand from a local name to an international brand complete with TV show and magazine, the exciting thing about the whole venture is that we Will be backed up by one of the largest and most successful companies in the region.

We didn't go into the legalities but our "financial and technical" backers would own 51% of the company brand since they did come up with it. We would be put on a basic salary (I had the figure and believe me you its a basic salary) by the VC firm as we get the business up and running and eventually grow it to the point of self-sustainability, this was a major selling point for me since at the end of the day we all have to pay bills and eat and having an income while working on a dream/vision really eases those worries.

The advantage of having a major company as a partner cannot be overstated, it gives us access to their technical and managerial know how, business contacts necessary to open doors and close deals and the "muscle" to actually get things done. The head of the company is a major IT visionary and has a wealth of experience in pioneering IT projects that have put the company in a league of its own.

The opportunity presented to me enables me to be part of something that grow into a well known brand, you rarely get chances like this presented to you. I would have the opportunity to build an application and in time head my own team, an exciting opportunity whichever way you look at it.

Hoolio is waiting for my feedback today and the next few days will be very crucial...check here for updates...

Top ten geek business myths

2006-10-03T09:25:00.000+03:00

Myth #1: A brilliant idea will make you rich.

Reality: A brilliant idea is neither necessary nor sufficient for a successful business, although all else being equal it can't hurt. Microsoft is probably the canonical example of a successful business, and it has never had a single brilliant idea in its entire history. (To the contrary, Microsoft has achieved success largely by seeking out and destroying other people's brilliant ideas.) Google was based on a couple of brilliant ideas (Page rank, text-only ads, massive parallel implementation on cheap hardware) but none of those ideas were original with Larry or Sergey. This is not to say that Larry, Sergey and Bill are not bright guys -- all three of them are sharper than I can ever hope to be. But the idea that any of them woke up one day with an inspiration and coasted the rest of the way to riches is a myth.

Myth #2: If you build it they will come.

There is a grain of truth to this myth. There have been examples of businesses that just built a product, cast it upon the ether(net), and achieved success. (Google is the canonical example.) But for every Google there are ten examples of companies that had killer products that didn't sell for one reason or another. My favorite example of this is the first company I tried to start back in 1993. It was called FlowNet, and it was a new design for a high speed local area network. It ran at 500Mb/s in a time when 10 Mb/s ethernet was the norm. For more than five years, FlowNet had the best price/performance ratio of any available network. On top of that, FlowNet had built-in quality-of-service guarantees for streaming video. If FlowNet had taken over the world your streaming video would be working a lot better today than it does.

But despite the fact that on a technical level FlowNet blew everything else out of the water it was an abysmal failure as a business. We never sold a single unit. The full story of why FlowNet failed would take me far afield, but if I had to sum it up in a nutshell the reason it didn't sell was very simple: it wasn't Ethernet. And if we'd done our homework and market research we could have known that this would be, if not a show-stopper at least a significant obstacle. And we would have known it before we spent tens of thousands of dollars of our own money on patent attorneys and prototypes.

Myth #3: Someone will steal your idea if you don't protect it.

Reality: No one gives a damn about your idea until you actually succeed and by then it's too late. Even on the off chance that you do manage to stumble across someone who is as excited about your idea as you are, if they have any brains they will join you rather than try to beat you. (And if they don't have any brains then it doesn't matter what they do.)

Patent protection does serve one useful purpose: it can make investors feel warm and fuzzy, especially naive investors. But I strongly recommend that you do your own patent filings. It's not hard to do once you learn how (get the Nolo Press book "Patent it Yourself"). You'll do a better job than most patent attorneys and save yourself a lot of money.

Myth #4: What you think matters.

Reality: It matters not one whit that you and all your buddies think that your idea is the greatest thing since sliced pizza (unless, of course, your buddies are rich enough to be the customer base for your business). What matters is what your customers think. It is natural to assume that if you and your buddies think your idea is cool that millions of other people out there will think it's cool too, and sometimes it works out that way, but usually not. The reason is that if you are smart enough to have a brilliant idea then you (and most likely your buddies) are different from everyone else. I don't mean to sound condescending here, but the sad fact of the matter is that compared to you, most people are pretty dumb (look at how many people vote Republican ;-) and they care about dumb things. (I just heard about a new clothing store in Pasadena that has lines around the block. A clothing store!) If you cater only to people who care about the things that you care about then your customer base will be pretty small.

Myth #5: Financial models are bogus.

As with myth #2 there is a grain of truth here. As Carl Sagan was fond of saying, prophecy is a lost art. There is no way to know for sure how much money your business is going to make, or how much it will cost to get to market. The reason for doing financial models is to do a reality check and convince yourself that making a return on investment is even a plausible possibility. If you run the numbers and find out that in order to reach break-even you need a customer base that is ten times larger than the currently known market for your product then you should probably rethink things. As Dwight Eisenhower said: plans are useless, but planning is indispensible.

This myth is the basis for one of the most classic mistakes that geeks make when pitching their ideas. They will say things like "Even if we only capture 1% of the market we'll make big bucks." Statements like that are a dead giveaway that you haven't done your homework to find out what your customers actually want. You may as well say: there's a good chance that only 1 customer in 100 will buy our product (and frankly, we're not even sure about that). Doesn't exactly inspire confidence.

Myth #6: What you know matters more than who you know.

Reality: You've been in denial about this your whole life. You were either brought up to believe that being smart mattered, or you just didn't believe your mother when she told you that getting along with the other kids was more important than getting straight A's.

The truth is, who you know matters more than what you know. This is not to say that being smart and knowledgable is useless. Knowing "what" is often an effective means of getting introduced to the right "whos". But ultimately, the people you know and trust (and more importantly who trust you) matter more than the factual knowledge you may have at your immediate disposal. And there is a sound reason for this: business decisions are horrifically complicated. No one person can possibly amass all the knowledge and experience required to make a broad range of such decisions on their own, so effective business people delegate much of their decision-making to other people. And when they choose who to delegate to, their first pick is always people they know and trust.

Ironically, C programmers understand this much better than Lisp programmers. One of the ironies of the programming world is that using Lisp is vastly more productive than using pretty much any other programming language, but successful businesses based on Lisp are quite rare. The reason for this, I think, is that Lisp allows you to be so productive that a single person can get things done without having to work together with anyone else, and so Lisp programmers never develop the social skills needed to work effectively as a member of a team. A C programmer, by contrast, can't do anything useful except as a member of a team. So although programming in C hobbles you in some ways, it forces you to form groups whose net effectiveness is greater than the sum of their parts, and who collectively can stomp on all the individual Lisp programmers out there, even though one-on-one a Lisper can run rings around a C programmer.

Myth #7: A Ph.D. means something.

Reality: The only thing a Ph.D. means is that you're not a moron, and you're willing to put up with the bullshit it takes to slog your way through a Ph.D. program somewhere. Empirically, having a Ph.D. is negatively correlated with business success. This is because the reward structure in academia is almost the exact opposite of what it is in business. In academia, what your peers think matters. In business, it's what your customers think that matters, and your customers are (almost certainly) not your peers.

[UPDATE: this is not to say that getting a Ph.D. is useless. You can learn a lot of useful stuff by getting a Ph.D. But it's the knowledge and experience that you gain by going through the process that is potentially valuable (for business endeavors), not the degree itself.]

Myth #8: I need $5 million to start my business

Reality: Unless you're building hardware (in which case you should definitely rethink what you're doing) you most likely don't need any startup capital at all. Paul Graham has written extensively about this so I won't belabor it too much, except to say this: you don't need much startup capital, but what you do need is a willingness to work your buns off. You have to bring your brilliant idea to fruition yourself; no one else will do it for you, and no one will give you the money to hire someone to do it for you. The reason is very simple: if you don't believe in the commercial potential of your idea enough to give up your evenings and weekends to own a bigger chunk of it, why should anyone else believe in it enough to put their hard-earned money at risk?

Myth #9: The idea is the most important part of my business plan.

Reality: The idea is very nearly irrelevant. What matters is 1) who are your customers? 2) Why will they buy what you're selling? (Note that the reason for this could very well be something like, "Because I'm famous and I have a huge fan base and they will buy sacks of stale dog shit if it has my name on it." But in your case it will more likely be, "Because we have a great product that blows the competition out of the water.") 3) Who is on your team? and 4) What are the risks?

Myth #10: Having no competition is a good thing.

Reality: If you have no competition the most likely reason for that is that there's no money to be made. There are six billion people on this planet, and it's very unlikely that every last of them will have left a lucrative market niche completely unexploited.

The good news is that it is very likely that your competition sucks. The vast majority of businesses are not run very well. They make shoddy products. They treat their customers and their employees like shit. It's not hard to find market opportunities where you can go in and kick the competition's ass. You don't want no competition, what you want is bad competition. And there's plenty of that out there.

Special bonus myth (free with your paid subscription): After the IPO I'll be happy.

If you don't enjoy the process of starting a business then you will probably not succeed. It's just too much work, and it will suck you dry if you're not having fun doing it. Even if you get filthy stinking rich you will just have more time to look back across the years you wasted being miserable and nursing your acid reflux. The charm of expensive cars and whatnot wears off quickly. There's only one kind of happiness that money can buy, and that is the opportunity to be on the other side of the table when some bright kid comes along with a brilliant idea for a business.

All these myths can be neatly summarized in a pithy slogan: it's the customer, stupid. Success in business is not about having a brilliant idea. Bright ideas are a dime a dozen. Business is about taking a bright idea and assembling a team that can turn that idea into a product and bring that product to customers who want to buy it. It's that simple. And that complicated.

Good luck.

Indeed.com: Salary Comparison Search engine

2006-09-29T20:06:00.000+03:00

Just stumbled upon Indeed.com. It does a salary search that gives you an estimate (key word) of what a salary might be for a particular job in a specific state or city.

So I tried a search for Web Developer, Nairobi and it told me Sorry no web developers work in Nairobi!!...hahahahaha!! ...:-) u try

Blue stuff,mobile companies,Vigilantes and my week

2006-09-29T12:53:00.000+03:00

My week can only be summarised as crazy and exciting at the same time.

On the mobile front, Celtel, the 2nd mobile service provider has introduced something that is bound to put MJ (Michael Joseph) on the run, one tariff for the 3 east african countries with no roaming charges, I don't know about you but that kicks arse whichever you look at it. In a nutshell everytime I go to Dar es Salaam,Tanzania to visit my dear brother I don't have to remove my SIM card and put one for one a TZ mobile provider, I'll just use my my Celtel Kenya SIM card and pay the same rate.

Word on the ground is that Celtel is drowning in debt. The numbers do give you a clearer picture, there are 6.5 million mobile subscribers in Kenya, Safaricom has 4.6 million of them leaving Celtel with a paltry 1.9 million. I'm a safaricom subscriber but I have to admit Celtel has better network coverage and a wider range of services. I'm in the process of acquiring my 2nd phone just for Celtel usage.

It seems Blue isn't the color to be this week. Bluefi5h seems to have run out of RAM resulting in a major boot sector error which culminated in a hard disk crash, in laymans terms the dude is burned out. I just hope he recovers and gets back to his normal self.

It seems that mobile phones are really penetrating in Africa, at least according to a report on ZDNET here. We now have HSDPA (high-speed downlink packet access) with our South African brothers. Looks like things will get better overtime, Celtel also launched their mobile internet access at Ksh20 (0.26$ cents) per mb (megabit) of data sent and received.

I had a talk with "Duke" of stockskenya.com and he tells me based on this article he'll launch a proactive group to agitate for the rights of the investor. You really need to read this article and see the underhanded approach adopted by stock brokers in a very bullish market. Looks like the birth of a vigilante group hmmmm...:-)

It seems the call center business isn't as rosey as I thought, if the action the company is taking an indication then things don't look very sunny. After a recruitment drive that so our company hire more then 100 people for one of our major clients, I was shocked to find out that the client cancelled the accounts and now we stuck with empty computers and the company has to retrench the guys they'd hired. Most had only worked for about 3 weeks so the disappointment and anger is at some crazy levels. Let's see how that goes...watch this space I might be out of a full time job sooner then I think....

It's amazing how web companies are valued look at the numbers:
Facebook-1.5$ billion
MySpace-Currently 580$ million but estimated to have a value of 15$ billion in the next 10 years or so..purchased by News Corp
Youtube-1$ billion.. but Mark Cuban doesn't think so article here

And that was my week...

The Top Ten or Eleven Lies of Entrepreneurs

2006-09-23T12:57:00.000+03:00

It seems Guy Kawasaki also wanted to expose the entrepreneurs lies here they are:

“Our projections are conservative.” An entrepreneur's projections are never conservative. If they were, they would be $0. I have never seen an entrepreneur achieve even her most conservative projections. Generally, an entrepreneur has no idea what sales will be, so she guesses: “Too little will make my deal uninteresting; too big, and I'll look hallucinogenic.” The result is that everyone's projections are $50 million in year four. As a rule of thumb, when I see a projection, I add one year to delivery time and multiply by .1.
“(Big name research firm) says our market will be $50 billion in 2010.” Every entrepreneur has a few slides about how the market potential for his segment is tens of billions. It doesn't matter if the product is bar mitzah planning software or 802.11 chip sets. Venture capitalists don't believe this type of forecast because it's the fifth one of this magnitude that they've heard that day. Entrepreneurs would do themselves a favor by simply removing any reference to market size estimates from consulting firms.
“(Big name company) is going to sign our purchase order next week.” This is the “I heard I have to show traction at a conference” lie of entrepreneurs. The funny thing is that next week, the purchase order still isn't signed. Nor the week after. The decision maker gets laid off, the CEO gets fired, there's a natural disaster, whatever. The only way to play this card if AFTER the purchase order is signed because no investor whose money you'd want will fall for this one.
“Key employees are set to join us as soon as we get funded.” More often than not when a venture capitalist calls these key employees who are VPs are Microsoft, Oracle, and Sun, he gets the following response, “Who said that? I recall meeting him at a Churchill Club meeting, but I certainly didn't say I would leave my cush $250,000/year job at Adobe to join his startup.” If it's true that key employees are ready to rock and roll, have them call the venture capitalist after the meeting and testify to this effect.
“No one is doing what we're doing.” This is a bummer of a lie because there are only two logical conclusions. First, no one else is doing this because there is no market for it. Second, the entrepreneur is so clueless that he can't even use Google to figure out he has competition. Suffice it to say that the lack of a market and cluelessness is not conducive to securing an investment. As a rule of thumb, if you have a good idea, five companies are going the same thing. If you have a great idea, fifteen companies are doing the same thing.
“No one can do what we're doing.” If there's anything worse than the lack of a market and cluelessness, it's arrogance. No one else can do this until the first company does it, and ten others spring up in the next ninety days. Let's see, no one else ran a sub four-minute mile after Roger Bannister. (It took only a month before John Landy did). The world is a big place. There are lots of smart people in it. Entrepreneurs are kidding themselves if they think they have any kind of monopoly on knowledge. And, sure as I'm a Macintosh user, on the same day that an entrepreneur tells this lie, the venture capitalist will have met with another company that's doing the same thing.
“Hurry because several other venture capital firms are interested.” The good news: There are maybe one hundred entrepreneurs in the world who can make this claim. The bad news: The fact that you are reading a blog about venture capital means you're not one of them. As my mother used to say, “Never play Russian roulette with an Uzi.” For the absolute cream of the crop, there is competition for a deal, and an entrepreneur can scare other investors to make a decision. For the rest of us, don't think one can create a sense of scarcity when it's not true. Re-read the previous blog about the lies of venture capitalists, to learn how entrepreneurs are hearing “maybe” when venture capitalists are saying “no.”
“Oracle is too big/dumb/slow to be a threat.” Larry Ellison has his own jet. He can keep the San Jose Airport open for his late night landings. His boat is so big that it can barely get under the Golden Gate Bridge. Meanwhile, entrepreneurs are flying on Southwest out of Oakland and stealing the free peanuts. There's a reason why Larry is where he is, and entrepreneurs are where they are, and it's not that he's big, dumb, and slow. Competing with Oracle, Microsoft, and other large companies is a very difficult task. Entrepreneurs who utter this lie look at best naive. You think it's bravado, but venture capitalists think it's stupidity.
“We have a proven management team.” Says who? Because the founder worked at Morgan Stanley for a summer? Or McKinsey for two years? Or he made sure that John Sculley's Macintosh could power on? Truly “proven” in a venture capitalist's eyes is founder of a company that returned billions to its investors. But if the entrepreneur were that proven, that he (a) probably wouldn't have to ask for money; (b) wouldn't be claiming that he's proven. (Do you think Wayne Gretzky went around saying, “I am a good hockey player”?) A better strategy is for the entrepreneur to state that (a) she has relevant industry experience; (b) she is going to do whatever it takes to succeed; (c) she is going to surround herself with directors and advisors who are proven; and (d) she'll step aside whenever it becomes necessary. This is good enough for a venture capitalist that believes in what the entrepreneur is doing.
“Patents make our product defensible.” The optimal number of times to use the P word in a presentation is one. Just once, say, “We have filed patents for what we are doing.” Done. The second time you say it, venture capitalists begin to suspect that you are depending too much on patents for defensibility. The third time you say it, you are holding a sign above your head that says, “I am clueless.” Sure, you should patent what you're doing--if for no other reason than to say it once in your presentation. But at the end of the patents are mostly good for impressing your parents. You won't have the time or money to sue anyone with a pocket deep enough to be worth suing.
“All we have to do is get 1% of the market.” (Here's a bonus since I still have battery power.) This lie is the flip side of “the market will be $50 billion.” There are two problems with this lie. First, no venture capitalist is interested in a company that is looking to get 1% or so of a market. Frankly, we want our companies to face the wrath of the anti-trust division of the Department of Justice. Second, it's also not that easy to get 1% of any market, so you look silly pretending that it is. Generally, it's much better for entrepreneurs to show a realistic appreciation of the difficulty of building a successful company.

Talk about insight...

Of Angel Investors,and Venture Capitalists..

2006-09-22T16:10:00.000+03:00

Angel Investors (Private Investors),Venture Capitalists, Investors..call them whatever you want at the end of the day they bring in the much needed money to take that dream of yours and turn it into a reality, the question is at what cost?..A large percentage of startup companies In Silicon Valley have leveraged large amounts of "seed" money in order to achieve their main objectives, is this truly the way to go?..

I haven't had the opportunity to meet on a business level any potential venture capitalists in this region, but lately its been the buzz word on everybody's lips. I know of two people who made their money developing an application that in a nutshell gave you access to the laws of the land with a single click, needless to say it proved to be a hit with several big companies,right now they've decided to take on the "venture capitalist" tag, I think I need to have a serious talk with them and ask them how that's going.

Just this week the Villager informed me that he was in the process of acquiring funding from an investor over an idea him and I had, you have to give the guy marks for going out of his way to get things moving. My skepticism went into full throttle when he told me that this money would be a loan at a certain amount of interest yet to be decided, I kept getting visions of an overseer standing over my shoulder witha whip screamin and shouting Profits!!Profits!! makes me think of Amistad (excellent movie starring Djimon Honsou)..I doubt if that's dramatic but when it comes tomoney you can't really be sure the extremes people will go to ensure that they get back their investment and a profit on top of it.

I'm meeting the Villager this weekend on "Kahawa (coffee) Sunday" :-) seems we've coined a name for those brainstorming sessions we have on sunday's..let me see what he'll tell me about our venture capitalist and whether wil have to sign away our souls.

Let me close this post with the top 9 lies of venture capitalists :-) as told by Guy Kawasaki, am sure there is number ten out there, be good and post it as a comment :-)..

“I liked your company, but my partners didn't.” In other words, “no.” What the sponsor is trying to get the entrepreneur to believe is that he's the good guy, the smart guy, the guy who gets it; the “others” didn't, so don't blame him. This is a cop out; it's not the other partners didn't like the deal as much as the sponsor wasn't a true believer. A true believer would get it done.
“If you get a lead, we will follow.” In other words, “no.” As the old Japanese say, “If your aunt had balls, she'd be your uncle.” Well, she doesn't have balls, so it doesn't matter. The venture capitalist is saying, “ We don't really believe, but if you can get Sequoia to lead, we'll jump on the pile.” In other words, once the entrepreneur doesn't need the money, the venture capitalist would be happy to give him some more--this is like saying, “Once you've stopped Larry Csonka cold, we'll help you tackle him.” What entrepreneurs want to hear is, “If you can't get a lead, we will.” That's a believer.
“Show us some traction, and we'll invest.” In other words, “no.” This lie translates to “I don't believe your story, but if you can prove it by achieving significant revenue, then you might convince me. However, I don't want to tell you 'no' because I might be wrong and by golly you may sign up a Fortune 500 customer and then I'd look like a total orifice.”
“We love to co-invest with other venture capitalists.” Like the sun rising and Canadians playing hockey, you can depend on the greed of venture capitalists. Greed in this business translates to “If this is a good deal, I want it all.” What entrepreneurs want to hear is, “We want the whole round. We don't want any other investors.” Then it's the entrepreneur's job to convince them why other investors can make the pie bigger as opposed to re-configuring the slices.
“We're investing in your team.” This is an incomplete statement. While it's true that they are investing in the team, entrepreneurs are hearing, “We won't fire you--why would we fire you if we invested because of you?” That's not what the venture capitalist is saying at all. What she is saying is, “We're investing in your team as long as things are going well, but if they go bad we will fire your ass because no one is indispensable.”
“I have lots of bandwidth to dedicate to your company.” Maybe the venture capitalist is talking about the T3 line into his office, but he's not talking about his personal calendar because he's already on ten boards. Counting board meetings, an entrepreneur should assume that a venture capitalist will spend between five to ten hours a month on a company. That's it. Deal with it. And make board meetings short!
“This is a vanilla term sheet.” There is no such thing as a vanilla term sheet. Do you think corporate finance attorneys are paid $400/hour to push out vanilla term sheets? If entrepreneurs insist on using a flavor of ice cream to describe term sheets, the only flavor that works is Rocky Road. This is why they need their own $400/hour attorney too--as opposed to Uncle Joe the divorce lawyer.
“We can open up doors for you at our client companies.” This is a double whammy of lie. First, a venture capitalist can't always open up doors at client companies. Frankly, he might be hated by the client company. The worst thing in the world may be a referral from him. Second, even if the venture capitalist can open the door, entrepreneurs can't seriously expect the company to commit to your product--that is, something that isn't much more than a slick (10/20/30) PowerPoint presentation.
“We like early-stage investing.” Venture capitalists fantasize about putting $1 million into a $2 million pre-money company and end up owning 33% of the next Google. That's early stage investing. Do you know why we all know about Google's amazing return on investment? The same reason we all know about Michael Jordan: Googles and Michael Jordans hardly ever happen. If they were common, no one would write about them. If you scratch beneath the surface, venture capitalists want to invest in proven teams (eg., the founders of Cisco) with proven technology (eg., the basis of a Nobel Prize) in a proven market (eg., ecommerce). We are remarkably risk averse considering it's not even our money.

Peculiar behaviour and just about everything...

2006-09-21T10:50:00.000+03:00

I haven't posted in a couple of days mainly because I've been working like a dawg at the "Sweatshop" having changed my work hours from 9am-6pm (usually leave the office at around 9pm) to 7.30am-4.30pm (have university classes at around 5.30pm so I have to leave early to beat the jam that is part and parcel of our lovely city). So I'll just recap on the various events..

So I was thinking back to a few years ago when the leading mobile service provider, Safaricom, had network congestion issues especially on Friday's when it seems everybody was calling somebody to organise a hookup somewhere. The CEO, Michael Joseph, when contacted for an explanation as to why the network had problems had the gall to say that "...Kenyans have peculiar calling habits..." :-) a comment that did not go down well with his customers as well as the general public, so he quickly apologised for that comment and explained it off with some english wizardry that I have no desire to pursue, by the way Sir Michael as I've aptly named him is white so people didn't take it lightly that an expatriate had the nerve to describe the people who gave him his job as "Peculiar". So I decided to look up the meaning of the word Peculiar and I had a grin all over my face when I saw the meaning:

Unusual or eccentric; odd.
Distinct from all others;strange

Guess which meaning my fellow Kenyans had chosen to take up? :-)

Anyway, yesterday was chaotic for me but it was also a good day since I was gifted with a laptop,Inspiron E1505 Series, which is making its way to Nairobi by November 4th (No i haven't put it on a ship..). Despite the exploding battery saga with the Dell Laptops I decided to go ahead and trust that they have fixed the problem, may be my faith in human beings needs to be questioned!! a laptop exploded yesterday at the Yahoo HQ and hundreds had to be evacuated according to engadget, the story goes on to say that this was a personal laptop :-). I come from the land where product recalls are just impossible so am thinking if mine does explode who do I run to?? Dell please open a country/region office here in Nairobi.

Last thursday we had the pleasure of hosting two google directors at our office, apparently our "Sweatshop" is getting more coverage then a political event, and if you know Kenya you know politics takes center stage. So that was exciting, the trip was pretty low key and no local daily mentioned that they were in the country, as always we "kissed arse" when we saw them :-) who wouldn't?? Google is to the internet what the Nile is to Egyptians, the source of life :-) By the way we went to the google directors page and we couldn't figure out the ones who were in our office (Yes the CEO didn't tell us their names!! how could he)..go figure!!..seems they also passed by a "common friend" whom I criticised..hmm..fill that in for yourself..

Seems Firefox 2.0 RC1 is available for download yippee!! here is the download link..

On tuesday I was chatting to Al Kags about the IFC Business Incubator and he was very skeptical about it. I figure he has more experience in the matter since he is a convenor at the ictvillage, to quote him this is what he had to say"its not for start ups, its unrealistically stringent and they get to own 75% of the biz" food for thought..hmmm...on the other hand he also pointed out that if the business plan is solid it will stand on its own..time will tell..

Gisty Jeng was in town on sunday and we had a chance to sit down and chat about everything, he was particularly interested in Online Payment dilemma and he was of the view that it was worth looking at. It seems he'll be leaving his Kampala haven, having been disillusioned by the organisation's direction as well as its vision, seems the grass isn't truly greener on the other side...

That's a wrap..my week in summary...

Minimsft: Anonymous Microsoft Whistle Blower

2006-09-14T12:43:00.000+03:00

The Insider is the true story of a tobacco executive,Jeffrey Wigand (played by Russell Crowe), who blows the whistle on the tobacco industry, the movie is deep and is amust watch for any serious person. In the real world, we have a whistle blower right in the middle of the Microsoft Campus, an employee, no one knows who he is (isn't that so cool) but hundreds of people comment on his blog, personally am fan of his criticism of Microsoft's management practises as well as its monolithic structure. In fact the statement his used in the About section of his blog is:

Let's slim down Microsoft into a lean, mean, efficient customer pleasing profit making machine! Mini-Microsoft, Mini-Microsoft, lean-and-mean!

The underlying message in his blog is MSFT (The Nasdaq name for Microsoft) is that it should be broken down into smaller but more efficient units. He knows not afraid to point out the inadequacies of Steve Ballmer and even goes ahead to criticise the products MSFT releases to the public.

You seriously need to read his blog, and so it is with much pleasure that I give you.....drum roll..moment of silence.......

MINIMSFT- http://minimsft.blogspot.com

:-)

Enjoy..read on..

2,000$ budget,LAMP and 10 million page views

2006-09-14T09:08:00.000+03:00

2,000$ budget,LAMP(Linux,Apache,MySQL and PHP/Perl/Python) and 10 million page views.. according to Kevin Rose the founder of Digg.com (Digg is a news website with an emphasis on technology and science articles) is what Digg.com is about. Digg.com only has 15 employees and no advertising budget, in fact it rose to fame through a lot of blogging which seems to be the way to go.I'm always amazed by the way the people with the smallest budgets and biggest visions always achieve the impossible, and it gives me hope that Kenya's own Silicon Valley isn't so far off.

A couple of months back a friend of mine, I call him "Duke" partnered up with a few like minded fellows and developed a Stocks website (www.stockskenya.com), the bullish market being experienced by our stock exchange is the hottest thing after sliced bread and young people are investing their money in equities in order to cash in on this market. I'm not sure what their budget was but I bet it was less then the $2000 dollars that Digg.com was developed with.

StocksKenya.com was developed using Microsoft's ASP.NET with a slight influence of AJAX, the site isn't the most eye catching and this is understandable bearing in mind that Duke isn't the most creative person this side of the Sahara :-) it could do with a lot of work in terms of the creative aspects and Duke assures me that this is in the pipeline but in terms of a source of current information it fits the bill. I had a chat with a fellow Afropreneur studying at the University of Texas-Austin and he was really impressed by the website, one of the features he pointed out was the stock tracker which allows you to track the prices of the companies you are interested in. Quick access to information seems to be a key objective of the website hence the tabular format (the influence of a pure coder can be seen here) of all the information as well as upfront display of the most relevant pricing information, to access the full features of the site a user needs to be

Only yesterday the site was featured in one of local dailies, The Standard, I didn't get a chance to read up on what they had to say about it about it but it resulted in an increased number of signups, a source informed me that it was more then 500 people no small feat especially in a country where the number of internet users is primarily limited to office users. I guess the publicity went along way. Duke informs me that they have plans to put up Advertising banners and other features which he didn't feel he could share with me :-)

There are other websites that aim to achieve the objectives that stockskenya.com is aiming for which should provide for healthy competition they include Stock-detective.co.ke (available in both english and Swahili) as well as the websites run by the various brokerage firms.

I promised Duke that I wouldn't bash the site but I'd offer constructive criticism which I have channeled directlt to him, but some of the features I'd like would be:

A more graphical analysis of the pattern of a particular stock with dynamic graphs. Currently the graphs are images which honestly doesn't do much for me in terms of tracking.
Integration with mobile alerts. I'd like to be informed of the clsoing price of the stocks I have interest in once trading closes, this would really be useful to those guys who don't have access to a computer through out the day.
Comparisons of several companies dealing in the same industry so that I can be able to make an informed decision based upon histories.

The list could go on and on, I believe these Afro-preneurs are on the right track they just need to realise that it's not a one horse race.

OpenOffice Just As Good As Ms-Office

2006-09-14T08:39:00.000+03:00

Having taken a break from writing the business plan for almost 4 weeks I finally managed to get a decent Word editor onto my aging laptop, most of you are thinking Ms-Word..well that would be the logical software to put in but after having lost One-eyed-bandit's "copy" of Office XP I decided to go the Open direction :-) and so I installed OpenOffice. I would have to say that it has one of the smallest installation files (70MB to be precise, Office XP comes in at a whopping 350+MB install file) considering the amount of software it comes bundled with. A couple of months back I'd read that OpenOffice was the memory hog and as such its adoption was proving to be a problem, I don't have any performance metrics to compare it with but I would have to say that in terms of memory consumption it proved to be much better then Ms-Office (You need to see the ageing laptop I'm using to understand where I'm coming from).

I'm not an Anti-Microsoft Crusader but I figure that if you can't afford to buy their products and piracy isn't you cup of cake why not take what's being offered out there as an alternative, I'm sure Bill (Gates and I are on a first name basis :-) ...hahahaha!!...) would agree. There are obviously some things that Ms-Office has that could probably put OpenOffice to shame but I figure that they are all cosmetic and in time Sun Microsystems will include them in the next release (currently we are on version 2.0.3).

Try it out, believe me you it worth the second look at..

Myspace.com- the truth behind the 27.4 billion gorilla

2006-09-12T08:56:00.000+03:00

Myspace.com has become synonymous with the success of Web 2.0 and Social Networking websites. Just check up on the stats and you'll see what I mean, surpassing MSN in terms of retail traffic and almost rivalling google in terms of traffic. An interesting article I got from techmeme.com just proves to you that there is always more then meets the eye, it seems Newscorp the current owners of Myspace.com really didn't want this info getting out, reminds me of a similar post I did :-) albeit with less legal drama and the fact that my opponent wasn't Rupert Murdoch:

what-news-corp-doesnt-want-you-to-know-about-myspace-condensed-edition

Read on..read on..

Amidst the sounds..

2006-09-11T08:44:00.000+03:00

Amidst the sounds and noise we all search for silence..

I was in church yesterday making peace with my creator, doing my best to confess my iniquities and renegotiate my contract which should see me beyond the pearly gates rather then in fiery walls of hades while all this was happening when I realised that I shared a common interest with every other person, we were all searching for silence, a place where we could shut down the noise of the world and just focus on ourselves. Whichever way you look at it, we are all running away from the noise.

The workaholic is running away from the home where he finds no peace. I've met people who say that they are more relaxed in the office then they are at home, I think they are commonly referred to as Married Men :-). The office provides an "island of exclusivity" where every other thing does not matter, the crying baby, the nagging wife, all that comes to an end in the office.

The faithful believer (no bias against any religion) is running from the problems of the world and a relationship with a heavenly being provides that, the church,mosque, synagogue you name it all provide a sense of seclusion that comforts the soul.

The drug addict uses the drugs to silence the noises of the world, and for those few minutes or hours they are intoxicated the world is the most silent place for them.

So what do you do to get to the silence?

Action and Reaction

2006-09-08T13:37:00.000+03:00

I was never good in physics in Secondary school, I cruised on grade D for so long that in my mind it almost sounded like a B but I did manage to pick one or two concepts or theories that I've clung on to like my life depended on it. The Action and Reaction Law always impressed me, mainly because it could be applied to almost anything from the most serious of things (a steamy affair) to the most trivial (think of a one night stand), where and how you chose to apply it is at your discretion :-). For those of you who didn't get a chance to study Physics, the law (Isaac Newton's Third Law) states that "For every action there is an equal opposite reaction" your probably wondering where am heading with all this well my previous post "Crisis of Poor Management In Local Tech Companies"=Action resulted in my former boss reacting in=Reaction. The reaction came in the form of an email which he copied to all employees of his company, I won't post that email unless you specifically send me a request by posting a comment,but I will say that it was short and straight to the point. This has prompted me to act or should I say react and re-examine the whole post from a different perspective. I'm no Ivy League graduate so you'll excuse me if my views don't sound very educated, but who says only the Ivy Leaguers can criticise existing businesses?

I wanted to do a complete critic of the said company but I've realised that events are overtaking me, I've decided that this post will be specifically dedicated to chronicling the events that have occured since my post went live, I'll only mention the key ones. I don't inspire to be great in what I write just to tell it like it is, if I didn't do that I'd be denying who I am.

September 6th 06:

The Villager puts his two cents on the matter. Short but straight to the point.

September 8th 06:

Digital evengelist posted a rather detailed comment on the matter which in all honesty gave me the desire to continue doing what am doing.

September 8th 06:

One eyed bandit commented..big ups for his words..

September 9th 06:

Pilgrim..oh lovely pilgrim..straight talker..I feel you on that post...

This represents the written comments I got from people out there. I must say I was surprised by the response, negative as well as positive, this blog was never meant elicit reaction or be the "voice of insanity" :-) believe me I've been branded many things during this past weekend from "An ungrateful fool" to a "Neo-crusader" and some others I can't mention, at the end of the day we do what we must do..

Sleep is the cousin to death

2006-09-07T19:11:00.000+03:00

Three weeks later and the insomnia persists, but now my attitude towards it has changed significantly. I have learnt how to embrace the lack of sleep as a gift rather then as a curse and harness its power and the opportunities it brings me. Last year when my eldest brother known as Makos came back home from USA after 13 years away he told me something that seems to have stuck, very few things he says actually stick in my mind :-), but this one did.."Sleep is the cousin to death..you'll get all the sleep you need when you dead".. he told me when I mentioned to him that during his whole stay at home he'd barely gotten enough sleep but was instead partying his behind off, I suppose the excitement of coming home after such a long time had gotten to him..

I don't have the luxury of explaining of my lack of sleep as excitement due to one or two things, somebody even suggested that I change diets which currently consists of:

No Breakfast
Lunch-Usually white rice and some animal or vegetable protein and a glass of fresh fruit juice
Supper-Rice/maize meal and some veggies or meat

Now you tell me what can I change form the meal plan above that could result in more sleep? rather then focus on what I could change I decided to focus on what I could accomplish now that I have officially become a nocturnal person. Many ideas have come into mind. all of them noble :-) incase your mind had wandered into the gutter, but the obvious one had always been to source for projects during the day and work on them at night, it made financial sense and judging by the noise my 1989 Nissan B12 makes I need the money like a junkie needs the fix.

So for the last couple of weeks I have been leaving the office at about 9pm, heading home, having dinner and sitting behind laptop trying to finish a project THE VILLAGER contracted me to do. I would be lying if I said that by the time I get home I'm not tired, am drained but it never translates into sleep. I get a lot done by 2.30am and plus I get paid :-)...

Some people have expressed concern that I'll burn out in pursuit of the almight dollar, the wrong assumption is that I never get any sleep, I do, just not at the common time that regular folks do and that I believe silences the critics :-)

Do I ever wish I could fall asleep immediately my head hits the pillow?Offcourse, but since that isn't happening why not harness its power :-) I see myself like one of the Marvel comic characters from The X-MEN :-) just without the tights and the weird costumes. In the X-MEN Professor Xavier teaches the mutants to accept their mutation and not see it as a flaw, so here I am...

Grey Spots: Blogger Poetry

2006-09-06T12:55:00.000+03:00

A fellow blogger Al Kags, just sent me a free (don't you just love that word!! :-) ) poetry ebook titled Grey Spots which his taken the time to write. I've always appreciated people who are able to express themselves by putting their thoughts and emotions on paper (kudos to all visual artists also) and so I took the time to read through some of Al Kags words, if I comment I just might spoil it for you :-) so I won't I'll let you read it and see which one speaks to you (personally like Senses of Me :-) oops !! did I just make a comment??? hahahaha!!)..

Head over to his blog Kenyan Tenses and post a comment..If you want me to send you the poetry ebook just post a comment/request with your email address and I'll be sure to send it you..

Measure of Success In Life

2006-09-01T19:11:00.000+03:00

You may have succeeded at life if...

If you do something no one ever accomplished before.

If you give more to the human race than you take away.

If you are ever a world champion.

If you spend more time happy than sad.

If you practice refined taste.

If you spend less time thinking about other people than they spend thinking about you.

If you have two or more surviving children.

If you have sex with more people than your partners.

If you die with more money than your parents.

If when the time comes you don't fear death.

If someone remembers you 100 years after you're gone.

If you make a difference in just one person's life.

If you ever get someone to truly love you.

If you accomplish everything which was expected of you and more.

If you never purposefully harm anyone.

...But the truth is, there is no official score.

by Bram Cohen September, 2000

Bram Cohen is the author of the peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing program and protocol BitTorrent.

Journey of an Afro-preneur: Godaddy.com Sucks....

2006-08-31T10:37:00.000+03:00

Update: 5th Sep 06
Due to hue and cry from blog commenters I've decided to change the title of the post to Godaddy.com Sucks from F**k Godaddy :-)

Finally the famous godaddy.com responds to my requests for the activation of my account, this is what I got from them:

This account has been locked due to suspected fraudulent activity. The payment method used was suspended from use in our system. All charges made to this payment method were refunded and all products were canceled.

This action was taken because the billing information provided did not match the origin of the order. That is, the purchase seemingly originated from a computer from outside of Kenya.

Please have the credit card account holder provide a viewable copy of his/her government issued photo identification -- like a driver's license or passport. A scanned image (under 100,000 Bytes in size) can be attached as a response to this message, or faxed to:

480-287-8003
Attention: Fraud Department, Laura

We will then be able re-open the account.

There you have it, am at a loss for words and for those who know me you'd know that's not easy. I have a few questions concerning this action:

If my account was suspected of fraud why did they let me purchase the first domain?
The billing information as well as the order origin I provided was Kenya and continues to be Kenya, for petes sake am in Nairobi right now, how did they ascertain that I am not in Kenya?
Why have they locked the two domains I wanted to purchase thus preventing me from purchasing them from other registrars?

Obviously none of this questions will be answered by the "almighty" godaddy.com....

Journey of an Afro-preneur: Insomnia

2006-08-25T15:27:00.000+03:00

True to my nature I have done a self-diagnosis and concluded that I now have Insomnia, why do I say this? well for the following reasons:

I don't get to sleep until aabout 3am despite my eagerness to embrace the bed and all its warmth and sweetness.
I associate the bed with lack of sleep and as such I avoid it ude to the fact that I know each time it will disappoint me.

As a web developer/coder I've always welcomed the lack of sleep especially during those times when a problem needs a solution or when you have a project that needs to be completed but what am experiencing lately borders on weird. I think "the bug" really has me this time :-)

My evening usually starts with me having my supper at around 9pm, I then head to my room at about 10pm switch on the laptop (which by the way needs a major upgrade), put on my headphones and begin assaulting the keyboard with every imaginable lines of code (PHP being my favorite then Java followed by a little Python hahahaha!! I wish!!) at some point I realise that several hours have passed and its now 1am, everybody is asleep in the house even our pet cat aptly named Peeps :-) is asleep. At about 1.45am I stand up just to get some blood moving to the legs, I glance at the bed and no desire to go in exists, by this time I have already scrolled through every number in my cellphone to see who I can call or text but I know most people are asleep with the exception of one person :-) she's always there for me and she knows herself :-)

At about 2.30am I decide to give the bed a chance, I keep telling myself this nite will be different from every other but I know better. At about 4am i begin to doze off which is really bad koz I should be awake in the next 3-4 hours to head to work, anyway I wake up at about 8.30am tired and worn out like I've been running during the night. Head to work, come back home and the cycle begins again.

I'd like to think that my renewed energy and desire to pursue some business ventures could be the key factor in my lack of sleep but I'd be wrong. I don't lie awake thinking of new ideas quite the contrary I lie in bed thinking of how I'll get more sleep :-) I'm a few days short of taking sedatives but am just afraid they'll mess up with my wonderful brain :-) and stunt my entrepreneurial spirit...that's me being a medical quack..I think I should stick to the web development side :-)

Journey of an Afro-preneur: Online Payment

2006-08-24T19:17:00.000+03:00

One of the biggest challenges my current idea is facing is the issue of enabling users to pay for the service/product online. I mentioned earlier on that credit cards still aren't the norm in Kenya and to date they are seen as a service only for the rich, even though this might not be completely true part of it is, since your income needs to be a minimum of Ksh30,000 per month equivalent to USD400 at the current exchange rate in order for you to qualify for a basic card which means its out of reach for a large percentage of the population. Fear of online fraud is also a challenge the credit card solution faces, due to lack of education or a well informed market, credit card holders in Kenya fear that all online transactions are open to fraud but so is every transaction even a barter trade (cowrie shells for a basket of fish) setup has its inherent fraud, this lack of knowledge needs to be addressed.

Integrating credit card payments onto the web app, albeit a tedious process would open the service to the percentage of the population who do have the cards and is definitely one way to go, but my biggest challenge is what about the remaining people who have no credit cards but have cash in the bank and would like access to the service/product?

The Debit Card hasn't missed my radar and I know that it can be used for transactions although most banks only support over the counter transactions thus rendering it almost useless for online transactions. The WebDOC suggested that we approach the banks with a strong proposal for the development of a local payment solution that would allow users to pay for services/products using their bank accounts, I've always confessed that am a true pessimist so I wasn't seeing this as an achievable option but am of the view that if the idea is strong enuff then it can be achieved especially with the smaller and more open banks.

One common method being used currently is the one where a user sends money from his phone to a specified number, this method works very well especially in cases where the amounts are small usually Ksh50-200 but would be difficult where the amounts are as high as Ksh1000 since one would need airtime/units on their phone that would me at least double the cost of the service, but I have considered the solution and it could be integrated at an earlier stage.

Africa as a continent must develop technologies that foster business and that make it easier to achieve ones objectives. The financial services are a key aspect of this. The current breed of banks in East Africa haven't been quick to embrace technologies that would make it easier for entrepreneurs to facilitate online payment, this must change sooner rather then later.

Comments are welcome

Virtual Call Centers

2006-08-22T18:41:00.000+03:00

I was just going through my favorite tech blog Tech Crunch, for those of you who wondering what techcrunch is about basically it's a tech blog written Michael Arrington it features all things web 2.0 so it's a major "have to visit" on my list of sites to look at, anyway I decided to look at an earlier entry just to see if I'd missed any major events in the Web 2.0 realm and boy was I surprised when I saw a post for a new company in the block called SKY-click which has been described as a "A 100% web based call center" and at the end of the post he describes it as a "Virtual Call Center", its developed by a company based in Switzerland. I won't go into describing/profiling this company instead I'l talk about how it can affect the call center business springing up in this region.

I think the question that comes to the mind of every Call Center enthusiast is "What does this mean for the upcoming offshore call center businesses in Africa and other regions?", I think it could present two outcomes, Potential Business or Potential Competition.
Potential Business

"When a customer surfs a company’s website he has the possibility to press a “Click to Call” button that initiates a call or video call with the company’s call centre or the relevant expert."

The keywords here are "company’s call centre", an external call center could handle the queries that come from the website without needing any special integration.More and more companies will be finding it easier to plugin the application onto their websites and all the call handling could be done by established companies such as my employer :-) Whichever way you look at it, the cost of paying people to sit down and wait for web inquiries is still cheaper in Africa then in most other continents so our call center services will still be required. I foresee a scenario where a company whose website has lots of traffic would like to have a call center application like SKY-click but doesn't want to invest in training and staffing a whole department to handle the requests, that's where we come in.

"SKY-click enables free PC to PC and cheap PC-to-Phone communication between a company and its customers."

The Skype integration (VOIP at work) means that the cost of the call is almost non-existent. Currently most call centers in Africa handle their calls through VOIP in order to minimise on the cost and because internet connection is slightly more reliable then the telephone infrastructure. Our company for example uses a VSAT link of about 3Mbps, the biggest drawback to this is the high cost of bandwidth (about USD20,000$ per month) and the latency associated with the VSAT setup, but with the advent of the underwater fiber optic cable which should be completed within the next 2 years these costs are bound to go down significantly, some say as much as 85%. This obviously presents numerous business opportunities for the existing companies as well as the upcoming ones who would obviously see the need for a "Virtual Call Center" as an integral part of their business.

Potential Competition

I think if its too easy then why would you pay an external company to handle your requests? Ignorance isalways been good for business :-) I've always said that if consumers knew the truth about the cost of the services/products they were purchasing they'd probably think twice.

SKY-Click pulls the curtain behind and reveals that it's not so hard to setup a small call center to handle the requests your customers have. If your in a continent such as Africa where the cost of labour is significantly low compared to Europe/America (a call center agent in Kenya gets paid roughly USD 200 per month exclusing commissions) a large multinational with a wide array of products wouldn't hesitate to setup one of this virtual call centers. Our company spent about USD100 million to setup the infrastructure for the call center, most of the money was spent in power backups and setup of the internet infrastructure.

At the end of the day businesses must re-engineer themselves to face off all forms of competition whether from local companies or foreign based. The internet is proving to be a major force to reckon with, so many companies leveraging the technology to achieve their objectives. Diversification into services/products that will give on a competitive advantage is key to survival.

Journey of an Afro-preneur: Job Dilemma Part 2

2006-08-21T12:28:00.000+03:00

In my last Job Dilemma post I mentioned that I was waiting for a response from my potential new employer on friday, and for sure the response came, although it wasn't what I was expecting. Let me paste the email (I've edited the parts that could incriminate me) I got from them, then you be the judge:

I will consider you when we make the next decision. I have mentioned you to our chief exec and we have a relationship with the top people in Your Current Employer that means we would have to mention your interest to them if we were going to make you an offer. We would not do this unless we were ready to employ you and I would warn you in advance. Again if this is likely to cause you any problems please let me know. Technical Director is back in the country now so we will probably review applications and try and make a decision early next week.

So there you have it, a response that just made my jaw drop!! I was left wondering why in God's name would you want to inform my current boss of my intention to leave?? While your at it why don't you just get me fired, that way I have no rom to negotiate since I'll practically be unemployed!!...I think all this company execs have some kind of buddy thingy I likened it to the days of slavery where if one slave showed interest in moving to another owner's plantation, the owners would then sit down and come to arrangement that would be mutually beneficial and that was what was happening here.

I figured let me get Pilgrim's take on the whole matter, and we discussed what kind off response I should send them. It had to be one that doesn't come out like am trying to hide something while still conveying an intention to be as open as possible, here it is:

My preference would be that the matter was handled in the most discreet manner possible. Recognising that we both have relationships to maintain with the Current Company Management, in our different capacities, I would request that, in the event that you select me to join your team, that you allow me to inform Current Company of my decision to leave prior to your organisation contacting them.

I think this response was quite fitting, and if it wasn't I don't quite give a damn!! :-) let's see how it goes...

Journey of an Afro-preneur: Writing the Business Plan

2006-08-19T13:49:00.000+03:00

I'd mentioned in an earlier post that I would start writing the business plan for the new idea I had, I figured this weekend would be a good time to start. I wanted to write the plan from home but since my Office 2007 Alpha version had come to an abrupt halt (I guess the demo period is over) my only alternative was to do it from the office until when I could get my hands on a earlier version of Ms-Office (may be I should move to Open Office and dent the sales of Microsoft hahaha!! ) .

Since I was already scheduled to be in the office for an 8am-1pm shift I figured this would be a good opportunity to get things moving. As I said earlier I was meant to be in the office by 8am but lately I've been suffering from some major sleep deprivation, I really don't know why but I figure it's nothing major, so I didn't quite get to sleep on Friday until when it was about 3am which means that when I was supposed to be waking up the sweet sleep was hitting me like a tonne of bricks and you can be sure I missed the wakeup call, but eventually I got to the office at about 10.30am two and a half hours late wuuuu!! :-) and looking like I was suffering a major hangover,luckily my boss doesn't work on weekends.

After chatting with Gisty Jeng from about anything and everything (stock market, retrenchment,paranoia), checking mail, handling an application downtime on the work floor I finally settled down to write the business plan at around 1.30pm and that is where things started going crazy, it's like I suffered a major attack of "writers block" hard to believe but the whole process of putting to words your vision and goals for a business is quite a demanding task. First of all you have this template you have to follow and there is so much to write about like Goals, Mission,Philosophy, Industry and that's just the tip of the iceberg koz there is the financial statements and projections you have to come up with but I figure you just have to do it one step at a time then you'll get it done. So I started on the Objectives of the company (by the way I haven't registered my company which is not a good thing but I'll get to it in due time) this was the easiest part, then I moved to the Mission then down to the Philosophy just at that point my Alias Season 5 torrent indicated that Episode 1 was fully downloaded and I decided to stop, all work and no play makes me a dull boy :-)

Silicon Valley Africans

2006-08-18T15:45:00.000+03:00

Any time I see my fellow Africans making waves in the IT sector I gotta standup and give them props, so when I stumbled across the blog, which by the way is a very interesting read, of one called Dare Obasanjo you can imagine my excitement.

According to the wikipedia:

Dare Obasanjo is a Program Manager at Microsoft where he works on the Windows Live Messenger instant messenger product and related services. Obasanjo is best known for RSS Bandit, a popular .NET-based RSS reader he wrote on a whim. Obasanjo is son of the current president of Nigeria, Olusegun Obasanjo.

[edit]

Work at Microsoft

Dare has spent much of his time at Microsoft defining the public-facing XML protocols for various MSN properties. Along with various members of the Microsoft Indigo team, Dare is coming to terms with the POX/SOAP tradeoffs. Prior to joining the MSN team, Dare owned the XML I/O and Schema APIs for the .NET Framework. He owned Microsoft's primary XSD implementation for a period of years in the past.

I have never used RSS Bandit and didn't know about until when I read up Dare, I'm downloading it but judging by the screenshots It looks quite powerful. Aside from the fact that the guy is the Son of the President of Nigeria, this guy seems pretty smart I guess you'd have to be to work in Microsoft Cheers!! to the guy.

Here is an outdated Resume which his posted on his site plus a link on the Microsoft Employees Page.

If you know of any other Africans making theirmark in Silicon Valley feel free to post the link.

Journey of an Afro-preneur: Job Dilemma

2006-08-17T19:00:00.000+03:00

Yesterday I went for a Job Interview at one of the local companies in Nairobi, a friend of mine had given me a heads-up on the Job opening so I sent my CV/Resume on a long shot attempt and I was surprised when they called me in.

I need to give you some history about this particular job, in 2005 around July the same guy had told me about the opening and I managed to get an interview. For those of you who've had the nerve wracking experience of going for interviews am sure you know the tension one feels during the interview process ("they" say you get better with time, am not sure if whether "they" meant you get better at being nervous or you get better at handling the nervousness). I was unlucky enough to be thrown in one room with the Technical Director a 110kg 6+ feet man and the Technical Manager who just looked malnutritioned, I think the director had been taking the manager's lunch, anyway the two guys proceeded to attack me from two angles. The tech manager asked me very specific questions relating to technology where general answers were not acceptable whereas the Director would just "scratch the surface" and focus on general aspects of the tasks I had undertaken, needless to say the "good cop/bad cop" routine worked like a nonsense and slowly but surely they broke me down. I remember that at one point I remarked that I felt that I had stayed too long in my current job and had been coding for a long time, the tech manager took the opportunity to point out to me that he had been programming since 1985 which would make my 3 years of development look like 3 days.

I left the interview room confident that I had missed the job, my hunch was correct and two days the manager called me to tell me that he felt that I wasn't quite ready for the job and that may be in a year or two he would consider me. Well a year has passed and there I was in the same building but different boardroom, I was surprised that he could barely remember me judging by the questions he asked me. At the end of the interview he basically offered me the job but was quick to point out that he felt that it was too soon for me to leave my current position, he explained that this was a personal opinion not likely to affect his decision whether or no to hire me, he told me to go and think about it and contact him within the next few days.

So here I am with a few things going through my mind, Should I leave my current position which I have only held since April 06 in order to move to a totally new setup? I have a policy against changing jobs before staying in an organisation for less then a year, I feel that a year is usually the minimum period one should work in an organisation for you to give an objective view of whether the organisation meets your needs or is inline with your goals for growth. On one hand is increased salary, new challenges on the other hand a need for stability and an opportunity to work for an organisation that is pioneering the call center business in this region and a chance to be part of it.

I talked to Pilgrim about the matter and she helped me clear the doubts I had over the decision then I decided to head to Monster and get some advice from one of the forums they have, I found a rather interesting post which seemed to address some of my concerns. So I saw the best way to proceed was to express my interest in the job and see how it goes. I'm expecting a response from them by this friday.

Journey of an Afro-preneur: Resolution in the horizon

2006-08-17T18:20:00.000+03:00

I've gotten one or two questions from blog fans :-) whether am going to allow Gisty Jeng to buy the domains, after much consideration I decided that this wouldn't be a wise move for the following reason:

Gisty Jeng seems overwhelmed with work at his current position. The workload seems to be drowning so the last thing I want to do is assign a task I feel he doesn't have the time to do. This decision isn't a reflection of my lack of confidence in him but as the leader of the team I need to make decisions that will be of overall benefit to the company. I have talked to Gisty Jeng and his accepted my decision on this.

So yesterday I sent godaddy my account details including the domains I wanted to purchase, am yet to receive a response from them but am confident the matter will be resolved before the end of the week which for me is tomorrow,Friday, commonly referred to as FurahiDay!! in Kenya.

Journey of an Afro-preneur: Obstacles Continued

2006-08-15T18:58:00.000+03:00

For the last couple of days I've been trying to purchase the two domains associated with the social app we want to launch, but every attempt seemd to be hitting a brick wall. Initially the domain had been purchased through a godaddy.com account but after Thursday's fiasco my account become inaccessible and the domains were in effect suspended. This hard never happened to me before so I wasn't sure how to proceed and I figured the best way to handle it was to give the registrar a few days to reactivate the account.

As of today, the domain and account were stil inaccesible so I decided to call godaddy.com support and find out what was going on. First call went something like this "Please wait for the support department to activate your account", I'd already sent an email to them in the morning to find out what was going on, so decided to follow up with a second call later on in the day which turned out to be a smart move I finally got a support rep who explained to me that my account had been suspended due to fraudulent activity and the domains in essence locked to prevent any activity on them.

I'd read Bob Parsons (Bob Parsons happens to be the founder of godaddy.com) post on his blog about "domain kiting" and I highly suspected that godaddy.com had flagged my account on suspicion of the activity. By the way you should read up on the whole domain kiting scheme, it's amazing the lengths people will go to make money. Anyway I can't be sure if that was the reason they suspended my account but it seemed to be the most logical explanation, to make a long story short godaddy.com has instructed me to provide them with some relevant information so us to unlock the account and unlock the domains we had attempted to purchase.

Gisty Jeng has again offered his services on the credit card front, I'm skeptical having already learnt a hard lesson but I just might entrust him with the task again, we'll see how it goes.

Journey of an Afro-preneur: Business Incubators

2006-08-15T11:43:00.000+03:00

Business Incubators seems to be the buzz word for every entrepreneur in Kenya right now mainly because the atmosphere is ripe with ideas but the pockets aren't filled with the money to bring those ideas into reality. Basically an incubator give you access to financing,markets, office resources which are really what you need when you starting out.

A fellow Afro-preneur who has an interesting blog here, mentioned one business incubator being run by the world bank. I've been toying with the idea of getting into one but I've never really felt that any of the ideas were financially viable in the short and long run until today when I stumbled upon a concept I had seen working very well in South Africa. I can't go into details right now except say that it could just catch on here. I decided to share the idea with Pilgrim whom I just love to death and she posed serious questions to me which I tried my best to answer and she was kinda satisfied with the direction I was going with this idea. Unlike most of my ideas that involved very little capital outlay, this one requires the resources of El Banco Mundial :-) Spanish for The World Bank.

I've been going through one of the Business plans submitted by a current Incubatee (Company or Individual being incubated) and they're pretty detailed, in fact the one am looking at is a total of 62 pages not to mention the Ms-Excel files they've done to show the financial stuff. No easy task but a dream is not usually an easy thing to pursue. So I've purposed to go through it comprehensively and pick out what I can from it before embarking on writing mine.

I love the energy you feel when you embark on a journey of this magnitude, the uncertainity that lies pales in comparison to the confidence you have in the business concept.

Journey of an Afro-preneur: Obstacles

2006-08-11T13:08:00.000+03:00

Pissed us hell but still living :-) Pilgrim told me to relax lest I pop a vessel, I told her that a vision/dream/idea is worth popping one or two vessels :-) not to worry Pilgrim I pretend to ignore but I listen. Pilgrim always manages to see past the problem am more of a "dwell on the problem" kindoff dude.

I mentioned yesterday's post that we had gone a step closer in realising the vision by purchasing the first domain name, well in a weird turn of events Gisty Jeng managed to cancel the domain purchase instead of purchasing the second one :-( . I managed to talk to Bluefi5h and he was more positive then me, he offered to purchase both domains which is a very good thing.

But today's twist of events has made me really think about teams and tasks. I delegate a lot especially if I feel that your more then competent, but I realised today that delegation can really mess you up and at the end of the day you'll have yourself to blame since as the leader the buck stops with you.

Meebome Widget

2006-08-10T20:09:00.000+03:00

For those you who visited the blog and noticed a rather interesting window on the right hand corner it's a meebome widget that allows me to chat with anybody who visits the blog :-)

Next time you around, just give me a buzz if am online you can be sure I'll respond as fast as I can

Big Thanks to meebo.com for providing this widget free of charge to everybody out there. I urge all of you out there to put it on your website or blog.

Journey of an Afro-preneur: One Step Closer

2006-08-10T19:54:00.000+03:00

I mentioned in an earlier post that I was considering taking a "Two Pronged" (two social webapps each with it's unque identity and targetting a different aspect) approach well yesterday that idea came closer to becoming a reality when I finally managed to register the first domain name (sorry I can't reveal it for now but be sure I will in time) big thanks to Bluefi5h for going the extra mile and getting this done.

All this happened after quite a lot of stumbling blocks which included a declined credit and debit card, and the pick of the day where I picked a hosting package which included free domain but racked up a bill of 168$ :-) don't ask me how this happened but it did and on my "fire budget" it wasn't something I was ready to accept so I rectified it. Not to worry people am getting a credit card (you really have to live in Kenya to understand why we don't apply for them but it has something to do with paranoia which could be traced back to the water hmmm :-) ) sooner rather then later.

Gisty Jeng eagerly volunteered to register the other domain, I have mucho confidence in him but he seems to be drowning in "co-operate garbage" I take it "the light he saw" was most likely an approaching bus and not the heavenly one he was expecting :-)

All in all a very positive week, looking forward to this weekend to see what Bluefi5h will come up with.

Journey of an Afro-preneur: Branding

2006-08-09T18:54:00.000+03:00

Today I've spent the better part of the evening trying to go through some of the logo concepts Bluefi5h came up with. It really is exciting stuff, the back-and-forth communciation we have via IM (Instant Messenger, thank you meebo.com :-) ) discussing colours,fonts, really makes you realise that the idea is really coming to life. IM really comes in handy during times like this koz it allows me to relay my ideas back to bluefi5h who just saves the chat logs and uses them as quick notes.

I have to admit I do have a bias towards blue as a logo colour and Imade this bias known :-). Ny the way I suck at design so my criticism is very constructive :-)

The logo is such an important part of a web app that I can't overstate it enough. Look at the most famous logos in the world such as ebay,yahoo,google and you'll get what am talking about. Currently there is a trend in current Web 2.0 companies with regards to their logos, check out this post, the most striking feature is the reflective images and the striking fonts.

On the web design front when you hear Web 2.0 the first thing that comes to your mind is AJAX,Rich User Interfaces,Tabs,Gradients,Large fonts :-) that seems to be the most common thing in all of them.I've taken the time to list a few of my most favorite Web 2.0 sites, the list ins't exhaustive:

i4giveu.com :-) powered by wordpress
meebo.com-best web based IM in the world.
Boompa.com-new kid on the block
Digg.com

Back to the drawing board on the logo concepts but based on the direction Bluefi5h was taking am sure he'll come up with something really awesome.<

Journey of an Afro-preneur: Dream Team

2006-08-08T17:42:00.000+03:00

Choosing your venture/idea partners:

Think of Lord of the Rings (fellowship of the ring)

We all want to have the best people on our team, just check out the way soccer clubs keep buying new players even when they have more then enough (Stupid Real Madrid), so a couple of weeks back when I was picking who I'd want in my development team one of the first people who came to my mind was Pilgrim :-) (I use aliases a lot just koz it sounds so cool)

I think I'd need a whole blog just to describe Haj :-) but in a nutshell I'd summarise her in an equation:

Adrenaline+Estrogen+Bill Cosby+Animaniacs+Afro-New Jack Swing loving+dynamite=Haj

But even this equation doesn't do justice to her character.

Humour and brains a lethal combination when you coming up with an idea that needs nurturing and she fits the bill down to a tee let's not forget the humour factor which we all need occasionally :-). I think every business idea needs that one person who'll see it from the consumers view and approach also from the business side (coders suck at this, look at the Google UI and you'll see what am talking about)..

Duncan aka Dunwan also joins the team, I've mentioned him before on a previous post so I won't go into so much details. Lets's just say he complements the technical aspect of the whole venture.

I also picked Ken aka Gisty Jeng :-) to partner up with Haj on the Business aspect of the venture. I used to school with Ken in Nairobi School (PATCH!! Rocks) and up until a few months ago we used to work together before he "saw the light", am not sure if the light blinded him but it eventually landed him in Kampala, Uganda (way across the border). Enthusiasm for the idea is what made me pick Ken and his business acumen.

On the creative end I picked Bluefi5h, a former workmate and a fellow blogger. This guy has more creative juice in his body then anybody I know, plus he has some very nice entertainment devices (Sony PSP, Satellite TV) that I know will come in handy when we having one of those long brainstorming meetings :-) Immediately I mentioned the idea to him on Gtalk his mind went into overdrive and he starting talking about all this ideas he has with regards to branding,merchandising etc, now you tell me who wouldn't want such a guy in his team?? He keeps me on my feet when I slack off..

yesterday I talked to another friend of mine Nellz and she showed an interest although ma yet to follow up on her...

A lot of other people have been involved in the conceptualisation phase but might not eventually make up the whole team, one major reason for this is that commitment is what's required not an exciting attitude that lasts for 5 minutes.

Journey of an Afro-preneur: Two Prongs

2006-08-08T11:20:00.000+03:00

After my first melting pot meeting I was supposed to send the list to one of my designers to start getting a creative picture but I've been running around like a lunatic handling some personal issues so you can imagine how pissed of my designer is!! :-)

I finally got round to doing it today morning :-) two weeks late, but I've been running around trying to purchase the domain name. It's hard to believe but i have no credit card so it's been a mess just trying to get my fellow paranoid Afros to let me use their over the net, I think a seminar should be run in Nairobi just to educate people on credit card usage over the internet.

I've been thinking of having to kindoff social apps, the first one is more of a community app whereas the second one will be more of a personal app. Its a "Two Pronged" approach which could mean disaster but on the other hand it could also mean success. I feel that users would like to interact in a social setting and also would like their own personal app that they could use to express themselves in a private way.

Journey of an Afro-preneur: LOL

2006-08-04T13:47:00.000+03:00

LOL: Labour Of Love :-)

A term I coined when I was asked about revenue generation on my social app :-) I had assessed the revenue models for most of the social apps and they all bordered on the numbers game i.e. large active numbers equals to potential advertising revenue.

So after getting too many questions from one or two people i decided to define my social app as a Labour Of Love :-)

I'm gonna be using it a lot throughout this blog so please make sure you keep it in your head.

Journey of an Afro-preneur: Brainstorming

2006-08-04T13:43:00.000+03:00

I don't think there's anything as exciting us a brainstorm over a boiling idea. Itr truly is an adrenaline rush that can't be compared to anything else.

So about a week ago after I had formally classified my social app as an LOL I setup a meeting with my fellow Afro-preneurs at one of the local coffee shops in Nairobi called Nairobi Java House. If you ever get to come Kenya this one of those places you really want to go and sip on some sweet and fresh kenyan coffee.

Adrenaline + Crazy Ideas + Kenyan Coffee=Innovative Afro-preneur :-)

The meeting was meant to be used as a starting point where we basically come up with a wishlist, it becomes like a melting pot of ideas where you just go on and on about what we wanted in the app. I picked a former workmate of mine Duncan to assist on the technical end, Duncan is one of those really smart dudes you need around when you thinking of setting up any techsavvy gig, excellent web developer and has a sharp eye for detail so it was easy for me to pick him plus earlier on he had expressed an interest in setting up a similar app. I mentioned in an earlier post that you need people around you who will help you nurture the vision/idea, duncan is one of those guys.

So I kick off the meeting with a brief description with what I have in mind with regards to functionality and we start writing up what the wish list. So many questions which I hadn't asked myself pop up and we make sure that we write up every answer.

Duncan asked me a question which I liked "Where do you see this app in the next 5 years?", I had to take a moment and think about it koz where you see your business idea in 5 years will strongly determine the decisions you make right now, whether it's the database design,financing,hardware,programming language,design,scalability etc. I answered his question by telling him that I wanted this app top become the number one african social networking portal ( a myspace.com/friendster/facebook thing-a-majig) :-) You ask "Couldn't you have come up with a more detailed answer to the question?" the answer is yes :-)

Two hours later and a cup of coffee down we finally concluded the wishlist, it was really beneficial koz it exposed flaws in the original concept and helped enhance the idea to a level we felt would be workable.

Journey of an Afro-preneur: Sharing The Vision

2006-08-02T15:23:00.000+03:00

So "the bug" has my mind, body and soul, it's actually a great feeling koz your so pumped up and every creative juice in your body is flowing. I picture Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they came up with google.

Almost forgot to mention that a last year I got bit by "the bug" and had a desire to setup a web directory service for east african businesses. The idea had already been implemented quite well by one or two companies (www.nationbusinessdirectory.com) but I figured I could do it better and incorporate other features that would make it the primary business portal for the region. I'm sure you wanna know how that went, may be I'll start a blog to talk about dead ideas :-)

I'm thinking to myself "what should I do next?" the logical thing was to share the vision with my fellow Afro-preneurs but there is this paranoia that would-be entrepreneurs concerning the ideas they have. We all fear that the next dude will steal the ide out pace us and implement our idea but I figure competition is healthy and so is paranoia :-).I had a meeting with a fellow Afro-preneur yesterday and he brought up the same thing.

I can't overstate the importance of picking the right people/person to share your idea with, so many times we pick the wrong people who tear into your idea and before you get started you've already seen failure. Constructive criticism is what your looking for as an entrepreneur, comments that will help you refine your idea and may be even take it a step further.

So first thing when I got to the office after my epiphany was to send a mail to a friend of mine where I basically outlined my vision for the whole web app. His comments were positive which was good but he asked the question that every budding entrepreneur asks "How do you intend to make money?". My answer to the question is "I don't know how and I'm not concerned how, I just want to do this" :-) Adrenaline had obviously overtaken business reasoning :-)

Social Apps and Revenue

Most social web apps generate their revenue through banner advertising or through the provision of premium services. In order to go the advertising route you need the numbers in terms of users and the traffic to back it up. My best example in the numbers category is Myspace.com, check the statistics here, the numbers can't be rivalled by any other social web app out there but the weird thing is that it's yet to make any money. In the premium services category I would have to pick LinkedIn.com (one of the most impressive social networking apps I've ever used, a must use) through their InMail service.But what you offer must really appeal to the masses and make them want to spend money so you really need to define your niche'.

Which way do I go?

Journey of an Afro-preneur: The Bug

2006-08-01T12:59:00.000+03:00

A couple of weeks back, actually around June. I had the idea to set up a web application that would bring communities,enthusiasts and basically everybody. I guess the "social networking bug" had bitten me and "the fever" was acting fast activating every nerve ending in my body, ideas came rushing in, brand names scribbled on papers, design concepts, AJAX interactions it became too much that I had to finally share it with the world.

Over the next couple of weeks I'll be detailing the chronicle of events that hopefully will lead to the birth of an Afro-social networking webapp.

Who knows!! it might actually inspire one or two people from my beloved continent Africa to reach out and pursue a dream.

Hiatus of an african tech-entrepreneur

2006-08-01T12:17:00.000+03:00

For the last couple of months I've been closely following the blog of a guy called Nicholas Ochiel, I can't quite remember how I stumbled upon it (you might want to check out stumbleupon.com) but I do know that newsvine.com had something to do with it.

Nicholas vision was to start a web app which he aptly called Cheeseforge :-) (i think my next blog will be on choosing a brand name), I think it has something to do with the fact that we all trying to "get the cheddar" :-), he describes cheeseforge us:

"Cheeseforge, therefore, has been built to allow individuals and small groups of the same ( e.g in very small companies ) to manage, analyse and share data about their expenses and income. Think of it as an easier, lighter, friendlier, simpler version of Quickbooks that you use within your browser ( think Gmail for finances )."

In a continent where very few people go tech-savvy you can imagine my excitement of hearing a fellow African (Kenyan) actually venturing into developing a web 2.0 business app that would help people keep track of their financial info.

Having read his blog I decided to go to the cheeseforge site which until recently was on http://my.cheeseforge.com, I use the words until recently because from what I can tell it seems to be no more. For those of you who didn't get a chance to see it, there was nothing much to it except a very snazzy looking form giving you the chance to signup so that you could get notified once the app went live. Being a developer I had to view the source of the page and see if I could get a sneak peek of what was under the hood. The source file didn't give me much except one piece of infotmation that I found quite interesting :-) a Javascript source file called Mochikit.js which is a clean and powerful javascript library available in the Turbogears framework which is a Python based development framework.

I'm no Python fan, may be because I've never really bothered to learn the language, but I do respect any person who develops in the language. Rumour is that it's the language that drives Gmail. Anyway back to my story, I figured let me ask good ol Nick whether he was developing the app using Turbogears but i got no response. I guess he had to hide what was under the hood :-)

So today I decide to head over to his blog to track the progess of the app, and to my dissapointment his posted a rather long and dreary post (the guy does have quite a flare with words) explaining that he will be going on a "Hiatus" apparently his mind needs a major reboot. He also mentions that public work on Cheesforge would be coming to an end :-( a very sad turn of events.

But not to worry Nick, the entrepreneur fire still burns and will continue to burn. I think I can speak for may budding afro-preneurs when I say that we know you'll get back on the work horse and blaze the way for so many of us who can't see the path.

Python curious gatos (spanish for cats) :-) check out Turbogears and Django I think I seriously need to check out this stuff :-)

Riya- A web wide visual search engine.

2006-08-01T11:49:00.000+03:00

Riya- A web wide visual search engine.

That's what the CEO Munjal Shah describes it us. I stumbled upon it a couple of months back when reading the Techcrunch blog. I checked it out but wasn't really that interested until today when I decided to go back and see what it had to offer. By the way his blog offers quite a detailed description of how the whole Riya idea came about and the adrenaline rush they got pre and post launch, a must-read for anyone interested in setting up a webapp.

I won't go into describing in detail what it's about but what I got from it is that it allows you to tag and describe each section of a photo which can then be recognised and searched. I didn't quite get the gist of it until when I searched for Machu Picchu and it gave me a list of photos tagged and described, I was then able to select a part of the photo and describe it as a face and who it was.

With all that excitement, I decided to setup an account so that I could show off my photos of Mt.Kenya, can you imagine my dissapointment when I got an error message ERROR: Your registration process could not be completed, please try again after some time.

I have tried more then two times to register but i Keep getting the same messsage, I suggest the guys at Riya.com check this out before the blogosphere slams you into the ground and buries you.

Update (later on today):

I headed back to Riya.com a couple of minutes after an anonymous user had posted a comment on my blog (yippe!!my first comment) Seems the first time I tried to register and got the error message my account had already been setup.I wonder why this happened? anyway am just glad it works.

Open source nightmares

2006-07-26T13:52:00.000+03:00

I think one of the biggest problems with open source (OS) development is the lack of proper and clear documentation. I've realised over a period of time that the biggest assumption that all the OS languages have is that every developer is a skilled developer and as such needs very little documentation or sample apps to begin with. I'm not saying that all of them lack the proper intro material but a bulk of them do.

The biggest culprit in my view would have to be the projects under the Apache foundation, by the way the projects these guys have are pretty interesting,the likes of Tapestry,BeeHive just to mention a few..By the way the guys at BeeHive do at least try and give you some form of documentation :-)

Every so often I get a chance to glance over the Apache Foundation website and see the new projects they have, hoping that with time they will have introduced better documentation but true to their nature they don't seem to care for the Beginner Programmer out there who has very little knowledge of the whole XML+Ant+War thingy...

Why focus on developing new frameworks when people can't get decent documentation on the current ones?

Microsoft has it's flaws but one thing I do give them marks for is that they do provide adequate documentation on all their frameworks. Take a look at the .NET framework, they've given you all the docs needed to start developing a basic web app within minutes of the installation. Then we have the website ASP.NET which is like your one-stop shop for anything and everything concerning the .NET framework, very nice stuff on it.

The guys at Interface 21 (Spring Framework) at least they tried by providing you with a sample application which even though isn't comprehensive it does get you started on the whole process. Matt Raible's Appfuse application is pretty good but lacks the start from scratch thing that beginners (like myself) want. Isuggest you head over to his blog and check it out, very nice stuff including some of his sample apps built using Tapestry,JavaServer Faces,Struts,Webwork and Hibernate not forgetting to mention Ibatis (easiest SQL mapping implementation I've ever used :-) ).

I recently started experimenting with Symfony PHP5 Framework, I didn't expect much but when I scooted off to the documentation section boy was I surprised. These guys have a fully developed web app Askeet.com and a day-by-day development lifecycle, what makes it even better is that it's all downloadable the source code as well as the tutorial (for those of you who don't have 24hr internet access you'll most definitely appreciate this). If you think that's not enough they have a One day tutorial showing you how to develop a basic application in one day damnit!! these guys are good. They even go a step further and give you access to movies describing how to perform certain tasks. Now this is what I call comprehensive documentation.
Some of you will notice the similarity between Symfony and RoR(Ruby on Rails) :-)

Why can't the guys at the Apache Foundation take time off and sit down to make some decent documentation??? Your projects are really nice but if am gonna spend hours trying to find out how to connect to a database and retrieve records then sorry guys I'll go to the next easy thing..

Other articles/posts written on the subject:

Is open source technology commercially viable in Africa?

2006-07-21T13:58:00.000+03:00

"You'll never make money in Africa if you go open source" a quote from my former boss, who is the founder of the most successful web development company in East & Central Africa.

My boss told me this when I informed him that I had been offered a job developing web application on the LAMP stack, the statement made me really think and question whether open source technologies adn their adoption have any commercial value in Africa.

A couple of interesting article/blogs on the net:

Open Source In Africa
Open source rising in Africa

Websites:
Go Open Source

This is just the first of many posts I'll be having on this topic, so watch this space...

Sweatshop Experiences Part 3-Prototypes

2006-07-21T13:47:00.000+03:00

Prototypes-the very mention of that word makes me shake in my boots. Don't get me wrong am a fan of making prototypes during every stage of development, the problem is that people abuse the very essence of prototyping.

Management use prototypes to bash the developer and add functionality that wasn't in the original specification much to the detriment of the developer without any consideration of how it affects development timelines.

Well my bosses basically used those prototype display meetjings to rewrite technical specifications because they would all of sudden get a wave of brilliance they hadn't encountered before!!..Imagine a situation where the IT Manager has been approving every stage of the development but when you meet his boss who automatically is your boss he immediately begins adding new stuff:

Could you automatically notify the user once a record has been deleted?
Could you let action 1 determine action 15 without it affecting all other actions?

Leave development to the developers and nudget meetings to the managers..

Sell yourself not your soul

2006-07-19T15:13:00.000+03:00

"Sell yourself not your soul"-Quadimoso 06

The inspiration for this quote came from a chat conversation I was having with a former workmate of mine today, a fellow web developer, who informed me that the Creative Director (who has now left the company) told the production floor people to develop their own portfolios and put them on the internet as a showcase for potential employers :-) talk about marketing oneself!!

For those of you who don't know, it's an unwritten rule in the web design industry that you should never outshine or outsell your employer lest he smites you with one powerful blow!!..

And that is my moment of zend for today :-)... Jon Stewart Rocks :-)