Cairo – No one, except the activists preparing it, saw the Egyptian revolution coming. And yet they might have gotten a pretty good idea of what was coming if they saw what happened in a summer camp for Arab children aged 12 to 15 in August 2010....
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Winch 5
All posts for October 2011
The key to social media and traffic in Cairo
Very nice but not totally convincing, Aly Rafea told me a secret this morning, a secret that's worth gold. Rafea is the founder of bey2ollak.com, an app that "lets people share traffic information for the primary streets in Cairo and Alexandria, (the...
Read more"Social" Marketing and the Egyptian Revolution.
Yesterday morning I attended a conference for entrepreneurs held near Cairo, in a "Smart Village" where Microsoft, Vodaphone, Intel, Alcatel and a lot of banks are located.The event included a Panel on social media, or, more precisely, on how...
Read moreCreating the African Gaming Industry
It all started as an ordinary rivalry, two young developers claiming at the same time to be the first game developer in Africa. No risk of it coming to blows with a continent separating them: one lives in Accra, Ghana, and the other in Nairobi,...
Read moreAn Activist Entrepreneur
Bruno Legendre acts with an unrelenting logic that I described Friday in my weekly column in the Science & Techno supplement (Article in French; subscription required). But I wanted to talk about him in a little more detail on several...
Read moreM-Farm lets Kenyan farmers find market prices with SMS
Simple, efficient and effective, the application developed by M-Farm allows rural Kenyans to know the market price of the products they sell in regional markets. They can also use the service to transport their crops or buy fertilizer.And the best...
Read moreCampaigning against car horns in Casablanca
Selma Benjelloun is slim, shy, discreet and determined. She needs to be in order to enter into a fight with this city's deafening car horns (klaxons in French)-- perhaps the wost that I've ever heard, and not only in terms of noise. Almost as soon as...
Read moreHow do you ask the innovation question?
Casablanca -- Lean, sporting a light beard, Adnane Charafeddine has the intense look of someone with a vision. And yet, when he shows me his method of innovating, I'm surprised – his art is copying. That's how he created QuelleVoiture.ma (What a...
Read moreMexico: Social networks against narcos
Mexican web users are perhaps in the process of creating, however gropingly, something new: using social networks to make up for the absence of civil society acting against the government and against narcos. Paradoxically, it is those in power who,...
Read moreYumbling part 2: When Capital Fears Risk
Mexico DF – Ricard Suarez found the money he needed for launching Yumbling, his site that aggregates all possible information on entertainment in Mexico City, while incorporating social-media and gaming layers. He found enough to pay developers for...
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