Cross Roads

I a few days ado i wrote about my fascination about table tops and desktops. I was interested and still am in making spaces more attractive and in the process generating revenue. In the process of all of this i came across a product i purchased a few months back. The product has a lid with a cultural and historic message. Not only have i been sold a nutritious product, i have also been educated in the process...and gained a more fuller knowledge of a complex and controversial people group. A few months ago the country had a push towards the Uganda products (Buy Ugandan). Arguments and counterarguments for this abound and the case for quality need not be mentioned. Often the push may degenerate into regional and then cultural biases especially in countries where ethnicity as a means of identity rests close to the heats of people. What this means is that there is a possibility that i will soon encourage people to buy western Ugandan or northern Ugandan or later on...focus only...

This week i had the privilege of visiting the Global Business Labs office at Makerere University. The trip came after months of talks via email but no progress. I guess my interest in this group stems from my general interest in the 'Innovation' boom that is taking the Information Technology world by storm. I had a few questions many of which were answered by the email that the group sent me. What i will present here are some of the basics as i see them. There are two major groups with which i have interacted (albeit from a distance). Demo-Africa and Pivot East. Both host events in Africa which are designed to tap into the vast pools of knowledge in Uganda's youth. The former had an event which it held in Kampala with one of our more notable innovation labs-HiveColab (http://www.hivecolab.org). The event has the backing of the U.S government and the then Secretary of State-Hillary Rodham Clinton (http://history.state.gov/departmenthistory/people/clinton-hillary-...

A casual visit to a restaurant reveals a few products that are placed on the table for decoration and for general use. I often notice the time taken to make these table tops as attractive as possible. From a purely marketing perspective, it would be nice to ensure that your product has the attention of at least everyone who uses the restaurant. Most of the up market facilities have products from foreign countries. It would be refreshing to see some local products. If you have some trouble marketing your country's sugar for export in tonnes, what about going the other way and getting your product into satchets. Small convenient well designed packets with superior products? Don't get me wrong. Nobody is going to do you any favors by placing sub-standard products at their facilities. Quality matters but so does packaging. The Battle for the Table Top Rages on You ask what does this have to do with technology? Well think of your table top as your desktop. I thin...

This week I had the privileged of attending an event the orange community innovations award http://orange.ug/ciawards/ held at Makerere University by Orange Uganda. Every year, the company hosts an competition for application developers which in my view achieves quite a lot in the development of Uganda's vast youthful intellectual pool. This event was created to target three broad categories. Health Agriculture Education In my view there was probably room for another category...security although you could argue that each of the categories presented is indirectly related to the security of the country. But my view was that there was room for one more category. I was unable to visit all the presenters and would find it a little unfair to showcase individual projects. However here are some of the suggestions that I have come up with. Naturally, some links between applications and use were simple and easy to spot and the potential of partnerships was in my view vast. Agri...

This is the Second Mozilla Uganda Community event that i was able to attend. This time around the event was held at Hivecolab on Kanjokya Rd. to highlight Firefox flicks competition (created to focus on the Firefox Operating System). We watched some of the submissions from the community in Uganda  as well as others from all over the world. It seems to me that the entrants made the use of three options. Animation, the use of Actors or a Combination of all two. The ones that crabbed my attention and that seemed to have captured the crowd were entries with which made good use of humor. I learnt that the system runs on CSS2, HTML 5 and Java Script. Was also glad to meet a team that has done some work before on the localization of the Firefox Browser. Maybe the lesson that i have come away with is the value that must be placed on user communities. These are groups that run on passion for software alone and that are often un-defiled by standard practice. Software juggernaut...

Today I had the privilege of visiting with a team at the Outbox Hub -located on Lumumba Rd. at Solis House. They have had a lot of events before including the pivot east which is from the look of things was very successful. Today they launched a new mentoring program which is dubbed Idea-to-Seed (I2S). The idea as i understand it is to attract entrepreneurs with a focus on mobile applications for the web. Having accumulated a lot of experience dealing with start-ups and hosting international and local events, outbox hub is uniquely placed to make some positive changes for young business people. The program is therefore designed to help them come up with well defined services and products. In addition to this they have identified some of the challenges that small business go through and made some solutions available either directly or indirectly. 1. Provision of space 2. Business Support 3. Mentoring 4. Consultancy 5. Advise 6. Fundraising. All of this matters in theo...