Disclaimer Alert!!!
Don’t misread the lines, yes I love African Tech, Yes I will choose African tech over other Tech, Yes I will advocate for African Tech, Yes I will fun and Support African Tech but I want fun I want dramas in the scene, or our culture hasn’t fully accepted Tech like politics and football or gossip? Or maybe I’m jumping too fast to my assumed conclusions, or not! Clearly, I bet yall can agree with me, most cases we here in our tech scene is this startup has won some funding, this startup has been nominated here, this startup has been launched, This ecosystem is a perfect hybrid for startups and blah blah blah! Nice things over there yes indeed, but after those what else do we have? we have news about startups during the weekdays, our weekends are dormant, some blogs get information after something has been done and its two days due, and even getting the information from the startup is hard.
The scene is barely making big headlines, and those that will manage as I said earlier, they will end up resettling in the outskirts of Africa, so shameful but you know what Isorait! The home base dwindles in poverty, unemployment, unexploited talent, skills and you generate income and flourish another land. Am I the one visioning the dark side, the unofficial version of tech, the inappropriate Erlich Bachman head methods? by any chance is anyone seeing where this is going?
Am I craving the 2030 version of Africa Tech culture? Yes, we are limited by useless policies that our governments have rolled out on entrepreneurship and ICT, “We empower the nation through ICT and the young “, what? this is another my version of let’s use the young’s brilliant minds to create non-viable products that will help us launder money. To be so honest how many people do understand the methods of acquisition is African Startups? Do we have a method even? what does it take? is it the idea or the product? I am sure so many of us the Techy society are fanatics of the major startup series Silicon Valley if you haven’t watched it go watch, This really explains almost everything we all crave as startup founders and Investors and co-working spaces. The series is a thrill with all that you need. I am not advocating for the practice of what happens there but what if you try?
- Facebook’s Interest In Safaricom’s M-Pesa
For instance, let’s take Zuck’s Interest in Africa’s Technology, man! that ninja smart AF, so he came to Kenya for what … his main interest was in Safaricom’s M-Pesa …. the news went down as a cliche and the next thing we know Messenger has payments, he then comes and releases his cheap data internet to the nation , so what then, Safaricom and all major service providers will reduce their data price and, the cheap facebook data is launched in remote areas, now the bigger possibility of you doing payments with messenger with cheap data and no transaction cost is high that’s a win for Zuck, and now that’s FUN! can Safaricom beat facebook if it manages to penetrate ? lets wait
- Uber Kenya’s Mind play on the Drivers
Uber is great, great services, great controversies, great choice of UI, and great choice of mind play, now I don’t really blame them but you know what this is Tech and we need to make it a better place for ourselves depending on the conditions placed, Now the Kenyan drivers had a lot of complaints about the prices cuts on the travels charge. So what did they do? they “struck”, then a few weeks later Uber released a press release, Yes not so much of an Increase pay in but I’m so sure Uber till plays the ‘god’, the drivers are still complaining, but Uber knows no matter what you won’t shift anytime sooner, and within time it will just launch an update to recover the percentage gap created during the roll of the price, I presume. Now The DRAMA between Uber and its Clients it’s crazy, it makes you wait to see when will the drivers quit? will Uber die in Kenya but then no wait aaah! it’s settled.
Rarely do African Startups go the IPO way, I guess Interswitch Nigeria Made it to the stop Line and that’s last year, that’s great. We only just go startup competitions, the pitch, those that failed to see it as a learning ground, those that make it, leverage their ways out of the scene :/ what happens to African startups after Y-combinator? we majorly stop at they made it to the Y-combinator and we do less follow up! So The African scene just needs to create a good competition among each other, we have diversified the culture, check for instance Snapchat, Instagram and Whatsapp, almost same story algorithm implemented among them and the controversy whether if the Founder has lacked ideas is kicking in, we will talk but still that’s what makes the companies grow, the more you use the products the more the value increases, the user database expands and data sell as usual. So let’s make our Tech Scene fun, Let us not rebuild platforms because a new language is rolled out and you want to be updated, naaah the user doesn’t give a sh** about the language used, so create it the basic way you know Twitter is just Jquery. You there struggling to use all the Js libraries and every other programming language to stay “ahead” before the year ends Twitter has a million more users and increase in value while you struggle to remember a function with no product launched. We need a disruptive Culture, stop caring about complex rules. be fun TECHYOLO.
Featured Images Eric Palma Illustration.
