WIRED:Africa, skipping past fixed phone lines for pervasive mobile telephony, is the place to be, writes DANNY O'BRIEN
TEN YEARS ago, when I first moved to San Francisco, it was the obvious place for geeks with a bit of wanderlust to go. A fair job market, a lot of fellow techies and, of course, plenty of eager investors. But most importantly, California seemed to be where interesting things were happening.
Even if they didn’t live there or even want to move, smart people paid attention to what was going on there.
Now, looking among my more enviably intelligent friends, I see a new geographical focus to their attention. A few have even upped sticks and migrated to the object of their fascination. These days, the forward-looking geek looks forward to Africa.
And it’s not just the World Cup. Two years ago, one of my best friends, Stefan Magdalinski, the young chief technology officer of a successful start-up, moved to Cape Town to begin his next business.
He spotted that Africa, leapfrogging past fixed telephone lines into pervasive mobile telephony, was the place to be.
I should grit my teeth here and add that there was no charitable intent here nor a plan to suck development funds or local government investment dry, the usual assumptions about businesses or businessmen moving in on Africa. Magdalinski has the geek novelty-seeking gene: he’s looking for the next challenging and transformative tech project.
His interest in Africa reflects a growing trend that sees the continent as the place where the Next Big Thing will hit.
I can’t quite describe the shape of that next wave, although looking at Magdalinski’s company, Mocality, allows me to pick up some of the commonalities that pepper the geek interest in Africa.
First, Mocality is based in South Africa which has developed a strong local technological community (in part due to the presence of some of the net boom’s earliest innovators, like Canonical’s Mark Shuttleworth).
Second, Mocality’s target market isn’t some global, affluent class of individuals. It’s Africans. Their product is a business directory, accessible by mobile phone, for small businesses which would never have considered advertising in a printed business directory.
Mobile telephony has created not just a market of consumers, but an untapped network of businesses and producers in Africa, too.
Mobile phone companies have responded quickly to this amazing growth, but they can’t do everything – and they’re slow even in the areas where they traditionally have enjoyed monopolies, such as business directories. (Another African start-up company to have roared in to this new niche is MXit, a free instant-messaging application that lets African users bypass the disproportionately expensive costs of SMS text messaging.)
Finally, despite its reputation as the most advanced market in Africa, Mocality hasn’t launched first in its home base. Its attention, like so many other tech entrepreneurs, is on Kenya.
If anywhere is a model, not just for the future of African technology, but most of the world, it’s Kenya. On the positive side, the country has M-PESA, a working micro-payment system bootstrapped on the dominant mobile telephone network, which allows companies like Mocality to scale down to the smallest business case. Mocality pays a small bounty for any Kenyan phone owner who sends the company a verifiable picture of a business and its contact details.
Its vibrant media and relatively open economy compared to its neighbours make it a great location for exploring business models that might map to the rest of the continent.
On the downside, Kenya still suffers from widespread corruption. Its telco infrastructure, while advanced, runs the risk of using its dominant position to seek out excessive profits rather than encourage a competitive local market. Currently, the average Kenyan spends an amazing 60 per cent of their disposable income (16 per cent of their total income) on mobile phone use.
Those are astounding figures, especially when you consider that most of that revenue goes to Safaricom, the primary telecommunications provider.
That’s double the percentage that the average Irish consumer spends on food, and it all goes to the same company.
If grassroots-driven African technology businesses are going to succeed, they’ll have to escape the huge (though voluntary) burden that the current telco- based infrastructure places on its users.
It’s not though as if other countries haven’t suffered (or will suffer again) the same challenges. Before the unregulated internet placed a bomb under telecommunication companies across Europe and the Americas, those countries had the same monopolistic control over the virtual world.
As Africa makes the transition from a telco-driven mobile revolution to a decentralised, user-driven, digital economy, the same opportunities and risks operate there. That’s why the geeks and entrepreneurs who built the first internet boom are so attracted to the great African communications revolution.
And that’s why it’s so important that they win – not just for Africa, but for the future freedom of every market that depends on mobile infrastructure. Which is to say, the whole world.
