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The first Tech4Africa Conference held at The Forum in Bryanston last week proved to be a refreshing and vital addition to the conference circuit.
With several high profile international speakers mixing it up with the best of breed locally, it was always going to prove an interesting and jampacked two days of talk around the challenges and opportunities on the continent.
Some highlights included the lively discussion around social media (or “the social web” as listed in the itinerary); the hilarious QA session with, amongst others John Resig (jQuery creator) and Dustin Diaz , UI goto guy for Twitter; the shared insights around mobile content for the continent; and of course, Clay Shirky’s keynote on how, beyond “lolcats”, the power of technology can enable collective action .
Here then some key takeouts for me from the two days
1. People first
It’s never been more important to have a genuine, honest and transparent relationship with your customers (a lengthy discussion of case studies BP and the new Cell C campaign proved how high the stakes are) while the importance of community and content with value was reiterated by panel and audience. On the business side, the necessity of a healthy network popped up in more than one discussion. Your competitors and industry peers should be one of your greatest soundboards.
2. Start small
A classic Clay Shirky delivery hit home when he advised to keep it small but good, rather than large and mediocre. It will always be more difficult to turn around and try to fix things than it is to make something of excellence, on a small scale, and grow it incrementally.
3. Use the Cloud
It’s daunting for any growing business to be lean and efficient with resources and infrastructure. The cloud (or “the web” , as one audience member insisted) has brought numerous tools to our doorstep, enabling the almost instantaneous access to virtual servers, disk space (Dropbox), eMailing campaigns (MailChimp), project planning (Bootcamp) , without having to invest in anything but nominal subscription fees.
4. Bad product won’t sell
Maybe an obvious one at first, but a crappy product won’t have legs. Especially in an age where a community of consumers can just as quickly shoot it down as they can build you up. Any good product has good marketing built in. Apple’s polite decline to officially engage in the social media sphere proves the point. They don’t need to get involved, because their consumers are already doing the marketing job for them.
5. True Love
Corny right? Yet it remains that key ingredient. The one that’ll see you through the good and bad times. Without genuine care for whatever it is you’re putting out there; there is no momentum, there is no meaning, and ultimately, there is no reason for anybody else to love it either.
6. Low fi
I’ve always believed that through limitations one excels. It’s the age old “invention through necessity” rule; and Fritz Ekwoge is proving it. His simple and brutally effective SMS “app store” and business directory (iYam) is getting a lot of attention. Bright Simons’ mPedigree is literally saving lives by enabling people in Ghana to verify the expiry date and authenticity of their medicine by SMS’ing the barcode (buying medicine over the counter in this country implies the shocking statistical likelihood of 1 out of three chances of dying from the very goods supposed to cure you). It also benefits the pharmaceuticals by returning analytics on where and how their products are sold in the continent . One wonders when everybody else are going to start using technologies such as IVR or USSD to it’s fullest potential; and yes, you may get creative with it if you’re so inclined…
7. …but what does it do?
This may be a harsh reminder for anyone who ever slaved away on building a technical solution, but to the customer, the most important thing is whether your service or product is making his life a little easier; not which technology was used in creating it. Over-engineering may be a good thing in the civil construction business, but consumer tech should always be dead simple. If it works, why complicate it?
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All in all it was a very important and extremely useful two days and I’d like to thank Gareth Knight from Technovated for firstly putting a conference of such stature together, and secondly giving me the opportunity to attend (I owe you one!)
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