Jonathan Gosier

Posts by Jonathan Gosier

Wednesday, 24th December 2008

Web Development

Facebook Developers Garage: Uganda

Facebook senior engineer Charlie Cheever flew to Kampala, Uganda, a couple of weekends ago to lead a Facebook Developers Garage and teach 100+ East African students how to take advantage of the growing Facebook economy using the company's apps platform and APIs. Leila Chirayath (founder of Samasource) and I (from Appfrica Labs) were also…

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Sunday, 12th October 2008

Social Media in Africa, Part 3: Democracy

Traditionally, the greatest power that governments have held over their people has been information. The promise that connectivity brings to Africa is that people are now using that abundance of information for oversight of government and more interaction with administrations. To say that the propagation of internet and mobile connectivity in…

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Saturday, 4th October 2008

Social Media in Africa, Part 2: Mobile Innovations

In Amsterdam the social media technology conference PICNIC2008 wrapped up last week after devoting an entire day of scheduling to the innovations coming out of Africa. Dubbed 'Surprising Africa', the conference featured prolific social entrepreneurs and technology developers from around the world who offered insight into various projects from…

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Thursday, 2nd October 2008

Social Media in Africa, Part 1

Contrary to popular belief, Africa is not completely absent from the Internet. In fact, the continent at large is undergoing a connectivity revolution unlike anything it has ever seen. Mobile phones in particular are propagating at an incredible rate, with penetration ranging from 30% to 100%. The average is 30.4% and there are 280 million…

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