Electronics. Entertainment. Gadgets.
New Media Addict
By Dave Thomas
About David
Dave Thomas is the online editor-in-chief of E-Gear. When he's not tracking online trends he likes to make movies, eat pasta or just sit around watching Doctor Who.Silver's Screen
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SXSW 2008 - Day Two: Africa Is the New MacGyver
Interviewed Daniel Stamm and Zoltan Honti, respectively the writer/director and cinematographer of A Necessary Death, about which I have already raved. Honti, who was working simultaneously with cinematography legend Vilmos Zsigmond at the time, had to sort of dumb down his style and pretend not to know how to handle a camera in order to achieve the amateurish, handheld DV feel of the piece.
My last interview of the day comedian and all-around Web/tech junkie Baratunde Thurston, whom I tried to interview at last year’s SXSW when he had no voice. This year, it’s back and he had plenty to say about everything from being Web editor for The Onion to supporting Obama. In keeping with the DIY theme of the conference, he talked about crowdsourcing the Obama campaign, providing tools for supporters online to use in the real and virtual world.
I’ll be posting the video and podcasts of these interviews soon.
Then came the now infamous Mark Zuckerberg keynote. Much has been blogged about this already, but since I was actually there, I’ll give you my impressions.
(And, seriously, don’t take my word for it. Listen for yourself.)
To be blunt, interviewer Sarah Lacy came off as unremittingly obnoxious. She appeared to be much more interested in the sound of her own voice than in really listening to anything Zuckerberg had to say. If Zuckerberg’s answers were repetitive it’s only because her questions were even more so. She committed numerous interviewer faux pas, including casually insulting Zuckerberg (imagine “Do you think Facebook is really worth $15 billion?” delivered in a very condescending tone) and stealing his thunder by announcing the launch of Facebook France before he could.
The crowd became increasingly annoyed with her and finally showed it when Zuckerberg called her on her question-free interview tactics, explaining his reticence at one point by saying, “You’re supposed to ask questions.” The audience went wild. Twice. Finally, one audience member simply yelled out “Ask something interesting!” to which she replied that what she was doing was harder than it looked and that if the crowd wanted to take over in a “Digg-style” of “mob rule,” it was welcome to. Some of us call that Q&A, but, whatever.
At least it provided an amusing Twitter stream for everyone who stayed away.
I checked out a couple of less contentious panels after that. ”Where Are the Black Tech Bloggers?” was of obvious interest to me, but the most outstanding aspect of the talk for my money was the fact that two years ago, the similarly-themed ”Blogging While Black” panel’s faces of color were almost all onstage. This year there was a much more vibrant mix in the audience itself.
”Africa 2.0” proved to be one of the most fascinating panels of the conference. It covered everything from emerging DIY tech trends on the continent (the cell phone is the PC of Africa - and Russia, too, for that matter) to misconceptions about high-tech business opportunities in Africa, the first of which being that there aren’t any (see a collage of just a few African tech companies here).
From becoming the next destination for outsourcing (provided they find a way to compete with China) to ground-up entrepreneurial endeavors, Africa is becoming an economic force to be reckoned with. The most apparent evidence of this is TED’s first conference in Africa. TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) is an invitation-only conference in which business leaders and luminaries with Big Ideas come together (imagine tech CEOs rubbing elbows with Bono and Malcom Gladwell). Basically a Platinum Club version of SXSW. The fact that Africa even had one speaks volumes about the changing perception of what types of business opportunities might lie there.
Another misconception about Africa - no film industry. To some degree, that’s been true, but Nollywood, a.k.a. the Nigerian film industry, is on the rise. This is one of the unexpected outcomes of the digital revolution. Americans aren’t the only independent filmmakers getting in on the introduction of cheaper production costs.
The panel also covered how voices on the ground know more about what they need than tech companies. While Nokia was struggling to figure out what new features to add to its phones in Africa, the consumers there already knew. Flashlights. It’s obvious in retrospect, but nothing Nokia would have necessarily come up with on its own.
Technology is also opening up avenues of political survival. The Internet is allowing more Africans than ever before access to the outside world. They can see how other countries manage (or mismanage) their affairs and decide if they want the same. They can circumvent government control of the media and technology itself, as did one application that got around Ethiopian blocking of SMS. They can hold their governments accountable like never before by posting records. In the States, we take for granted the fact that if Politician A said one thing in 2008, we can check for ourselves if he said the opposite in 1998.
You can learn more at the panelists’ Web sites. See how Africans are becoming the MacGyvers of the world at Erik Hersman’s Afrigadget. Check out Africa’s Wall St. Journal at Nil Simmonds’ Nubian Cheetah. Learn how one woman is bringing African fashion to a larger audience at Uduak Oduok’s Ladybrille. Find out more about African business trends at G. Kofi Annan’s Annansi Chronicles.
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