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Alexandria: The library, from papyrus to bits

Alexandria – Located not far from the ruins of its ancestor, the building containing the new library of Alexandria (Bibalex) is alone worth the trip. The exterior of the building designed by the Norwegian firm Snøhetta looks like a sort of half-moon sitting on the horizon. The interior contains the largest reading room in the world, composed of seven terraced floors and containing 400 networked computers. The library has a small parchment collection, but the only manuscript that remains from the original library is in Austria. Here, you can only see a replica – results of a more recent past.

The stacks currently contain 1.5 million volumes (500,000 of which were donated by the French National Library), and can hold nearly eight million. But you get the sense that the library’s importance is in something else – part of me even wishes it held no paper-bound editions.

“More than a library of books, we want to create a series of platforms for disseminating knowledge,” Mariam Nagui, director of exterior communication for the IT section – which has almost 50 developers – told me while showing around. Among the library’s digitization efforts are an ancient copy of the Koran and of the Bible (in Arabic), placed side by side. You can search how and when the same word is used in either text, for example, “peace.” It’s very instructive.

Books in the digital collections can be annotated and highlighted. Every user can have their own virtual bookshelves, and share what they are reading on Facebook and Twitter. Soon, they’ll be able to share citations. All this is due to the work done by theInternational School of Information Science (ISIS, appropriately), which is located in the library.

The Bibalex has received a lot of aid (private and public) from the exterior. One of the most symbolic instances, in my opinion, is that theInternet Archive, run by Bruce Khale in San Francisco, installed a mirror containing all Web content from 1996 to 2007 there.

The library also has a super computer that can be used by Arab researchers, at no charge, for efforts from data mining to genomics. It also contains a collection of PowerPoint speeches, launched with the University of Pittsburgh long before SlideShare.

Outside of the website, which doesn’t grant access to everything, the library has installed “Embassies of Knowledge” in “several socially diverse and geographically distant locations throughout Egypt.” There, people can access the library’s collection of e-books.

The reading room’s computers are popular with the city’s young people, who can use them for whatever they choose to pay (on average, yearly membership of less than 4€).

Skeptics say that they come just to log into their Facebook page, but there’s nothing wrong with this. It’s part of the risks and rewards of web, net, and information technologies.

“Everything we’re doing today is digital,” Nagui said. “We try to facilitate maximum access to what the library produces.” What a revealing word. In the digital age, a library is not simply a repository of books, a receptacle of knowledge – it produces. Assembling and making accessible, it is transformed into a platform.

I hope the Bibalex could last as long as the original, 650 years. That way we’ll know if digital media will resist time as well as papyrus did. I’ve seen many universities are were better funded and better connected, notably Stanford and Berkeley, but none is as symbolically important as this, both for its history and location. I’m not sure how, but I think we should all try to help make it a real place of open knowledge, digitized and distributed.

Any ideas?

 

Silicon Valley Cafes at Nairobi’s iHub

Nairobi’s iHub is an open space for geeks, hackers and investors. It acts as a model for all of Africa.

The indisputable sign of legitimacy: they have a Pete’s Coffee, just like you can find everywhere in Silicon Valley. (According to connoisseurs – and who isn’t a connoisseur in the San Francisco Bay Area? – it’s much better than Starbucks).

While there’s one less “e” in iHub’s Pete’s, you can hardly tell. And they make good coffee.

PS. I interviewed the owner of the cafe: he actually is named Pete, and he was a barista – he smiled at this.

Map of Peet’s Coffeeshops in Silicon Valley

 

 

 

Egypt: When Revolution Comes from the Mouths of Babes

Cairo – No one, except the activists preparing it, saw the Egyptian revolution coming. And yet they might have gotten a pretty good idea of what was coming if they saw what happened in a summer camp for Arab children aged 12 to 15 in August 2010. They came to the camp, located in Ismaïlia, 150km from Cairo, to learn how to express themselves, and ended up taking over. Because of candy.

These 70 kids from eight countries (Yemen, Morocco, Egypt, Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq) came in order to learn how to speak their mind in every possible medium – film, music, drawing, blogs, posters, to name a few. The camp expected poems, songs, or videos; but five days had barely passed before the kids were demanding sweets, which the organizers didn’t provide. Or didn’t allow (I forgot to ask).

Getting no response, the kids decided to organize. The most active ones led a protest, mobilizing the other campers to the sound of a drum, occupying the radio and choosing a representative to negotiate with the organizers.

“Even though we didn’t show it, we were delighted,” said Ranwa Yehia, director of ArabDigitalExpression.com. She was also surprised. Yehia has journalism in her blood: “it’s what I love, and what made me what I am today,” she told me in her apartment, located in the Zamalek neighborhood in Cairo’s center. “But I left in 2005 when I realized how bad traditional media is.”

Yehia and her husband, Ali Shaath, a computer scientist, decided to devote themselves to Arabic children’s digital expression.

The first group of campers met in summer of 2007. In 2009, they protested – already, against the lack of candy and soda – but didn’t take action. In 2010, on the other hand, they took control inside the camp. Even more astonishing is the fact that, when a group of “veterans” from the previous year’s protest wanted to arbitrarily resurrect it, the majority didn’t listen.”There’s no consensus,” they told them. “Make pamphlets. Convince us.”

Very mature.

They had actually posted their rules at their arrival:”We except nothing less than absolute freedom.” In every case, Yehia said., “their slogans are often inspired from whatever country they come from.”

The secret of this astounding success lies in part in three rules that Yehia and Shaath hold rigorously in place: the amount of boys and girls must be equal; social differences are reduced to a minimum (everyone wears the same shirt, at least at the beginning); and above all else, “when they realize that we are treating them as equals it is amazingly empowering for them.”

Incredibly, the kids of 2010 even tweeted their revolt to the rest of the world … which didn’t notice. But for Yehia and Shaath, there is no doubt: “After January 25th (the date of the first major anti-Mubarak protests that led to his fall on February 11th), we understood – after the fact – that the 2010 revolt was a symbolic forerunner.”

“In 2009, they demanded. In 2010, they took what they considered to be their right. They stopped believing that things change themselves. It’s very similar to what happened in the Arab world this year.”

 

The key to social media and traffic in Cairo

Very nice but not totally convincing, Aly Rafea told me a secret this morning, a secret that’s worth gold. Rafea is the founder of bey2ollak.com, an app that “lets people share traffic information for the primary streets in Cairo and Alexandria, (the country’s second-largest city),” he told me. Bey2ollak translates roughly to “what people are saying,” with the “2″ replacing an accent mark – the hazma – that doesn’t exist on Latin keyboards.

Initially launched for Blackberry and iPhone, then Android, the app is now available on the majority of Nokia phones, the primary phone used in Egypt. It has no GPS, no map. The user looks up the the name of a street or highway they want to take, and the app returns comments via text. Traffic conditions are classed in five categories based on how fluidly it is moving. The app can report what it sees. One-hundred thousand people use the service launched, as is proper for geeks, on 101010: October 10th of last year.

Rafea, 23, holds a degree in computer science; he launched his company with four family members.

I didn’t really understand their choice to first launch on smartphones, in a country where the devices are still rare. The same for not using SMS.

His response: “Innovation, for us, meant going for simplicity. Not many people know how to read maps, so we chose the simplest system possible. Egyptians are fine receiving SMS’s, but sending them is not as easy.”

I didn’t find this explanation very convincing after seeing people use SMS in Dakar, Accra and Nairobi (see my post on Kenya’s m-farm, for example).

And this is how, forced to retreat, he told me that the key to his company is not crowdsourcing, not technology: “There’s simplicity, sure, but the language is essential. We decided to launch in neither Arabic or English, choosing instead the language that young Arabs use on the internet, a language their parents don’t understand.” This form of Arabic is written in Latin script, using numbers to fill in where letters don’t exist; it has its own vocabulary.

“The secret,” he adds, “is slang.”

This is obvious, my dear Francis, when dealing with social media!

Thank you, 3ly (that’s how he writes his name).

What lessons can we learn from this?

 

“Social” Marketing and the Egyptian Revolution

Yesterday morning I attended a conference for entrepreneurs held near Cairo, in a “Smart Village” where Microsoft, Vodaphone, Intel, Alcatel and a lot of banks are located.

The event included a Panel on social media, or, more precisely, on how marketing uses it.“Social is the new viral,” said one of the CEOs who spoke there.

I heard a lot of generalizations like “Listen to your communities and adjust your strategy,” or “educating clients is essential,” and even “content is key.”

I hesitate between calling these useful or “the usual bullshit”, as one of my neighbors did.

But we’re in Egypt.

@tarekshalaby, a web designer and entrepreneur, has no qualms with tweeting “Down with Tantawi” (who is the commander-in-chief of the armed forces).

Someone responds that this is not the place to vent one’s political sentiments….

No matter what, it is a different type geolocalization, one that is particularly efficient.

 

Creating the African Gaming Industry

It all started as an ordinary rivalry, two young developers claiming at the same time to be the first game developer in Africa. No risk of it coming to blows with a continent separating them: one lives in Accra, Ghana, and the other in Nairobi, Kenya.

Learning of their rivalry definitely piqued their interest, and they talked together about whether what counted was being the first to put a game on the market, or to be the first to build something from scratch, without using any mods or apps available on the web. This way, each cold hold the title – each has his version, so there’s no need to chose.

“I felt like I was alone. I was happy to find another African who was passionate about game development,” Wesley Kirinya explained to me in Nairobi, where he lives. “So we started chatting from time to time.” This was 2007.

But Eyram Tawia, the Ghanian I met in Accra, had the chance to be chosen to attend a school of technology and an incubator financed and organized by Meltwater.com, a Norwegian company located in San Francisco.

After several months, the two realized they should unite their efforts. The two developers met in Accra and decided to start a business together, LetiGames.com.

Their first product launched just before the African Cup of Nations. StreetSoccerBattles.com lets you take on several people in street soccer. They have since released iWarrior for the iPhone. “We wanted to show how safaris really work, how rural dwellers defend their crops and villages against animals,” Eyram told me in Accra. “Our designs are based on traditional, and very African, images.”

The next step: educational games.

Eyram’s objective “is not only to make games for Africans, but to make games in Africa that are able to compete on the global market.”

“More than being a company, we are in the process of building an entire industry,” Wesley, echoing Eyram, said in Nairobi.

The big problem – which I found in many cases – is that there is no context, no ecosystem. Creators and entrepreneurs are legion. The reduction in prices and the multiplication of collective efforts, whether or not supported by foreign countries, lets them launch products. But, most often, they must create the ecosystem that any initiative like this needs in order to exist and prosper.

It’s sort of a wake-up call.

 

An Activist Entrepreneur

Bruno Legendre acts with an unrelenting logic that I described Friday in my weekly column in the Science & Techno supplement (Article in French; subscription required). But I wanted to talk about him in a little more detail on several points:

• As an agronomic engineer, he quickly realized that there was something wrong with traditional development aid. Basically, it doesn’t help the people who “benefit” from it to help themselves (my terms).
• He therefore created a company, Performances, which does not allow him to receive grant aid (the French and those they influence are like that).
• But there are companies and there are bigger ideas. Legendre’s has two major characteristics:
  • All the entities involved (those who finance and those who receive the services) have equal voice on the board of directors.
  • The company tasks itself with the little things instead of big ones, for example installing small oil presses that allow the production of good on-site oil instead of limiting rural Senegalese to agricultural production and relying on distant industries for industrial processing. The main objective is to produce fuel from jatropha, a shrub originating in the Americas.
• Without grants (see above), Legendre created a partnership with a French NGO that participates in financing (and thus has a seat on the board).
• He recognizes the essential role played by ICTs (information and communications technologies), which helped him find the partners he works with, and that allows them to work together, as they track his on-site activities virtually.
• But he understands that producing energy encourages electricity consumption, often among lower-income populations, to the detriment to other jobs like education. The growth in mobile and television ownership pushes young people to leave home in the pursuit of another country’s dreams. This path is not inevitable, if people are given knowledge in addition to dreams.
• For this, Legendre has created a rural education program.
• Finally: in order to act freely in civic society, he has taken Senegalese nationality.

Coherent and consequential, no?

 

M-Farm lets Kenyan farmers find market prices with SMS

Simple, efficient and effective, the application developed by M-Farm allows rural Kenyans to know the market price of the products they sell in regional markets. They can also use the service to transport their crops or buy fertilizer.

And the best thing about it is the business was built by three young women still in school, after a professor told them about a mobile-app competition. They entered and won, receiving €10,000 to develop their application.They next created a company that was quickly selected by m:lab, a Kenyan incubator.

“The application relies on three features,” co-founder and head of marketing, Linda Kwamboka, 23, explains. “The starting point was the price-enquiry module: the farmer sends an SMS to the code 3535, noting the product and the location they’re interested in, and in less than 10 seconds the service sends them the price, which lets them decide where to sell.”

For example, sending an SMS saying “price, cabbage, Embu” will return the average price on a 126kg bag of cabbage in the city of Embu. But by typing “price, cabbage, Nairobi,” a farmer finds out that they could sell the same bag for five times the price in the capitol. It’s up to the farmers whether the difference in transport costs make the trip worth it.

The two other functionalities allow farmers to buy and sell together via SMS.

But companies in incubators like m:lab are trying to create businesses, and so there’s the question of a business model. This is also simple. M-Farm charges 10 Kenyan shillings per SMS, about 10 cents. Kwamboka says that farmers have no problem paying this fee because it allows them to save thousands of shillings.

A small detail I teased her about: since I didn’t have any credit when we did the demonstration on her phone, Kwamboka had to go out and recharge her pre-paid card. An ever-present problem that mobile fans always forget to mention, and something I’ll talk about again.

No matter what, the service is interesting. In less than a year (the company started in November 2010), the regionally limited pilot project already has 2,000 users in its database. 400 farmers use the feature that lets them buy or sell together.

I’d imagine they don’t stop here. Do we wish them good luck?

 

Campaigning against car horns in Casablanca

Selma Benjelloun is slim, shy, discreet and determined. She needs to be in order to enter into a fight with this city’s deafening car horns (klaxons in French)– perhaps the wost that I’ve ever heard, and not only in terms of noise. Almost as soon as you land, your ears are assaulted with urgent honking.

But how do you convince people to stop?

To do this, Benjelloun is counting on the help of her brother, who owns a printing shop, as well as on social media. It’s a true challenge.
“We launched the initiative at the end of January, 2011, right in the middle of Arab Spring,” she explains. “We felt sort of ridiculous attacking noise pollution while the revolutions were taking down entire regimes. But we’re still fighting.”

She uses Facebook and Twitter, among other services, to “use commando tactics to come face-to-face with drivers.” Her group meets at traffic circles at rush hour to distribute stickers and engage in conversation.”

It’s a question of raising awareness into civil action: “honking is an act that only we control. It’s not the government creating the pollution. Stopping it is up to us.”

The movement quickly received a lot of support from the media. But Benjelloun wonders if newspapers and radio and television stations cover it to avoid talking about politics. “It’s a way of showing an example of non-frontal combat against the system. It’s soft news, but there are things outside of confrontation that also work.”

Casablaklaxoon.com (French), the site where she organizes her campaign, means “Casa without klaxons.” If I lived in this city, I would do everything I could to help her to succeed, but the stickers are still rarely seen and a taxi driver told me, “you can’t drive here without a horn.”

Benjelloun has heard even worse than this, someone else telling her, “I’d rather lose my brakes than my horn.”

Is silencing car horns harder than overthrowing a dictatorship?

 

How do you ask the innovation question?

Casablanca — Lean, sporting a light beard, Adnane Charafeddine has the intense look of someone with a vision. And yet, when he shows me his method of innovating, I’m surprised – his art is copying. That’s how he created QuelleVoiture.ma (What a Car), a social site bringing together car buyers and sellers. Buyers can find info on cars that are available, read about the race car they dream of buying, and how to maintain the car they can actually afford.

“We simply and viciously copy things people are doing in other places,” he explains – in this case, that means copying several automobile magazines and other specialized sites. “What find what works best. We copy it and then we watch. That’s my method.” I write about this in more detail in an article comparing his method with that of two other Casa entreprneurs, published Friday in Le Monde’s Science&Techno supplement (Article in French; subscription required). It makes you think.

Having set off on a world tour of innovation, I realized during the second stage that I’ve been asking the wrong question. And I’m trying to figure out how to correct this.

After spending 15 years in the San Francisco region, the idea that innovation means creating something that didn’t exist before had become ingrained. I was wrong. This false ideal stays with you, as Mohamed Oumazir, who helped me meet Adnane and the others, reminded me with a friendly smile.

Didn’t the great Steve Jobs first see the mouse and graphics interface at the Xerox Parc labs?

Combining these, the Mac changed personal computing. The innovation was in the packaging and marketing. All markets are by definition relative. In fact, even if they’re often less provocative than Adnane, the people I meet seem to be on the same wavelength, with variations that I will have to learn how to interpret.

This is the case, for example, with Carla Gómez Monroy, a former student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab. In Mexico, she told me that, even if her country lacked audacious capital (my term) and the incentive to innovate, she was fascinated by the hacking people are doing there, creating solutions “that are nothing extraordinary, but solve concrete problems.”

Copying and modifying and modifying through combination might not be that different. According to Wikipedia, the term comes from the Latin “innovatus,” to renew or change.

This gives us at least two possibilities: innovation means bringing to the market something that didn’t exist before. It also means finding new ways to solve problems in an established space.

So we get to the fact that San Francisco innovates for its geek population is able to spread variations on products and services across multiple markets. But Casablanca, Nairobi, Mumbai and Shenzhen don’t innovate any less, but do so for their own increasingly connected multitudes. Maybe I’m wrong. Tell us.