Blerdology is a tech social enterprise focused on increasing the number of African Americans in technology and making life better for those already in the space by facilitating networking and exposure opportunities. We’re also the first organization to host hackathons specifically targeting African Americans.
African Americans compose less than 1 percent of tech professionals and entrepreneurs and we feel this diversity of thought is much needed.
Our hackathons are unique in that we pairs coders with aspiring minority entrepreneurs and build their projects on site for little to no cost. Entrepreneurs also meet with business consultants and investors on site to work through their business models and plan for the future. We collect our coders resumes and supply them to our sponsors and other corporations so that our supporters can further their career ambitions.
We also generally have some type of philanthropic element to our events, often donating a portion of the proceeds to a local STEM or tech-focused charity in the city of the event.
We have upcoming plans for a tech camp with the US State Department and a series of startup mixers across North America.
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A bookmarklet that lets you view a website at various screen sizes and orientations, plus an onscreen keyboard you can toggle on and off.
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A Chrome extension that lets you find torrents—via Google, Bing, Yahoo!, the Internet Archive and torrent-specific search engines—and download them.
Surf also provides “file health estimates”, so you can avoid poorly-seeded swarms.
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Drag any movie file onto Beamer and it will start streaming wirelessly to your TV with Apple TV instantly. No jailbreak required.
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Why did we focus on Africa? The continent’s one-billion people are coming online and 600-million of them already have mobile phones.
It is estimated that by 2040, Africa’s working age population will be the largest in the world, making for a large number of young, active consumers — the brand conscious, aspirational demographic businesses covet. In the last 10 years 117-million Africans have migrated to cities, establishing a larger, wealthier concentration of people in need of goods and services and making Africa more urbanised than India and almost on par with China.
Consumer spending grows by four percent a year and by 2020, Accenture estimates that poverty levels in Africa will fall to 20% from nearly 45% percent in the1980s. The secret is out.
Wired likens the opportunities in Africa to those of the pre-dotcom boom in 1995. Says the magazine:
“If you want to become extremely wealthy over the next five years, and you have a basic grasp of technology, here’s a no-brainer: move to Africa.”
So what opportunities are indigenous African tech startups seizing? Let’s take a look. Please note that this list is not exhaustive by any stretch of the imagination. Instead, consider it a sampling of African talent and be sure to let us know about brilliant startups that should also be on this list.
We look forward to hearing from you and compiling a sequel to this article.
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Mashable | First African Designed Smartphone, Tablet Hit Market
Congolese entrepreneur Verone Mankou wants his tech startup VMK to be for Africa what Apple is for the U.S. and Samsung is for Asia. That is, he wants the majority of people on the continent to use the African-designed smartphone and tablet he is making.
I like the move…
TechStars has teamed up with sports footwear and apparel giant Nike to power the latter’s Nike Accelerator program, which will host 10 companies for a three-month, mentor-driven acceleration program. Powered by TechStars (like the company does in partnership with Microsoft as well), the program aims to leverage the Nike platform to support digital sports technology innovation. (via Nike to kick off a Nike startup accelerator in March 2013, powered by TechStars - The Next Web)
This is a power move by Nike…
(via emergentfutures)
The Russian underground economy has democratized cybercrime | Ars Technica
If you want to buy a botnet, it’ll cost you somewhere in the region of $700. If you just want to hire someone else’s for an hour, though, it can cost as little as $2—that’s long enough to take down, say, a call center, if that’s what you were in the mood for. Maybe you’d like to spy on an ex—for $350 you can purchase a trojan that lets you see all their incoming and outgoing texts. Or maybe you’re just in the market for some good, old-fashioned spamming—it’ll only cost you $10 for a million e-mails. That’s the hourly minimum wage in the UK.
This is the current state of Russia’s underground market in cybercrime—a vibrant community of ne’er-do-wells offering every conceivable kind of method for compromising computer security. It’s been profiled in security firm Trend Micro’s report, Russian Underground 101, and its findings are as fascinating as they are alarming. It’s an insight into the workings of an entirely hidden economy, but also one that’s pretty scary. Some of these things are really, really cheap…
Learn the tricks of the trade….
(via writingcapital)
![How the mighty have fallen | The Big Picture
[…] We believe the U.S. road to Greece travels first through France, the U.K., and Japan. Yikes!
The following chart also fits perfectly into the presentation Hugh Hendry gave at this year’s Economist Buttonwood Gathering. Here’s Hendry:
I go to Japan…It’s hard to believe equities and properties have fallen 80 percent over the past twenty years… The impossible is happening today in Japan. Some of the largest Japanese corporates are on the verge of bankruptcy…
Opportunities for newer giants…](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mcy0rop0Ht1rpnttlo1_500.jpg)
How the mighty have fallen | The Big Picture
[…] We believe the U.S. road to Greece travels first through France, the U.K., and Japan. Yikes!
The following chart also fits perfectly into the presentation Hugh Hendry gave at this year’s Economist Buttonwood Gathering. Here’s Hendry:
I go to Japan…It’s hard to believe equities and properties have fallen 80 percent over the past twenty years… The impossible is happening today in Japan. Some of the largest Japanese corporates are on the verge of bankruptcy…
Opportunities for newer giants…
(via writingcapital)
Microsoft’s Downfall: Inside the Executive E-mails and Cannibalistic Culture That Felled a Tech Giant - Vanity Fair
The same observations about the use of AIM status updates led to Buddy Gopher, an app that consolidated the away field of your AIM buddies on a single page, now long shut down.
Microsoft completely missed the rise of social networks, but amazingly so did AOL, who had AIM as a great starting point.
I wrote about possibly building something cool on top of AIM based on the Buddygopher experiment, way back in 2006, and I was contacted by people reporting to Jim Bankoff, a VP at AOL. We set up a project to build what would have been a very cool app: project name Nerdvana. My partner, Greg Narain, and I were pushing at content curation through a stream-based, open follower architecture leveraging the 400M+ AIM accounts then in use.
Alas, Jim Bankoff, now CEO of SB Nation, left AOL after Randy Falco joined AOL. The project petered out without serious sponsorship, the budget pulled away to other AIM related projects. We never even got to build the prototype.
But Microsoft and Yahoo also failed to try to make the transition from disconnected buddylists to a unified social network. Likewise my client Jabber, who opted to not build a social network solution on top of its distributed protocol, and is now a part of Cisco.
You can say that these ideas were too early, but these are companies that had all the motivation in the world to experiment ahead of the wavefront.
Perhaps this failure to attempt to design speculatively is another proof of Ven Rao’s Manufactured Normalcy Field: the sense that the present will last a good while into the future, instead of the continuous creative destruction mindset, where the present is being relentlessly consumed by the future, which is only a few weeks, days, or minutes from now. But the bigger the company, the more likely they are to act as if the present is eternal, and the future is retreating as fast as they amble forward.
That’s why Microsoft has fallen so far, to the point where Apple’s revenues from the iPhone alone are more than Microsoft’s entire top line. That’s why AOL has fallen like a meteorite, vaporizing on a death trajectory toward the center of the Earth. That’s why Yahoo has lost its mojo. They stopped speculating, and tried to treat the future as the back porch of the present.
(via stoweboyd)
This is a problem all companies face, but tech companies suffers from this the most because their main product is innovation…
(via emergentfutures)
It’s usually associated with government, but according to The Next Web, D.C. has some pretty impressive startup cred. It’s the fifth biggest VC market and home to a number of promising companies. Click through for the full rundown on why the nation’s capital has the right stuff to foster entrepreneurship.
Nice spotlight on the Tech scene in DC
Valuations for tech companies are very hard to gauge….
Very interesting report from Caris & Co. Internet analyst Sandeep Aggarwal today. Although Aggarwal mainly follows the big publicly traded Web stocks — your Googles, Amazons and eBays of the world — he obviously keeps track of the top private firms as well.
Aggarwal and his team put out an…
