No Techies on the front page

I remember sometime in September 2009 when news filtered out that the London Stock Exchange had concluded arrangements to acquire Millennium IT, a Sri Lankan software firm that had just developed and deployed what was at the time the world's fastest financial trading platform with the ability to process about 1 million orders per second for about 18 million pounds ....Sterling.

My excitement knew no bounds. For the next few days it was practically all I could talk about.

So much so that it prompted my then colleague Sogo to ask me:

" O boy why this thing de trip you like this? , in fact....wetin de power you ?"

Which in plain English roughly translates to:

"My friend, why is this news exciting you so much? In fact...what drives you? What are you passionate about?"

At the time I really could not give him a straight answer. I just knew that I was very excited. At the time I told him that the reason for my excitement was manyfold.

I de find developers (Boiling The Ocean)

Forgive me reader for I have sinned, it's been like 10 months since my last blog post.
As usual so much water has passed under the bridge since we last had a chat. The tech ecosystem in Africa continues to make steady progress. While things are still a loooooooooong way from where they could be , there have been a number of positives to gloat about . For example more and more people are beginning to realize the value that tech hubs (or innovation spaces or shared spaces or whatever name you choose to give them) can bring to the ecosystem and have started to support them more. It is also heartening to see more events and competitions in the community ...organized by the community for the community such as the Africa Android Challenge and the Innovation Open Ideas event in Douala Cameroon. Interesting times ahead!!!

Anyways, now to today’s gist. I came across this this article some days back. Its a well written article with a lot of useful insights. I do feel however that it is not telling us anything new, that is unless of course you have been living under the proverbial rock for the past 2 years or so. Pretty much everyone has heard at sometime or the other that Africa is new frontier with the greatest growth prospects and all that jazz. The bit that caught my eye was a single sentence, that i know also caught the eyes of a couple of people.
“Though skills are in short supply, they are becoming more abundant”