Fresh from last week’s TECH4AFRICA conference, held in Johannesburg from August 12 to 13, head of Flow’s programming team, Richard Frank, looks at some of the key lessons he learned.
1. Mobile is the not the next big thing – it’s big right now
I’ve long been cynical about mobile, sitting behind my MacBook Pro screen, finding it preposterous that people would want to use their tiny mobiles as internet tools. But based on news from places like Kenya, Ghana and Nigeria, mobile is absolutely dominating the African market. And startups like Mocality, mPedigree and iYam are successfully showing how mobile can connect people, both to each other and to products.
And it’s not only in Africa that mobile is becoming a dominant force. Talks from international experts like Dustin Diaz (a user interface engineer at Twitter), John Resig (the creator and lead developer of jQuery JaveScript library) and Jonathan Snook (a Canadian web designer and developer) focused to a larger degree on the mobile space. If the likes of these gurus are excited about it, there’s no doubt that I should be too.
According to Quirk eMarketing’s Rob Stokes, 25% of Google searches in South Africa are done on mobile devices. That is 2-million searches a day – a phenomenal number, even if you factor in that most of these are probably for Facebook.
2. Africa is an exciting place to be
There is some incredible innovation in Africa at the moment. We might be the kings of the 419 scams, but there are some super smart geeks in places like Kenya and Ghana, working toward something more broadly beneficial for their communities. Take Ushahidi for instance, a powerful crowdsourcing tool that allows communities to rally around an issue or emergency – from political violence in Kenya to the recent Haiti earthquake.
SeedCamp, held the day before the conference at the Gordon Institute of Business Science, introduced audience members and venture capitalists at the conference to around a dozen of South Africa’s best startups and entrepreneurs, like Andy Higgins from bidorbuy.co.za. It was interesting to see the number of local Groupon clones starting to look for attention. I spotted two at the conference: Twangoo and Dealcatcher. Watch this space as Groupon clone wars, perhaps like those in the United Kingdom, hit South Africa!
3. There’s just no keeping tabs on tech
Joe Stump’s presentation on scaling and the use of NoSQL Databases gave some food for thought. Performance is something we take for granted in South Africa because we don’t have massive numbers of users – even the top websites in South Africa only need around four servers at most. But as we start to think “global” or even “continental”, we should be paying more attention to the architecture of our next big app.
John Resig’s response to my question about the future of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) in relation to programming logic (variables, mixins etc), was telling. He said it’s not about “if” CSS will ever support these things, it is a question of “whether we will ever be able to use it”. He says he doesn’t see a future where jQuery doesn’t support Internet Explorer 6. That is scary!
Dustin Diaz took us through the Twitter JavaScript API @Anywhere and some of the development decisions he had to make, emphasising that this is some of the cleanest code he’s ever written. He also spoke about the Twitter development team’s peer programming approach. A pair of programmers sit at one desk with two keyboards, two mice, and one screen. Working in this way, developers can talk through their logic and spot each other’s mistakes as they develop an application, ensuring that there are fewer bugs in the system at the end of the day. This is definitely something to consider the next time Flow is building a complex module. I also enjoyed Diaz’s humorous take on buzzwords, especially HTML5, which has come to encompass CSS, JavaScript and basically anything shiny and new in web development, rather than the actual specification. HTML5 is the new “Web 2.0”, so to speak. At this rate, people are going to ask developers to HTML5 their sites, without having a clue as to what that actually means.
Andy Budd made an impressive case for usability, and how people pay for the experience in addition to the product. He took the example of a coffee franchise in London that does extremely well because of good usability design in their (offline) shop architecture – from the queuing experience to the shop’s ambience. Why else would someone pay £2.20 for a cup of coffee if they can get it at half the price down the road? Andy’s talk made me think about how key interfaces for our e-commerce products can be, and how usability design can improve conversion rates.
4. South Africa can host cool tech conferences, too
I’ve been to some dead boring conferences in South Africa, but this one blew me away. I enjoyed the fact that:
- There were very few thinly veiled sales pitches, and the sponsors kept their messages short.
- Each presentation left at least 15 minutes for questions, and speakers were kept on track and on time by moderators. Stuff Editor Toby Shapshak was the standout moderator – he must have been the funniest guy at the conference.
- The speakers were well prepared and professional, and while many of them are absolute rockstars in their particular fields, they did not act like rockstars when mingling with delegates. Nor did they hide away in their hotels. The fact that some stayed right until the close at 7pm on Friday was testament to how committed they were – to technology and to the conference.
- There were two well-defined streams, technology and business, held in separate venues. The downside of this is that I wanted to go to both! I had to make some tough decisions.
- There was plenty of great food, coffee and free beer.
Organiser Gareth Knight and his team should take a bow. I can’t wait for the next conference.