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This is really cool. Kudos. I shared someone's paper and asked for their feedback, they said it was pretty accurate!

Submitted!

This is really cool. Congrats on the launch. Would be interested to know which low resource languages in Sub-Saharan Africa you'd be working on, particularly in Nigeria and South Africa.

Agreed, it's a shame the wording on this license is so confusing as it's a really nice framework... just way to confusing about what you can/can't do with it

Looks cool, congrats on the launch! Will you guys be doing text to speech in any indian languages? If so would love to see a demo of that!

This is great, nice work!

Out of interest what is the startup idea for propprices? Like the interface but I'm not clear who the customer is

Great work on chart.js. And thanks for your time on this! Hat tip to you!!

Thanks for the info! Really super interesting to hear about your sources of inspiration for this is India.

I think you're onto something with a chat app UX for small businesses!

This is interesting! How did you come up with this idea for emerging markets in particular?

Also, out of interest, what service are you using for the SMS authentication?

Yes! I also really enjoyed the Futurological Congress. The film rendition, while straying from the short story significantly, is still worth watching I think. https://imdb.com/title/tt1821641

Yes, I think this example highlights a point many aren't picking up on. PWAs have been biggest in emerging markets. I think Ali Baba also used them to great effect.

Ever tried to get users in emerging markets on old Android devices to discover, download and update your native app? It's a world of pain.

Really neat. Nice one!

While it is maintained by Atlassian, I found this react library really useful for making customized Trello boards for myself https://github.com/atlassian/react-beautiful-dnd

Creating cards that made sense for my use case was fun... I was going to play with adding a card type that I could work on to create notes with my apple pencil, a bit like postit notes... Anyway, a silly side project for me I guess, but worth a look if you're heavily invested in Kanban format

Thanks for sharing this, is interesting to hear what other folks are doing in practice!

We were actually thinking of migrating to something similar in terms of data fetching to Apollo/graphql and leaving redux for more app wide state problems.

Could you share any further insights on how you started organising this project? I.e. some pieces in Apollo/graphQL while maintaining a redux core, (presumably that's the core you started with?). Would be really interested.

Also I share your sentiment exactly, redux isn't dead. It's still a really solid approach to state management, and in complex applications I still think it's one of the best options. Thanks and kudos to the maintainers!

I think there are a range of software businesses that are now viable given the maturity of the mobile money systems, the penetration of smartphones and coverage of data networks. B2C is tough as purchasing power is low, but if you get to significant enough scale it works out. I'm seeing physical products do better for now in B2C, e.g there are a lot of so called pay as you go solar product players with decent investment now. I think B2B is still pretty untapped though and is personally what I'd explore more. Lots of businesses require tech solutions that solve challenges specific to a doing business context in East Africa. There are a lot of startups in Nairobi now, but quality is wildly variable. There are lots of gaps to fill!

Interesting take the mpesa back story. For those interested in the current state of the mobile money industry in Africa and other developing countries I can recommend GSMA [1].

While I think the "send money home" value proposition story in Kenya was crucial, it doesn't really explain why mobile money works (or doesn't work) as a service. This is basically all to do with massive agent networks. The business model isn't as easy to get going as people assume, and most telcos failed to pull it off. Regulation (or lack of it) was also very critical for Kenya's success.

In general mobile money is fascinating to examine though. And it's an absolute game changer in Kenya!

[1] https://www.gsma.com/sotir/

Agreed. Complex analysis was a great course!

This is really nice. Great work!

The IFC and World Bank appear to hail Tala (and similar organisations) as a top "fintech firm innovating in financial inclusion" [1]

These organisations may be more likely to give companies like Tala support than routing them out, unfortunately.

[1] https://www.european-microfinance.org/publication/financial-...

Thanks for sharing! Seeking a shorter feedback loop makes total sense.

Thanks for the clarification here!

Since you are using freemium at the moment do you have some way of quantifying the hassle that this decision has created? It would be interesting to know more about how you navigate this kind of tradeoff since this is really what matters when it comes to detemerning whether a decision like freemium vs no-freemium is actually a good decision

I went through it the first time by reading over Computability & Logic (5th edition) [1]. I'd love to go over it again, and would recommend it to anyone interested who has a few weekends to invest.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1556746.Computability_an...

I wonder whether the point is more to do with memory. If you can show a person remembers more from watching an instructor code out an example on screen compared to reading a text based tutorial, and they spend the same time doing both, then it may follow that it's more efficient for that individual to learn in a non-text based manner.

In practice, I wonder whether this non-text based learning is more useful in the earlier stages of learning to write code. This might because your learning much more than how to write a valid set of lines that compile to an expected result, there's a lot about style, motivation and norms that you have to soak up too. A lot of that is often implicit in text based tutorials, whereas the video based format makes many minor details explicit (e.g. seeing someone type a line of code wrong, and then explain, 'oh yeah this is a commmon mistake'... this actually encodes a lot of information a text based tutorial would typically miss)

> when a European company casually runs roughshod over that identity [of being an African company] and trades in it, it’s a slap in the face. It effectively lays a beachhead for digital colonizers in the space. “With enough millions you too can claim to be an emerging “African” growth co

I applaud the directness of this article. It's an important issue, there are big market opportunities in Africa and entrepreneurs who are African nationals deserve better access to them.

However, it's important to note there are very successful 'tech' companies part owned by African nationals and incorporated in Africa (as far as I can make out). E.g. SportsPesa [0] which has a mix of Kenyan/European/US founders [1] and looks like one of the most profitable East African companies right now [2] (it blows Jumia out of the water). It's a company doing well enough to sponsor a premier League football club shirt.

I wonder whether the more serious barriers to young African entrepreneurs are their governments & regulatory environments. Incorporating a company, setting up bank accounts and so on in many African countries feels like a challenge in itself. And many African founders may look for US/European founders simply to incorporate entities elsewhere which will likely increase their chances of investment and security. This is where the "beachhead for digital colonizers" metaphor becomes multifaceted. I think the beachhead goes both ways, because there is value to an African national registering an entity, e.g in the UK [3]. This isn't really to do with identity, it's to do with practicality and trust. It's hard to trust institutions in a lot of African countries, and that's a disservice to the people and young entrepreneurs that live there. The smart ones probably won't wait around, they'll figure out the safest foundation for delivering tech products and services to people in Africa.

I'd be interested to hear from any African entrepreneurs working in Africa here on what the practical barriers/solutions have been to setting up companies and getting them working.

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/research/stocks/private/snapshot.a... [1] https://samrack.com/who-owns-sportpesa-here-is-a-list-of-the... [2] https://businesstoday.co.ke/sportpesa-float-ipo-nse-next-yea... [3] https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/10682750/officers

> what is happening today is that the market has almost entirely turned into a betting machine. Not only that, it’s a machine for betting on a horse race in which it’s possible to cash your winning ticket long before the race has actually finished. In the past, entrepreneurs got rich when their companies succeeded and were able to sell shares to the public markets. Increasingly, though, investors are allowing insiders to sell their stock much earlier than that. And even when companies do reach the point of a public offering, these days, many of them still have no profits. According to University of Florida finance professor Jay Ritter, 76% of all IPOs in 2017 were for companies with no profits. By October 2018, the percentage was 83%, exceeding even the 81% seen right before the dotcom bust in 2000.

I thought the end of the article had some of the most interesting content. Amazing how many companies IPO without being profitable!

Thanks! This analysis is really helpful to sense check the accuracy of these kinds of ML predictions based on satellite data.

Out of interest, could you share any further insights around the challenges using the Sentinel-2 data set?

great work, and a nice PWA example. Thanks for sharing!

I would have liked to know why these mods don't just stop doing this free work if they're getting abuse for it.

Without understanding their true incentives to remain mods of these large sub communities it's hard to assess this issue in a more balanced way. Can anyone else shed more light on this?

This is a terrible use of World Bank funds, if true. Where does it say this is funded by Uber though?

I'm 30 now. In my 20s I was all over the place. I studied maths, did my masters, was on the path to acadamia, jacked it all in and went snowboarding for a year. Almost stayed on working as a DJ in the Alps. Then I felt I should go to get a real job, but real job offers scared me because the work seemed to lack any substance (I basically thought the work sounded pointless). I tried a few things and then eventually landed working in mobile tech in Africa and Asia and loved it. Then I moved to Kenya and started a tech startup. I have no idea what will happen next. The key lesson I've learned from all of this is that I could have never predicted what would have happened over this last decade. There have been some ups and downs, but one thing I'm clear on is that I have no regrets about doing what I felt was truly important at the time. If you think it's truly important to go and be a skiing instructor right now then why not just do it. It's hard to be too logical about the these things... try not to leave yourself destitute of course, but it doesn't sound like that's a big risk!