Edwin's Corner

In the late 1990s the fastest way I communicated with my family was by waiting in line at my high school’s telephone booth. I always prayed that someone would pick my call on the other end.  We have come a long way in two decades and a mobile revolution has broken down the barriers that kept us apart. The rapid urbanization we see today is as a result of better communication.   It is estimated that by 2016, 500 million Africans will be living in urban areas and the number of cities with more than a million people will increase to 65 .   In these cities traffic congestion, water and air pollution, cramped and littered living spaces will continue to be a constant reminder of strained resources.     While all this is happening a technology revolution is quietly taking shape.  In 2014, Mozilla announced the intention of developing a $25 smartphone in a consortium with Indian phone-makers, Spice and Intex, and Chines...

A cursory observation of NASA’s missions as they lift off illustrates the deep desire for man to explore the uncharted space. What it fails to illustrate is the deluge of terabytes of data that such missions create on an hourly basis. Big Data is a reality that can only be ignored at a cost. There is no industry today that does not need the right kind of data to sustain its strategic objectives. “Big Data is an all-encompassing term for any collection of data sets so large and complex that it becomes difficult to process using on-hand data management tools or traditional data processing applications.” Wikipedia   Over the last 20 years data has moved from the confines of the organization and exploded into the hands of billions of people interacting on the Internet. Today, individuals generate 70% of online data and this will increase as 3 billion more people come online by the end of this decade. More ‘Things” are coming onli...

A few weeks ago I had a chat with Emmanuel Kweyu, the Operations Director at Strathmore i-Lab about their work on e-health in Kenya. I also started delving into the world of moon shots as depicted by Larry Page , who lives by a 10X mindset. Instead of aiming to improve something by 10%, like everyone else, make it 10 times better. This thousand percent improvement on the current situation is what we term as a moon shot. It requires rethinking problems entirely and exploring the edge of what is technically possible. Using Peter Diamandis’  “ six Ds of exponentials ”, which is a way of thinking about exponential technologies and how they are affecting our world today. I wanted to investigate their proposition for transforming healthcare in Africa.  Why? Because when you look at Africa’s state of health care as a unit, the picture is one of a generally poor population, subject to diseases that have been eradicated or under control i...