Franco Papeschi – World Wide Web Foundation

To Monrovia – Web Foundation’s visit to Liberia

Sep 4, 2012 at 3:01 am • Franco Papeschi • Leave a Comment

Few months ago, in May 2012, I spent a couple of weeks in Liberia, exploring some of the possibilities to start a Mobile Entrepreneurship project in Monrovia. The aim of our visit was to conduct a field assessment to evaluate …

Problem: 7,000 Doctors Serve a Nation of 40 Million People. Solution: MedAfrica

Mar 12, 2012 at 5:39 am • Franco Papeschi • Leave a Comment

The Web Foundation’s Mobile Entrepreneurship Initiative stimulates the creation of new, locally relevant services accessible through mobile and Web technologies by transforming entrepreneurs’ ideas into products, and to build a company (start-up) behind these products.

This is the first in a series of blogposts where we catch up with some of the successful start-ups coming from the labs we are working in (Ghana, Kenya, Senegal).

In September of 2011, two Kenyan geeks – Mbugua Njihia and Steve Mutinda – presented their unreleased product to an audience of US angel investors and technology experts – you may recall a blogpost we dedicated to this event at the end of last year. Their product, MedAfrica focuses on delivering basic information about health and medicine to phones — not just smartphones — and enabling people to use that information on their own.

Now, a few months later, we’ve decided to see what they are up to, and to discover more in detail their continued evolution.

Launching Entrepreneurs du Mobile au Sénégal

Dec 15, 2011 at 4:26 am • Franco Papeschi • Leave a Comment

One of the key strands of the project VOICES is the creation of a training lab that can foster entrepreneurs and students on how to create mobile and web services, with a specific attention on sustainable business models. We …

Mobile Entrepreneurship Initiative @ Over the Air conference

Oct 10, 2011 at 4:22 am • Franco Papeschi • Leave a Comment

Last week I spent one day at Over the Air, checking some of the most interesting evolutions in the mobile world. For those of you who don’t know what Over the Air is:

“a unique tech-agnostic event for and by the developer community, featuring technical workshops where attendees can roll up their sleeves and tinker with new platforms, operating systems, APIs & SDKs; and tutorial sessions that feature real business cases, new insights and a healthy dollop of inspiration. Attendees are invited to stay overnight so that they can work on ideas, apps and hacks on the fly – to be entered into the various hack-athon competition categories and demo’ed on the second day. It’s a great vibe of bean bags, gadgets, knowledge sharing, hacking & lots of good geekery”

UX for (Future) Start-ups. AKA a Week of Training in Nairobi

Jul 5, 2011 at 8:20 am • Franco Papeschi • Leave a Comment

In these 2 weeks since the official launch, lots of things have already happened at the mLab East Africa. For instance, I had the pleasure of being the first trainer to use the new mLab training room!

The 20-ish students spent one week to get to know all things User Experience, from how to engage with potential users in full discovery mode, up until testing a prototype of their products. In between, we stumbled upon things like: personas, user journeys and activity flows, concept blueprints, sitemaps, sketches and wireframes. The goal in a week of highly participatory training is not to create user experience consultants. On the contrary, it’s to help future entrepreneurs and developers learn the elements (tools, practices, approaches) that the User Experience disciplines have refined for years and years, and give them the ability to use in their nimble (Lean? Agile?) way. Consider this as a participatory workshop on UX for Kenyan mobile / web start-ups.

mLab East Africa is GO (and lots happened already)

at 7:29 am • Franco Papeschi • Leave a Comment

mLab East Africa is a project that we have been working on for a while. Activities started last year, and putting all the things together (a physical space, a community of passionate people, a training programme, a competition for start-ups, an incubation centre, a testing room, researches on mobile market) is not an easy task to do in few months. But we are extremely happy now, as the East African mLab is officially opened on the 16th of June, and most of the initiatives have started, and have had good feedback already.

Pivot25 – Day 2

Jun 16, 2011 at 4:16 pm • Franco Papeschi • 1 Comment

Presentations at Pivot25

Second day at Pivot 25 – the mLab East Africa initiative to bring focus on the mobile developer and entrepreneur community in the region; tension started growing a little bit for the participants to the competition, but informal chats and business cards exchange are the most common stress-relief, it seems. Each of the start-ups has a shiny black stand where they can be found but it is easier to stumble upon them while queuing for the coffee or trying some of the sponsors’ geek toys (among the others: Huawei IDEOS, sporting Android OS; Samsung phones and tablets; Nokia N8s).

Pivot25 – Startups, East Africa and Mobile Innovations

Jun 15, 2011 at 2:44 am • Franco Papeschi • Leave a Comment

Yesterday and today it’s all about start-ups: I’m in Nairobi, where the Web Foundation is sponsoring one of the most visible initiatives of the mLab East Africa project: Pivot25.

Pivot25 is a 2-day conf-etition (sorta kinda a mix between a conference and a competition for start-ups): there are heated discussions and panels on topics that go beyond the technical aspects (you should have been here yesterday for the ‘Women in ICT’, to see a proper discussion); there are also 25 East African start-ups presenting their products, their vision and their plans for the future. You can see the live stream here: http://www.capitalfm.co.ke/tv/pivot25

Dakar: Mobile Innovation Lab, Faster Horses and Spring Towns

Apr 12, 2011 at 7:40 am • Franco Papeschi • Leave a Comment

In case you have missed the news, we at the Web Foundation are putting together another Mobile Innovation Lab. This time it’s in Senegal. This is a great opportunity to make our Mobile Web Ghana initiative feel less alone in West Africa, and, at the same time, support other projects that are happening in the French-speaking countries of the region (e.g. the Web-alliance for Regreening Africa). The opportunity has been created thanks to the VOICES project, and the lab is one of the efforts that the Web Foundation is leading in this European project.
The different aspects of the project (e.g. technical experimentation and pilots on voice technologies and web protocols; the human factors research on acceptability) will give the lab deeper expertise and capability to share knowledge with the labs’ participants.

Mobile Entrepreneurs in Africa – First Day of Training

Feb 25, 2011 at 6:16 am • Franco Papeschi • 7 Comments

Start of Web Founation Mobile Entrepreneurs Training Program in Ghana

Max, Florence and myself are currently in Accra for the first training session of the Mobile Entrepreneurs in Africa project. We have worked very hard for the past months to get all the ducks in a row. Yesterday we started one full month of training, workshopping, demoing, sketching, coding, and prototyping mobile services and business models (prototyping business models? Yes! You may want to check this blogpost, for more.