Notes from the Maker Faire Africa 2009 in Accra, Ghana from Friday 14th to Sunday 16th August.

Follow the MFA09 aggregator on Maneno.

MFA09 program available here.

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Emeka Okafor – Announcements

What is happening after Maker Faire?

Announcing of prizes:

• Multi machine prize: encourage individuals in Ghana to put together multi machines by the end of the year – 500$
• Next Maker Faire – hopefully in Kenya, Nairobi -> looking forward for a Maker Faire price – 1500$

Acknowledgement of the partners and sponsors

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Emer Beamer,  Patricia – Match a maker

Searching for people with AutoCAD skills, for a sys-admin internship in Ghana or somebody with skills in Shae-butter production – look at Match a Maker, soon to be announced on Butterfly Works

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Mark Davies – Esoko, Wayan Vota – Inveneo, Miquel – Maneno; Building SMS applications and bandwidth ICT models

Phone is perfect for applications as the reach is really good

Various examples:

• Esoko
• Mobi Game 2 Sure
• YoohSMS

Various free APIs

• RapidSMS
• FontlineSMS
• InfoBip
• YoohBulk
• IntelliSMS
• Clickatell

SMS – the lowest common denominator, but also hightest cost per data

Maneno – specifically designed for low bandwidth

• everything compressed (images, …)
• design very light-weight

Advice

• low number of requests
• Google page analyser
• Ajax has to be used cautously – can be very annoying

Where do web developers in Ghana host websites?

• usually in the US
• because of price reasons
• web hosters in Ghana can’t assure 24/7 availability
• maybe hosting content in Africa would be a good idea – or at least Europe as it’s closer to Africa (lower latency)

What about only designing websites for only Africa and not caring about the rest?

For technological discussion – new Accra technology group, meeting every month

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Prizes for engaged people