Juliana Rotich had her TED talk this month where she brought light to the invention of BRCK which can offer resilient mobile connectivity for Africa.
Africa has unreliable internet and frequent outages which brings frustration to users and reduces productivity for businesses. To help combat this, the iHub (a sort of internet cafe) was built in Nairobi, Kenya and it has been a central hub for technology and collaboration.
Ushahidi
Ushahidi was built in 2008 when Kenya was faced with a lack of media flow during a countrywide blackout. Ushahidi is a software used to build visualization maps from data such as SMS, email and instant messaging apps. This software is online and open source and acts as a foundation for users to start building their own visualization maps. 2013 would mark Ushahidi’s 5 years of existence and since it’s birth, there have been a large creation of many global maps in various areas of the world.
BRCK
BRCK allows for internet connectivity via a mobile network such as 3G. It offers 8 hours battery life for continuous productivity. It uses ‘the cloud’ to backup information. It has multi-sim capabilities and a fast swopping mechanism which uses load balancing to automatically change to the fastest mobile network.
She also highlights the lack of local financing and using Kickstarter to raise funding to bring the project to market. She sees the product bringing potential to small business, coders in Nairobi and increasing collaboration within African counties.
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