0:00:00.349,0:00:03.543
Living in Africa is to be on the edge,

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metaphorically, and quite literally

0:00:06.297,0:00:09.929
when you think about connectivity before 2008.

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Though many human intellectual and technological leaps

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had happened in Europe and the rest of the world,

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but Africa was sort of cut off.

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And that changed, first with ships

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when we had the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution

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and also the Industrial Revolution.

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And now we've got the digital revolution.

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These revolutions have not been evenly distributed

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across continents and nations.

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Never have been.

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Now, this is a map of the undersea fiber optic cables

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that connect Africa to the rest of the world.

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What I find amazing is that Africa

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is transcending its geography problem.

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Africa is connecting to the rest of the world

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and within itself.

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The connectivity situation has improved greatly,

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but some barriers remain.

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It is with this context that Ushahidi came to be.

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In 2008, one of the problems that we faced

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was lack of information flow.

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There was a media blackout in 2008,

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when there was post-election violence in Kenya.

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It was a very tragic time. It was a very difficult time.

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So we came together and we created software

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called Ushahidi.

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And Ushahidi means "testimony" or "witness" in Swahili.

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I'm very lucky to work with two amazing collaborators.

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This is David and Erik.

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I call them brothers from another mother.

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Clearly I have a German mother somewhere.

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And we worked together first with building

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and growing Ushahidi.

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And the idea of the software was to gather information

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from SMS, email and web, and put a map

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so that you could see what was happening where,

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and you could visualize that data.

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And after that initial prototype,

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we set out to make free and open-source software

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so that others do not have to start from scratch like we did.

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All the while, we also wanted to give back

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to the local tech community that helped us

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grow Ushahidi and supported us in those early days.

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And that's why we set up the iHub in Nairobi,

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an actual physical space

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where we could collaborate,

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and it is now part of an integral tech ecosystem in Kenya.

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We did that with the support of different organizations

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like the MacArthur Foundation and Omidyar Network.

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And we were able to grow this software footprint,

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and a few years later it became

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very useful software,

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and we were quite humbled when it was used in Haiti

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where citizens could indicate where they are

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and what their needs were,

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and also to deal with the fallout from the nuclear crisis

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and the tsunami in Japan.

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Now, this year the Internet turns 20,

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and Ushahidi turned five.

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Ushahidi is not only the software that we made.

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It is the team, and it's also the community

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that uses this technology in ways that we could not foresee.

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We did not imagine that there would be this many maps

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around the world.

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There are crisis maps, election maps, corruption maps,

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and even environmental monitoring crowd maps.

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We are humbled that this has roots in Kenya

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and that it has some use to people around the world

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trying to figure out the different issues that they're dealing with.

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There is more that we're doing to explore this idea

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of collective intelligence, that I, as a citizen,

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if I share the information with whatever device that I have,

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could inform you about what is going on,

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and that if you do the same, we can have a bigger picture

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of what's going on.

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I moved back to Kenya in 2011.

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Erik moved in 2010.

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Very different reality. I used to live in Chicago

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where there was abundant Internet access.

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I had never had to deal with a blackout.

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And in Kenya, it's a very different reality,

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and one thing that remains despite the leaps in progress

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and the digital revolution is the electricity problem.

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The day-to-day frustrations of dealing with this

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can be, let's just say very annoying.

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Blackouts are not fun.

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Imagine sitting down to start working, and all of a sudden

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the power goes out,

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your Internet connection goes down with it,

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so you have to figure out, okay, now, where's the modem,

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how do I switch back?

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And then, guess what? You have to deal with it again.

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Now, this is the reality of Kenya, where we live now,

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and other parts of Africa.

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The other problem that we're facing

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is that communication costs are also still a challenge.

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It costs me five Kenyan shillings,

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or .06 USD to call the U.S., Canada or China.

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Guess how much it costs to call Rwanda, Ghana, Nigeria?

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Thirty Kenyan shillings. That's six times the cost

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to connect within Africa.

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And also, when traveling within Africa,

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you've got different settings for different mobile providers.

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This is the reality that we deal with.

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So we've got a joke in Ushahidi

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where we say, "If it works in Africa, it'll work anywhere."

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[Most use technology to define the function. We use function to drive the technology.]

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What if we could overcome the problem

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of unreliable Internet and electricity

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and reduce the cost of connection?

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Could we leverage the cloud?

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We've built a crowd map, we've built Ushahidi.

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Could we leverage these technologies

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to switch smartly whenever you travel from country to country?

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So we looked at the modem,

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an important part of the infrastructure of the Internet,

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and asked ourselves why

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the modems that we are using right now

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are built for a different context, where you've got

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ubiquitous internet, you've got ubiquitous electricity,

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yet we sit here in Nairobi and we do not have that luxury.

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We wanted to redesign the modem

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for the developing world, for our context,

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and for our reality.

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What if we could have connectivity with less friction?

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This is the BRCK.

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It acts as a backup to the Internet

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so that, when the power goes out,

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it fails over and connects to the nearest GSM network.

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Mobile connectivity in Africa is pervasive.

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It's actually everywhere.

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Most towns at least have a 3G connection.

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So why don't we leverage that? And that's why we built this.

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The other reason that we built this

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is when electricity goes down, this has eight hours

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of battery left, so you can continue working,

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you can continue being productive,

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and let's just say you are less stressed.

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And for rural areas, it can be

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the primary means of connection.

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The software sensibility at Ushahidi is still at play

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when we wondered how can we use the cloud

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to be more intelligent so that

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you can analyze the different networks,

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and whenever you switch on the backup,

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you pick on the fastest network,

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so we'll have multi-SIM capability

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so that you can put multiple SIMs,

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and if one network is faster, that's the one you hop on,

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and if the up time on that is not very good,

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then you hop onto the next one.

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The idea here is for you to be able to connect anywhere.

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With load balancing, this can be possible.

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The other interesting thing for us -- we like sensors --

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is this idea that you could have an on-ramp

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for the Internet of things.

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Imagine a weather station that can be attached to this.

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It's built in a modular way so that you can also attach

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a satellite module so that you could have

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Internet connectivity even in very remote areas.

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Out of adversity can come innovation,

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and how can we help the ambitious coders and makers

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in Kenya to be resilient in the face of problematic infrastructure?

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And for us, we begin with solving the problem

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in our own backyard in Kenya.

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It is not without challenge.

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Our team has basically been mules carrying components

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from the U.S. to Kenya. We've had very interesting conversations

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with customs border agents.

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"What are you carrying?"

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And the local financing is not

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part of the ecosystem for supporting hardware projects.

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So we put it on Kickstarter, and I'm happy to say that,

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through the support of many people,

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not only here but online,

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the BRCK has been Kickstarted,

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and now the interesting part of bringing this to market begins.

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I will close by saying that, if we solve this

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for the local market, it could be impactful

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not only for the coders in Nairobi

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but also for small business owners

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who need reliable connectivity,

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and it can reduce the cost of connecting,

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and hopefully collaboration within African countries.

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The idea is that the building blocks of the digital economy

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are connectivity and entrepreneurship.

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The BRCK is our part

0:09:04.923,0:09:07.507
to keep Africans connected,

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and to help them drive the global digital revolution.

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Thank you.

0:09:12.505,0:09:16.744
(Applause)