What The Konza Technopolis Promises

60 Km south of Nairobi sits a 5,000-acre piece of land that has been earmarked for a multi-billion shilling technopolis. A technopolis ‘technology city’ is an area with a collection of buildings dedicated to scientific research on a business footing. Typically businesses and organizations in the cities focus on product advancement and innovation. A ground breaking ceremony of the project is scheduled for September this year, as part of Kenya Vision 2030 flagship projects. A master plan for the phase one of the Kshs. 800 billion project has been drafted by International Design Engineers, Pell Frischmann from London, UK. This phase will include a science and technology park spearheaded by the Ministry of Science and Technology, a Business Processing and Outsourcing (BPO) park, world class hotels, a stadium and other social amenities typical of a city.

But what causes excitement about this project? Kenya intends to use the facility to promote conference tourism and is preparing a bid for the 2018 GSMA World Congress.
The annual meeting brings together 800 of the world’s mobile operators, more than 200 technology companies and about 50,000 IT executives. The new city will be under Konza Technology City Authority, a new parastatal to be created to ensure continuity of the project. Various firms will be competing for contracts to build Kenya’s multi-billion Shilling dream ICT park on a 5,000-acre site south of Nairobi. In the list of contenders are India’s Mahindra, Tata Infrastructure, Leasing and Financial Services, Wipro from America and global technology firm IBM. Winners of the master builder tender are expected to develop property on location and upon conclusion lease it out (for 99 years) or sell it to interested buyers.

Similar cities already exist in Malaysia (PutraJaya), Panama (Pacifico), the Philippines (Subic-Clark) and China (Shenzhen). Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) ventures have recorded tremendous growth globally. For instance, India took over most of the BPO services – from search engine optimization to contact center services, an avenue that Kenya will be pursuing. India had revenues of US$10.9 billion from offshore BPO and US$30 billion from IT and total BPO (expected in FY 2008). Important centers in India are Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai, Kolkata, Mumbai, Pune, Patna and New Delhi.India thus has some 5-6% share of the total BPO Industry, but a commanding 63% share of the offshore component.

In the Philippines, pioneer BPO companies developed and expanded their services not only in the country’s capital but to other key cities such as Cebu in the south. Other prominent examples include the Hsinchu Science Park in Taiwan, The Research Triangle Park in North Carolina, NanKang Software Park, Cambridge Science Park and NETpark in County Durham, England, Pardis Technology Park in Iran and Daedeok Innopolis in South Korea. Security risk is the major drawback with Business Process Outsourcing. Outsourcing of an Information System, for example, can cause security risks both from a communication and from a privacy perspective.

If Kenya decides to set up a BPO park at the Konza Technolopolis, using world class infrastructure and technology, the park would to facilitate research, education and business, creating thousands of jobs for the innovate ‘techies’ with a business acumen. Besides building area, these parks offer a number of shared resources, such as uninterruptible power supply, telecommunications hubs, reception and security, management offices, restaurants, bank offices, convention center, parking, internal transportation, entertainment and sports facilities, etc. In this way, the park offers considerable advantages to hosted companies, by reducing overhead costs with these facilities.

The new city is part of a strategic plan to position Kenya as the region’s technology hub, using the development to entice venture capitalists to finance local companies and international companies to set up base in the country. Venture capital is financial capital provided to early-stage, high-potential, high risk, growth startup companies. The venture capital fund makes money by owning equity in the companies it invests in, which usually have a novel technology or business model in high technology industries, such as biotechnology, IT, software, etc. The typical venture capital investment occurs after the seed funding round as growth funding round in the interest of generating a return through an eventual realization event, such as an IPO or trade sale of the company. Venture capital is a subset of private equity. Therefore all venture capital is private equity, but not all private equity is venture capital. For local talent, this is a reason why the project should be exciting!

Technology For Entertainment

In June this year, a holographic telepresence session was demonstrated at the Cisco Expo 2011 at the KICC - for the first time in Africa. A 3D image of a Cisco Executive at San Jose was beamed to a screen in front of an audience in Nairobi, creating an almost real life interactive experience. This was similar to the CNN's holographic election coverage in November 2008 in the US. The cable news network projected 3D 360 degree footage of virtual correspondent Jessica Yellin from Chicago all the way to the station's election center in New York. The female reporter seen in the CNN newsroom was actually miles away but appeared to be standing on stage inside the room courtesy the "hologram technology". The concept of 3D telepresence, a real-time dynamic hologram depicting a scene occurring in a different location, attracted considerable public interest since it was depicted in the original Star Wars film in 1977.

Holography is a technique that is used to display objects or scenes in three dimensions. Such three-dimensional (3D) images, or holograms, can be seen with the unassisted eye and are very similar to how humans see the actual environment surrounding them. A practical method of producing truly three-dimensional images that do not require the viewer to wear special eyewear has many potential applications - in telemedicine, mapping and entertainment, for instance. A 50 Hz nanosecond pulsed laser is used to write the holographic pixels. Multicoloured holographic 3D images are produced by using angular multiplexing, and the full parallax display employs spatial multiplexing. However, the challenge for most entertainment devices is the lack of the capability to update images with sufficient speed to convey movement.

Apart from holographic telepresence, television series such as 24, NCIS, CSI NY, Bones and Grey's Anatomy, have been featuring technologies such as HD telepresence, GSM triangulation and 3D Project Mapping. Also growing in popularity is 3D gaming, both online and offline. Modern game or graphics engines generally provide a scene graph, which is an object-oriented representation of the 3D game world which often simplifies game design and can be used for more efficient rendering of vast virtual worlds. As game engine technology matures and becomes more user-friendly, the application of game engines has broadened in scope. To facilitate this accessibility, new hardware platforms are now being targeted by game engines, including mobile phones (e.g. Android phones, iPhone) and web browsers.

3D projection mapping has recently emerged as one of the subtle forms of advertising, with big companies like Nokia, Samsung and BMW projecting beautiful 3D video displays on buildings around the world and sharing their campaigns on the web. 3D projection is any method of mapping three-dimensional points to a two-dimensional plane. As most current methods for displaying graphical data are based on planar two-dimensional media, the use of this type of projection is widespread, especially in computer graphics, engineering and drafting. Using the 3D projection mapping technique video artists are able to project images, video and motion graphics onto buildings and other 3D objects to make it look as if the objects are moving, morphing, and changing structure.

Computer Generated Imagery, or CGI, is an emerging aspect that has changed motion picture special effects. Digital compositing allows far more control and creative freedom than optical compositing, and does not degrade the image like analogue (optical) processes. Digital imagery has enabled technicians to create detailed models, matte "paintings," and even fully realized characters with the malleability of computer software. The most spectacular use of CGI has been the creation of photographically realistic images of fantasy creations. Images could be created in a computer using the techniques of animated cartoons or model animation. In 1993, stop-motion animators working on the realistic dinosaurs of Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park were retrained in the use of computer input devices.

What we commonly known as animation is actually called rendering in CGI. Rendering is the final process of creating the actual 2D image or animation from the prepared scene. This can be compared to taking a photo or filming the scene after the setup is finished in real life. The mode of CGI is making its way into the local entertainment content such as Ngukinyukia by Kayamba Africa, Reuben Kigame's Mushukuruni and the Sunflower Kids Club's Where Will I go, Twamwimbia by Balozi Productions. Rendering may take from fractions of a second to days for a single image/frame. In general, different methods are better suited for either photo-realistic rendering, or real-time rendering.

And Here Comes The Cloud Phone

Just when you thought cloud computing was complex enough, here comes a cloud phone. Mobile service providers can offer subscribers their own telephone numbers and identities without the need to sell devices or SIMs with every number. Subscribers can make and receive calls and messages from multiple accounts from a single device or anyone else’s phone in complete privacy, just like you or I can access email by logging in and out of our accounts on other people’s computers through a web browser. The cloud phone customer uses the same top-up vouchers, applications and mobile carrier care system as any other prepaid user. The system requires no special handset features, SIM cards or additional client software. Since the person can't always have the phone in hand 24/7, she can nominate a friend or family member who has a personal phone to receive notifications on her behalf.

Movirtu, a UK-based company that provides Mobile Identity Management (MIM) solutions for wireless telecommunication service providers, plans to roll out a cloud phone aimed at low-income users in Madagascar. The product was being tested in 2010 and started being deployed as a pilot in Madagascar by Airtel Madagascar. With a single community phone, such as ‘Simu Ya Jamii’, an agent will be able to offer access to individual accounts and the customers will be able to maintain their called identification (Caller ID). The account details are stored in the operator's hub and each individual user on the platform gets to store contacts and can have a service which forwards missed calls to another phone for when they are not logged in. It also contains a gateway that will allow them to use m-money services like M-Pesa.

According to the World Bank, 4 billion people live on less than Kshs. 180 ($2) per day – most of who live in Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. This means that buying a phone for this population is not a priority as compared to basic needs such as food. With the cheapest phone going for around Kshs. 1,000, this cost is beyond their means thus most of these families miss the opportunity to enjoy services that most of us do on the mobile network. Their lives could be greatly enhanced socially and economically with access to a mobile phone. The mobile phone immediately puts them in touch with families, healthcare services or potential employers, without having to travel many miles from their rural villages. Hence, a cloud phone shared among three or five persons would bring reprieve to the rural communities and provide a channel of communication to the outside world.

So, how does a cloud phone work?

Once launched by a local operator, people subscribe to the service by visiting their local village payphone agent or airtime voucher vendor to purchase a mobile number. To access their account, they simply borrow a phone from a friend or family member or use a community phone. No special handsets, SIM cards or additional client software are required; rather, the service works instantly on all basic mobile handsets available today
The subscriber enters a network code; that, in turn, activates the cloud infrastructure platform, such as MXShare from Movirtu, and enables the Cloud Phone service on the handset. The Cloud Phone service makes them an identified subscriber with a unique phone number and prepaid account.
Movirtu will be charging a subscriber an estimated amount of between Kshs.10 to Kshs.20 to buy a phone number which will then give a subscriber access to the phone profile in the cloud mobile infrastructure. The subscriber logs in with his or her own number and a pin code for authentication. Then a prompt is played by the cloud platform such as, "Hello, John. Your balance is Kshs.20. You have two missed calls. You've got one SMS message." The call costs are the same as the existing prepaid tariffs that already exist on the prepaid network. Besides allowing subscribers to receive remittances, the technology can be used as a gateway for the introduction of shared mobile-Web enabled devices in the rural communities. This will propagate better services such as m-commerce, m-health and m-learning. These services are key in the achievement of the objectives of Vision 2030.

Is Your Data Really Secure?

Several days ago, suspected hackers tried to steal the passwords of hundreds of Google email account holders, including those of senior U.S. government officials, Chinese activists and journalists, Google claimed. The company said it recently detected the security breach and stopped what it described as “a campaign to take users’ passwords and monitor their emails, with the perpetrators apparently using stolen passwords to change peoples’ forwarding and delegating settings.” Google’s email service enables users to forward messages automatically and grant others access to their accounts. In April, the media covered a story on a cyber attack on Sony Corporation by a group of unknown cyber criminals who hacked into their servers and stole the data of over a 100 million users. Ring a bell? The entire fiasco is reported to have cost Sony an estimated figure of over $171.2 million, but more importantly seemed to have lost the trust it had with its customers. By comparison, the earthquake and tsunami March 11 caused an estimated $208.5 million hit on the company's profit for the fiscal year ended March 31.

Most often than not, we provide more and more information to the Internet about us, our lifestyle and family from blog posts, social media sites and friends’ pages. However, we seldom stop to consider how secure your data is. The recent cyber attack events went on to illustrate that the importance of data security is critical, both for computer users and most businesses. There are three kinds of data; data at rest, data in motion and data in use. Bank account details, client information, payment information, personal files and so on are data we store, share or use for different purposes. All of this information can be hard to replace and potentially dangerous if it falls into the wrong hands. Data lost due to disasters such as a flood or fire is crushing, but losing it to cyber criminals or a malware infection can have much greater consequences. Threats to data security can either be physical-such as a fire, power outage, theft or malicious damage- or human- such as the mistaken processing of information, unintended disposal of data, cyber attack or erroneous input.

So, how can we secure our data? Data security starts with a strategic planning and risk assessment. Technically, it’s not possible to guarantee 100% security for data in any form; we can only avert cyber attacks and mitigate their impact. The key questions we would ask ourselves: What would happen if you lost your’s or your organization’s data? ; What would happen if an organization lost your data?; Who has access to data at rest?; Who is allowed to move data?; Who uses the internet, email systems and how they access it? Who will be allowed access and who will be restricted?; Whether or not one is required to use passwords and how they are maintained? and properly training the staff and enforcing data security. We can then identify areas of vulnerability and develop strategies for securing your data and information systems. Since data can be compromised in many ways, the best security against misuse or theft involves a combination of technical measures, physical security and a well educated staff.

Hand-held devices and laptop computers have become popular in the business environment. To a mobile worker, there are benefits aplenty to mobile information access. According to McAfee, on average, one in three employees keep sensitive work-related information on their mobile devices. However, as mobile access to sensitive corporate information becomes more popular and the number and type of mobile devices used to access such information increases, security is an important concern. Mobility has its own characteristics and, hence, security issues. Mobile computers are at a much greater risk of data loss through damage and theft. The mobile device problem goes both ways. While many employees use their personal devices to handle work-related tasks, such as accessing corporate email and viewing documents, nearly 63 percent of work-issued mobile devices were being used by employees for personal activities, such as access to Internet.

Given the unique nature of the mobile environment, mobile security is not a single security solution but rather a combination of solutions extending the existing security infrastructure to the location of the mobile devices. An administrator needs to create security policies specific to mobile device usage. In case of a loss of a mobile device, we need to minimize the impact of the lost device: Password-protect all devices, encrypt sensitive documents on the device, and don't use automatic scripts for VPN login. Mobile device security policies should also include minimizing access to limited sources using firewalls. It is also important to protect the device from physical damage by using a casing. Internet access should be in needful and careful manner to prevent spyware from invading our mobile devices.

Access To Technology For People Living With Disabilities

In Kenya and East Africa, there is a critical shortage of resources and opportunities for people with physical or mental disabilities. One major challenge that people with disability face is low literacy levels and in essence access to modern technology. Computer literacy, in particular, is paramount in the day-to-day activities of today’s world; using smartphones, ATMs, Job Applications, E-Commerce and so on. Various organizations have come to their aid by providing basic training on fundamentals of computer literacy that will positively impacts the lives of people living with disabilities. On top of this debilitating lack of education, opportunities to join the workforce are further hindered by general bias and a lack of awareness that people with disability can handle many of the same tasks that sighted people can.

Deaf Aid, a Norwegian development organization, has been working hard to change that by engaging in several programs throughout Kenya that are helping deaf youth develop valuable knowledge and skills. Deaf Aid’s activities include creating a Kenyan sign language, launching an education and child development center in the Kibera slums, and, most recently, providing educational resources to help deaf students develop IT skills. Deaf Aid in conjunction with Cisco Systems established a Cisco Networkin Academy with a lab to equip deaf students with ICT skills. Hital Muraj, Cisco Networking Academy manager for East Africa facilitated the establishment of the academy while the Norwegian Government supplied refurbished computers.

The academy had to develop sign languages useful in the identification of gadgets like hard disk, and Internet for easier understanding. Out of the first 15 students who have graduated from the Cisco Networking Academy program, 11 have found internships and four have started full-time jobs. Andrew Wasike, a former student at the academy, is a technician with Computer Planet. Computer Planet is a computer maintenance and networking services company located along Mombasa Road. Wasike is responsible for software installation, networking, and repair of computers and printers. This is a rare opportunity for a deaf student.

InABLE, an organization based in the US, has set pace in assist blind and visually impaired children access technology. To improve future opportunities for these children, inABLE has brought computers, the internet and assistive technology to the blind children of Thika School for The Blind. The organization believes that computer literacy will not only allow our students to bridge the academic gap with their sighted peers, but also arm them with valuable skills that allow them to enter a job marketplace that has dismissed them for too long. The idea came up about when the founder of inABLE, Ms. Irene Mbari-Kirika, traveled back to her Kenya from the US to establish a library and encountered a particularly engaging group of blind students had insufficient educational resources and nonexistent assistive computer technology.

People who are blind and visually impaired, however, find cell phones difficult devices to operate. Basically, a phone has got a screen, keys, and switches for power and volume. One key is often indistinguishable from another by touch. The screens are small. The switches are often in inconvenient locations. Incorporating a keyboard for sending text further complicates the device. Most phones do not have audio output of either keys pressed or information displayed on the screen. Over the years earlier several companies were have been to experimenting with more accessible designs. Current smart phones can access email and the Internet; limitations in their screen-reading software prevent the plethora of information from being read aloud.

Audiovox was one of the first to develop a voice-recognition system for the cell phone. Its Voice Guidance System gave users the ability to speak a phone number to dial and listen to incoming caller ID. Verizon soon followed with its own software. A recently added application called Voice Genesis Vemail allows email to be read aloud on some phones. Samsung entered the field with the design of a conceptual Braille keyboard phone. The Touch Messenger would enable visually impaired users to carry on a mobile conversation in Braille. The device has two Braille pads. Messages can be typed on the top keypad and read on the lower. Some cell phones advancements can have previously unforeseen benefits for visually impaired users. Kurzweil Technologies, the inventor of various text-reading devices, has developed a device based on the Nokia N82 smart phone. This new phone literally reads to you. Take a picture of a printed page or an object, guided by a voice-recognition system. Press a button, and presto—printed material is read using a synthesized voice.

So, how would the deaf use smartphones? For most smartmobile phones, they must send text messages. But that can be limiting because it doesn’t convey emotions, voice inflections or body language. Engineers at the University of Washington have developed a system that helps deaf and hearing-challenged users communicate using video chat. For most people, video chat on cellphones is a fun application. But for deaf users, video chat could make a huge difference to their quality of life.With video chat, they can use Sign Language, just as they do in face-to-face conversations. The software, mobile ASL, can potentially run on any device. The software is specially designed to allow video chat through cellphones, without taking up a lot of bandwidth.