bring on th the ice age ...

A couple months ago, Samantha Spooner of Kenya's Nation Media group asked if she could interview me for a special report she was putting together on the entrepreneurial African tech scene. The questions Samantha asked me mostly centered around my entry into the IT field and led to the topic of what I was currently working on. The resultant articles form the interviews by Samantha and her colleague  

• Africa's Software Developer's Build Global Gem's from Dusty Kiosk's - Business Daily Review, Kenya  
• Africa's Hottest Techies - Africa Review, Kenya
• African's on Tech Edge - Africa Review, Kenya

If you read the articles you may realise that I mention that I left Africonnect Zambia Ltd. Something that I haven't mentioned yet on this blog ... I left Africonnect in March of this year (2010) after we came to the conclusion that running a design unit within the ISP wasn't yielding the kind of results that we had hoped it would when I joined the team. During the time I was at Africonnect, our moribund group of four (often three and later two) man unit worked hard to introduce a new level of communication architecture and design to the Zambian website scene. We relished every single challenge that came our way. However, a challenge we consistently struggled with involved the clients (esp. government) realising the true cost of professional services like web design, content writing and web-based platform development. It eventually became very hard for a highly skilled team like the one I lead to compete with one man "joomla" website production who offered the client an all inclusive price that was often less than a quarter of our production cost.

The pro free market pundit would argue that it was probably fair game  and I would be inclined to agree except in this instance the client very often isn't completely aware of the cost implications on quality for the product they seek. The Zambian corporate buyer very often assumes that getting website is like waling into a shop to buy a word-processing package. Unfortunately, unlike a common disposable item in the case of websites ... one size does not fit all. One glance, at almost all the Zambian government websites serves as proof that the lowest bidder in a tender to provide website services probably doesn't know what they are talking about. 

Welcome the ICE Age ...

When I left Africonnect, I was pretty worn out in-part because aside from client websites - we were always working on (and maintaining) our own projects - iSMS.zm, ndola.co.zm, mongu.co.zm, etc. The reality is, at the end of the day, we didn't enough time and manpower to get these projects out in the way I wished we could. I am a content person at heart and not being able to do good justice to our own content projects always broke my heart. 

I a couple of weeks off to rest and when I eventually got back to consulting with friends, family and a business partner about what could be offered in the Zambian market. digital ice interactive media was born out of these discussions. The idea is simple - to work with clients that intend to realise measurable benefit from communication online.  To test the markets need for our services, we've decided to bootstrap this venture meaning that it hasn't borrowed any more and it grows solely on the payments it receives (probably explains why I'm the only employee  to-date) and so far ... Our own website is pretty rubbish at the moment but look forward to getting a proper description of the services we offer soon.

The other area that we're (trust me, my business partners do exist) getting back to is content - BH Magazine which I was privileged to start with a couple of friends in 2000 has been dormant for the good part of the last two years. If you've read the articles listed above, you will notice that I mention that it will return this year. We also have in mind at least two more content sites to introduce before year end. I will write more on these in time to come.