East Africa Winners

1st prize of $15,000 – The Grainy Bunch by Eric Mutta (Tanzania)
The Grainy Bunch is a national grain supply chain management system that monitors the purchase, storage, distribution, and consumption of grain across the entire nation. It was developed with the understanding that selling “the effects of efficiency” to actors in the grain supply chain is much easier than selling “the effects of climate change”.

Grain is nicknamed the “white oil” which lubricates the engine of Tanzanian growth. Even short-term disturbances in its supply chain adversely affects hundreds of thousands of people. To ensure both food security and economic security for all Tanzanians, a system is required to both monitor and facilitate the supply chain of grain, from the soil to our plates.

2nd prize of $7,000 – Mkulima Bora – Stepheno Maleche, Gerry Nandwa, Joseph Onginjo and Oliver Otieno (Kenya)
Mkulima Bora enables farmers to input the type crop they wish to plant into an app, then it cross-checks meteorological data to determine if the crop is suitable given the timing and location. Mkulima improves farmer yields, saves them time, and money

3rd Prize of $3,000 – Agro Universe – Oliama Brian, Daniel Mumbere, Nabuto Josephine, Bossa Alex, Sanya Duncan, Olwenyi Victor, Kato Charles, Masaba Kizito, Kalema Moses, Namuyiga Winfrey (Uganda)
Agro Universe allows farmers with agriculture products or livestock to alert the app’s community so that they can buy and sell goods from each other. It works on both mobile and the web. The aim of Agro Universe is to create a regional marketplace where products can be sold that may have no demand in the user’s immediate area but that might in areas farther out.

West/Central Africa Winners

1st prize $15,000 – HospitalManager by Victor Ogo Ekwueme (Nigeria)
HospitalManager is a web-based application that helps hospitals and health organizations prepare for disasters such as floods and storms. More frequent heat spells, rains, and floods are leading to heath emergencies, both due to the event itself, and later to water related disease. HospitalManager will help hospitals in Nigeria, and potentially throughout Africa, identify patterns in patient visits following rains and floods, so that staff can better prepare for these situations and save more lives. Hospitals can anticipate incoming disease and emergency patterns using real time climate forecasts. On longer time scales it will allow policy makers to plan locations of new hospitals.

2nd prize $7,000 – Eco-fund Forum by Assane Seck, Guillaume Blandin and Markus Faschina (Senegal)
Eco-fund Forum is a web-based community organizer and geo-localized data exchange tool to help individuals and communities working on sustainable resource management throughout Africa to share their own experiences on best practices. Thus they will better understand and respond to the climate change challenges impacting each specific local context. For example, coastal communities in Senegal that suffer from erosion can learn from neighbors that are successfully and durably overcoming the same problem by regenerating and preserving a littoral forest. Furthermore, the Forum will give those communities a voice which should alert political decision makers to address climate change challenges in time.

3rd prize $3,000 – Farmerline by Alloysius Attah and Emmanuel Owusu Addai (Ghana)
Farmerline is a mobile and web-based system that furnishes farmers and investors with relevant agricultural information to improve productivity and increase income. Lack of information about weather patterns and about which crops grow best in a changing climate hurts rural farmers’ yields. Cell phone use is growing rapidly throughout Ghana, including in rural areas. This mobile tool can help farmers in Ghana to get information about agricultural best practices down to the farm level, including choosing crops best suited for their specific location, and how to prepare for changes in the weather (including dry spells, changes in seasonal onset, and extreme events).

The Apps4Africa winners were announced at special ceremonies in Durban during COP17 (West/Central Africa) and Kikuube, Uganda (East Africa). Appfrica highlights the winners.

KABUL, Afghanistan — Afghan President Hamid Karzai on Thursday pardoned an Afghan woman serving a 12-year prison sentence for having sex out of wedlock after she was raped by a relative.

Karzai’s office said in a statement that the woman and her attacker have agreed to marry. That would reverse an earlier decision by the 19-year-old woman, who had previously refused a judge’s offer of freedom if she agreed to marry the rapist.

Despicable journalism that all headlines suggest Karzai simply pardoned the woman, because it is WRONG to imprison a rape victim. In reality, he only did it after she agreed to follow a judges order that she marry her attacker -- who is a relative!

TOKYO — The United States gave a stern warning on Wednesday over recent cyberattacks on Japan’s top defense contractors, the latest in a series of security breaches that have fueled worries over Tokyo’s ability to handle delicate information.

An online assault on defense contractors including Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, which builds F-15 fighter jets and other American-designed weapons for Japan’s Self-Defense Forces, began in August but came to light only earlier this week, prompting rebukes from Japanese officials over the timing of the disclosure. IHI Corp, a military contractor that supplies engine parts for fighter jets, may have also been a target, the Nikkei business daily reported.

The breach came less than two weeks after a Japanese air traffic controller was questioned for posting secret American flight information on his blog. The data including detailed flight plans of Air Force One last November, as well as data on an American military reconnaissance drone, officials said.

The breaches threaten to undermine any progress made by Japan, an important American ally in the Asia-Pacific region, in bolstering cybersecurity in recent years.

The Japanese government had promised to revamp its security procedures after a Navy officer was arrested in 2007 over the leak of classified data on the United States Navy’s advanced Aegis combat radar system, which is also used on Japanese warships.

As Filloux points out, the math in this graph is not pleasant: over the last seven years, The Washington Post has lost five dollars in print revenue for every dollar that it has added in the form of online ad revenue — losing almost $90 million in print revenue while its online business has grown by less than $20 million. Other newspapers may have somewhat different numbers, but the trend is likely to be very similar. And Filloux correctly diagnoses the main reasons for this online-revenue problem:

• Too much free content, which has diluted the value of editorial brands like theWashington Post.

The dilemma for newspaper companies is that incremental change is not really helping them adapt, or as Filloux puts it: “mere adaptive tactics won’t save the traditional news industry in their multi-front war against disruptive technologies.” The Washington Post has done as good a job as any paper of trying to build a business online — online accounts for 43 percent of overall revenue, up from just 10 percent in 2004, according to the figures that Filloux quotes — but overall its business continues to decline because online ads are worth so much less than their print counterparts.

There are no signs that this is going to change any time soon — if anything, online advertising just keeps getting cheaper (newspaper companies are forming private ad networks, but this seems both too little and too late) and that means newspapers are fighting the law of diminishing returns.

[via gigaom.com]

Some people love Facebook, others hate it, and many have a little of both. It can be a great way to keep in contact with old friends and relatives, but it’s also a great way for third parties to harvest loads of free data that may not be used the way you want. Plenty of social sites have popped up over the years in the hopes of dethroning Facebook, but not many have had the goods, or really provided much that would entice a user to switch.

Not long ago, a couple students got together and decided to do something a little different: an open and distributed social network that did not rely on a single company or website to host all the data. Instead, anyone who wishes can create a node for their friends, and users of these nodes can communicate without handing over all their data. This is Diaspora, and right now it’s in some of the early testing phases. We’ve put together an overview of what Diaspora has got now and where it’s likely to go in the future.