Pumzi – A Kenyan Sci-Fi

January 26, 2010 by Leave a Comment

Pumzi, Kenya’s first science fiction film, imagines a dystopian future 35 years after water wars have torn the world apart. East African survivors of the ecological devastation remain locked away in contained communities, but a young woman in possession of a germinating seed struggles against the governing council to bring the plant to Earth’s ruined surface.

The short film, which will screen at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, “started off as a small script about what kind of world we would have to be if we had to buy fresh air,” writer/director Wanuri Kahiu told Wired.com in a Skype interview.

Read More.

Filed Under: Cool Sites, Miscellaneous Tagged With: , ,

Stealth Mode?

December 24, 2009 by 2 Comments

Sometimes I get a lot of emails from people wishing to start a new business or website. One thing that I almost always get from these nice people is that they want me to assure them of absolute secrecy regarding their project. They are afraid that if other people hear about it, then their idea will be stolen.

But is that really true? The sad fact is that no one really cares about your idea anyway. And I speak this from experience – we’ve been involved in a whole lot of projects and the level of secrecy surrounding a project does not affect its success in the least. In fact, the more secrecy there is, the less your chances of success. I bet some of you never thought about it that way, ama? This is especially true if your project involves a lot of technology.

Why? Because high technology start-ups are very very much shaped by and demand a lot of user feedback. You cannot build a perfect project while tucked away in your basement – you need people to continually test it and give feedback so that your product ‘evolves’ into something that is just perfect for your target market. This is the plain truth, dear readers.

Please have a look at: Stealth Startups, Get Over Yourselves: Nobody Cares About Your Secrets by TechCrunch.

What do you think of all this?

Filed Under: Case Study, Cool Sites, Tips Hacking and Reviews Tagged With: , ,

11 Web Apps That You Should Know About

September 22, 2009 by Leave a Comment

LifeHacker has a list of very useful web applications that many people don’t know about. They say, “As with rock music, video games, and other awesome pursuits, great web applications often don’t get enough credit for what they do well..”

Here’s a list of some underhyped web-apps.

  1. The Aviary Suite – Aviary is a webapp maker that specializes in fully-featured Flash apps, and they’re seemingly engaged in a dare to see how much users can get done entirely in a browser.
  2. Fonolo – If calling a company’s customer service line and dealing with automated answering systems fills you with a certain kind of dread, you need a Fonolo account.
  3. Drop.io – Besides giving anyone 100MB of temporary file-sharing space without any sign-up required, drop.io can handle the rare faxing job, record voice memos by telephone, set up quick multimedia presentations, and more.
  4. PDF to Word – If you need to grab elements from a PDF, edit part of its text, or cut down its size, you might try converting it to a Microsoft Word file.
  5. YouMail – For those feeling like their phones are under-powered, there’s YouMail. Sign up, follow YouMail’s instructions on setting up your phone to hand over your phone’s voicemail duties to its service, and you’ll be able to listen to or download voicemails from its web site or smartphone apps.
  6. Instapaper & Read It Later – It’s a really cool article or blog post you just stumbled across, but at the moment—right this second—you don’t have time to read it. If you had a bookmarklet or browser plug-in for either the Instapaper or Read It Later service, you’d be able to quickly send that web page to your account for bookmarking.
  7. Lovely charts – The Flash-based webapp produces very clean-looking charts for all kinds of purposes.
  8. Screen Toaster – Fire up ScreenToaster’s site, load its Java-based applet, and you can record surprisingly decent quality screencasts and demonstrations, with audio voice-overs, at the push of a single button.
  9. Tinychat – Setting up a live video, audio, and screen-sharing chatroom for up to 12 people at once seems like something that might require a dozen software installations and point-by-point walkthroughs. Tinychat makes it easy.
  10. Freckle – Freckle doesn’t require you to learn a new set of rules or input methods to track how you spend your time working for clients.
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Get A Free Domain Name With CO.cc

July 23, 2009 by 4 Comments

Co.cc gives away free domains such as example.co.cc. The vast majority of domain names are free, though some more popular ones must be paid for. You can use your co.cc domain to either re-direct to your main website, or a domain itself. You’ll need somewhere to host your website, however.

Search for the domain you want – if it’s available, register it today for FREE! Free for life. I registered www.likechapaa.co.cc yesterday (and configured it to redirect to this website). The only catch is that if you don’t “set up” your free domain within 48hrs, you lose it.

If you are still insure of this online thing, why not try it with a free domain?

Filed Under: Cool Sites, Tips Hacking and Reviews Tagged With: ,

How To Find Profitable Internet Business Models

June 29, 2009 by 1 Comment

So, the much-hyped fibre optic cables are finally here! I don’t know about you, but I’ve been waiting for them for years… Why? The cables are very likely to change the way the internet is accessed and used in Kenya. The main benefits are going to, eventually, be cheaper and faster access to the internet. This probably means that:

  1. There is going to be a sharp increase in the number of people who access the internet
  2. There exists a big HUGE opportunity to make money online in Kenya and this opportunity shall increase as the number of internet users increases.

So, the big question (apart from reading Like Chapaa regularly – subscribe for free if you haven’t yet) is: how do you make money online? There exists big opportunity, but how do we take advantage of it? What can you do to make money online?

How To Find Profitable Business Models
When thinking of starting a business, any business, the part where most people struggle is the conceptualization of the business model. They don’t know what kind of business to start, what market to target, where the revenues are going to come from and so on. The same applies for web businesses, perhaps even more so. People often do not know what sites to create, or how they are actually going to earn money.

Wouldn’t it be great to have a place where you can go to and study, in detail, successfully employed web business models? Is there any place where you can go to to generate web business ideas?

Yes there is, and it is: www.flippa.com

Flippa is a place where people buy and sell websites. The site has had a lifetime total of USD 24 million in sales so a lot of business gets done there! When you visit the site you will find lots of sites for sale. Obviously, some of them are not worth your time so you need a way to separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. You can do it in two ways: click on “just sold” or “browse all listings“.

Clicking on “just sold” will let you view websites that people actually bought. These sites are obviously built on sound web business models as they would not have been bought otherwise. You can click on each site sold to learn more about it and, possibly, why the purchaser paid for and bought it.

Clicking on “browse all listings” is even better. It lets you see a long list of sites up for sale but not yet sold. The thing to do is to browse through the list and check on the number of bids. If people have actually placed a bid on a particular website, it means that they are prepared to buy it. This probably means that the website in question is built on a good and workable web business model. You can click on each listing to learn more about the website.

Now, this is where things get interesting. Since people genuinely want to sell those websites, they will give all sorts of information about them, including details of how they built them, where they get traffic from, where their revenues come from and so on. Better yet, you can ask questions about specific points and the seller will gladly respond to them. Think of the possibilities: you can learn the ins and outs of a web business and then just duplicate it elsewhere.

Just today, I learnt that you can actually be paid for offering free magazines to your website’s visitors. I sincerely do not know anywhere else where you can learn so much detail about existing businesses for free. It’s a goldmine.

I haven’t even touched on the very hot prospects of buying a web business and running it yourself, or improving it and selling it for HUGE profits. Therefore, stay tuned to this site…subscribe to receive free email updates. Or by RSS.

Have a question? Don’t hesitate to ask!

Filed Under: Cool Sites, Make Money, Small Business, Tips Hacking and Reviews Tagged With: ,

Alice and Kev

June 28, 2009 by Leave a Comment

In a brilliant blog, games design student Robin Burkinshaw tells the tragic but fascinating story of what happened when he stripped two game characters of their possessions and left them in a place designed to look an abandoned park, letting his simulated humans fend for themselves.

It’s a virtual social experiment that relies almost entirely on the programming of the characters to decide what happens next.

I’ve read through the entire blog in one sitting (it is that amazing) and I recommend the blog to all of you! While reading through it, it felt like a good book and I could not stop thinking that it would make a great movie or TV series. It just goes to show how good games are getting these days, particularly this game.

Calling the Sims a game is an understatement – it is so much more and you just have to play it to find out that for yourself.

Please have a look at Alice and Kev.

Do not just look at it for its entertainment value. Think about what Robin is doing. He’s drawn a huge amount of attention to his blog and, ultimately to himself. In the process he’s proven what a great storyteller he is (this should work well for his career in game design) and probably earned quite a lot from Amazon.com (if you buy The Sims 3 from one of the links on his site, he gets a commission).

It is a prime example of using what you already have in hand to try and get ahead. What talents/skills/strengths do you have in hand? Are you fully exploiting their potential?

Filed Under: Case Study, Cool Sites, Tips Hacking and Reviews Tagged With:

Scribd and Other Web Delights

June 13, 2009 by 1 Comment

Scribd is a social publishing site where millions of people share documents. It has been called a youtube (sort of) for documents. Scribd lets you upload Word, PDF, text (.txt), PowerPoint, Excel, PostScript, and LIT (.lit) files for private use or public sharing.

Why would you share your documents with the world? Well, Scribd’s CEO, Trip Adler has the answer: by sharing documents you make them social objects that a community can add onto.

“I was skeptical about scribd – yeah, not a great name – but it is helping me change the game for my long children’s book. I needed a solution that was plug and play and enabled me to give readers a terrific experience for my 400+ page book on my web site, and I really wanted a way for them to easily give me feedback on the book. Whala! Scribd. For authors, legitimate ones especially, what a great way to get real market data. Kids read it the book on my site, I count the hits, get their comments, and direct them to buy the paper copy on amazon. Awesome.” – John Wolpert

Like scribd? Try it: www.scribd.com

Other Web Delights:
Opera is about to “reinvent the web“. No one seems to know how, exactly, but I can’t wait to see what they have up their sleeve.
Windows 7 will launch without IE in Europe. Wow.

Filed Under: Cool Sites