On Sat, Aug 28, 2010 at 7:15 PM, Riyaz Bachani <riyaz.bachani@ke.wananchi.com> wrote:
interesting ... goes back to a question i had last month ... we've had fiber for a year now. where are the apps ?
@Riyaz, web apps is a good question. I think you will find the answers from Kenyan internet bloggers. As an example, Kenyan tech bloggers -given that majority are not technologists- are doing a far better job than any web technologists. They do not develop any apps but see trends on frameworks used in other countries and quickly pick on these trends. Most Kenyan bloggers use the existing frameworks like wordpress, joomla etc and roll out quickly what they need. These frameworks, at basic level, do not need any specialization knowledge nor local hosting. So far on my study towards Silverlight, I’ve uncovered many things that are not being done locally. It’s true; there are tiered levels in web app developments. I think that due to commercial reasons and constraints, many Kenyan web technologists focus more on the presentation tier and long term developments beyond this tier are seriously slowed or non-existent. For some people out there like me, presentation tier is the least of my concerns (at this stage). Eg, What made me very curious about twitter and the lack of information, I’m now using twitter as a research and study model with a view of creating a test clone as I progress on my study. Twitter fits perfectly as a web tiered app because the presentation tier is not what made it a success. I hope down the road some of us will be able to partner with bloggers, service and infrastructure providers, businesses etc to bring a new generation of web services to KE. These services could be games, chats, audio, video, managed services etc. I also think the KICTB grants will produce some interesting scenarios for discussions, if they managed to get any web technologists to come up with such apps and services. Me thots and catchup in a few weeks time due to time pressure. :-) Rgds.