EntrepreneurBait: Africa, Awesomeness, Imperialism

by Nathaniel Whittemore

categories: africa, history, Society

Published September 17, 2009 @ 03:46PM PT

After a few months of experimentation, "the daily entrepreneur" is no longer daily. I found that while many people appreciated the links, it was difficult to get people excited and interested day after day. While a feature like this may eventually return, for the time being, I'm going to be experimenting with some other forms of semi-regular links.

With that said, welcome to EntrepreneurBait, a bi-weekly post that features and puts some context around some of the most interesting and provocative posts. Thanks to @tactphil, @socialedge, @beunreasonable, and lots of other folks on Twitter for many of these links.

There have been a lot of great posts about Africa, social media and startups in the last couple days. A blog post on This Magazine makes the argument that the use of Twitter in rural areas - the case in question is the recent riots in Uganda - is not about the immediate availability of news as much as the "personal microphone" effect. African blogging platform Maneno's Director of Technology Miquel Hudin wrote a recap of the Maker Faire Africa event held last month in Ghana for the PopTech blog, and

There has also been a lot of conversation recently about Innovation. Today, the ever provocative Umair Haque wrote "The Awesomeness Manifesto," which is all about how we need to shift our thinking away from "innovation" - a broken, 20th century economic concept that relies on destruction, in Umair's mind - and instead talk about "awesomeness," which includes pillars like love, value, sustainable creation, and being insanely great. Sean over at Tactical Philanthropy also wrote about innovation, connecting articles about Six Sigma (efficiency management practices) with design thinking of the sort practiced by firms like IDEO.

There have also been some just Generally Interesting Things. William Easterly has been writing about the relationship between imperialism and state-led development (an interesting counterpoint to the argument that imperialism is always directly related to free-markets). From the organization side of things, I've been hearing more and more buzz about "Kiva for education" nonprofit startup Vitanna. And the Feast Kitchen has announced their final roster of startup finalists.