Internet technology guru Clay Shirky together with leaders from Twitter, Mozilla, WordPress, and Yahoo are set to give presentations at the inaugural Tech4Africa event, being held in Johannesburg on 12 and 13 August.
The event, organised by Web 2.0 provider Technovated, will focus on the role emerging and Web technologies have to play in African business and development. Speakers will delve into the funding landscape in Africa and what cloud computing, Web 2.0, the mobile Internet, and other emerging technologies mean for its businesses and societies.
Keynote speaker Clay Shirky is an experienced speaker on topics related to the Web, social media and the Internet. Shirky has spoken at events such as TED Global, SXSW, the Web 2.0 expo in New York and San Francisco, SES San Jose, the Adobe Learning Summit, New York Tech Meetup and the Aspen Ideas Festival.
He currently divides his time between teaching, consulting and writing. His consulting practice focuses on the rise of technologies such as peer-to-peer, Web services, and wireless networks, which provide alternatives to the wired client/server infrastructure that characterises the Web. Shirky is especially well-known for his advocacy of crowdsourcing and collaborative efforts online.
Other top technologists delivering presentations at the conference include Dustin Diaz, a user interface engineer at Twitter and author of JavaScript Design Patterns; Joe Stump, the former lead architect of social news Web site Digg and co-founder of SimpleGeo; Matthew Mullenweg, the founding developer of WordPress; and John Resig, creator of the popular Javascript library jQuery, and a Javascript tool developer for Mozilla.
If people want to build something global, they have to learn from the best, opines Gareth Knight, MD of Technovated. “If you want to scale a database to three billion records, are you going to listen to someone who hasn't done it before, or are you going to want to learn from Joe Stump who has done exactly that.”
He argues that the fundamentals of technology are the same regardless of where in the world people are. “Just because you are an African company doesn't mean you don't have to build your code in a secure way,” he explains.
However, when investigating market penetration or how to build something for the African consumer, he believes an African perspective is needed. To this end, the conference will also offer African technologists such as Steve Vosloo, the 21st century learning fellow for the Shuttleworth Foundation; Barbara Mallinson, founder of educational collaboration platform Obami; Agosta Liko, founder of mobile payment service PesaPal, and Erik Hersman, the co-founder of open source crisis information site Ushahidi.
“This is the first conference in SA to bring together so many international and local speakers of such high calibre. It is an excellent learning opportunity for any person or organisation with an interest in the African Web - whether as an end-user of the technology, a technologist working with the technology, or an entrepreneur or investor active in the African market,” states Knight.
“We're excited to have drawn a speaker of Clay Shirky's calibre to this event. By attracting such a strong line-up of African and international speakers to this conference, we hope to inspire a generation of Africans to go and do extraordinary things with the Web and other emerging technologies,” he concludes.
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