communication «Many Possibilities

Mobiles in Africa – We Need The Eggs

By Steve Song, on April 29th, 2009

At the end of the movie Annie Hall, Woody Allen says,

this guy goes to a psychiatrist and says, ‘Doc, uh, my brother’s crazy, he thinks he’s a chicken,’ and uh, the doctor says, ‘well why don’t you turn him in?’ And the guy says, ‘I would, but I need the eggs.’ Well, I guess that’s [...]

South Africa: Income Spent on Communication

By Steve Song, on March 12th, 2008

The conventional wisdom in the ICT4D community is that people in developing countries spend a higher percentage of their income on communications than the global average. For South Africa, this notion became is widely accepted (I think) thanks to the Vodafone study on mobile usage, in which Diane Coyle of Enlighenment Economics says:

“Expenditure on [...]

Great diagrams: How to Make Lasagna Instead of Spaghetti

By Steve Song, on February 21st, 2008

Earlier this week I came across this wonderful master’s thesis entitled Generation of Complex Diagrams: How to Make Lasagna Instead of Spaghetti by Noah Iliinsky. We have all at various times had our minds numbed by needlessly complex diagrams that did more to obscure the issue than explain it. [...]