Reporting from Picnic ’08 in Amsterdam: Forget what you think you know about Africa! – day 3

26 Sep Reporting from Picnic ’08 in Amsterdam: Forget what you think you know about Africa! – day 3

By Doris Obermair
Images by Silvia Langa

Picnic goers find themselves confronted with the common problem of mega-events: too much stuff happening at the same time. The agenda of the last day at Amsterdam’s Cross Media Week was especially complicated to manage. While I was listened to Kenyan writer and journalist Binyavanga Wainaina who opened the «Surprising Africa» track, a vibrant sessions about social and creative development from Africa, I missed an interesting session called «Internet of Things». Matt Cottam (co-founder of Tellart), Rafi Haladjian (co-founder of Violet and father of the RFID rabbit Nabaztag), Oliver Christ (SAP Research Switzerland) and others discussed how they have converted ideas and gadgets for hackers into readily available products used both in research and industrial applications. But back to the Africa track where a young, creative and well-connected middle class showed how different things actually are compared to the poverty, war and disease image drawn and transmitted by western media. The session focused on positive signs from the continent including the massive African mobile revolution (280 Million mobile phones are currently in use making Africa the fastest growing mobile market with mobile banking being big business), the African blog and open-software communities (check out projects like Afrigadget, Ushahidi or Mashada), new urban art, filmmaking and citizen journalism. The participation of Google, Vodafone and Nokia who presented their present and future projects in different African countries underlined that business opportunities are real and that it’s time to substituted aid programs by infrastructure and investment programs to make substantial change happening.

Rushing back to the main conference hall I made it to Jose Louis de Vicente’s speech on data visualization. He is the director of the VISUALIZAR program on Information Visualization at Medialab Prado visualizar in Madrid and gave an insight into some of the projects developed by his team. One is Las Casas Tristes an online tool to map out and visualize a sad landscape of the more than 3 million empty houses built during the Spanish housing boom of the last 10 years.

And while I went to see one of my heroes, the French Silicon Valley tech-entrepreneur Loic Le Meur’s, founder and CEO of the video platform Seesmic and listened to Gisel Hiscock Google’s European Director of Business Development and Amazon’s CTO Werner Vogels I miss out on other interesting sessions, like the Augmented Reality Special, the Coolpolitics Power Lunch, the Games go Social activities and a lot of other stuff. Find more reviews at the Picnic blog. By the way, to celebrate its 10th anniversary Google will give away 10,000,000 USD (yes, ten million) to those who most help , making the world a better place.

Outlooks for Picnic 2009: Europe’s biggest creativity and innovation event goes New York celebrating the 400th anniversary of the foundation of New Amsterdam, commonly know as New York.

Stay tuned: tomorrow we report on the winners of Picnic’s Green Challenge award.