11 June 2007

Catching Up with AfriGadget/White African

After a security breach crashed his two crucial blogs, AfriGadget and White African, on Thursday morning, blogger Erik Hersman lost his voice for the conclusion of TEDGlobal. But now he's back up, and we're catching up with him:

From "Finally! A Mobile Payment System for Africa!":

Yesterday’s talk by Herman Chinery-Hesse was one of the highlights of TEDGlobal for me. He is the owner of SoftTribe, the leading computer technology company in West Africa, and a dynamic speaker and visionary. He’s been a trailblazer in what he called, “tropically tolerant software.” ...
... Herman stated one thing that I think will rub some in the diaspora the wrong way, but he uses his own life as an example:
"It is not dignified for an African to live their whole lives overseas."

Hersman blogged his own talk too -- he gave a 3-minute presentation on AfriGadget, saying:

Africans are bending the little they have to their will, using creativity to overcome life’s challenges.
The examples on AfriGadget showcase African ingenuity, the type of ingenuity born of necessity.

TEDBlog comments are still down -- and you're invited to join the conversation on TED.com, perhaps in the Theme called "Africa: The Next Chapter," where we've collected some Talks from past TEDs that touch on the themes from TEDGlobal 2007.

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