In Motion

Living without Regret

2012-01-13T08:54:00.000-05:00

There was an excellent article published in The New York Times the other day that resonated with me deeply. It doesn't take long to understand why – the article begins with the following passage:

At 17, I wrote a speech titled, “When You Come to the End of Your Days, Will You Be Able to Write Your Own Epitaph?” It reflected the approach to life I adopted after my mother’s untimely death from cancer at age 49. I chose to live each day as if it could be my last — but with a watchful eye on the future in case it wasn’t.

My goal was, and still is, to die without regrets.

For those of you who know me well, it should be pretty self-evident why this piece called out to me. It was my very own experiences in the same situation that led me to take on the very same philosophy, and as I discussed in my last post, it's treated me pretty well. Still, it was fascinating to see what people had to say on this issue as they looked back on life, especially as we start a new year.

The article summarizes many of the main points from a new book, called 30 Lessons for Living. I was skeptical at first, but the book is actually the product of the Cornell Legacy Project, which has interviewed over 1,000 older Americans from different economic, educational and occupational strata. The article starts with three major components that define most peoples lives: marriage, careers, and parenting, but alas, three components I have not yet had the opportunity to live. More compelling to me personally were the latter three aspects that the article discusses: aging, regrets, and happiness.

On aging, I'll confess that, for the last few years, I've been pretty afraid. One of my (unspoken) justifications for pursuing my gap year and graduate school was my reasoning that as long as I didn't settle down in one place indefinitely, I could avoid being a real adult. If I could keep my life in discrete chunks, I wouldn't have to grow up. But the section on aging begins with another enlightening quote. The experts on aging, those who have aged themselves, say,

“Embrace it. Don’t fight it. Growing older is both an attitude and a process...” The experts’ advice to the young: “Don’t waste your time worrying about getting old.”

This piece of wisdom (combined with a TED talk I recently watched about life's third act) has gone a long way to change my attitudes. Perhaps getting older, reaching that next step, is something I should be looking forward to rather than seeking to put off.

The passage on regrets begins:

“Always be honest” was the elders’ advice to avoid late-in-life remorse. Take advantage of opportunities and embrace new challenges. And travel more when you’re young rather than wait until the children are grown or you are retired.

Okay, I may have been pretty far off on the aging bit, but I think I've got this one pretty much down.

And finally, the passage on happiness reminded me of an old personal maxim that I think I may have forgotten on some level recently:

Happiness as a choice, not the result of how life treats you.

It's amazing – I think I may have actually been happier when I had major parts of my life to be unhappy about. Things have been going so overwhelmingly well these last couple years that I've almost lost that invaluable contrast; if I can be happy given the most unhappy circumstances, I can be happy always. Remembering that sounds like the beginning of new year's resolution I may actually keep.

Reflecting on Three Years of Travel

2012-01-10T11:05:00.000-05:00

Oxford, just after I arrived in 2009.

Three years ago today, I landed in England for the first time with my suitcases and a stomach full of fear and apprehension. I had never traveled on my own before, never been to Europe, never lived abroad, nothing. I remember getting off the plane and wandering around Heathrow as anxiety welled up within me. My phone wasn't working despite the preparations I'd made beforehand. I didn't know how to get to the tube stop where I'd be meeting my cousin who had been living in London. What was the difference between the rail and the underground anyway? I called my father from a pay phone in a panic. He didn't pick up. Neither did my aunt. I was stuck. I was alone. But though I didn't realize it at the time, this feeling of discomfort, of anxiety, would soon become an addiction.

Today, looking back, it's hard to even remember the feeling of terror that pervaded me that day. I was such a different person back then, filled with hopes and desires of the young adult I'd like to become, but still falling short. I knew I had it in me to be adventurous, to be outgoing, to be courageous (read: kind of insane most of the time). How these years have changed me.

After hanging up the phone for the last time, hopeless that anyone back home would be able to help me, I made the decision that would come to define the years since: I'd have to buck up and figure it out on my own. And how that realization has come back again and again, whether it's been finding an unconventional job for after graduation, figuring out how to navigate complex organizations like Google, or landing in a new country for the first time without knowing anyone or how to speak the language. It's amazing the things we can do when we have no other options. The addiction has been putting myself in those situations and finding out that that maxim holds true every time.

Since that fateful day three years ago, my life has transformed monumentally: I've lived on 3 continents, traveled through 30+ countries, made some truly extraordinary friends in some of the strangest places, and learned more about myself and what I'm capable of than I ever dreamed before.

Some time ago, I read a study showing that people who had traveled demonstrated more out-of-the-box thinking. They were more creative, less held down by the restrictions of their small spheres of the world. If my personal experience has taught me anything, it's that I am far less bounded by the expectations and norms that society creates for me. One of my favorite cartoons from xkcd (currently hanging on my wall) talks about this problem: "The infinite possibilities each day holds should stagger the mind. The sheer number of experiences I could have in uncountable... And no, I don't have all the answers. I don't know how to jolt myself into seeing what each moment could become." And alas, neither do I, but it's something I aspire to, and all the travel has been one hell of a start.

How I Spent My Gap Year

2012-01-09T10:33:00.000-05:00

Greetings, friends, family, and other readers. I'm going to be totally cliché and begin this post with an apology for not updating in months. I recently finished my first term at Cambridge, and after moving around so much last year, it was a relief to be able to stay in one place for more than a couple weeks. The classes I took were generally interesting and challenging, the people I met absolutely extraordinary, and the Oxbridge culture just as decadent as I remembered. But that's not what I really wanted to write about today. A few weeks back, I visited some former colleagues at the Google office in London, and heard really encouraging news about the project I used to work on. Since it was secret and un-launched for my entire time at Google, I never really got to talk about what I was up to, but now I can!

The project I spent most of my year working on was focused on getting small and medium businesses in emerging markets online. While I was first focused entirely on Africa, the organization quickly changed so that I was working across emerging markets (hence explaining much of my crazy travel). The product I was working on, which you can now try here, aims to make the process of website creation for emerging markets business as seamless and easy as possible. We labored endlessly to make the user experience as simple as possible, constantly testing with users across the world, and incorporated a number of emerging-markets-specific features like SMS notifications and automatic mobile optimization for the websites created.

Today, the campaign/product is launched in a number of countries including Kenya, Nigeria, Uganda, Senegal, and Malaysia. You can check out some of the small businesses who have gotten online below:

The Sugar (Malaysian clothing store)
Binata Foods (Kenyan health food store)
Sparkling Logistics (Kenyan transportation company)
Red Apple Cafe & Restaurant (Ugandan restaurant)
Get Rams (personal favorite, Nigerian ram rancher)

Life In Motion

2011-10-09T18:14:00.001-04:00

Greetings from Cambridge! I haven't decided yet whether to continue writing this blog, but seeing as I no longer work for Google and no longer live in Africa, at the very least, I thought it was fitting to come up with a new name. Why "In Motion"? Over the last year, I've done a fair bit of travel, and I've discovered that it's the one state that feels more natural than any other to me. It's the sensation of a plane lifting off the ground, the road speeding beneath my wheels, the wind rushing past me at furious speeds. I live for motion, alway pushing forward, looking back only to remember past joys and learn from old mistakes.

These last few weeks in Cambridge have been incredibly, absolutely hectic. We'll see once things normal out whether I can still find interesting enough things to say to put here. Until then...

One Year Ago...

2011-09-07T13:17:00.000-04:00

One year ago today, I landed in Africa for the first time. Looking back at my journal, I arrived at my hotel, discovered I had no hot water, went to the office, and ate some chicken with jolof rice. Pretty typical day in west Africa, really, but it was anything but typical for me. I've come a long way since then, establishing an entirely new life and lifestyle for myself.

In short, some of my greatest accomplishments this year:

Visiting 2 new continents and discovering a newfound love for parts of the world I hadn't even thought of before.
Climbing Mount Kilimanjaro and visiting my friend Alma in Rwanda after over a year of planning.
Hitting 20 countries in the span of 12 months, many of them for the first time, and many of them more than once.
Expanding my culinary comfort zone by eating all sorts of unusual ethnic dishes (see Nigerian giant land snails).
Discovering frequent flyer miles and learning how to sleep on planes.
Becoming comfortable taking bucket showers and surviving without proper toilets or electricity.
Finally achieving platinum status on the Starwood Preferred Guests program (I'm actually way too proud of this given the fact that it just means I've spent way too much time living out of hotel rooms).
Making friends with some pretty extraordinary people.
Learning that I am in fact good at the work I've wanted to do for several years.
Coming to understand a lot about myself, what I value, and what kind of life I want to lead.

Here's to hoping that this coming year holds just as much growth, fun, and adventure as the last!

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New Beginnings, Once More

2011-09-02T15:25:00.000-04:00

Today is my last day at Google. Actually, to be more precise, today is my third last day at Google. After all these years, you might think that, by this point, I'd be used to coming and going, and yet, it's still pretty hard. It's been an incredible 12 months. Since I started this job last August, I've made my way to 20 countries, met so many fascinating people, and made some truly extraordinary friends.

And yet, one year later, I'm also ready for a change. The flip side of moving around so much is that I haven't had much of a home this last year, or more figuratively, much of a real place in the world. Living on the extremes of life has been profoundly eye-opening. Before I started traveling a few years ago, I had no idea that this type of nomadic, high-flying lifestyle was possible. Now I've lived it, and I can appreciate it for what it is. Many of my friends have commented that my life seems to be endlessly exciting and glamorous, and to some extent, it has been, though they miss the parts when I'm throwing up from food poisoning or stranded against my will in a strange city. But it's also been somewhat isolating. It turns out that the lifestyle I had growing up has some merit to it too: seeing the same group of friends more than once every few months, having a place to call home, feeling like you actually belong. These are the things I look forward to becoming reacquainted with next year at Cambridge.

Cambridge, approaching fast on the horizon. For the last few days, I've been receiving a barrage of emails about all of the places, activities, and people that await me. I wish I could express my excitement. If I decide to keep this blog through this next step, I think I'm going to have to change the title though... Suggestions welcome.

Until the next time, my friends.

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Turkish Airlines: Worst Customer Service Experience Ever

2011-07-21T15:12:00.001-04:00

An open letter to Turkish Airlines customer service:

Dear Turkish Airlines,

In the past, I've flown exclusively on your airline whenever there's been a TK option on my route. I'm sorry to say the flight that I just got off will be the last.

I booked a ticket from Tel Aviv to Nairobi with your company, despite the fact that there were cheaper and faster options available. When I got to the airport in Tel Aviv, the flight was delayed and they tried to reroute me. This was strike one. I had two more legs on my journey that I would miss if I didn't make it to Nairobi on schedule, costing me several hundred dollars.

After checking my passport in the system, the TK employee at the counter told me that there was no way to get to NBO that night, and that my best option would be to fly to Istanbul and TK would put me up for the night until the next flight. I asked if there were any way I could upgrade to business since the delay was costing me a day's travel and a great deal of money. The employee said there was none left, despite the fact that there were several empty seats in business when I got on the plane. Strike two.

When I finally got to Istanbul and went to the desk to sort out the hotel and flight for the next day, they informed me that my travel agency had not confirmed my ticket, and as a result they wouldn't put me up for the night. "Are you kidding?" I asked, "An employee from your company promised me a hotel room when I got here. If I hadn't been promised a room, I wouldn't have gotten on the plane." "The man at the counter must not have checked your ticket," he replied. I asked him if it was my fault that a TK employee had screwed up when he checked me in, and the fellow kindly informed me that it was in fact my fault. I kid you not. Strike three. This was, hands down, the worst customer service I have ever received in my entire life.

Now here I am, loyal TK customer, and I'm stranded in Istanbul with no hotel, no ticket out, and no help from any of your representatives. I have to say I'm sorely disappointed. I thought loyalty counted for something in this business. I guess I'll just have to find another airline for whom it does.

Sincerely yours,
Benjamin Cole

Watching and Calculating, African Governments Learn From the Arab Spring

2011-07-06T06:20:00.000-04:00

It's no secret that Africa houses some of the longest-serving and most repressive dictators on the planet. Even among the states that have progressed past authoritarian rule, many governments still restrict basic rights with heavy-handed and often violent tactics. It's also no secret that Africa has the smallest Internet penetration of any continent, though it also cannot be denied that the advent of cheap, web-enabled phones has been precipitating broad changes in the continent's Internet landscape. Up until recently, these two facts may have seemed only peripherally related. Most governments had taken a pretty laissez-faire approach to the Internet; it wasn't enough of an issue for most leaders to take the time to learn about, let alone address with policy. But as the Arab Spring continues to roar just a stone's throw North, tremors have rippled well into the heart of the continent. In response, many African governments have begun taking strong stances on Internet freedoms, even before most of their populations have had the chance to experience the free and open Internet as it was originally formulated.

Encouraging Online Freedom of Expression in Sub-Saharan Africa

2011-06-24T09:46:00.000-04:00

Our mission as a company is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful - it is therefore in our interest for free exchange of information to flourish online. As access to online information continues to grow in Africa, and in the aftermath of the recent uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa, we are beginning to see governments crack down on dissent in order to prevent free expression both online and offline. There is a growing need to raise awareness about the complex issues surrounding new technology and social media tools that are used for activism.

Umbono: Jump Starting the Internet Ecosystem in Africa

2011-06-22T07:34:00.001-04:00

Greetings from Cape Town, South Africa! To preemptively answer your question, no, I'm not on vacation – I'm here to help set up a new program called Umbono, Google's new start-up incubator that will be located here. But before I delve too deeply, let me briefly explain what a start-up incubator is. While the concept of incubators is relatively common in the US, when I've told folks in South Africa what I'm doing here, I often get a look of confusion – "An incubator? Isn't that something you put eggs in?" Well, yes, you could say that...

Simply put, start-up incubators are programs that select a group of early-stage companies, generally through a competitive process, that most commonly provide mentorship and funding. The start-ups are also usually given space in the same establishment so that they can form bonds and learn from one another's struggles as well. The idea was most notably popularized in the US by Y Combinator, a high-profile incubator founded in 2008 by software legend, Paul Graham. Since then, a number of similar programs have cropped up around Silicon Valley and beyond, but very few outside the US.

That's where Umbono comes in. As part of Google's goal to establish a thriving, sustainable web ecosystem in Africa, we realize that there need to be a wide variety of players in the space. So Google partnered with a number of local South African players, including a variety of angel investors to provide funding and guidance, the Hub to provide working space, and Cell C to provide internet connectivity. In addition, the program also includes business skills training, specifically tailored for new businesses, and mentorship from local experts and various Googlers with experience working in emerging markets (like me!).

The program is still in its very early stages – we're just vetting the candidates and getting the space set up, but I have very high hopes for how it will turn out. If all goes well, maybe I'll come back here in the winter (summer for South Africa) and work with my start-ups on the venture capital pitches. At least that's my secret plan for the moment – I'm sure it would be much nicer than dreary winter England!

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Mobile Money: African Panacea?

2011-06-06T11:16:00.000-04:00

Alternatively titled "My Obligatory M-Pesa Post". Mobile banking/payments is the topic I get asked about most often by people who have just begun to scratch the surface of tech in Africa. "Oh, you work for Google in Africa... I just read about this fascinating mobile banking system in Kenya! Perhaps you've heard of it?" And while I do grow a little tired of fielding the same question again and again, it is the first question I get asked for good reason! The mobile banking phenomenon is an innovation indigenous to Africa, and a perfect illustration of African ingenuity.

But before I get into my own opinions, first, a brief primer on the banking landscape in Africa. As some of you may know, banking is one of the more unsolved problems here (and that's saying something). Transferring money is a nightmare. Very few people have bank accounts, and virtually every society you meet is purely cash-based. When I first moved to Ghana, for instance, I had to stay in a special hotel catering to foreigners that would take my credit card, and when I moved into my first apartment, I had to pay 10 months rent, upfront, in cash. So I had to go to the ATM, several times, each time withdrawing several hundred dollars worth of money. Not the best system. There must be some better way of transferring money, of paying bills, of stocking away a savings fund, you may think. Well a few years back, some clever folks in east Afruca were thinking the same thing.

Originating in Kenya, M-Pesa is Africa's first and most widely-known mobile money service. M-Pesa literally means mobile money: 'M' for mobile, and Pesa, Swahili for money. It was originally conceived to facilitate microfinance payments in Kenya, but in just a few years, M-Pesa has become the largest banking operator in Kenya. At its essence, the system allows users to transfer money via mobile phones running on Safaricom, Kenya's largest telecom provider. The basic paradigm, which has become a model for many other African countries, is that of a branchless bank: customers can conduct all of their financial transactions without ever needing to visit a physical bank office. Customers can transfer money mobile-to-mobile and deposit/withdraw money from affiliate businesses.

In its first two years, from 2007 to 2009, M-Pesa accrued a staggering 6.5M customers in Kenya, quickly attracting the attention of many other mobile carriers in many other African states. It became the symbol of African tech innovation, and a demonstration that necessity is the mother of invention here just like anywhere else. Since then, many others have tried to duplicate its success, but to date, with very little success. Since I got to Ghana, a number of mobile money services have launched; just about every major carrier has one, it seems. And yet, none of them have taken off. This has been an issue that's been bothering me for some time. Why could this work in Kenya, and yet, it would seem, nowhere else?

When the topic came up in conversation at a technology roundtable that Google hosted last week, our country manager, Estelle, proclaimed that mobile money hadn't yet become enough a part of daily life in Ghana. "Sure, I can pay my cable bill, but what I really want to is to be able to pay my taxi driver." That makes sense, but it still begs the question: Why? What made M-Pesa different? Good product design? Better marketing? Superior distribution? I'm sure all of these facets played some role in M-Pesa's success, but I would posit that there was another factor that trumped all the others. At launch, Safaricom, the mobile operator on which M-Pesa runs, had an astounding ~80% market share. In fact, before going public, Safaricom was a joint venture between the Kenyan government and the British-owned telecom, Vodafone, effectively, a government-owned monopoly.

With that in mind, it's no wonder the service was able to take off so quickly. In Ghana, the largest carrier, MTN, only has around 55% market share. As a user, compare the two mathematically: with M-Pesa, there's an 8 in 10 chance that the person with whom you want to transfer money has an account, whereas in Ghana, we've seen a much more fractured market, where the best you are do is just slightly better than 1 out 2.

What does this mean for mobile money more broadly? Well it's clear that not every country is going to share the particularly suitable climate that Kenya enjoyed. If mobile money is to take off in other contexts, carriers are going to need to establish open standards that allow users to interact across networks. Unfortunately, I don't see that happening anytime soon. The best outcome, I think, would actually be for the government to step into a regulatory role, compelling operators to play nice with one another. But, this doesn't seem terribly likely in the short-term either, at least not in Ghana. Regardless, I'll be watching the space closely, wondering just who will be first to step up: the carriers or the national governments. Only time will tell.

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One Year Out: Reflections on a full year out

2011-05-31T18:06:00.000-04:00

Another significant milestone came and quietly passed for me yesterday. It was the one year anniversary of my graduation from college: one year since I said my teary goodbyes to my alma mater, to my friends, and to any semblance of life as I had ever known it. It's been quite a year since. I've explored more new places than I care to count; I've met just about as many new people as I did in my first year of college, and at some points, each week seemed to feel like an entire lifetime. In that sense, I've lived an awful lot in the last 12 months, perhaps more life than I lived in the first 20 years of my life. Here are a few of the lessons I've taken away.

We all have a lot more freedom than most of us ever realize. During the course of these 12 months, I've met so many extraordinary people, people with such incredible stories, people who have picked up their entire lives and moved forever to a different continent, people who decided to put "real life" on pause to start living, and people who are on years-long expeditions around the world. Growing up in suburban New York, there only ever seemed but a few set paths that were laid out in front of me. I would do well in school so that I could do well at a good college so that I could get promoted at a good job. Since I started traveling, the world has opened up to me. All of a sudden, I have days where I'm baffled by the sheer number of possibilities my life could take. It's both beautiful and terrifying. (See XKCD.)

You don't have to follow in anybody's footsteps. I always saw people who I wanted to be like. I've always had role models to look up to as I've grown up. But now more than ever, I understand that I have to be my own role model. If I don't live life the way I want to, no one else is going do it for me.

There's real racism out there. Perhaps the most profoundly negative realization I've had this year is just how prevalent racism actually is around the world. Growing up, it never seemed strange to me that I had Puerto Rican cousins, Christian cousins, Jewish cousins, black cousins, the whole nine yards, that when people asked me where I was from, I had to spend five minutes giving them the cliff-notes of my family ancestry. I always kind of assumed racism was restricted to certain parts of the US that I had kind of written off anyway. But this year has shown me just how wide it actually spans. Intelligent people, people I would otherwise respect. It's been an issue that has deeply saddened me as I've seen it play out negatively in the lives of people I care about.

Meaningful relationships are what make the world go round. Though this year has been phenomenal in the sheer magnitude of people I've met and places I've been, there's been a stark juxtaposition between the truly meaningful relationships I have with just a few people and those that I have with the many very cool other passing travelers. Since I left Cornell, I've had the opportunity to travel with many of the people who mean the most to be in the world. What a difference it makes.

People are just people. This was a lesson that took me a long time, the course of years, to truly learn. Many of you who haven't know me long might be surprised to find out that I used to be agonizingly shy. I didn't do well in groups, and it took me ages to open up to people. I make the comment about the people who haven't known me long, because most of those I've met in the last year, I've met because I put myself out there: striking up conversations in museums and hostels, going out to bars alone and leaving with a group of friends, being introduced through a friend of a friend of a friend and making the connection into something real. I used to not understand people – they seemed so foreign to me. But the more I people I meet, the more connections I make, the more I realize we're all just the same. (See The Ghost of Corporate Future.)

Everybody laughs; everybody cries. While the last lesson I've learned from meeting other travelers around the world, this closely related lesson has come from observing: the way a mother hugs her child, the way brothers beat up on each other, the way children play together. We all eat. We all laugh. We all cry. We all love. This year has impressed upon me that no matter how different a culture may be, we all have far more in common than not.

The more I travel... A good friend that I traveled with in Italy last summer sent me a quote some months ago that sums up the most profound person lesson I've learned in these last 12 months. It comes from Anthony Bourdain, the celebrity chef, and reads, "A writer friend of mine wrote the older he gets, the more he travels, the less he knows. I understand what he meant now. It seems that the more places I see and experience, the bigger I realize the world to be. The more of it I become aware of, the more I realize how relatively little I know of it, how many places I have still to go, how much more there is to learn. Maybe that’s enlightenment enough - to know there is no final resting place of the mind, no moment of smug clarity. Perhaps wisdom, such as it is for me, means realizing how small I am, and unwise, and how far I have yet to go."

I hope you take away some of these lessons as well.

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Diagnosing malaria? There's an app for that.

2011-04-28T14:00:00.002-04:00

If you're familiar with Africa at all, you already know that malaria is a tragic and monumental problem here. Every year, almost 800,000 people due from malaria worldwide, with just about 90% of those deaths coming from Sub-Saharan Africa. Malaria is a curable, preventable disease, but the lack of trained medical professionals, diagnostic tools, and prescription drugs in Africa make it a seemingly insurmountable issue. To try to take the malaria problem, a team of computer scientists from across the US built an app that allows for simple malaria diagnosis with a (slightly tricked out) smart phone.

The team, named LifeLens, competed in Microsoft's annual Imagine Cup, building a potentially world-changing application on top of Microsoft technology. The team's video explains it all.

The project provides an awesome proof of concept, showing us just how far everyday technology has come and what widespread applications it can be used for. But more that a proof of concept, this, in its current stage, is probably not. The team made a big stride in allowing the app to function without an Internet connection, but still the cost of the device alone will remain a colossal hurdle for widespread adoption. Nonetheless, it's an incredible first step. I'd love to see someone more commercialization-minded pick up the technology and run with it to make something that could actually make a big splash in the market.

It's truly a wonder how far we've come, and it's so refreshing to see people apply the technology so many of us take for granted to tackle real issues around the world.

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A Very Ghanaian Passover

2011-04-26T14:00:00.013-04:00

Holidays this year have been interesting to say the least. My first holiday abroad, Thanksgiving, I spent alone in my Lagos hotel semi-miserably working and eating room service (though it was fortunately followed a couple days later, by a belated celebration at the home of a random expat couple who happened to be friends of friends of friends). I spent Christmas exploring Bangkok with my dear friend, Kathy, and we reigned in the New Year at the infamous Countdown Party on Koh Phangan. For my birthday, I made very certain to travel back to lovely New York to be with my family and friends for the first time in months. But after all of this, I have to admit, Passover has been the most interesting of all.

Despite the challenges of being in Africa, I had not one, but two Passover seders, one at my own apartment and one at the house of a local Jewish expat couple. While the second night, was much more what I was used to from growing up on Long Island (reading from the haggadah, singing Diyanu, and kids frantically searching for the afikomen), the first night was a truly unusual and especially memorable Passover experience.

First, I should preface that the seder at my apartment was not hosted by me; it was hosted by my Christian roommate Bridgette. Yes, you read that right. I learned that night from Bridgette's pastor that her church practices what's called apostolic Christianity. In other words, they worship as Christ's apostles did. So in practice, they're actually more like Jews than modern Christians (except for that whole "Christ our savior" thing). And while there aren't very many, if any, native Ghanaian Jews, there are quite a few apostolic Christians. So we ended up hosting quite an interesting night.

Their customs depart considerably from those of most Jews, but the fundamentals are the same. The day before the seder, she baked her own unleavened bread and I made charoset. They aren't quite so picky about what constitutes chametz, but Bridgette faithfully cleaned out our kitchen before Passover began. And while there was no retelling of the story of Passover (a staple that I personally missed), we did pray before the meal began. I've always believed that how one worships is a personal matter, and for me, being Jewish is more about making a point to do something and to act righteously rather than following a set of rules. Thus, I don't believe that one people's interpretation of a text is inherently any better than anyone else's. Needless to say, I was actually quite excited to try another group's customs for a change.

The people I met were fascinating. I spent most of the night talking with a few local recent college grads. They were telling me all about their frustrations living in Ghana as young, educated adults. They had spent all of this time and energy in college, and now that they were out with degrees in math, statistics and economics, they couldn't find jobs. They voiced their sorrow that they felt like they had to leave their homeland to find opportunity. They didn't want to leave, and yet given the state of Ghana, they didn't want to stay either. These were all things I understood, but what really hit me as I was talking to these bright, articulate, hard-working young men was that just because where they were born, they weren't entitled to the same opportunities I was. Despite their hard work, despite their drive, and despite their intelligence, getting a visa or a job overseas seemed an insurmountable obstacle. They asked me about all of the places I'd traveled, and I ended up talking about New York. They listened raptly, and seeing the interest on their faces, I added, "You should visit!" As soon as the words came out of my mouth, I realized how foolish I must have sounded.

One bit of the conversation that really hit me was one of the guys said, "every time I see an obruni, I feel inspired." "Why?" I asked, perplexed. "Because they're blessed." I tried to argue that we're all blessed in our own way, but confronted with the reality that these young men faced, I couldn't argue that we're all blessed equally. When I started traveling a few years back, I left the United States a staunch believer that the US wasn't inherently any better than any other part of the world, just different. Maybe bigger, more prosperous, more powerful, sure, but not inherently better. Two and a half years and many countries later, I still believe we Americans must to acknowledge our country's faults, but on the same token, I also count myself very, very lucky to have been born in the USA.

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The Web As a Spotlight: An Alternative Look at Technology in the Arab Spring

2011-04-18T19:01:00.000-04:00

Since the spring of 2009, scholars and pundits alike have been debating the role technology has played the spate of uprisings across the Middle East and Africa. From Iran in 2009 to Egypt in early 2010 to the uprisings still taking place today, the web has clearly played a new and central role, in effect differentiating these revolutions from any that have come before. To date, most of this debate has focused on how important so-called social media services have been in organizing and carrying out these protests, with prominent minds on both sides of the argument. But while this debate continues to rage, I'd like to focus on a completely different aspect -- a feature that has been largely ignored. I'd like to look at the web as a metaphorical spotlight, casting attention on people and parts of the world all too easily overlooked before.

What Technology Brings to the Developing World

2011-04-08T05:08:00.001-04:00

When I decided to move to Africa, I did so with the goal to do good. I had spent four years in college studying algorithms, building software and even having fun, but when all was said and done, I craved to do something meaningful. I came to Africa because I wanted to see a different side of life, to broaden my way of thinking, and to make a positive impact where I could. Now just how I would manage to do that was less immediately clear. How could I use my skills to make difference?

Personal Update: Plans for Next Year

2011-04-06T18:51:00.000-04:00

Those of you who have been following my adventures closely will know that I set out on this journey to Africa with the intent for it to be one year long. The plan after that was to do graduate school. Well, it's been quite a ride since I first set off, and I've since been blessed with many extraordinary opportunities to pursue when this year comes to an end.

Back in the fall, I applied for several graduate programs, all for master's degrees in computer science (or related fields). As usual, I had hoped to have my next step figured out quickly, preferably before my half way mark. You can imagine my dismay when I heard many of the programs wouldn't get back to me until the end of March. The end of March!

Before I had even heard from graduate schools, my colleagues at Google started intimating that I would be welcome to stay longer. My old boss even offered to let me switch projects and locations if I wanted to. How many times were opportunities like these going to happen!? The first time Google let me create my own job I chalked up to good luck, but twice? I have to say, it was very tempting. And not to mention, I didn't yet have any other offers.

But then the decisions started rolling in. The very first offer I got came from Cambridge. I had applied for the Gates Scholarship, interviewed over Skype from Nigeria, and two days later, had a very surprising email in my inbox. I'd won! I literally spent the afternoon walking around Accra in a daze just repeating to myself, "This life is unreal." For those of you unfamiliar with the Gates, it's the Cambridge equivalent of the Rhodes Scholarship, and arguably one of the most prestigious scholarships in the world. The selections committee focuses on academic merit but also on leadership and a potential to impact the world.

But I hadn't even heard back from my other choices yet! I was dumbstruck; I hadn't seen it coming, and I didn't know what to do.

Fortuitously, I happened to have a 24-hour stopover in England between Ghana and Switzerland the very next weekend, so I decided to take the opportunity to speak with some folks in the department and some of the current Gates Scholars. I was very impressed. Everyone I met seemed profoundly intelligent, but more than just that, they seemed worldly, thoughtful, and passionate. I discussed academics, toured campus, and even participated in a scholastic event the Gates Council had put on. To be honest though, what left the lasting impression on me was an offhand conversation I had with a couple of current Gates Scholars. They were studying engineering and computer science, respectively, and after a long day of meeting people and walking around, the three of us sat down for a drink. And these two hard science people and I ended up talking about democracy, about the revolutions in the middle east, and about how the size of a country influences the most effective style of governance. I hadn't had a conversation so stimulating outside my domain in a long time.

Still, I wasn't sure. I should at least wait until I know my other options, right? That seemed prudent. But then the folks at Cornell started putting pressure on me. Apparently the Gates Foundation wouldn't wait forever for an answer. So as I boarded the flight for New York last month, I decided I would hear what my mentors had to say on the subject. I spoke to three people, but I barely had much of a choice after the first meeting; my friend Jared wouldn't let me leave his office until I said I'd take it. Fortunately the other two concurred.

So I decided to take it.

As for my next steps, class starts on October 4, so I actually have more time than I thought I would. I decided to extend my time at Google an extra two months to round out the full year. I'll finish on September 2 and take the intervening month to visit friends and family around the US. It has been quite a while after all.

If you're interested in hearing more about the Gates Scholarship, you can visit their website or watch the Trust's introductory video. Here's my profile too.

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Back in Ghana: Home, Sweet Home?

2011-03-29T17:16:00.000-04:00

After 4+ months of nonstop travel, I'm finally back in Ghana for more than a week at a time. Home, sweet home, eh? It's a strange feeling being back. It's strange to be anywhere for more than a few days, but strange here especially. I remember when I left back in mid-November. I went out to a local jazz club the night before and met a few new expat friends. "Will be you be my insta-friend?" one girl asked who was still new to Ghana. That's how it had been. In the months leading up to this massive trip, I had met so many people from all around the world, and none of us knowing anyone else all became fast friends. Some of those friendships became full relationships and others remained fleeting acquaintances, but when I left, I left a life behind. Settling in again some 19 weeks later, I realize the life I left no longer exists.

It's incredible how transient life can be. In 4 years of college, I could go away for a weekend, for a school break, for a semester abroad, and I could always rely that many of the same faces would greet me when I returned. Not so for in the life of an extreme expat. Many of my Ghana friends were on short-term contracts and have left or are leaving. Others will take significant work to rehabilitate after so much time apart. After that little fire incident in my apartment, I don't even have my same room anymore (though my new place is exponentially nicer). After starting from scratch in a new country almost every week, you might think this would feel familiar for me, but it doesn't.

And so I start again.

7 months down and 5 to go. I'm debating what I should try to accomplish in these last 5 months. There's still so much left of Africa I need to see. So much personal improvement put off by travel. So many books and projects and people. At the very least, I'd like to do one more thing interesting enough to warrant a spot on the BBC. What do you think? What should I try to accomplish in my remaining time?

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The Black Waters of Makoko

2011-03-11T13:16:00.003-05:00

The waters of Makoko ran black, luminous, like oil. Large swaths of the land were littered with trash, and the ground sank beneath you with each step. We were in one of Lagos’s notorious water slums, built on stilts above the Lagos Lagoon and populated by the poor and desperate. Some eighty or ninety thousand people live this way.

When I had told my friends in Ghana that I was planning to visit Nigeria, the reactions I got were almost the same. “Good luck, man; I hope you come back,” one said, only half-jokingly. I had been living in Ghana a few months already; how different could Nigeria really be?

Picking up my luggage and making my way through immigration, I stepped outside the airport into the heavy, humid air. A driver was supposed to meet me, but there was no one to be seen. I looked out over the crowd again, getting a little bit more anxious. I had started to attract attention. The sun was setting rapidly behind a cloud of smog that enveloped the city. The warning I had heard so many times was echoing in my ears, “never walk around Lagos at night.” I took out my phone; it was nearly dead. After several tries, I finally got a hold of my company’s security service. “Get back inside the airport”, she said “There should be a coffee shop. Do not leave until you get word from one of our people on the ground.”

Despite my rocky start, I was determined to get to see the city and know the people. I was determined to see the full range of existence in Lagos. That’s how I ended up in the slum neighbourhood of Makoko.

We pulled up in two large SUVs. There were four of us, plus our two close protection officers and our driver, Obinna. We could feel that we were not welcome.
A man emerged from one of the makeshift structures and singled out my Nigerian colleague, hissing at him in a language I couldn’t understand. Another stood menacingly, arms crossed on the plank that connected us with a few of the homes on stilts, black water flowing in between.

We went towards some women and children who had started piling out of the homes. The reactions ranged from wonder to open distrust. We tried to greet them. No response. “What’s the local language?” my colleague asked me under his breath. “Yoruba,” I said. “How do you say hello in Yoruba?” my colleague called across the water. “A-gu” one of the women responded with a smile. “A-gu” we called back. A few of the kids started to smile too.

Before long, the children were giving us a proper lesson in Yoruba, laughing mercilessly at us when we got a new word wrong. I felt a tug on my hand and looked down. It was a boy who couldn’t have been older than five. He held onto my hand and wouldn’t let go. I knelt down on the soft, sandy ground and shook his hand. “Hi, I’m Ben; it’s nice to meet you.”

My Nigerian colleague came back. One of the community elders had agreed to show us around. And so we walked through the alleyways, past houses and countless spectators. The structures were basic, no running water and only a few frayed electrical wires for the lights hanging from the ceilings. My American colleague noticed a stray dog drinking from the black liquid that flowed through the neighborhood. “How could an animal survive like this?" he asked. Even the water bore the stench of decay.

We continued on. Many of the children happily called after us, “Oyibo, oyibo!” I had just learned that was Yoruba for “white man”. “Oyibo, that’s me!” I called back to them, inciting a great deal of raucous laughter. Further on, we met a young man, shirtless and holding a homemade cigarette that definitely contained something besides tobacco. “Hey oyibos, I want to work! I’m strong, and I want to work!” he said, flexing his muscles to show just how strong he was.

Makoko is held to be one of the most perilous parts of the city, notorious for its area boys or street gangs of teenagers. But what we found there was actually overwhelming kindness. Everyone we met wanted to show us a different view, to talk to us, to tell us who they were. I could only imagine how it must have seemed to them as two big cars pulled into their little village and a group of oyibos poured out. But as soon as we became human to them, as soon as there was the slightest bit of common ground, we connected as human beings. They, like us, like anyone else, feared the unknown, and yet just as universally, they also yearned for connection, for expression, to be understood.

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Credit to the folks at the BBC for helping me edit this, even if it won't end up on the air. Here's to finding another interesting experience to write about!

Voice: The Obvious and Yet Unutilized Tool for the Web in the Developing World

2011-02-19T14:52:00.000-05:00

Practitioners of technology in the developing world have long accepted that the "normal" ways of interacting with the Internet, the ways that we Westerners have become accustomed to, don't always apply in the developing world. Mobile is a central and critical aspect to any well thought out technological offering for the developing context. At Google, we focus on it relentlessly. The numbers are clear: mobile penetration outstrips traditional Internet penetration by at least an order of magnitude in Africa. This picture becomes even more revealing when we look at the types of phones that people have. The majority of African mobile users don't own smart phones or even feature phones; the majority rely on phones with only basic calling and messaging services like SMS and MMS. So if we're going to reach the vast majority of Africans, we need to focus there. To this effect, a lot of work has been done around SMS. Google has launched its Health and Agriculture Tips, for instance, but SMS has a number of serious contextual limitations: illiteracy, lack of functional literacy, and local languages not supported by phone keyboards. But there's also another route that hasn't been so explored: What about voice? What about voice as a tool for interacting with the Internet?

I would posit that just as voice is becoming a popular tool for accessing the Internet in the developed world, it will become an even more important tool in the developing world. Sure there are limitations. Voice recognition is still technologically imperfect, let alone in dealing with the myriad accents and languages of the developing world, and interpreting voice commands is certainly more computationally intensive than text. But really, what choice do we have? By comparison to SMS, voice is immeasurably easier and more intuitive. Compare trying to type in precisely structured commands into a text message, especially in cases of limited literacy, with simply interacting by voice. Yes, the technology is more complex, probably the reason we've seen so little of it to date, but the value provided to the end-user is incomparable.

While Google is yet to do much in this domain, the World Wide Web Foundation has taken some interesting steps. The projects of greatest interest that they're working on are called Voice-Browsing Acceptance and Trust and VOICES (an acronym that makes very little sense if you click through to see what it actually stands for). Check them out. Both projects are in their early stages, so it's a little too soon to draw any conclusions, but it's very satisfying to see that the ICT4D community is actively investigating this avenue. In my opinion, it holds a huge amount of promise.

What do you think? Could voice be the tool that allows the developing world to reap the benefits of the web?

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Political Turmoil and the Internet in Africa

2011-01-30T10:14:00.000-05:00

On December 17, a young Tunisian college grad, frustrated by his inability to find a job and the harassment he received from the police, publicly set himself on fire and, in effect, set off an explosive chain of events that would change the political landscape of his country forever. In just the last few months, there has been an unprecedented surge in the continent's political instability. The dictator of Tunisia has been ousted; the former president of Cote d'Ivoire hanging onto his post despite calls from a united international community to step down, and the most recent anti-government riots in Egypt calling for the resignation of the country's leader. Technology has played an pivotal role in each of these situations, whether by its innovative use, as a tool for governmental oppression, or by its notable absence.

The phrase "Twitter Revolution" has been used more than once in the recent past, and there has been a great deal of debate over whether the designation is indeed accurate. The anticommunist protests in Moldova and the Iranian post-election riots in 2009 were both dubbed Twitter revolutions, but how big a role Twitter, or social media more broadly, played has been a hotly contested topic. Popular science writer, Malcolm Gladwell, went on record in October 2010 saying that social media was not a suitable tool for real, high-risk social movements, that social media was great for maintaining a broad network of weak ties, but that strong ties were the prerequisite for high-risk behavior. Many Internet pundits were quick to jump on Gladwell after the debacle in Tunisia, where social media has played a clear and substantial role.

One of the major points against Gladwell was that he seemed to conflate social media's use as a tool with social media as a cause for social change. Yes, social media allows you to maintain lots of weak-tie relationships, but it also acts as a powerful, distributed communication platform that has been transforming the very model of mass media. Before Twitter, Facebook, et al., there were relatively few channels for communicating information to the masses. Now there are multitudes. Before, only a very few people controlled the message that reached the public; now anyone in an Internet society with a Twitter account can command millions of followers. As one of his main points, Gladwell talks about the civil rights movement in the US. He states that there was no need for this brand of social media for people to engage in collective action because 98% of the black population could be reached at church on Sunday mornings. It doesn't take a scientist though to see that his point is purely anecdotal. Not all societies have a physical venue where social leaders can reach masses of people. In some societies, the only option is virtual, a situation that is even more true in the case of particularly repressive governments.

All of this is exactly what we're seeing happen in Tunisia and now Egypt. Twitter is being used to coordinate logistics. Facebook and YouTube are being used to broadcast pictures and videos of the protests. Social media is being used to incite people toward action whereas before they might have felt isolated, alone, and afraid to act. Clearly some people in Egypt's leadership viewed social media as such a powerful platform that the government took the unprecedented step to cut off almost the entire nation's access to the Internet. What sort of effect this will have on the riots will be interesting to see. While it may disrupt coordination, I've also heard that people who might have otherwise turned to the Internet to vent their frustration are now taking it to the streets instead. The point of no return may already be past for the Egyptian government.

The most fascinating piece of the puzzle to me is the stark contrast in what we've seen happen in Cote d'Ivoire. November of 2010 saw the first elections in Cote d'Ivoire in many, many years. The elections were supposed to have taken place in 2005, but were ultimately put off year after year. The race pitted two men against each other: then president Laurent Gbagbo and former prime minister Alassane Ouattara. When all was said and done, the Independent Electoral Commission announced Ouattara as the victor, a result that was confirmed by a number of international observers including the United Nations. However, the Gbagbo government was quick to call the results invalid, and ever since the country has been caught in a standstill with neither man willing to back down.

The interesting part of all of this to me is the stark contrast it provides to the other two African states: there has been neither any comparable popular uprising or any such widespread use of social media to organize. (As a point of reference, Internet penetration in Cote d'Ivoire stands at less than 5% whereas Egypt and Tunisia stand at 21% and 34%, respectively.) Without these means of mass-to-mass communication, Gbagbo has been able to retain control of the media within the country and frame the situation in a way that purely suits his needs. While I wouldn't go so far as to conjecture that the lack of Internet usage in Cote d'Ivoire is the root reason for the lack of an uprising, it seems clear that it has played a role.

What do you think? Does social media have the potential to play a substantial part in social change?

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Further Reading:

Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted, by Malcom Gladwell (The New Yorker: Oct 4, 2010)
Tunisia Teaching Gladwell, by Geoff Livingston (Jan 24, 2011)
What if Tunisia had a revolution, but nobody watched?, by Ethan Zuckerman (My Heart's in Accra: Jan 12, 2011)
Egypt Cuts Off Most Internet and Cell Services, by Matt Richtel (NYT: Jan 28, 2011)

Atop the Great Firewall of China

2011-01-22T14:31:00.000-05:00

When I was in Shanghai last month, one of the first things to hit me was just how prevalent Internet censorship is in China. Dubbed the Great Firewall, China's Internet restriction policies are widespread and, arguably, the most extensive in the world. In fact, one of the main reasons there were no new blog posts from that period was because Blogger is blocked. For that matter, so is Facebook, Twitter, and a whole host of other commonly used online tools. Speaking of Facebook, someone from my old team there created a stunning data visualization of Facebook friendships around the world that illustrate the Great Firewall quite well.

As many commentators have pointed out, there's an awfully glaring hole in this world map: China's nowhere to be seen. In addition to general censorship of the Internet, China also employs a small army of "Internet police", rumored to number over 50,000, who "guide discussion" in online forums, or to put it more bluntly, disseminate propaganda. The government also monitors the Internet activity of individual citizens, specifically ones suspected of dissidence. To this point, Amnesty International points out that China has actually imprisoned more journalists and cyber-dissidents than any other country in the world. As an American, I have to admit it was quite jarring to all of a sudden not have the same liberties that I've grown up with. I wonder how the actual inhabitants of the country come to deal with the restrictions or if they even have an impact on people's day to day lives. Perhaps I'll just have to go back to find out for myself...

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Year in Review: A Look Back at 2010

2011-01-08T10:39:00.002-05:00

365 days, 8,760 hours, 525,600 minutes, one year. To think, if it weren't for a few natural laws, these numbers would be nothing more than that, just numbers. And yet, we each use these constants to measure the progress of our lives. How much have we grown in the past year? How much have our lives changed? In a way, I'm grateful for this cyclic nature of life -- it forces us at certain intervals to step and reflect.

Growing up, my plans for the future only ever went up to the year 2010, and even that always seemed impossibly far away. 2010: The year I would graduate college, the year I would enter this "real world" I had heard so much about, the year I would be forced to be independent, and in many ways, the year I would have to say goodbye to those last vestiges of childhood. Sounds kind of terrifying, doesn't it? Well it was. 2010 was a year of many emotions: fear, yes, but also love, wonder, happiness, anxiety, and so many others.

Just before January 1 of last year, I found a present for myself in a random bookstore in New York. It was a five-year journal. Each page is assigned a day of the year, and seven lines of each page is allotted to each of the five years. (Complete the first seven lines on each page in your first year, start from the beginning going through the second seven lines, and so on.) I knew that the year ahead would be one of the most memorable of my life, and so I've been very persistent at keeping up with it, bringing it with me everywhere I travel, and even defying the laws of my personal nature by not losing it. It chronicles a number of monumental experiences that this last year has encompassed: exploring eastern Europe with Robyn, living atop a bookstore in Paris, visiting friends in the UK, spring break in Cancun, my final semester at Cornell, senior week and graduation, backpacking through Europe yet again, starting a new job, moving to Africa, and traveling the world over. I did the calculation the other day, and in one year, I've managed to spend time in 20 countries spanning 4 continents. During my travels in Asia, I heard an old Chinese proverb that seemed to relate particularly well to this past year. Roughly translated, it says "to go 1,000 miles is to have read 10,000 books". In that case, I've done pretty well for myself this year.

Here are some of my most memorable entries from 2010:

Jan 1: First day of a new, rather important year. It was a strange day in Odessa, Dickensian even. Odessa started out dead and later, a thick fog descended on the city. I wonder if I'll ever come back here. (Ukraine)

Jan 2: Left Odessa for Chisinau today. Long, sketchy train ride ensued. Robyn and I got to the border and discovered she was missing the necessary documentation. Got through alright though. Spent the evening at MallDova, ate like kings. (Moldova)

Jan 9: Another superb day at Shakespeare & Co. Spent the evening gallery hopping in the Marais, the hip, trendy part of the city, and then after closing, saw a blacksploitation movie with most of the staff. This place already feels like home. (France)

Jan 22: Last day in Europe, and an eventful one. Had lunch at Google with Sian, hung out with Sam, explored the National Gallery, and had a delicious traditional Indian meal with Sam's family. I can't believe it's been four weeks and classes start on Monday. Time for another hasty transition. (England)

Jan 26: First day of classes of my last semester -- pretty scary. I keep hearing about my friends who have jobs locked down about to enter the real world. The Real World -- I'm putting that one off as long as possible. (US)

Feb 18: A pretty typical day at Cornell: class, nap, studying, meetings, and then out. Pretty typical day for everyone except me until this semester. This normal college life things is pretty sweet. (US)

Feb 27: Day one of the birthday marathon. Lunch with Dan Tracy, nap, birthday dinner #1, hockey game, and then a classic Deb & Co. birthday pregame. Finally topped off the night by sledding down the slope with Stef. Awesome. (US)

Mar 16: What a beautiful day. Submitted my paper, probably aced by entom prelim, awesome tea date with Kathy, and productive Kyoto Now! meeting with Fil. All topped off with another hysterical night of Latin Dance with Stef, Alison, and Dan. Life is beautiful. (US)

Mar 26: Last day in Cancun, bittersweet. I feel about ready to go somewhere else, but what the end of spring break means for me and my college experience is terrifying. I'm just comforted that I squeezed so much into this last half-semester. Carpe diem! (Mexico)

Mar 28: Couldn't have asked for a better way to start this half of the semester. Woke up to an email from Nelson, and I got it! Product management/business development in Ghana! All topped off by a Ben's Best pastrami sandwich and a painless drive back to Ithaca with Donna and Amanda. Here we go! (US)

Apr 18: What a fun day. Holi and roof chilling with Krebs, Jack, and Zack, followed by the Flaming Lips' surreal, awesome show and trivia at Rulloff's. Had so much fun just chilling on Krebs' roof blowing bubbles, eating fancy cracker snacks, and taking photos. Loving life. (US)

May 30: Commencement! Ahhh! I can't believe the day has finally come! The ceremony was nice, and I got to sit with lots of my best friends. Went to the history and honor society reception, and then out for a really chill last night out with friends. (US)

June 28: LONG day of transit. Didn't sleep a wink during the night and then a 12-leg trip to the vineyard including almost every form of transportation imaginable. Looks like it will be worth it though. This place is stunning and the family seems incredibly caring and genuine. Spent the afternoon stacking wood and then a big dinner with the other WWOOFers. Just about everything I could have hoped for. (Italy)

July 11: Slept in while Jason went to the Uffizi. Good decision. Marveled at the David once again and met these cool couple of girls from San Francisco. Had aperitivo with them at this cool student bar and then wandered around looking for a bar to watch the final World Cup game. (Italy)

Sep 7: My first day in Accra. The Google driver, Daniel, was waiting for me at the airport, thank God. Unloaded my stuff at my hotel and then off to the empty office. Thankfully the receptionist was expecting me. Tried to catch up on things, ate some Ghanaian food, and went home. The hotel is okay: no hot water, shoddy Internet, but a big, comfy bed, TV, and cleanness. Lots to get used to here... (Ghana)

Oct 3: First day back in Europe. Spent the afternoon wandering around the charming city of Dublin. Beautiful parks, lovely restaurants, such little poverty. Oh! And I took the greatest shower of my life. What a contrast to Accra. Have I been living this way my entire life without ever realizing it? (Ireland)

Oct 18: Day of travel from Zurich to Accra. Got up at an ungodly hour, missed both of my trains, but got there nonetheless. Arrived in Accra and actually felt like it was home. Spur of the moment meet up with other expats, so glad it's turned out to be easy to meet cool people here. (Ghana)

Oct 24: What a wonderful day at the beach. Beautiful landscape, friendly people, no connection to the outside world, and total peace of mind. Life doesn't get much better. Got back around 4:30, grabbed some dinner, and recharged for the week ahead. (Ghana)

Nov 5: Thank God it's Friday. Catching up on things and my first debrief with the Trader team. Had a really nice TGIF with the team and a great dinner with Gabe, Ariana, and Co. Such good conversation. I love nights like this. (Ghana)

Dec 4: On the plane the whole day, finally got to Singapore in the late evening. When did this become my life? And the hotel... Fast Internet, good food, good shower, gym, laundry, amenities. I'm in heaven. (Singapore)

Dec 25: Awesome day! Chatuchak Market in the morning -- very cool. Made some good purchases and ate THE BEST PAD THAI EVER. Dinner at Cabbages & Condoms. A little less sex-health-oriented than expected, but really nice ambiance. Went out with Kathy, Jess, and her cousins. None of us paid for a single drink all night. Fun times. (Thailand)

Dec 31: Last day of 2010, and yet, without the winter weather, it hardly feels like it. Spent the afternoon in Fisherman's Village eating and drinking and writing, a throwback to roughly a year ago this time. Reined in the near year at the infamous Full Moon Party and had fun meeting random people. Hello 2011. (Thailand)

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Singapore: Government that Works?

2010-12-14T00:51:00.000-05:00

As some of you may know, I spent last week working in Singapore. I have to say, when I decided to move to Africa, I didn't expect my job to take me through an entirely different continent. Three months in, and I may have to reassess the name of this blog and start calling it Google's Man in Transit. But that's the subject for another blog post. For now, I want to highlight a few observations I had in Singapore, another truly fascinating place.

Unlike most cities, Singapore is also a country in and of itself. It's like the city-state model of old. Inhabiting an island off the coast of Malaysia, Singapore is a profoundly unusual place. The city is clean, organized, and extremely safe. I noted to one of my colleagues that it feels like the way one might imagine a futuristic city would be portrayed in a movie: the buildings are tall, but it never feels claustrophobic; the city center is devoid of poverty, and the public transit system is eerily efficient. As a former British colony and current commercial hub, virtually every inhabitant speaks English, and as a modern-day melting pot, it's as Asian or as Western as you want it to be

What makes Singapore really interesting though, is the way the society/government functions. It's what some people might call city planning and regulation that works, and what others might call overreaching paternalism and government interference. The first thing many visitors hear about Singapore is the government's unusual stance on chewing gum. No one is ever quite sure whether gum is legal for personal use or whether it's just importing with the intent to distribute that's illegal, but one thing that you most certainly hear on arrival is that spitting gum on the sidewalk is an offense punishable by caning. Yes, caning. In actuality, gum is only legal for "therapeutic" purposes, and the whole caning thing is a widely propagated urban legend, but it is indicative of the government's policies at large. Some true facts about Singapore: drug possession (marijuana and cocaine, specifically) carry a penalty of death, the posted fine for eating on the metro is S$500, roughly $375 USD, and vandalism (not gum spitting) is indeed a canable offense.

The government is largely autocratic and yet there is remarkably little corruption, an interesting contrast to some other countries I can think of. The government is also hugely paternalistic in its regulation of "morally hazardous" behaviors. For example, there's only one casino in Singapore; entrance with a foreign passport is free, but Singaporeans have to pay S$100 to get in. The justification I heard is that it generates revenue for the state, but the government doesn't want its own people engaging in such questionable activities... just foreigners. Kind of makes sense, and yet something about it also feels deeply wrong. Nonetheless, I thoroughly enjoyed my time there; I would love to make a trip back one day to continue to explore its many eccentricities. And with this job, who knows, that day may be sooner rather than later.

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Launching Google Trader in Ghana

2010-12-07T22:53:00.000-05:00

In between getting 200 Nigerian businesses online and flying off to Singapore for my month in Asia, I had spent one day in Ghana to help launch the country's largest classifieds website, dubbed Google Trader. We had launched Trader as a pilot in Uganda over a year ago, and after months of iteration and improvement, we're seeing it spread to the other side of the African continent. Since I had been involved in much of the pre-launch preparations, I decided to come back to Ghana in between my two other stops for the big day. And boy was it a big day.

Starting at 8:00am, the Trader launch team, comprised of about 5 Googlers, 10 event staff, 20 promoters, and 100 dancers, went from site to site staging flash mobs around the city of Accra. It was an extraordinary spectacle. Slowly, people wearing bright Google t-shirts would start to pervade an area. And then boom! All of a sudden, loud music blared (the Google Trader song, no less, commissioned by a Nigerian artist), and the dancers ran into a central area and kicked off a two-minute choreographed dance routine. Here are some of the photos from the day.

The first flash mob begins...

Flash mob in full swing.

Dancers showing off their skills.

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One Day, 200 Nigerian Businesses Online

2010-12-06T00:41:00.000-05:00

There I stood, in front of my first group of 100 small business owners at ChamsCity, the world's largest cybercafe, in Lagos, Nigeria. I had just been informed that none of the equipment I thought I would have was functional. No projector and only a broken microphone. And then, to top it off, due to a last minute schedule change, I was going to be giving the entire workshop rather than just the second half. Lovely. If I were going to pull this off, I would need to be quick on my feet.

And yet, despite the hiccups, when all was said and done, the day worked out pretty well. By the time these 200 small business owners left, they had started using Google Apps, making a website, and registering their business with Google Maps.

The event was the culmination of weeks of work, and from the preliminary feedback, the reactions were generally positive. Get African Business Online, or GABO as we call it, is part of Google's larger initiative to make the Internet more useful and relevant to Africans. As I discussed in my post on the topic, there is a dearth of African content on the Internet, and Google views this as a major hurdle to Internet update. While 200 small business websites is but a drop in the bucket, it's been an instructive first step. We had business owners from just about every field you could imagine, from PR to manufacturing, from travel agencies to photographers, and we gathered a vast array of feedback about what's important, what's not, and where we should move next.

The whole GABO team.

The team of developers helping the small business owners.

Now onto the hard part: taking the lessons of the day and figuring out how to scale the initiative across the entire African continent. Never a boring day at work; that's for sure.

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Lagos, Nigeria: One of the Most Fascinating Places I've Ever Been

2010-12-03T09:38:00.000-05:00

When I got off the plane in Lagos, I had very little idea what to expect. As I mentioned in my last post on the subject, I had gotten very mixed reviews. One colleague called Nigeria "extreme Africa". Others warned me about the constant mortal danger. And another colleague told me about all the money there. Without actually visiting, it was hard reconcile all of these observations, but now that I have, I can say it all makes sense. Sort of.

Sort of because the more time you spend in Lagos, the more you realize that things there just don't make sense. The only outcome of trying to make events and conditions there seem rational is a sore head. Lagos is a place of extreme disparities, in wealth, in safety, and in quality of life. When I moved to Africa, I was warned of such disparities, but nothing I've seen so far comes even close to Lagos.

Lagos is broken into two general areas: the mainland and the islands. The mainland is extremely poor and extremely dangerous. Walking around there at night is seriously asking to be mugged, kidnapped, or worse. Most mainlanders live in slums, some of which have grown so large that people have started sand-filling the lagoon separating the mainland from islands and building houses on the unstable ground and stilts.

Compare this with Banana Island. Banana Island is an artificially created island connected to the other islands and is home to Lagos's wealthiest inhabitants. Like the slums in Lagos Lagoon, Banana Island was created by sand-filling the body of the water and building structures on top of it. There's only one road leading into the Island from the rest of Lagos. The road itself is unpaved for long stretches and generally looks like it's leading to a dead-end. But when you get out the other side, you could be anywhere in the world. Well, anywhere in the world that has a number of legitimately palatial mansions, luxury apartments, and first-class amenities. I couldn't help being reminded of Robert Moses's alleged architectural attempts to keep poor people out of Long Island. (In a biography, author Robert Caro, accused Moses of building bridges over highways into Long Island intentionally too low for buses to clear.) While I can't say anything for sure, considering how spotlessly developed Banana Island itself is, it's hard to imagine that the Island's proprietors would have an awful lot of trouble finishing this one road, especially when it's the only route in and out of the area.

During my time in Lagos, I stayed mostly on the islands. My hotel was on Victoria Island, and my office was on Ikoyi, both in the safer, wealthier parts of town. I did get to do some field visits to local business owners though, and the vast disparities the city offers couldn't be harder to ignore.

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Being Thankful

2010-11-28T17:41:00.000-05:00

I have a confession to make. It's not easy for me to say, because I try always to be grateful for my life, through the ups and downs regardless. But on Thanksgiving last week, sitting in my hotel alone, eating the same dinner I had eaten for days before, and working away on my project for work, I'll admit it: I was pretty miserable. It was the first time that I had been away from home on Thanksgiving, and while the holiday may not mean a lot to many American families, it always has for mine. Tonight though, maybe a few days late, I was blessed to be invited into the home of some fellow American expats, people I didn't even know before, for their version of an expatastic American Thanksgiving. I can't even express how thankful I am.

To give some context, rewind a few days to Wednesday of last week. I was out to dinner with a new friend, Bic, a friend of a friend from Ghana. (It's amazing how the expat social network works, but that's a topic for another post entirely.) She brought another friend with her named Stacey, and they mentioned that a few of Stacey's friends were having some people over for a Thanksgiving celebration on Sunday, if not on the actual holiday itself. I said that I was bummed that I didn't have any plans, and they said they'd see what they could do.

Well a few days later, I officially scored an invite. The hosts all worked in the oil and gas industry, which is very common for expats in Nigeria. I had never met any of them, but they warmly invited me into their home, and into their little expat family. I had no idea what to expect, but boy was I pleasantly surprised. Everyone was so kind and welcoming; the people were all interesting, and the food was absolutely phenomenal. (The hosts had imported every last vestige of your typical Thanksgiving feast from the US right down to the canned cranberry sauce.)

Sitting at their dinner table, surrounded by so many wonderful new friends, I couldn't help feeling deeply thankful for them, for this life, and for everyone I know. The last couple weeks have been unusually stressful on the job, and there have been times that I've felt lonely working all the time without a solid support system around. But this one evening snapped me out of my slump and reminded me that I have so much to give thanks for: for the greatest job I could hope for; for finding warm and supportive people everywhere I go, and most profoundly, for truly being able to live out my dreams.

While I may have been pretty miserable on Thanksgiving itself, it seems the holiday may have come at just the right time to remind me of all I have.

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Our Strategy in Africa Part IV: Looking Toward the Future

2010-11-22T06:00:00.001-05:00

No matter how much resources Google, or any other company, pours into Africa, our bets will never pay off unless we keep an eye out for the long term. How can we help develop not only an Internet ecosystem in Africa, but also one that's sustainable? In this final installment of my series on Google's strategy in Africa, I'd like to put the spotlight on one specific initiative that's been underway for many months aimed at achieving this very goal: Google's G-Africa events, run by none other than my friend and colleague, Bridgette.

Since September 2009, Google has been holding conferences known as G-Days across Africa. There have been eight thus far, and we will continue to hold more in the future. These conferences are generally split into two halves, one geared at technical folks like CS students and software developers and the second half geared at business leaders and marketers, each with its own unique objectives.

The first half has a double purpose; while we do spend a good portion of the day educating software professionals and students about Google developer tools, our other goal is just as important: to create communities of techies throughout Africa. Some time ago we realized that there were technologists across Africa, but for some reason they weren't talking to each other. In this vein, we leave a fair amount of time for networking, and also encourage the creation of Google Technology User Groups to keep people engaged long after the event is over. The second half, aimed at businesspeople, is all about how they can get the most out of the Internet. We hope that these events, in conjunction with a host of smaller ones we do, will spur an active and enduring community of developers and Internet savvy businesses.

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What Will Our Legacy Be?

2010-11-19T11:26:00.001-05:00

What motivates today's young leaders? What factors from our collective youth have given this generation its unique character? What legacy will our generation leave behind? These are the questions David Burstein, author and founder of Generation18, is trying to answer. Last Friday, I had the pleasure of speaking with David over VC from Ghana about my work, his background, and our opinions on where this generation is headed.

David's a fascinating guy. When he was in high school, he set out on a two-year project to make a documentary investigating the disproportionately low number of young voters. He ended up interviewing a host of public figures ranging from senators to famous actors. In 2008, he founded 18 in '08 (now known as Generation18), which would become the largest national nonpartisan political engagement organization aimed at and run by youth. Since then, he's been interviewed on CNN, NPR, and C-Span, among others. But it was actually David's newest project that led us to connect with one another. He's working on a book about our so-called millennial generation and what makes it tick, set to be released next year. As a side project, he's also co-authoring a series of articles in Fast Company, one of my favorite publications, along the same lines. The series, called Change Generation, profiles a number of "risk-taking, do-gooding young entrepreneurs". The articles thus far have highlighted a range of young leaders from activists to business leaders to philanthropists. Definitely check it out; I've certainly been finding inspiration in it.

Finally, I pose the question to you: What will this generation's legacy be? What will we leave behind?

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Landed in Lagos, the Heart of Nigeria

2010-11-17T12:02:00.003-05:00

Today is day three in Lagos, and day two of a national holiday for the Muslim celebration of Eid al-Adha, the Festival of Sacrifice. As a result, I haven't seen too much, but I do have some initial observations about this city that garnered such polar reviews. But first, some background. With a population nearing 160-million, Nigeria is the most populous country in Africa and the eighth most populous country in the world. It's largest city, Lagos, alone has roughly one-third the population of all of Ghana. When I told people I was coming here, I got the full range of reactions, from "Oh Lagos is a real city; have fun!" to "Good luck buddy, see you in the next life." I was intrigued. How could one place evoke such different opinions? One thing I knew for sure was that in West Africa, Lagos is certainly a place whose reputation precedes itself.

Lagos (pronounced "LAY-gos") has a reputation for being extremely dangerous. Even Nigerians are deeply suspicious of other Nigerians. In the three days since I arrived, I haven't seen it yet, but I credit that to the fact that my only day out in the city consisted entirely of meetings and being shuttled around in an SUV; since then I haven't been foolish enough to leave my hotel. (Funny story though, when I landed on Sunday, I proceeded to walk out of the airport and discover that Google hadn't set up a driver to pick me up. The sun was beginning to set, and I couldn't get in touch with anyone from the company. I did my best not to panic, but this situation could have very easily turned out to be very bad. But back to my point...)

In the US, Nigeria is arguably best known for Internet scams, and that's certainly apparent and consistent on the ground. Internet scams, or 419 as they call it here, are extremely prevalent. Some Nigerians are concerned by this international reputation, but many believe that these scams help drive the local economy. Ironically, scammers here are called Yahoos ("Yahoo" is pidgin English for "scammer"), the same thing Yahoo employees call themselves.

Another interesting difference from Ghana is the culture of bling. Nigerians aspire to success, and then they really flaunt it. When I visited KNUST in Ghana, the students told me that you could recognize the Nigerians on campus based on their flashier attire. This observation turned out to be indicative of Nigerian culture at large. This cultural more may have something to do with the demographics of the country. The populace is incredibly young; the median age is just over 19, but life-expectancy is extremely low, at roughly 47. With figures like that, it's more understandable why people might spend so much on the present that they end up living without savings.

More observations on the culture and technological landscape as soon as I escape the confines of this hotel! Tomorrow will be an exciting day.

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Conjuring Stability from Chaos

2010-11-10T06:11:00.002-05:00

Would you believe that in the five months since I graduated college, I haven't stayed in any one place for more than three weeks at a time? At the beginning, it was easy. I was traveling around Europe with friends or bouncing around between a few of the places I consider home, places that I have solid friends and family to visit and enjoy. Africa has been its own challenge. This post is my attempt to tackle one of the great challenges I face in this chaotic, ever-changing life: the lack of permanence, the lack of any routine, fundamentally, the lack of stability.

This life I've chosen has been fascinating. I get to solve new, interesting problems every week. No one week is like the next, and no one day quite like another. I'm gifted to work with brilliant, determined people who believe deeply in the difference they're making in Africa. And the people I meet outside work are almost all uniformly bright, friendly, and captivating. What more could I ask for, right?

The first factor that brought this absence to my attention was how quickly the people I've been meeting here turnover. There are very few expats who are here for the long-haul, and everyone's on their own schedule. People regularly disappear for weeks or forever. One of my first friends here, for instance, someone who is responsible for many of my current friends, left just a couple weeks after I met him. That's a pattern that's emerged even more since. When I meet people today, I begin the interaction with the awareness that there's a 50-50 chance I'll never see them again. It's a strange way to live: liberating but also very difficult.

And what's more, I'm also aware that I'm certainly part of the problem. This Sunday I'll leave Ghana for two to three weeks before traveling to Singapore with a brief visit back in Ghana. This life is dynamic, fast-paced, and exciting, but it can also be jarring and uncomfortable. I have been able to meet others who seem to do it though. My colleague, Bridgette, for example, travels even more than I do and yet manages to run nearly every day and has a social life wherever she goes. I don't know how she does it, but I'm shooting to learn, how to conjure stability from chaos.

They say that life doesn't come with an instruction manual. Never in my life have I felt more like I've needed one than I do now. This lifestyle is so fundamentally different from anything I've ever lived, and it's definitely going to take some time to master. But don't you worry. This mastery may not come tomorrow, next week, or next month, but it will. I won't accept anything less.

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Our Strategy in Africa Part III: Making the Internet Relevant and Useful

2010-11-08T07:04:00.001-05:00

Did you know that Africans represent 14% of the world's population and yet only 2% of the Internet users? With numbers like that, it shouldn't be surprising that there isn't much African content online or very many products aimed solving African problems. Thus, we hit a bit of a chicken-and-the- egg problem. Because there are so few Africans online, there is very little useful or relevant content, and because there is so little useful or relevant content, there's very little reason for Africans to get online in the first place. We're hoping to shake things up, and here's how we're going to do it.

Step One: Facilitate the creation of African content

We seek to educate businesses and consumers on the value of using the Internet and enable them to create a presence online. An example of this kind of activity would be what I was doing last month with west African exporters, training them on Internet tools and helping them create basic websites for their businesses. It's also what I'll be working on for the next two weeks in Nigeria, leading up to a large-scale event in Lagos where we help 200 small-to-medium-sized businesses get online. Success stories abound. I've met more than one local blogger who's been able to make a living from the revenue he gets from AdSense. Another inspirational story is that of Gregory Mchopa, a Tanzanian artist who's been able to launch an online business selling his paintings after outreach from Google.org. In addition to this, we also seek to encourage publishers, media, and future journalists to leverage online tools to distribute their content. In Ghana alone, we have met with the press a number of times to advise key players how to build an online presence, advertise their content, and get the most out of the online efforts.

Step Two: Launch products that solve African problems

Thus far, we've launched three main products specifically built for the African market. One, which I've already spoken about at length, is Baraza, which I continue to find very useful. The other two are called Trader and Tips. Trader, which launched in Uganda in the summer of 2009, is an online classifieds system that allows users to buy and sell goods and services from a computer or mobile phone. Tips, also known as Health and Agriculture Tips, is a service that provides access via SMS to locally relevant health and agriculture info. We also launched Tips in the summer of 2009 in partnership with Grameen and MTN. The service has since received millions of hits in Uganda alone and won the GSMA award 2010 for Best Mobile Services for Economic and Social Development. You can learn more about both of them in this excellent short video, which was actually part of my inspiration for trying this kind of work.

Together we believe that these two approaches pose a promising avenue to foster this Internet ecosystem we're shooting for. For me personally, these two goals are how I spend the vast majority of my time, so time will tell if my hard work pays off!

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Google Tech Talk in Kumasi: Meeting Bright and Motivated Students

2010-11-05T05:32:00.002-04:00

We arrived about ten minutes late after getting thoroughly lost driving around the campus of KNUST, Kumasi's science and technology university. Fortunately, in Ghana, ten minutes usually isn't late at all. It was my first time giving such a talk to university students, but it felt like a natural thing to do after being on the other end of so many at Cornell. To our surprise though, when we got into the lecture hall, there were already about 50 students eagerly waiting for us.

The crowd was mixed on that Wednesday afternoon, from some very tech savvy computer science students to other engineers to some decidedly non-technical folks. The talk was sponsored by the National Society of Black Engineers and the KNUST Google Technology User Group, a group of Google enthusiasts, similar to the Google Ambassador Program back home. After fiddling with our equipment and trying to overcome the Internet connectivity issues, the introductions commenced.

The event organizer finished, and donning my brand new Google Africa t-shirt, I began. "Hi, I'm Ben, and I work at Google."

The general theme I covered was spurring content creation in Africa. As of 2008, the World Bank had Ghana at only roughly one million Internet users, akin to Senegal, but far behind South Africa, Kenya, and Uganda, and despite gains in the last two years, there is still a dearth of Ghanaian content online. How can Google help Ghanaians overcome this obstacle? The two products I focused on were Baraza and Blogger. Baraza, which we just launched last week, is a question and answer service created exclusively for Africans. Blogger, as many of you probably know already, is a tool that makes blogging simple and easy for consumers around the world.

After giving my presentation, showing a quick YouTube video, demoing Baraza, and showing off my own blog, I was very impressed by the quality of questions I got about Google products. "How does Google determine how much revenue I make from my blog?" "Is Python the only language supported by Google App Engine?" "How does Google know if a blogger logs on and clicks his own ads to generate revenue?" It was evident to me that these students had clearly done their homework and already pretty astute users. It was very rewarding, and even if nothing else, it gave me a lot of confidence that the next generation of Ghanaians will be uniquely web-savvy.

At the end, we distributed a bunch of Google Africa shirts to a t-shirt-hungry group of students. A number of students came up to us afterward to introduce themselves and challenge us with more insightful questions. As we were walking out, the greatest feedback we received from the organizers was that even though we had been talking for two hours, they wanted us to stay longer to teach more technical content. To me, that says a job well done.

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Life's Getting Better All The Time

2010-11-03T08:28:00.001-04:00

This post is adapted from an email I sent to some friends and family a few days ago. My apologies to those of you reading it twice.

I was sitting in my apartment the other day trying to think of a song that adequately summed up my experience over the last few weeks since I got back to Africa, and this was the first thing that popped into my head: "It's Getting Better All the Time" by the Beatles. I have to admit, it's getting better. Life here wasn't easy from the start; in fact, it was really damned hard. But so much has changed in such a short period of time. Since visiting my colleagues in Europe, I have a deep understanding of my job and what's expected of me, and more importantly, I feel like I'm being effective at it. What's more, all of a sudden, I have a thriving social life here. I had no idea how easy it would be to make friends once I broke into the social scene. Last Thursday night alone, I was invited to four different functions ranging from an expat mixer to an MIT alumni gathering. Hard to believe only a matter of weeks ago, I didn't know a single soul.

In other news, I'm planning to travel to Nigeria and Singapore in the next couple months, both of which should be interesting adventures. I'm also trying to figure out awesome travel plans for my holiday break. Any ideas would be welcome! I'm debating between Africa and Asia since I'll be in one of the two on either end of my break. What do you think?

Not too much more to say really besides that I'm loving just about every moment of my time here. I'm very literally living my dream. I feel like I've always enjoyed what I've been doing, but this is the first time in my life that I have trouble going to sleep most nights because I'm too excited about the day ahead. Life is good, and it just keeps getting better.

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Introducing Google Baraza

2010-10-28T09:22:00.001-04:00

Yesterday, Google launched its newest Africa-centered product in Ghana, and I had the opportunity to play an active role in the festivities. Google Baraza is a community-based Q&A service that was created specifically for the African continent. As I've outlined in my previous posts on Google's strategy in Africa, one of the big obstacles to a thriving Internet ecosystem in Africa is the lack of locally relevant content. Baraza lets African users work around this issue by posing their questions directly to other Africans and encouraging a community of users who both provide and acquire value from the product. At this point, you're probably wondering what makes Baraza special/different from all the other Q&A services out there, why the name Baraza, and most importantly, what sort of launch activities I got to participate in yesterday.

At the most basic level, what differentiates Baraza from other services is that it's created specifically for the African market. Whereas most questions a Westerner would want to know are only a Google search away, the same just isn't true for Africans. But more than that, Baraza has some interesting features that make it a more compelling product than other similar offerings. First of all, the entire site is based on a currency of points. You get points by answering questions and you spend points to ask. What's more, you get extra points if the community determines that your answer is good. Unlike other products, this forces members of the community to give as well as take. In addition, there is the concept of reputation where someone who consistently gives good answers earns a spotlight on the site. Both of these features create a strangely addictive user experience that has me wishing I knew more about Accra so I could answer more questions myself.

Why the name? Baraza is actually a Swahili word and it means "council" or "task-force". Since Swahili is the most widely spoken African language, it seemed like an appropriate choice.

And finally, my own exploits. Yesterday afternoon, my new colleague, Juliana, and I went down to one of Accra's most prominent cyber cafes, Busy Internet, formerly run by Google's own Estelle Akofio-Sowah, and got people using the product. As part of the launch push, Google was sponsoring free browsing, and simultaneously, running a radio show on Accra's top station, Joy FM, featuring local celebrities like our Estelle answering questions that had been posted to the site. Well about an hour in, Juliana got a call, and the two of us had a radio cameo on the show being broadcast to the masses of Ghanaians stuck in traffic (a very substantial part of Ghanaian life, unfortunately). It was pretty cool to hear our voices on the radio a few minutes later, but really, just another day in this crazy, extraordinary, borderline ridiculous job. I'm looking forward to see how all of Ghana reacts to this new service.

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Perched at a Tipping Point: Let the Price Wars Begin

2010-10-25T08:25:00.002-04:00

Over the last several weeks, technologists in Africa have begun to see an extraordinary phenomenon starting to take place across the continent. Price wars have begun. In Kenya, consumers have seen a 30% reduction in broadband prices, a 50% - 75% drop for calling, and a shockingly high 94% decrease for SMS. Similar trends have emerged in Ghana last months with the first real price war in calling and SMS and bandwidth prices plummeting by up to half. But this sudden new occurrence begs several questions: Why now? Who will benefit? And how does Google fit in?

First, why now? Really, it's been a long time coming. The mobile phone market in Africa is exploding, and for the first time we're seeing real competition among Internet providers.

Some staggering facts:

In the last 10 years, the number of mobile phone subscribers in Kenya has ballooned by roughly 100,000%.
Mobile penetration in Ghana in September was 67% and is expected to hit 80% by year end.
Today, nearly 2 in 3 Kenyan households have mobile phones, twice as many as have running water.

These kind of statistics combined with the recent significant shake up in the African telecom industry has spelled good news for consumers. This burgeoning market has attracted a great deal of interest from foreign multinationals; just last month, Indian telco giant, Bharti Airtel, bought the African subsidiary of one of the top telecom providers on the continent, Zain. Bharti Airtel has had great success in India and has a reputation for its disruptive tactics. Clearly, the incumbents weren't going to take this sitting down.

This disruption has been further exacerbated by the introduction of significant, new physical infrastructure around Africa. When the Internet was first introduced to West Africa, for example, the only way to connect was via satellite, a solution both inefficient and highly expensive. In 2001, the first underwater cable, SAT3, landed, and for the first time, provided the opportunity for fast, cheap web connectivity. But as economics would predict, the markets didn't play out exactly that way. With satellite as the only competition, the owner of SAT3 only had to undercut the extremely expensive alternative. Things remained this way for quite some time. In fact, it wasn't until just this summer that a second underwater cable, Main One, launched, spurring fierce disruption to the market. By September, broadband prices in Ghana had been slashed in half. And with the upcoming entrance of a third submarine cable, Glo-1, the former SAT3 monopoly is all but history. Similar dynamics have been taking place in East Africa as well, with the launch of three submarine cables since just 2009.

What's more, telecom providers are starting to realize the power of lower prices. Vincent Wang’ombe, a marketing manager from Kenya Data Networks went on record saying, "From our experience, a reduction in internet prices increases usage, and this is why we will be lowering our prices before the end of October, so as to utilize both our international and local capacity. We have un-utilized capacity that we are paying for whether we use it or not." At last, people are beginning to talk sense.

Finally, how does Google fit into this? To put it lightly, my colleagues and I are very much encouraged by recent developments. Google's goal in Africa is to help spur a sustainable, thriving Internet ecosystem. And as I noted in my recent post on barriers to access, cost is still a huge obstacle. So we'll see how it goes from here. We at Google believe that if we can build compelling products and services, the more people there are on the Internet, the more people will be using them. It's an exciting time to watch this all play out.

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Some links about these recent events:

Kenya mobile price war cuts calling costs
Safaricom of Kenya Slashes Mobile Text-Message Cost by 94% Amid Price War (Bloomberg)
Safaricom slashes SMS tariffs as price war hots up (IT News Africa)
Zain introduces low-cost vouchers as price war intensifies (IT News Africa)
Kenya Data Networks announces 30% price cut; Safaricom WiMAX acquisition finally approved (TeleGeography)
Bandwidth prices slashed by over half (Ghana News)

Home, Sweet Home

2010-10-20T08:13:00.000-04:00

On Monday night, I landed once again in warm, muggy Accra, but unlike the first time, this time I was greeted by a feeling I hadn't at all expected. Arriving in Accra Monday night, I felt like I was home. Sure, gallivanting around Europe had been fun, and sure, I had been reluctant to give up all of the Western luxuries, but I have to admit it; I'm starting to see the virtue in the whole concept of home, even if it is fleeting.

Europe really was superb though, with the exception of an awful case of food poisoning. (Though better there than here. I'm sure if I got sick in Accra, I would be convinced it was some rare, exotic disease that was sure to kill me.) It really was such a pleasure catching up with friends in London, Oxford, and Zurich, and what's more, the Zurich Google office is awesome. Pictures below, but I'll just say that in one trip from my desk overlooking the alps to the cafeteria for dinner, I took a fireman's pole and a slide, waded my way through a jungle, and passed basketball court to get to the all-you-can-eat, free, gourmet food. And all of the Swiss chocolate lying around everywhere... In a sense, I'm glad I was only there for a week, because I'm sure I would have ended up morbidly obese if I had stayed much longer.

On the other hand, when I walked in Barcelos last night, the place where I often get dinner on week nights, the staff smiled at me as they always do and asked me where I had been the last two weeks. That's a nice feeling, the simple knowledge that someone has missed me and was glad for my return. It's an interesting life I'm leading, one of the nomad with no real attachments or home, but as it turns out, that's all the more reason that the little things are important. I've been thinking a lot about my life recently and while 90% of the time, I'm just amazed by the opportunities I've been blessed to have, I also recognize that it's not always the easiest life to lead. Then again, that's exactly what I wished for, wasn't it? It's not the first time on this journey that I've realized you really do have to be careful what you wish for!

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Signs of autumn. (No seasons in Ghana, unfortunately.)

One of my literary heroes, Oscar Wilde.

Beautiful, manicured park in Dublin,
stark contrast to the natural beauty of Africa.

Hotel room in Zurich, also stark contrast
to accommodations in Accra.

Fireman's pole in the Zurich office.

Jungle lounge in the Zurich office. Notice the hidden chairs.

More of the Zurich office.

Nap room in the Zurich office.

Massage room in the Zurich office.

Last shot from the Zurich office on my way out.

Our Strategy in Africa Part II: Eliminating Barriers to Access

2010-10-17T11:26:00.002-04:00

A few weeks ago, I outlined Google's overall strategy in Africa and mentioned that three posts would follow doing deep dives on each of the central components: access, relevance, and sustainability. This entry will tackle the first issue. Access is still a monumental hurdle, and probably the most significant one, to developing a thriving Internet ecosystem in Sub-Saharan Africa. High quality connectivity is extremely expensive and very hard to come by. Google has a plan for helping the people of Africa overcome this challenge though.

Google is working on eliminating barriers to access on two main fronts. The first is through a technology called Google Global Caches. Basically, GGCs are servers that can be installed at ISPs or Internet Exchange Points that cache frequently accessed public content like YouTube videos. This means that once the data is accessed once, it is then stored locally so that when another user goes to access it, the traffic doesn't have to cross the globe to the nearest data center. By doing this, Google improves user experience by reducing latency when accessing Google services and also lessens international bandwidth requirements for internet service providers. It's a win-win situation for everyone: ISPs don't incur as much of the costs of international traffic, users get their content faster, and Google gets to provide higher quality services to consumers.

The other major initiative Google has been taking is the University Access Program (GUAP). GUAP is a a program wherein Google works with universities to foster a community of effective Internet users among the faculty, staff, and student body. From our perspective, the hope is to build a new generation of Internet educated African citizens who can then spread their expertise to the masses. To do this, Google works with the universities to provide contributions for infrastructure including wireless access, bandwidth, international bandwidth; affordable laptops, email and the full Google Apps suite, all with expert guidance/consultancy. Again, it's the sort of program that's win-win for everyone involved. The universities get to better prepare their students for the world, the users have the ability to be more effective, and Google sees more people using the Internet and its products.

To sum up Google's strategy in this domain, basically folks have been very clever in devising programs that serve every party involved, whether it's an ISP, a university, or a user. It's these kind of initiatives that dominate Google's strategy in Africa. We're constantly asking the question, "how can we make a positive impact while also moving forward with Google's long-term goals?" It's not a question that has a lot of easy answers, especially in Africa, but fortunately for us, we've got a lot of good people thinking about it.

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Life in High Contrast

2010-10-13T11:23:00.003-04:00

This last week and a half in Europe has been hard. Hard for a number of reasons, not the least of which including food poisoning, not staying anywhere for more than a few days, and not knowing my way around. But more profoundly, these last several days have made me realize that I live life in high contrast and just how much my perspective has changed from my short time in Africa.

I got to Dublin last Sunday for the Google EMEA sales conference after an 11-hour red-eye. Those of you who know me well know my finickiness about sleeping and thus my deep-seated distaste for red-eyes, but I was actually in pretty good spirits when I got to Ireland. Dublin's a charming city, and manageable enough that I got to explore the city fairly quickly. Things quickly took a turn for the worse, however, when I ate a smoked salmon crepe for dinner, resulting in the worst case of food poisoning I could imagine. I won't go into the details, but let's just say it was bad. I was supposed to be getting to know my team, and instead I ended up incapacitated the entire time. On Wednesday, I departed for London, Friday for Oxford, and then Sunday for Zurich, where I am now. I'm grateful to be feeling much better this week, and grateful that this entire trip won't have been in vain.

But onto the crux of this post. I'm reminded of a quote by the famous theologian, Cornel West, in reference to a statement from Socrates. The classical philosopher is credited with saying, "The unexamined life is not worth living," to which West famously replied, "and the examined life is hard." It is in this way that these last several days have been hard. When I got to Dublin, the first thing I did was take a long, hot, fully pressurized shower. For the first time in weeks. And it was glorious. And yet. And yet, as I was standing under the full stream of hot water, I couldn't help feeling like I was doing something wrong, that I was being sinful, overly self-indulgent. Walking around the city I got the same impression. The manicured parks, the fancy restaurants, the large, beautiful homes. Had I really been living amongst all of this my entire life without ever appreciating it? I supposed I had.

It wasn't until this realization that I understood how much my time in Africa had changed my outlook. Over the last week, I've talked about the things that I can't take for granted back in Ghana: electricity, running water, etc., and I can tell that most people just don't understand what that's like, what some huge portion of the human population live with every day. It's staggering to think, really. You can see the pictures on the web or TV, but you can't really understand until you experience it yourself. And that's something I have to think is extremely important for humanity as a whole. I feel like I'm a fuller person for understanding some tiny portion of these things, and I'm left wondering how we can get people at-large to understand these hard realities. I have to believe that we'd be a stronger civilization if more people did.

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Venturing into the Night

2010-10-02T11:08:00.001-04:00

The dirt road was dark and uneven, and I had been walking for some indeterminably long time. I had tried to follow the directions given to me: turn left on Oxford Street and keep going on Papaye Down, but as anyone who has lived in Ghana knows, most roads here do not have commonly known names. I had walked, and walked, and walked. A hair salon, a mobile phone voucher hut, a series of makeshift homes... Nope. It was nearly 8:00; they were all shut up, and I was sure I was lost.

I finally conceded and called the new friend I was supposed to be meeting, but no answer. Finally I got to the end of the road, loitered for a moment trying to figure out what to do, and serendipitously saw him entering a nearby restaurant. I had made it after all. He brought along his roommate, Gabe, and the three of us had Thai food together. They were also pre-grad school students spending a year working a field research firm in Accra. We ate a light meal, and then, the three of us, ventured out into the night.

The first stop was an Irish pub popular with the local expat community. Walking in, I had such a bizarre sense of being in an entirely different place. The staff was African, but the customers were almost entirely white. I hadn't had such a reaction since I visited the Accra Mall, another truly bizarre experience to have in the middle of Ghana. According to local legend (read: my friend's educated speculation), the pub owner was an ex-MI6 agent. Ask him what he did before moving to Ghana and where he lived, and you get, "Oh, in the construction business. Where? Syria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia." Mm hm.

We had a couple drinks there and headed to our next destination, Bywell. When my friend, Ryan, asked me if I wanted to go, I said I had never been. At this point his roommate sarcastically chimed in, "But you want to take home a prostitute tonight?" Apparently this place had a reputation, but Ryan assured me that it wasn't all that bad. Once we got there, the bar turned out to be actually quite cool. The space was smokey, and the air hung heavy with the fusion rhythms from the live band at one end. The popular style of music here is called hip life, Ghana's answer to Reggae, with musicians playing instruments spanning cultures and origin, from the trumpet and keyboard to African drums. The full gamut of people were here: new expats and old, rich locals and poor, and of course, gathered in one corner, a number of prostitutes and their prospective clientele. Overall, it felt kind of like I was in a strange variation of Casablanca.

We all had work in the morning, so Bywell was our last stop for the evening, but the night was surely a successful one, my first adventure into the thriving Ghanaian nightlife.

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Getting African Businesses Online

2010-09-30T10:04:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I spent the day with two colleagues from Google at the West Africa Trade Hub ICT Conference. The two other Googlers, Eve and Estelle, and I gave training sessions for small business owners from Benin, Togo, and Ghana to help them develop basic web presences with Google Sites. It was fascinating to work with these small exporters, some of which did not speak English or had never used a computer or the Internet before. By the end of the day, over a dozen small enterprises were online with email addresses and easy access to their content, but the SME owners weren't the only ones who left better for the experience. As you might expect, we probably learned just as much from them as they did from us.

One of the starkest observations was this: Even basic stuff can be hard. I had no idea how many roadblocks a user could potentially hit just trying to sign up for a Google account, find a website/service, etc. For example, trying to explain the nature of an account security question (e.g. "What is your mother's maiden name?") to a user who doesn't speak either of my languages, English or Internet lingo, can be extremely difficult.

Another one was that many people simply don't know what a quality website looks like. I found myself consistently asking the business owners, "What would you want to tell someone who knows nothing about your business?" With the extreme inexperience using the Internet, people often need suggestions for standard pages, content, how to structure their sites, and so on. Even with standard or comprehensive help text, people still need a lot of guidance/hand holding. Building a system that feels like a human tutorial is difficult.

The final observation was that people don't really need to be sold on the value proposition. This was the most surprising to me. Internet penetration in Ghana is only ~4%, and yet these business owners were so enthusiastic and determined to get online. Granted there's a selection bias for the people who would attend such a conference, but it was also clear that there's already a rich market of interested business owners. People are very excited to have the autonomy to get online themselves. Good news for me!

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Estelle presenting while Eve offers one-on-one support to a business owner.

Helping a Ghanaian Shea butter exporter develop a website.

A gift from the lady above for a hard day's work.

Our Strategy in Africa

2010-09-26T18:56:00.002-04:00

First of all, full disclosure, everything I discuss in this series of posts has been approved for external dissemination by the PR folks at Google, so you're not getting any insider information from me. That said, obviously this comes with my own personal commentary, so that's something! The plan is to write four posts about Google's objectives and strategies in Africa; this first one will be a general overview and the next three will be deep dives into each of the obstacles we're seeking to overcome. Here goes...

Why is Google in Africa? Most people in most African countries don't use credit cards or have bank accounts, the two ways a consumer might pay for advertising, so it clearly isn't about making money (yet, at least). So what is it? Simply put, Google is serious about Africa, and our strategy is to get users online by developing an accessible, relevant, and sustainable Internet ecosystem. We reason that the more people using the Internet, the more people will be using Google products. And so we want to make the Internet an integral part of African life. But to do that we have to overcome some extremely nontrivial obstacles, chiefly accessibility, relevance, and sustainability.

Accessibility

In order to develop a thriving Internet ecosystem in Africa, one of our chief goals is to help overcome the barrier most Africans have to accessing the Internet. You would be shocked to find out how much it costs for a good Internet connection in Africa. Despite some increases in competition, telecom providers are still charging exorbitant rates for service, and while there's not an awful lot we can do on this front, we do our best encourage more open markets. Furthermore, we design products like Google Health Tips that use mobile technology and SMS to deliver services more affordably to the masses. (This is some of the stuff I work on!) We're also doing our best to minimize latency (i.e. load time, time it takes to respond) for products in areas with extremely weak connections. This is a serious technical challenge, but it's one that Google is dedicated to working on.

Relevance

It shouldn't surprise you that there is frightfully little content on the Internet that is relevant to Africans. Why would there be with so few Africans online? And so we have the chicken and the egg. If the Internet isn't useful to Africans, there's not much incentive to use it, and without many people using it, the Internet's not going to become very useful. That's where we come in (this is my main focus). We seek to facilitate the creation of relevant African content, both by enabling translation from more common Internet languages to local dialects such as Wolof and by making it easier for Africans to create their own relevant content such as local maps. At the most basic level, we're trying to solve fundamentally African problems for African people.

Sustainability

The final barrier we need to overcome is sustainability. Once it's off the ground, the Internet ecosystem in Africa has to be able to carry itself. So how do we accomplish this? In one word: outreach. We've been holding conferences all around Africa for students, software developers, and business owners, spreading the word about how the Internet, and Google products, can help them become more effective, efficient, and successful. What's more, we've been reaching out to universities, providing low-cost laptops, facilitating broadband access, helping raise the level of computer science curriculums, and encouraging innovation and entrepreneurship.

We believe that if we can help Africa overcome these hurdles, there's no end to the potential for the Internet ecosystem here. And so we march on. We may not see results for some time to come, but true to Google's nature, we're interested in a lot more than just short-term gains.

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In unrelated news, I got my business cards the other day. They make me happy.

TEDxAccra: A Day of African Luminaries

2010-09-23T09:24:00.000-04:00

On Monday morning, many of the world's great thinkers and doers gathered in solidarity around the world to commemorate the 10-year anniversary of the unveiling of the UN Millennium Development Goals. This worldwide event was termed TEDxChange, styled in the format of the TED conference, and convened by Bill and Melinda Gates on behalf of their foundation. In an open letter, Melinda declared the aim of the gathering to be "to reflect on the Millennium Development Goals ten years in, and to look forward to where we’ll be [by 2015, the MDG deadline]."

Very luckily for me, I got to be a part of this movement, this moment in time.

The organizers of the conference chose a few African cities to host, and very fittingly, one of them was Accra. What's more, the first speaker in the day's main session was none other than Google's very own Estelle Akofio-Sowah, the Google Ghana Country Lead and my stalwart companion in the office here. The other speakers included representatives from the African Progress Panel, a nonprofit development group chaired by former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, and the Kofi Annan Centre of Excellence in ICT, among others. From the talks that were given throughout the day, two major themes emerged from the disparate topics

The Need for Accountability

The first thing that struck me was that every single speaker underscored the need for accountability within Africa, and not just the kind of accountability you might imagine. Peering at Africa through the lens of an American's eyes, it's easy to conceive the need for governmental accountability. People must hold their leaders accountable for their actions and for results, something that does not happen enough here. One participant made the astute observation that, in Ghana, the only times politicians visit their districts are when they're running for reelection, but because of the wide sense of apathy towards government, nothing changes and ineffective people are allowed to remain in power.

Estelle Akofio-Sowah, Google Ghana Country Lead

But accountability is also so much more than that here. We, Africans and us all alike, need to hold each other, and at the most profound level, ourselves accountable, for our actions, for the impact we have on others, and for our future. Reliance on the government and on NGOs is, simply put, not sustainable, and neither is the widespread sense of apathy towards tomorrow. African people and their leaders need to take ownership of their futures, or no matter how much anyone seeks to spur development, the efforts will not yield fruit. I want to end this passage with a story that was delivered by the fellow from the African Progress Panel from a meeting he had with Kofi Annan and Nelson Mandela. Annan joked, "You know, for a man who's retired twice, you seem awfully busy," to which Mandela deftly replied, "How can I rest when there's so much work to be done?" It is my hope that the next generation of African leaders, hopefully aided by advances in technology, will carry on in Mandela's spirit long after he is gone.

Potential for Technology to Solve Real Problems

Another interesting theme that emerged was the role of technology in solving real, important problems on the ground. The host of the event, Mariéme Jamme, constantly urged the audience to blog and tweet about the conference and about our experiences in Africa at large. If we speak up, she posited, our leaders and our compatriots won't be able to ignore us. Governmental leaders, in any part of the world for that matter, are too easily caught up their political bubbles and lose their grasp of people's actual experiences and their plights. We as citizens, regardless of our location, need to make our voices heard, and technology gives us a megaphone that has never before existed.

On a very different tract, another of the speakers, Bright Simons, discussed a very concrete issue that he was using technology to attempt to solve. In essence, Africa struggles with a major problem of counterfeit prescription medications. Counterfeiters have gotten so good at creating medications and packaging that look so close to the original, that it is nearly impossible to differentiate. But what's almost identical in form is absolutely absent in substance. These counterfeit drugs have the potential to lead to countless deaths across Africa as they are unknowingly distributed to sick people for potentially fatal maladies like malaria. So to work around this problem, Bright borrowed a model from an existing system well known to Africans: pay-as-you-go cell phone vouchers. When Africans buy vouchers to top up their phones, they are given an unreproducible 10-digit number that is validated by entering it into the phone. Bright's idea was to use the same idea to validate pharmaceuticals. If each drug could come with such a number, the companies could leverage the huge, existing cell phone infrastructure to allow patients to simply validate their medications themselves. A perfect example of a culturally appropriate innovation, from Africa, for Africans.

In Conclusion

In closing, it was quite a day of learning for me, and of meeting quite a few interesting people too (purely by chance, I bumped into three Cornellians in a crowd of about 40). The irony was not lost on me that we were sitting in a 5-star hotel being overfed with delicious food, just miles for shanty towns, talking about the struggles to end poverty and hunger across the continent. But these are the juxtapositions that have come to define much of Africa, and certainly have had an influence on my time here. One can only hope that progress marches forward.

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"Would You Like Fries With That?" Western Cuisine Meets West Africa

2010-09-18T11:35:00.001-04:00

Chicken and avocado wrap from Smoothy's.

When I travel abroad, one of my absolute favorite activities is to sample the local cuisine. You can learn a lot about a culture by the types of foods they eat, the types of seasonings, and so on. Italian food, for instance, is robust, flavorful, passionate, whereas French food is more subtle, complex, and dry. So one of the first things that really hit me when I got to Ghana was that traditionally Western food seemed vastly more prevalent than African food around town. Sure, I had gotten used to seeing burger and pizza joints across Europe, but I expected something a little different when I came to Africa. And perhaps that's exactly what I got: a little different.

During my first week here, I actually went considerably out of my way in search for authentic Ghanaian food, a search that yielded only moderate success. While I was staying in my hotel and ordering dinner in every night, I made a point to restrict myself to the rather meager section of African dishes on the menu, easily working my way through all of the options before week's end. A few basic Ghanaian foods are easy to come by: Banku and Tilapia (fermented mashed corn and a very bony fish), Joloff rice and chicken, to name a few, but would you believe that it's actually much easier to find Chinese or Indian food walking down Oxford Street, Accra's main drag? While you won't see a McDonalds or Jamba Juice, you certainly will stumble upon Papaye and Smoothy's, their close relatives.

I've been trying to figure out why this might be the case since the original realization hit me. Perhaps the restaurants cater to the on-average wealthier expat community and upper class of locals who have spent time living internationally? Perhaps it's simply a vestige of colonial rule? Or maybe people just like Western food better. It's hard to say. What do you think?

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Broadband Dongles & Malaria Pills

2010-09-16T09:04:00.002-04:00

Since I got to Ghana, two technologies have become especially important to me, one that we in the high tech industry would normally perceive as "technology" and one that we wouldn't. The two things I'm talking about are mobile broadband dongles and anti-malaria pills. Within my first few days here, these two objects became essential parts of my daily life, though obviously for drastically different reasons.

Broadband dongles are small devices that plug into a USB port and allow you to access the Internet from any location there's cell phone reception. As I've mentioned in previous posts, this is orders of magnitude more common than finding a stable land-line or Wifi hotspot. Similar to cell phones around the world, you can choose to either buy monthly plans for access or "pay as you go", to borrow a marketing term. The connection still isn't usually great, but for a last resort, it can make a huge difference. And for me, between the unstable Wifi connection in my hotel and the urgent nature of some of my work, it already has.

The other technology that has become an integral part of my life in Africa is my daily anti-malarial medication. For those of you unfamiliar with the intricacies of malaria (like I was before I came here), it's a disease caused by tiny parasites and transmitted by mosquito bite. What's more, unlike most common diseases, malaria never fully leaves your system, lingering in your blood stream for the rest of your life. So in prevention, I've been taking a drug called Malarone (the most expensive, least side effect causing, most effective option), though there are two other popular alternatives: Mefloquine (the one that can make you loopy) and Doxycycline (the one that makes you extra sensitive to the sun). It seems that among the other expats I've met here, Malarone has become the standard, which is comforting. The biggest downside is its cost. In the US, a single pill commands anywhere between $10 and $15. For a single pill! And mind you, you have take these pills every day of your stay. That's expensive even by American standards, let alone Ghanain. In fact, when you think about it, the cost of taking Malarone every day for a year adds up to between $3,650 and $5,475. That's roughly 3 times the entire country's per capita GDP. Ridiculous? Absolutely. But damned if I'm going to get malaria while I'm here. So it goes.

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One Week In: The Culture Shock Sets In

2010-09-14T08:00:00.001-04:00

Almost exactly one week ago, I landed in Africa for the first time, in a different world, far away from home and anything I had ever known. And it's been quite a week since then. My first week of work here was relatively uneventful with the office being mostly empty, and Friday was actually a national holiday for the end of Ramadan, so it ended up only being a three-day work week for me. On Friday, I met up with a friend of a friend whom I had been introduced to, and she showed me around the downtown area of Accra. (Really, when I say downtown Accra, I really just mean one main road called Oxford Street, perhaps the only road in the city that just about everyone knows by name.) It was my first time really seeing any of the city, and I have to say, it was a lot to take in. Besides obviously being singled out by all the vendors on the street, the most remarkable observation from the experience was just the abject poverty of the area. My friend, Kimmie, introduced me to a local girl around our age and her mother. We saw where she lived, in a house without running water, any sort of temperature control, or electricity. We started talking with the mother, and mentioned how she knew my friend, through a UN program that provided food for her because she was HIV-positive. Like I said, a lot to take in.

That night, Kimmie and I met up with some other expats living in Accra, and we all went out for a drink together. It was then that I discovered that apparently Accra has quite a nightlife scene, something I didn't partake in on that occasion, but good to know for the future. It seemed like I was starting to feel at home.

On Saturday and Sunday though, once I was back to fending for myself, it really started to hit me how uncomfortable I was in this new place. Yes, I've traveled a lot before, but moving to a new place is an entirely different story, let alone to a place that's about as different as a place could be. But even through the discomfort, I'm constantly aware that this is what I wanted; this is what I sought out. As uncomfortable as it is at the moment, it is this discomfort that I wanted. I'm a strong believer that pushing yourself leads to growth, and so I do the best I can never to be too comfortable where I am. If I'm not pushing myself, I'm dong something wrong.

Fortunately though, work offers a very welcomed reprieve from the harsh realities of life in the developing world. On Sunday evening, when I was preparing for my first real week at work, where I would actually be doing something rather than just preparing to do something, I got so excited at the prospect of being back in a place that I understood. For all of its differences, Google in Ghana is still Google, and the culture at Google is something I know and understand well. What's more, the Ghana Country Lead, Estelle, is finally back in the office, and she's phenomenal. I couldn't ask for someone better to help me settle in and show me the ropes.

And so we're onto week two! All I need to do now is figure out what exactly I'm going to be doing for the next nine and a half months. I can't wait.

Another yummy Ghanaian meal.

You can find all sorts of random animals roaming the streets of Accra.

A run down car just decaying on the street.

Ghanaians seem to have a thing for Obama,
perhaps because he visited the country last year.

The promised picture of a woman carrying items on her head.
You can't tell here, but this is actually a very young girl.

Construction stopped midway through the process, now used for hanging clothes.

A typical sight in Accra.

Democracy at work.

My Western reprieve from the harsh realities of Accra.

A painting a bought from an artist on the street.
Apparently the masks are called "Freedom Masks"

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They Call Me Monday: Naming in Ghana

2010-09-12T08:03:00.001-04:00

A few days ago, I got to speaking with a fellow Googler who's spent a lot of time in Ghana, and among the many useful pieces of advice she gave me, one interesting bit stood out. "You need a Ghanaian name!" I soon discovered that in Ghana it's traditional to name children based on the day of the week they were born. What's more, each day of the week is supposed to have certain characteristics associated with it. A child born on Sunday, for instance, should tend to be passive, sensitive, and warm, and also a good secret keeper. I also learned that being able to introduce yourself with a Ghanaian name makes a big difference when interacting with locals, so clearly I should have one!

And so I did a bit of investigation. As it turns out, February 29, 1988, my birthday, fell on a Monday. This means that I should be nurturing, dependable and organized. (Not too far-fetched, I hope.) It also gives me my my list of possible names. Based on my day of birth, I could either be (a) Kojo, (b) Kwadwo, (c) Jojo, or (d) Cudjoe. Well, fortunately for me, I didn't have to decide for myself. Over the weekend, while I was waiting for my real estate broker to meet me at the local grocery store, a young Ghanaian man approached me and started chatting. At first, I thought he was trying to sell me something, but really he just wanted a new friend. "What day of the week were you born?" he asked. Luckily, I knew. "That makes you Kwadwo," (actually pronounced more like "Kw'djo"). So there we have it. I think I like it. What do you think?

For a more full history and information on naming in Ghana, visit the Wikipedia entry.

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Can Voice Messages Replace SMS in Africa?

2010-09-10T14:24:00.000-04:00

This is the question posed by Professor Eric Brewer and his team at Berkeley. Eric is a Visiting Scientist at Google, and I had the privilege to chat with him last week while I was in New York. One of the subjects we touched upon during the conversation was a study his team had done last year, implementing a new system of asynchronous voice messages in rural Uganda to supplement voice calls and text messaging (Heimerl et al, 2009). SMS (i.e. text messaging) has become hugely popular in Africa for several reasons: low cost, asynchronicity, and the unreliable cell phone coverage. Let me unpack each of these components.

Cost. With voice calls often costing between $0.10 and $0.20 and text messaging costing only around $0.04, it can often be much more cost efficient to communicate simple messages through SMS.

Asynchronicity. Often a person simply wants to communicate a message without requiring immediate consumption or feedback. I can only speak as an American, but in the US, the immediacy of voice calling has in some situations come to be seen as obtrusive, whereas SMS allows recipients to digest and respond to messages at their leisure.

Unreliable Coverage. Connectivity across Africa is shoddy at best, and in rural environments, it can often be nearly inexistent. "Sometimes [users] have to wait hours, hike miles, or climb trees to have voice conversations," (p. 4). Furthermore, asynchronous messages provide the extra advantage that only one of the two parties needs to be within range of the network at a given time to communicate.

However, there are still issues that prevent SMS from being the sole method of communication across Africa. Among others, these are their impersonal nature, high rates of illiteracy among the population, and the difficulty of typing in local dialects. Users in Brewer's study expressed a clear preference for voice communication, citing that "hearing a particular person’s voice made the conversation more serious for business purposes, and more meaningful for personal uses," (p. 4). Furthermore, with high rates of illiteracy and local dialects that do not lend themselves to English character set phones, SMS is not always a feasible mode of communication either.

Brewer's group seeks to take the most valuable aspects from both voice calling and SMS to combine them for a novel solution: asynchronous voice messaging. AVMs (my own acronym) offer a potential low cost alternative to calling while also allowing users to convey the personal essence of one's voice. They circumvent the limitations of illiteracy and local dialects while also allowing recipients to consume messages at their own pace. Since AVMs do not need to be delivered immediately, providers could transit them by utilizing excess bandwidth at very little marginal cost, theoretically passing that savings on to the consumer. To quote the paper, "the resources of a synchronous communication system are idle most of the time. This is due to the resources required for synchronous communication, which must be provided exactly when needed. Asynchronous communications improve this situation by allowing for load balancing, moving messages to times when the system is under-utilized," (p. 2).

Brewer and his team conducted a pilot study with approximately 230 individuals in ten different villages, and their findings were hopeful, providing a solid proof of concept for this potentially major paradigm shift in African telephony. What do you think? Could voice messaging provide a viable alternative to SMS in Africa? Is this an area Google should be looking into?

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Landing in Accra, Beneath the African Sun

2010-09-08T17:48:00.004-04:00

Yesterday morning, I landed in Accra, Ghana, where I shall remain for a time yet undetermined. The flight took the full 11 hours, starting 4:20pm EST and landing 7:20am GMT. It may have been long and mostly sleepless, and I may have come close to crying for all that I was leaving behind, but alas, I made it in one piece. After a year of planning, I'm in Africa.

Very fortunately, Google's driver, Daniel, was waiting for me at the airport, and I only got mildly swindled by the scam artists waiting there. (I suppose it was inevitable, but I still felt dumb.) Daniel took me to my hotel where I dropped off my luggage and promptly realized that I had no idea what to do with myself. So I went to the office, the empty office. You see, this week is Google's G-Kenya conference in Nairobi, and the entire Subsaharan Africa team is there. Thankfully the receptionist had been alerted that I was coming, so she showed me in, and I got to work trying to figure things out. I wish I could express how comforting it was to be there. Even if it's only two, disconnected rooms, the Google office in Ghana feels like a Google office nonetheless. For lunch, I ordered some traditional Ghanain food, basically seasoned rice and chicken, which was brought to me by someone I can only describe as the office footman. The seasoning was not what I expected since it looked so close to something I might get in the US, but once I got over the initial hurdle, I rather enjoyed it.

Around 6:00pm, I headed back to my hotel, watched a movie and the news on TV, and tried to get some work done on my laptop. That didn't work as well as I would have liked. The Internet connection in my hotel, and from what I hear, in many places across Ghana, is shoddy at best. This resulted in a nontrivial amount of frustration especially since so many of the people I need to work with are in time zones so different from mine.

Today was my first full day in Ghana, and very kindly, the Google Ghana Country Lead, Estelle, who's out of the office this week, sent her personal driver to pick me up and show me around the city. We hit some of the major tourist sites like the soccer stadium and the Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park as well as a decidedly less touristy market where they sold mostly traditional clothing, masks, and even swords. Being led through by a local, it was starkly clear how singled out I was as a white man. On the upside, I learned a new word from the experience, obruni, which means, you guessed it, white man. In the afternoon, I headed back to the office to get some more work sorted out, finally met one of my sometimes office mates, Ego, who's from Britain, and got lots of advice on the expat life.

From my two days here, a few basic observations have stood out to me. The first is the culture of servitude. It's been discomforting having someone wait on me; I've always just taken care of myself, more or less. Stranger still is the attitude servants seem to have have, that of utter, well, subservience. In the US, even people in service professions usually seem to have a sense of entitlement that doesn't exist here. Another significant lesson has been about the state of Internet connectivity/telephony. I knew it would be bad, but that's entirely different from actually understanding it. Between not being able to do my work online and having to ask people to repeat themselves every other sentence on phone calls, I can tell I'm already starting to make headway on one of the pieces of advice I got before leaving: Feel people's pain. The last observation I've had is a less serious one, basically about how people carry things here. I wish I had a picture to illustrate it, but I've never before seen everyday people carry so much atop their heads, and without using their hands to balance it. Huge baskets of everything you could imagine: eggs, pineapples, hair brushes, everything, all perched feet high atop their heads. The notable exception to this rule is for carrying a baby, which is invariably done on one's back, strapped on with a large shawl. Pictures to come, I promise.

For now, that's it. This weekend will consist of lots of apartment shopping as I seek to find somewhere more permanent to live. Wish me luck!

Pictures after the jump!

Airplane reading on the way to Ghana.

The Google Ghana office with my lunch sitting atop the table.

Traditional Ghanaian meal: Banku, fish, and pineapple for dessert.

The view from the entrance to my hotel.

The Ghana National Soccer Stadium.

The Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park. The structure on the left
was built to resemble a cut down tree, symbolizing Nkrumah's
unfinished work. The figure on the right is the statue of
Nkrumah that was defaced during his coup d'etat.

A statue of a traditional Ghanaian herald, welcoming
Nkrumah back to Ghana after his exile.

A market selling traditional Ghanaian crafts.

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New York, New York

2010-09-05T12:49:00.006-04:00

I've noticed a theme in my life recently: as soon as I begin to feel settled into one place, I know it's just about time for the next. This last week in New York has certainly had its ups and downs. Five days to scramble around, trying to coordinate logistics across three continents certainly wasn't easy; in fact, it was probably the most stressful week I've spent at Google in any of my internships, but I suppose that was to be expected. On the other hand, there has been so much awesomeness too: tons of delicious food courtesy of the Google NY Culinary Team (I think I ate a full meal every other hour), a new smart phone, and most importantly, catching up with lots of old friends and getting to make a few new ones.

Aside from the scramble to get ready, I spent the week meeting with some key players on the Google Africa team, getting as much advice as I could amass. Here are some of the interesting tidbits.

Understand the user. Do as the locals do. Go outside major cities; see where people live. Try to spend a night living with a local

Feel people's pain. Try the Internet connection and cell phones that the locals use. Understand their experience.

Beware of corruption. When money is so hard to come by, many people have to engage in unethical behavior to make a living. I heard about a project that was sabotaged by the people it was built for because it made selling services on the side too easy to track.

Use my novelty to my advantage. There's no arguing that I'm clearly going to stick out like a sore thumb wherever I go. Instead of taking it as an obstacle, turn it to my favor. Don't be apologetic for being different.

Go with the flow. The work culture in many of the countries I'm going to is just fundamentally different. People won't follow schedules in the way we do, for instance. Just accept it.

Another fun part of the week involved the six-foot talk K'Nex Ferris wheel that I (and three other interns) built two years ago. It used to sit up on the sixth floor with sales but has since been moved to a new seat of honor, at the very entrance to the office that nearly everyone passes going in and out of work. On every tour I gave this week, I would point it out and note, "I built that." The reactions ranged from laughter to respect to disbelief. My favorite was a friend proclaiming, "only at Google do the interns get paid to play with K'Nex." A true statement if I've ever heard one. In fact, we got quite a bit of publicity for it when we did.

Our K'Nex creation in its original location two years ago.

Tomorrow, to Africa! More pictures after the jump...

Saying goodbye to old friends, Steph Rigione and Caitlin Strandberg.

User experience interns, Hronn Brynjarsdottir and me, in NYC two summers ago.

My apartment for the week, courtesy of Google.

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New Beginnings

2010-08-30T12:00:00.004-04:00

One week from today, I will be on a plane headed for Accra, the capital of Ghana and, for the next several months, my new home. It's hard to believe that after this long journey, after all of the trials and roadblocks overcome, that the day has finally arrived. Today, I rejoin my old company and my old community. A little bit of background...

The Long and Winding Road

During my freshman year at Cornell, I met a woman named Laura Granka, who would go on to be responsible for much of my subsequent success in college. Laura was a User Experience Researcher at Google and an alumna of Cornell. She was giving a talk to the Information Science department, where I studied, and on a whim, I decided to attend. Google had always seemed like a fascinating place to work, and her job certainly sounded interesting, so we got to talking over email. Several correspondences later, she asked me for my résumé. The rest, as they say, is history. Two interviews, a textbook on user research methods, and many months of waiting later, I got the call that would permanently alter the course of my college career. "Hi Ben, this is Lindsay, your recruiter from Google..."

My first summer at Google, I worked at the company's headquarters in Mountain View, California. I served on the User Experience Research Team, investigating usability issues with the Docs suite. For my second summer at Google, I decided to switch things up and work in the New York office, again doing user experience research, though this time on a variety of advertising products. During my time in New York, I met two people who inadvertently had a profound impact on me. One was a close friend who had spent a summer traveling through Africa during high school, and the second was an Associate Product Manager on my team who was spending his 20% time working on a project in Africa. Both came back with such extraordinary experiences and only the best things to say about their adventures. And thus the idea began forming in my mind.

After two very enjoyable and instructive summers, I had the nagging suspicion that user experience research wasn't the right path for me in the long term. Another field had become my clear preference, product management. Sure I could run user studies and examine data, but I believed that my greatest skill set really lay in dealing with people, coordinating projects, and setting product vision. I also had the predicament that after two summers with the same company, and one internship left before the end of my undergraduate career, it might be wise to work somewhere else for a while. So I spent my last summer working at Facebook, exploring yet another of my disparate passions, computational sociology, a subject that I had ventured into in my classwork at Cornell. Once again, I enjoyed the experience and learned a great deal, but by this point, my mind was made up. I was going to Africa.

The Dream

To be more specific, I wanted to move to Africa for a year before pursuing graduate school; I wanted to apply the skills I had acquired during college, and I wanted to make a positive impact on the people I was serving. So with no leads and no ideas, I went to my first logical contact, my old mentor at Google, Alfred Spector, the Vice President of Research and Special Initiatives. He gave me some contacts, and eventually, I found some others through a variety of sources, but for months on end, I was only hitting dead ends. People had switched jobs; people didn't have space for me; some people were just slow to respond to email. Finally, in February, I took a trip back to the New York office to visit Alfred again. I explained my situation, and he decided to take a more active role in resolving it. Within a week, I had a phone call set up with Nelson Mattos, the Vice President of Engineering for EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa), and a few months and interviews later, I had a job.

Google was a natural fit. After all, their mission is to "organize the world's information and make it universallyaccessible and useful." It seemed that perhaps I could help with those two aspects, serving a part of the world for which the Internet and technology has yielded disproportionally few benefits. Not to mention, it's an awesome company to work for. I knew that I would have the resources and organizational capacity to make a significant impact, and moving to a continent not necessarily known for its safety, I felt a deep sense of comfort knowing that I would be going with Google.

The Job

The job description is still pretty nebulous. I've been told that I'll be based in Ghana, but that I will also be traveling extensively through Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, Uganda, and South Africa (so just about all over the continent), and that I'll be helping establish seed content for a few products that Google wants to launch in a variety of new markets (a role with clear product management implications). So what does that mean exactly? I wasn't quite sure myself until my second interview with new boss, Juergen Allgayer. To paraphrase him, Google has a set of products built ready to launch, but they aren't very useful without some content already in them. To give an illustrative American example, Google Maps woudn't be very useful if you couldn't look up where the nearest Starbucks is. Analogously, Google Trader, an SMS-based marketplace, isn't very useful without listings from vendors. How am I going to help accomplish this? Your guess is as good as mine. But alas, that's what this blog is for. I hope to keep you all updated about my adventures spreading technology and exploring culture in the developing world. Wish me luck!

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Blog Launch

2010-08-08T11:41:00.008-04:00

This blog is set to launch on the first day of my new adventure, August 30th, my first day of work at Google in New York.

See my personal info page for more information about me and my journey.

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