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Today is Monday. Let’s get it.
1. The Open Yaba Manifesto is here, and you can start contributing right now. Link
2. Why do women lead only 5 percent of Africa’s companies? Adesua Dozie’s question (Medium post) is important because while everyone is currently talking about the rampant sexism in Silicon Valley, if someone started to rattle the cans down here, the amount of shit that will come pouring out will confound everyone.
3. A town in South Africa is reportedly planning to float their own digital currency. But this is not any town, this is an Afrikaaner-only town called Orania, which has its own currency and I don’t know enough about ZA geopolitics to have a useful opinion on the subject, so please proceed by yourself.
4. African filmmakers are beginning to explore using virtual reality to tell intricate stories. Link
5. Congrats to Dot Learn, who are the first runner up in the Cisco global problem solver challenge. Link
6. If you’re based in the Bay Area, and you’re somehow not subscribed to the Devcolor newsletter (if you are white, you are excused, ahem), you should check out the last edition. Link
If you are a graphic designer aged between 18 and 35 with excellent logo design skills, you can win a laptop, a tablet, or a smartphone by participating in the NIPOST Logo Redesign Competition. Entries are open from June 25th – July 15th, so hurry and apply here.
A message from LSETF
If you are involved in the Lagos tech ecosystem, the Lagos State Employment Trust Fund needs your input to guide its plans to support tech entrepreneurs. You can help out by visiting this page to take a survey.
Other things
+ Ibraheem Babalola’s startup, Muster. It’s like Tinder, but for roommates (as opposed to hookups). At least that’s how I recommended he keep his pitch short. It’s been live for two weeks, and he still has a shit ton to figure out, so give them feedback and be nice. Link
+ Since I shared my personal expense tracking spreadsheet, I get accosted by personal expense/finance developers all the time. The one I’m looking at currently is an Android app called Kliqr, and even though I’ve not gotten around to using it yet, I can already guess that it behaves a lot like Reach, which intelligently sorts your debit SMS alerts into coherent expense categories. A solution that works, if you’re okay with an app that’s able to look at your text messages. If you check it out, be sure to tell us what you think on the Radar discussion.
+ If your WCW or MCM is one of those people that says “feedbacks”, please advise them to cease and desist. No, I don’t know how you’d do that with tact, sorry.
That’s all.
Have a great week and rest of 2017