Google cocktail- interesting and informative

On thursday evening I attended a small cocktail hosted by the head of google kenya, Joe Mucheru, and by extension the google head office. The cocktail proved to be quite interesting and informative, the attendance was diverse with people from different fields, google was represented by several key people including the Technical Lead in the kenyan office who is 100% kenyan although he did work at the googleplex in mountain view, california.

One discussion of particular interest to me rotated around the issue of local content, this was of more interest to me because of my passion and commitment to providing genuine local content to the masses. The technical lead at google kenya, a fellow by the name of Chris (second name was hard to remember) Kiagiri, engaged me in the content discussion and explained the two schools of thought on the whole issue, the first school of thought is that Infrastructure must precede content and the second one is that Content must precede infrastructure.

The first school of thought believes that the infrastructure must first be developed before the investment into content is done. The reasoning behind this is that even with powerful content online, without the necessary infrastructure all of this content is beyond the access of the masses, even thoough I don't totally agree with it it does have some merits. No one would like to make a large investment in collecting content if no one can access it locally and as such some people are content with waiting for the infrastructure.

The second school of thought believes that content can be collected, stored and disseminated (limited dissemination) before the infrastucture arrives. I ascribe to this school of thought for the reason that genuine local content can be accessed beyond our borders where the infrastructure exists and this is a ready and willing market, so it would be myopic for me to say I can only collect local content once every house and school has access to cheap and affordable internet. Even with minimal investment, the collection and dissemination of local content can be achieved and if the content is rich it will pay itself back.Lack of infrastructure cannot be an impediment to building capacity in the collection and dissemination of local content, in fact it should be a driving force that pushes as to invest and prepare for the time when internet access will be cheap and affordable.

During the cocktail I also learned that google will be opening another office in Africa, Senegal to be precise. Chris informed me that Senegal is a strategic location due to the fact that the fibre from portugal will first land at Dakar before heading off to other countries in the region. Google choosing Senegal tells me that small countries are now starting to take the lead in attracting strategic investments from key companies all over the world.

I was also informed that Google will be launching in mid january a detailed version of google maps for Kenya and East Africa, this was truly exciting news especially for those of us who have interests in developing applications that leverage exisiting infrastructure such as Google Maps. The mashups game just got more intense with this information.

All in all it was a fruitful evening, complete with good food and excellent discussions. To learn more about this author, visit John Wesonga's Website.

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