Tech4Africa is a web and emerging technology conference, bringing global perspective to the African context.

Web: http://tech4africa.com/
Social Media: https://www.facebook.com/Tech4Africa

https://twitter.com/Tech4Africa

TECH4AFRICA is proud to bring together some of the most respected people in technology to share, teach and interact with Africans, in Africa. It’s an exciting time for African technology and we hope that you enjoy the opportunity that Tech4Africa presents, as much as we’ve enjoyed putting it all together.

KEYNOTES

HERMAN CHINERY-HESSE
Herman is a software engineer by profession.19 years ago he co-founded the SOFTtribe limited, one of the leading software houses in West Africa.

He holds a number of directorships and is an Assessor of the Commercial Court, Ghana. He has won a number of personal awards including Outstanding Ghanaian Professional from the GPA Awards (UK), as well as the Distinguished Alumnus Award from the Texas State Alumni Association and Texas State University-San Marcos (USA)-the first and currently only African recipient of the award.

Herman has also been a resource person and visiting speaker at the Wharton Business School, Harvard Business Schools, Cambridge University, the University of Ghana, and the TEDGlobal Conference in Arusha, Tanzania, amongst others.

The BBC describes Mr Chinery-Hesse as Africa’s Bill Gates.

In his own words, “if Africa misses the current global IT boat there may never again be an opportunity for rapid wealth creation on the continent”.

JOSH SPEAR
As one of the youngest and most influential marketing strategists in the world, Josh is sought out for his intelligent, no-holds-barred insight on everything from design to authenticity and ‘word-of-mouth.’ His own blog, joshspear.com, uses a network of writers across the globe to unearth trends in art, design, mobile and the future of digital media itself.

Josh’s New York-based consultancy applies a digital worldview to the challenges and ambitions of complex corporate organisations. It creates strategies for deeper, lasting online relationships – including new models to measure performance in emerging environments. As well as advising some of the world’s biggest brands, it also works as a think-tank on the influence of technology on all aspects of human behaviour.

A hugely engaging conference speaker, Josh’s presentations set out new ways for organisations to harness the internet. He analyses what it is that makes certain things catch on, and explains how to position products and services to capitalise on fast-moving trends. And with a billion people online at any one moment, he shows how to get the attention of the digital generation.

Josh is frequently featured in Time Magazine and The New York Times. For several years he has been an active participant and keynote speaker at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where he was formally nominated a Young Global Leader.

Find Josh on Twitter @joshspear (Hover over the link to the left for more options)

INTERNATIONAL SPEAKERS

ADAM DUVANDER
Adam DuVander is the author of Map Scripting 101 and Executive Editor of ProgrammableWeb, the leading resource for open Web API news and information. DuVander is also an active contributor to the open source mapping library, Mapstraction. Previously he wrote for WebMonkey, Wired.com’s web developer resource.

Find Adam on Twitter @adamd (Hover over the link to the left for more options)

CENNYDD BOWLES
Cennydd Bowles is a user experience designer and writer based in Brighton, UK.

His book Undercover User Experience Design, written with colleague James Box, has been acclaimed as “a must have for your bookshelf”. He writes a popular blog and contributes regularly to influential publications including A List Apart, Johnny Holland and .net magazine.

At Clearleft (Design Agency of the Year 2009), Cennydd advises clients including Samsung, The Open University, JustGiving, Gumtree and WWF on the benefits of putting users first. He also shapes the design and strategy of Clearleft’s famous Silverback usability testing suite and pioneering web fonts application, Fontdeck.

A leading figure in the British user experience community, Cennydd co-founded the UX London and UXCampLondon conferences and is an active mentor of British user experience talent. He speaks at design and UX conferences across the globe, and his thoughts on design have been quoted in publications as diverse as Design Week and the Abu Dhabi National newspaper.

Find Cennydd on Twitter @cennydd (Hover over the link to the left for more options)

JONATHAN GOSIER
Jonathan Gosier is a designer, software developer, and serial entrepreneur. He currently serves as Director of Product for SwiftRiver at Ushahidi building a platform for making sense of streams of realtime data. Gosier is also the founder of Appfrica and HiveColab a business accelerator and incubator for East African technologists. He’s also served as an investor for many African startups including the Kuyu Project and Status.ug, a now defuct UGandan mobile-social network. Jon Gosier has been a frequent speaker at the TED Conference, is a TED Senior Fellow, and TEDxOrganizer.

Find Jonathan on Twitter @jongos (Hover over the link to the left for more options)

JAMES BOX
A self-confessed ‘user experience professional’, James works for Clearleft in the seaside town of Brighton, England. Part information architect and part interaction designer when he’s not building sandcastles on the beach, James crafts websites that are fun and easy to use. In 2010 his first book ‘Undercover User Experience Design’ (co-authored with colleague Cennydd Bowles) was released to critical acclaim and has been described as a ‘a must have for your bookshelf’ that teaches how to ‘create a culture of UX from the ground up’.

Find James on Twitter @boxman (Hover over the link to the left for more options)

ROBERT NYMAN
Robert is a Technical Evangelist for Mozilla and is a strong believer in HTML5 and the Open Web. He has been doing web development since 1998, where especially JavaScript has been a love for quite some time. Robert regularly blogs at http://robertnyman.com and tweets as @robertnyman, and he loves to travel and meet people

Find Robert on Twitter @robertnyman (Hover over the link to the left for more options)

NDUBUISI EKEKWE
Ndubuisi Ekekwe holds two doctoral and four master’s degrees, including a PhD in electrical and computer engineering from the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore and MBA from University of Calabar, Nigeria, by March 2009. He founded Ultinet Systems-an IT & telephony firm- and formerly held the title of Banking Executive with Diamond Bank Plc, Lagos. Ekekwe is the Founder of the non-profit African Institution of Technology and has held visiting positions in three African universities.

An inventor, he holds a US Patent on microchip used in minimally invasive surgical robots and has authored many journal and conference papers. He was a panelist on Knowledge Industry in Africa in 2010 Wharton Business School African Business Forum, a speaker at 2010 TEDxChange Amsterdam, a knowledge expert in United Nations 2010 Lessons Learned Workshop for 5 African Countries (Freetown), plus numerous technical conferences including ISSCC, ISCAS, etc.

AFRICAN SPEAKERS

GARETH KNIGHT
Gareth is a digital maven and technology entrepreneur. Educated as a zoologist, he is a veteran of two dot com bubbles in London, one acquisition, and runs Technovated, which has recently “pivoted” into an ecommerce play, and is backed by respected investors in London and South Africa.

Gareth is also the founder of TECH4AFRICA.

Previously, Gareth served in London as Director of Product Management for MyHeritage.com, a global family genealogy company based in Tel Aviv.

Before joining MyHeritage, Gareth landed seed funding from London’s top early stage investors to co-found Kindo.com, a global family social network with an international team spread around the world. He then led the Product team in London to roll out a localised version of Kindo in 17 languages within 6 months, as well as an aggressive search engine campaign, both of which resulted in users from circa 220 countries and an enviable growth rate.

Kindo was voted one of the top 3 most promising Internet companies in the UK for 2008, and was acquired by MyHeritage in August that year.

In 2010 Gareth was named one of South Africa’s “Young South Africans You have to take to lunch” by the Mail & Guardian newspaper, and in 2009 was one of “Men of Influence – 35 South Africans Under 35” by GQ magazine.

Find Gareth on Twitter @oneafrikan (Hover over the link to the left for more options)

NIC HARALAMBOUS
Nicholas Haralambous is a qualified journalist and media maniac who quickly moved away from print media, through online and in to mobile media production and management. He has worked in “dead-tree” media with the Sunday Times and Financial Mail.

His new media experience includes working as the head of the mobile division at Mail & Guardian, the GM of the Zoopy.com Gauteng office and Product Manager of Vodacom SA’s mobile social networking division.

Nic is one of the co-founders of Motribe and takes on the roll of Chief Ninja of Operations and Business development.

Find Nic on Twitter @nicharry (Hover over the link to the left for more options)

VINCENT MAHER
Vincent Maher is the co-founder of Motribe, a mobile community platform. Previously he was the portfolio manager for social media and the commercial manager for mobile advertising at Vodacom, the strategist at the Mail & Guardian Online and creator of Amatomu.com, the South African blog aggregator and analytics system. Before that he was director of the New Media Lab (which he helped create in 1996) at the Rhodes University School of Journalism & Media Studies, the managing director of Digital Commerce, technical director of Bitr8 and a multimedia director at VWV Interactive. He has worked in the online media industry since 1996, has presented papers at many international conferences and specialises in building large-scale social applications. At some point during the chaos he also helped found Slip Skateboards, one of South Africa’s underground skate brands.

Find Vincent on Twitter @vincent_maher (Hover over the link to the left for more options)

BARRY DEVLIN
Dr. Barry Devlin, Founder and Principal, 9sight Consulting

Dr. Barry Devlin is a founder of the data warehousing industry and among the foremost worldwide authorities on business intelligence and the emerging field of business insight. He is a widely respected consultant, lecturer and author of the seminal book, “Data Warehouse – from Architecture to Implementation”. With a Ph.D. in physical chemistry, Irish-born Barry has almost 30 years of experience in the IT industry, mostly with IBM, as an architect, consultant, manager and software evangelist. He continues to define and discover novel solutions to real business needs in the area of the fully integrated business-informational, operational and collaborative-providing an holistic experience of the business through IT. He is founder and principal of 9sight Consulting (www.9sight.com), specializing in the human, organizational and IT implications and design of deep business insight solutions, working with leading analysts and vendors in BI and beyond.

RIAN VAN DER MERWE
Rian van der Merwe chose a career path in Product Management and User Experience Design, and is currently the head of Product Management & Design at South African online retailer kalahari.net.

After completing degrees in Engineering and Information Science in South Africa, he moved to Australia to complete a Ph.D in Internet Marketing. From there he moved to California to pursue a girl (yep, they eventually got married).

He spent the next 6 years working in Silicon Valley: first at market research firm Survey.com, followed by 4.5 years in eBay’s User Experience Design group. His last position at eBay was as Senior Manager of Product Strategy, where his responsibilities included leading a team of strategists who worked with various parts of the organisation to develop and guide product roadmaps and requirements that meet user needs.

He then joined South African startup Yola.com in San Francisco as a Senior Product Manager, where he was responsible for the product vision, strategy, design, and development of a variety of areas of the Yola user experience. In March 2010, his family moved back to South Africa permanently where he established and grew the Product and User Experience teams at Yola’s Cape Town office. In December 2010 he moved to head up the Product team at Kalahari.

He is passionate about user experience design and software development, and excited about the great opportunities ahead in the South African Internet space.

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