The Brand Evangelist

All eyes on Africa.

With Internet connectivity costs dropping year-on-year, connectivity speeds increasing annually as well. It has become quite affordable for the average African Entrepreneur to have internet connectivity for business purposes. Coupled with the dropping costs and increased speeds is the advent of Cloud Computing (Software As A Service) which has also made many tools available to many African Entrepreneurs at an affordable cost of little or no capital investment - i.e. subscription model.

Thus the African Entrepreneur is presented with an opportunity to grow their business at the lowest
cost possible through:

* Online Collaboration with other like minded entrepreneurs around the world
* Work in Virtual Teams on specific instead of hiring full time staff
* etc.

There are many entrepreneurs that are working in isolation. If they are aware of collaborative online tools and how to leverage it, they can work smarter and more creatively.

There are many tools on the web that African Entrepreneurs can use to grow / improve their businesses. On 8th of July 2011, 12noon GMT [1pm Nigerian, 2pm South African, and 3pm Kenyan time] you can join us on Twitter (another useful collaborative tool) on the #mbGeeks monthly chat when we discuss this topic [Virtual collaboration among African Entrepreneurs] with our guest Emeka Okoye.

Emeka Okoye has a strong technology and system development background paired with proven success leading small to midsize engineers’ development teams. Over 17 years of progressive experience in Web, Enterprise & Mobile Software development and Project Management including management, strategic technical analysis, architecture design, planning and product development using object-oriented approach, agile methodology with best of breed technologies. Innovative, Visionary and creative technologist with deep understanding of and expansive experience with the full spectrum of data, e-business, Enterprise Architecture (SOA, BPM, Web Services, REST), Social media, Mobility, and Semantic Web (Linked data, RDF, SPARQL) related technologies.
He is a strong advocate of Mobility and Semantic Web in Africa on the micro-blog, Twitter (@emekaokoye)

We will be discussing along with him the Topic Virtual collaboration among African Entrepreneurs, tools, benefits/challenges and case studies.

The following are the questions we will be discussing with him;

Q1 What tools are available online for virtual collaboration?

Q2 Which ones have you used?

Q3 What are the benefits of online collaboration?

Q4 What are the obstacles to online collaboration & what can we do to solve it?

Q5. Any other question.

To join it the chat. Log on to twitter and follow the hashtag #mbGeeks. When responding to the conversation use the hastag #mbGeeks so that we all can see your tweet. Otherwise you can open a channel on tweetdeck, hootsuite or seesmic to filter the hashtag into one column. tweetchat.com is also another means of joining in.

If you have any question you will like to ask our guest, tweet it to @tefomohapi or @jesseoguns before Friday or fill it in the comment section bellow.

Please share this post with people in your network and invite them for the chat. It is about leveraging on online conversations to create a critical mass of development.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Post written by Tefo Mohapi – He has more than 10 years experience in the ICT industry. He adds value to various organisations with his vast technical knowledge, experience and an ability to align technology with business and organisational needs.