Apple ‘visionary’ dies aged 56

Life of Steve Jobs

• Born in San Francisco in Feb 1955 to university students Joanne Schieble and Syrian-born Abdulfattah Jandali
• Adopted as a baby by a Californian working class couple
• Had a summer job at Hewlett-Packard while at school – later worked at Atari
• Dropped out of college after six months and went travelling in India, where he became a Buddhist
• Launched Apple with school friend Steve Wozniak in 1976 and the first Apple computer the same year
• Left Apple amid disputes in 1985 but returned in 1996 and became CEO in 1997
• Bought Pixar animation company in 1986 for $10m
• Married in a Buddhist ceremony in 1991 – has three children with his wife and a daughter from a previous relationship
• Had a personal wealth estimated at $8.3bn (£5.4bn) in 2010
• Diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2003, and after three periods of sickness leave, resigns as Apple CEO in August 2011

Tips For Entrepreneurs

Question:  “What advice would you give to a first-time entrepreneur in the planning stage? What are some key areas to focus on? And what areas don’t need as much attention?”

Answer:

1) Don’t focus on the business plan. It’s too early for that.

2) Focus on a small niche, a white space you identify, a need that you think doesn’t have many people addressing it.

3) Choose something that you really care about or have passion for.

4) Execute as fast as you can, building something to address that narrow niche, even if it still has some bugs.

5) Launch super fast.  Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn said, “if you are not ashamed of your product when you launch it, you launched too late.”

6) Focus on the very small group of initial users of that product. Make it a community. Listen to any feedback.

7) Iterate on the feedback you get. That will make your product grow. If it doesn’t, you need to pivot or kill the idea and move to the next one.

By Loic Le Meur

Small Business Owners in a Nairobi Slum Display Kenyan Resilience – By Brendan Bannon

 

Benson Omenda, 48, has been tailoring clothes for residents in Nairobi’s Kibera slum for more than 15 years. “I fear the best days are behind us, especially now that the second-hand clothes markets have arrived, meaning tailored clothes are not so longer popular.”

Brendan Bannon

 

 

:: Kibera, Nairobi  Kenya ::

A string of small shops in Kibera, a Nairobi slum, were looted and burned in the post-election violence of 2007. Today, many of those store owners are once again turning a profit.

Less than an hour after the results of Kenya’s presidential election were announced late in December 2007, the fires started in Kibera, Nairobi’s largest slum.

Supporters of rival political parties launched a month of attacks against their opponents in a wave of violence which eventually killed 1,300 people nationwide.

Along one of the frontlines in Kibera lay the 100-odd small shops – selling everything from bottles of Coke to cheap plastic flip-flips – lining the 500-yard road leading down to Olympic Secondary School.

All were looted then torched. Businesses built over years were lost in a day.

Today, however, cautious optimism is back, as Nairobi’s irrepressible push for profit overcomes fears of a repeat of the “clashes” as the next election looms.

Several members of the self-help Olympic Small Business Organization shared their thoughts.

Cynthia Achieng, 34, Olympic Beauty Shop

“You can’t dwell on things that are not your fault, like my burnt store or my stolen goods. If I did that, I would be lost. My kids are young, their Daddy lost his job, so what can I do? We need something on the table at the end of the day. After the violence, I decided to pick up from scratch. I started just putting down some sacks on the street, putting my wares on them. Eventually, I progressed, I built this kiosk with some help from neighbors. Today I am selling more things even than before the violence. I have expanded my business, and now you can see, I’m moving ahead. I am optimistic.

“I prefer dealing with women’s goods than men’s, it’s simpler, you know we women are vulgar spenders, we see something, we buy it even if we did not plan for it. I know well how to sweet talk people to separate from their money, that’s my profession. If I don’t sweet talk them, they will just walk away.

“Business has gone down because of post-election, and as for now the economy is very down, inflation is high, it’s too unbearable. Nowadays people only cater for food, not other expenditures. What can stop me from achieving my dreams is only the politicking in Kenya. I don’t want to tell you that our government will help us, they will not. The common man will always remain as he or she is, unless he works hard. It is up to me to rise up and do something good for myself, or for the society. That’s how we will be moving on.”

Peter Ogweno, 32, Alfa Electronics

“I was working for another guy in another electronics repair shop, but I had been keeping some small money little by little and I had some small capital. After the violence, I saw that this was the time to open my own shop. It was not enough money, I had to start small and work hard to progress.

“The first few months, the biggest challenge was getting new customers. I had some few friends they were helping me to find customers, and I brought some from the old place. Now my momentum is building up very highly. We repair radios, TVs, amplifiers, microwaves. Most things we manage, it’s only that repairing a machine from US, Europe, UK, spares are not available. Those from China, they are many and not any problems.

“What I need is a more modern and bigger shop. These ones here are temporary and we are always being told by the City Council that they will be removed. There is no way to find a loan to expand your business if there is the risk that tomorrow a bulldozer will come and pull it away with no warning.

“But I have some confidence that things can change. In five years you’ll find me here running this business, but it will be bigger. I don’t need to go to these upper class shopping centers in the city. Business is business wherever you are.”

Evalin Aoko, 38, Candy Stall

“I started this business in 2006, selling candy to the children at the school nearby here, they are my best customers, even by 6:00 a.m. they are buying. I have my stock here on this tray outside my friend’s shop. When I started, I had something like $30 as capital, it allowed me to buy the first stock. Since then I have had to take some loans to buy more stock, or pay school fees for my children, or just to put food on the table.

“What I need is simple – capital. Then I can go to the suppliers in town and buy things in cartons of many, instead of packets of few. Then the price is lower and my profit is higher. But where do I find the money for the wholesalers like that? When the sales are good I can raise $6 a day in profit, but even that’s not enough to cover the bills I have to pay. That’s why I cannot move on.

Read More

7 Innovative Secrets of Steve Jobs

Tags

7 Innovative Secrets of Steve Jobs

In 1972, Steve Jobs left his Silicon Valley home and headed north to a small liberal arts school, Reed College, in Portland, Ore., only to drop out after one semester. Like many teenagers, the 17-year-old Jobs lacked direction.

“I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out,” Jobs said later. “Here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out okay.”

The courage to leave school—to “follow your heart”—is the first of seven principles outlined by Carmine Gallo in his new book, The Innovation Secrets of Steve Jobs (McGraw-Hill (MHP), October 2010). Gallo, a communications pro, is the author of the best-seller The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs.

Gallo’s new book, however, takes him out of his core marketing expertise and into new ground where clichés help him define something as elusive as innovation. No doubt parents everywhere who fork out thousands for their kid’s college education are shuddering over the first principle.

Gallo revels in the image of Jobs-as-superhero, which somewhat undermines serious analysis of the iconic man’s ability to deliver not what people want but what they will want. Many of Gallo’s other six principles are just as simplistic, such as put a dent in the universe, say no to 1,000 things, and create insanely great experiences. (See below for the list of principles.)

It’s not all bad. Gallo comes closest to his mission in his third principle, kick-start your brain, which, like many chapters covering each principle, is riddled with quotes from Jobs: “Part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians, and poets, and artists, and zoologists, and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world.”

One of the recurring themes in The Innovation Secrets of Steve Jobs is the ability to think differently and openly and constantly question the status quo. In order to do this, one must have enough and varied life experiences—both good and bad—to draw from, according to Gallo.

In the chapter about kick-starting your brain, Gallo cites a Harvard study that found that creative thinking requires the ability to connect vastly different experiences in order to arrive at something wholly new. For instance, Jobs sat in on a calligraphy class at Reed College, and Gallo shows how Jobs would later connect this experience with technology design.

Continue Reading

Courtesy of CIO.com

 

 

Kenya’s Informal Sector – Some Great Lessons

Steve Daniels was a “scrawny white kid” from New York when he went to Kenya to study development technology and ended up writing a book about the informal sector that changed the way he viewed the world. More importantly, it may help change the way the West’s development sector interacts with Africa. By MANDY DE WAAL.

The book was inspired by the waste that Daniels experienced in his chosen field of study in Appropriate Technology at Brown University. “In many cases I found that appropriate technology meant to be small-scale technologies meant to empower people and communities were really not effective,” says Daniels, speaking to The Daily Maverick from Providence, Rhode Island. “It is a movement started in the 1970′s for the development of societies, but often the technologies for development were not being used, weren’t scaling, weren’t being used or weren’t really generating income for people.” In short it’s all about the old aid story of outsiders coming in to help uplift “poor” Africa, but either not doing much or doing more harm than good.

“When I got to Kenya it occurred to me, as it occurs to many people, that having these Western designers come into a country to design a technology and hand it off to people doesn’t work. The designers are so far removed from the people who are building, using or owning the technology that the transition process was not effective in most cases.” Daniels’ epiphany was in engaging Kenya’s informal sector, an industry that has scant attention from the academic or book worlds.

Daniels tells of the time of his first experience walking into Gikomba, a massive informal settlement in Nairobi that’s famous for its density. “Wandering through these sheds and the friendliness of the people who gave me tours of what they were doing really impacted (on) me. I ended up walking into this large work shed of these men who were hammering these large metal sheets into bowls. They offered to let me try to hammer these bowls. Here was this little scrawny white kid with all these big, strong men who have been doing this day in and day out, and I was so terrible at it. I gained a lot of respect for them, that’s for sure.”

Outside Gikomba, Daniels saw a man creating art with welded iron. “He had built about 12 welding machines from scratch. I don’t know how to build a welding machine, so I was very impressed with the ingenuity. The work was very spectacular and he was able to get a connection to a market abroad and transitioned from making furniture for locals to doing art and exporting it, and had expanded his workshop. I asked him what kinds of things he had done for safety because he wasn’t wearing protective eye wear or gloves, and he just showed me his hands which are all cut up and blistered and he said: ‘We are jua kali’. That epitomised everything for me.”

It was at that time that Daniels realised the vast talent contained in this sector. “I realised that there is this huge source of talent in the informal economy that the appropriate technology movement hadn’t really been tapping into this as much as it should,” he says. “I stumbled upon the ‘jua kali’ and thought we should really be designing with these fabricators who understand how to design for the local market, know what materials to use, know how to build with these materials and distribution networks to get their products all over the country, to the even most remote villages.”

The “jua kali” concept is ambiguous because the phrase was coined in the sixties to refer to people who work at manual jobs or with their hands under the hot sun. Today it means anyone in the informal sector whether a trader, producer or retailer and typically these businesses are between one or five people strong. The informal economy in Kenya comprises close to three quarters of all employment and creates about 90% of all new jobs annually according to Daniels. “The large manufacturers and formal sector in Kenya creates almost no new jobs and employs a small portion of the economy.”

A problem Daniels identified is the lack of interaction between the formal and informal sectors, which has narrowed the transfer and growth of abilities. “Skills are passed on organically, informally and through apprenticeships. This has been effective over decades, but the technology that the jua kali use in their workshops is limited and they can’t always transfer all the skills they have.” In the seventies people exiting the formal sector for self-employment brought with them knowledge of machinery and design skills learned in that sector. This has dissipated over the years. “The products built in the 1970s are still being created today, but we are not seeing a lot of new technology or products coming out of the sectors. Innovative new products are introduced from outside the sector.”

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

An example of this is the Kenya ceramic “Jiko” which is an energy saving charcoal oven introduced to the informal sector by an environmentalist in government. It took good effort to train people over large geographic areas to generate income using this product. Today the “Jiko” is spread throughout east Africa and is the most commonly used oven in the “jua kali”. “This shows we can do more to foster innovation in the jua kali sector. What’s more important is to lower the risk to build new technology because every investment in this informal sector has to yield an immediate return.” People in the “jua kali” are survivalists who must feed and care for their families, but with micro-finance, better business-development services and access to the right technology, innovation and new product development can be fostered.

“It has given me a healthier respect for the formal economy because I now see different ways that the formal and informal economies can interact because development really has to be a collaborative process by all parties. The biggest barrier to innovation is that the government, educational sector, formal economy, and informal economy are all doing their own thing and not talking or interacting. Development has to be a collaborative project.”

Daniels says writing the book has changed the way he sees the global north and the global south interacting. “I had previously seen development as something that could be promoted by Westerners, and I now see development as something that needs to be taken charge of by indigenous leaders. You need to not come in with our own technologies, but empower people to create their own movements, new products and technologies.” The book’s message is that Africa can solve its own market problems and has key lessons for South Africa where unemployment is on a dangerous incline.

Courtesy of The Daily Maverick