United States’s Support of Technological Advancement in Ghana

Technology is increasingly becoming the single most important catalyst to socio-economic development in Ghana. There are innovative technologies that are being introduced to improve and ensure the sustainable use of technology to enable poor people and marginalized communities to use the potential of information technology to transform their lives. With progress in mobile telephony, where the gap between rich and poor is narrowing rapidly, informational technology can have greatest developmental impact, such as in high-speed Internet access and broadband connectivity, the development of local information technology industries, and of applications.
The US State Department (Embassy) has been leveraging on its resources to harness this potential that will narrow existing inequalities. Last year , the State Dept sponsored Apps4Africa, Computer Mania and Robotics Inspired Science Education.

Apps4Africa challenges application developers to find innovative technological solutions to everyday problems on issues ranging from transparency and governance to health and education. Four Ghanaian innovators are finalist this year vying for $10,000USD and advisory support.

Computer Mania brought together school children  and teachers a hands-on activities related to mobile application development, water purification, food engineering, and energy in three cities; Accra, Tamale, and Kumasi.

Robotics Inspired Science Education, connects science theory with hands-on learning, students and teachers explore best practices to strategize, design, build, program and test robots to solve defined real world problems. Students gain valuable team-building, presentation and communications skills, and have a whole lot of fun while pursuing serious science. These workshops introduced robotics kits, guidebooks and additional training suggestions in order to inspire Ghanaian youth to pursue science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education and careers.

Finally , in the area of Cybersecurity, Cybercrime & Internet Freedom , the US organized the West African Cybersecurity and Cybercrime Workshop earlier this week to provide the tools and information to evaluate and improve regional capacity to address cyber security challenges as mobile security, computer forensics, strengthening national laws, building emergency response teams and ensuring that comprehensive national cyber security plans promote internet freedom and respect for civil rights/civil liberties.

 As well as supporting/promoting internet freedom through the support for BlogCamp 2013 which seeks to encourage social media enthusiasts to create content that can give a voice to every Ghanaian regardless of religion, gender, political affiliation, etc.

With the help of all these projects Ghanaians are being encouraged to take up the study of science and the creation of applications that fits into our industry and solves societal issues.

Chairperson of BloggingGhana Launches Social Media Awards as part of BlogCamp13

Social Media has added new dimensions to content creation and changed the pattern.It has allowed everyone and anyone to become a content creator. There is a need to train more people on becoming good creators and magnify the ones producing quality content. 2: 33 pm on twitter is usually characterized by Ghanaians tweeting #233Moments. However at the same time today, 08/01/2013, the social media world in Ghana and beyond received the awesome news of yet another BlogCamp in Ghana. The Chair of BloggingGhana, the defacto Association of Bloggers in Ghana, launched BlogCamp Ghana 2013 and Ghana's first social media awards. The awards was announced at last years event and it  will be the first time "content creators" = bloggers will awarded for their commitment to creating and sharing content from and about Ghana to the world.Chair Kajsa Hallberg Adu also mandated the BlogCamp team to find Ghana's best blogger in a tweet:

Kajsa Hallberg Adu@kajsaha

With this tweet, I mandate the #Blogcamp13 team to go find the Best Blogger in 2012! blogcampghana.comMay the best win! #233moments

8 Jan 13

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BlogCamp 2013 is themed "Content is King" celebrates the relevance of quality content in branding individuals, organisations and nations on the web. 
In 2012, BloggingGhana organised the first BlogCamp Ghana under the theme "Voice of a New Generation". According to feedback gathered on social media, the event was a huge success. BlogCamp 2013 aims to take the experience a notch higher with Social Media Awards as a key part of the event.We entreat everyone to go on the website and nominate as well as lock down this date - 23rd March, 2013- on their calenders and endeavour to attend BlogCamp2013. See you in March...Cheers! 

Koding Opens Its Social, In-Browser Development Tools To a Select Few for Beta Testing

Koding, the startup that helps developers code and collaborate from their web browser, is leaving private beta today.
The company isn’t exactly throwing the doors open. It’s more like … nudging? The goal is to make the product available to everyone, but the company is opening gradually, with the hope of not overloading its servers. Specifically, it’s giving members three invites each, and as each new member uses their invites, the userbase will grow. (The company is also allowing some TechCrunch readers to jump the line — keep reading to find out how.)
Koding is supposed to make the development process both easier and more social. Users build their projects in the browser, with a free development server that supports Java, NodeJS, Perl, Python, Ruby, C, C++, Go, and other languages. The company compares its features to Facebook or Yammer, allowing developers to share their code with each other, ask each other questions, and collaborate on projects that can be public or private.
As a sign of the developer interest, co-founder and CEO Devrim Yasar says that among the people who signed up for an invite, 70 percent actually accepted the invite when it came and created an account (10 percent is standard, he says). A total of 10,000 developers participated in the beta.

Yasar also wrote a blog post about the launch, where he describes Koding as “the next little thing”, as well as a product that he’s been working on for three years:

“This project will try to push you to think differently in some ways, ways that you may not feel comfortable at times. It is not just about writing code, it is about thinking how teams and companies will be formed in the future. We will share more, protect less, that’s the idea. Our offices will be our devices that we connect to internet with. Teams will be more dynamic, can grow to 100s of people and shrink back as fast. We will be more inclusive of others, and have core team members that we’ve never met in person.”

Koding recently raised a $2 million Series A from RTP Ventures and Greycroft. The basic product will always be free, Yasar says, while the company will make money by charging for extra features and services

Culled from http://techcrunch.com

IBM integrates optics and electronics on a single chip

In what is likley a significant development for the future of optical communications, IBM researchers have managed to shrink optical components to fit alongside their electrical counterparts on a single chip. This advance in the realm of “silicon nanophotonics” paves the road to much higher-performance servers, data centers and supercomputers in the years to come.

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Having built about 200 of the world's 500 fastest supercomputers to date, IBM is putting a great deal of effort into developing technology to raise the performance bar even higher. Besides, the competition isn't exactly waiting around: China, India and the American company SGI have already announced plans to build supercomputers of their own with a performance approaching one exaflop – one billion billion floating point operations per second, a fifty-fold improvement over today's fastest supercomputer – by as early as 2017.

The performance of microprocessors increases exponentially as years go by and yet, when it comes to putting together tens of thousands of them to create a supercomputer or a big data center, this doesn't automatically translate into proportionally higher speeds. A system of this magnitude can only move as fast as the slowest of its components and, as it turns out, the main bottleneck here is the speed at which data can be sent across the different processors. The existing copper interconnects are limited in bandwidth and are expensive relative to their performance, costing several dollars per Gbit/s.

Ten years ago, IBM set its sights on solving the issue by pushing a technology that it dubbed "silicon nanophotonics." The idea behind it is to increase the throughput of data communication between chips by switching from copper to optical signaling. In much the same way integrated circuits bundle an increasing number of transistors into a single die, IBM is shrinking optical componentry into far smaller and more powerful form factors.

As part of its research, IBM has now announced it has managed to shrink the optical components down to the 90 nm scale. This is of crucial importance, because it means that optical components can for the first time be built using the familiar, well-oiled manufacturing processes used to create electronics, and then embedded side by side with them on a single chip.

The development is expected to bring costs down considerably, to less than a cent per Gbit/s. IBM has already demonstrated optical transceivers exceeding 25 Gbit/s per channel, and showed that multiplexers embedded in the chip can feed parallel streams of optical data into a single fiber to reach much higher speeds.

While this advance isn't likely to affect consumer electronics in the short term, faster supercomputers will assist scientists and engineers in making key advances in a very wide range of disciplines, including aerodynamics,cosmology and neuroscience.

by Dario Borghino 

Source: IBM via Gizmag