Morocco is now a world leader in solar power:
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/02/04/465568055/...
Ask HN: Which developing nations have interesting tech stories at the moment?
41–50 of 127 posts
Re: Ask HN: Which developing nations have interesting tech stories at the moment?
#42I'm surprised that no one has mentioned Tunisia. Its main advantage is that the country produces SF-grade engineers for 10% of the cost.
https://techcrunch.com/2016/02/11/tunisia-is-becoming-mena-n...
https://www.wamda.com/2015/11/why-accelerators-are-flocking-...
http://www.tunisia-live.net/2015/07/10/tunisia-start-up/
Some nuance: https://medium.com/@ostl/tunis-as-a-startup-city-or-not-2d4d...
Re: Ask HN: Which developing nations have interesting tech stories at the moment?
#43Not at the moment, but when Venezuala finally turns away from socialism/communism and rebuilds itself; it will be interesting to see how well they can do in the tech sector.
Iirc Venezuela already has a fairly good (all things considered) internet access.
Semi-relatedly Cuba has some pretty ingenious innovation to get around the tightly controlller internet access including makeshift internet that closely resembles a meshnet. Would be interesting to see how Cuba would react to state sanctioned capitalism considering the population very much has been educated under the Castros.
Re: Ask HN: Which developing nations have interesting tech stories at the moment?
#44India | Telecom | 110M subscribers on-boarded in 100 days To summarize: Jio, which is our cellular telephony play, now is the world's largest cellular data network (pumping 22,000 TB per day) and onboards a million customers a day! We now have 110 million subscribers (in ~100 days). This became possible when the telco regulators here gave a go ahead to use the Govt of India's pet biometric auth project Aadhaar[1] to…
Wow - those stats are definitely impressive. What's the best way to reach you? Would love to talk more about this.
Re: Ask HN: Which developing nations have interesting tech stories at the moment?
#45Morocco is now a world leader in solar power: http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/02/04/465568055/...
Thanks for the link.
Re: Ask HN: Which developing nations have interesting tech stories at the moment?
#46India | Telecom | 110M subscribers on-boarded in 100 days To summarize: Jio, which is our cellular telephony play, now is the world's largest cellular data network (pumping 22,000 TB per day) and onboards a million customers a day! We now have 110 million subscribers (in ~100 days). This became possible when the telco regulators here gave a go ahead to use the Govt of India's pet biometric auth project Aadhaar[1] to…
An interesting article on Jio from The Economist:
http://www.economist.com/news/business/21718495-jios-100m-ne...
By their math, acquiring those 100 million customers cost 25 billion USD. The writer is sceptical that Jio will ever make that money back.
Personally I think it's awesome that an Indian billionaire is spending his money on local digital infrastructure. Even if Jio doesn't become hugely profitable, its network seems to be a boon to India.
Re: Ask HN: Which developing nations have interesting tech stories at the moment?
#47Ukraine's IT industry is rather developed with still relatively cheap workforce. And there have been a few successful startups recently: http://www.uadn.net/2017/01/09/top-10-ukrainian-startups-in-...
The workforce is currently cheap compared to western countries because of the local currency's low value, and IT being one of the very few fields where people get paid in dollars. So as a result, what would be a low wage in the west is an extremely high wage in Ukraine (e.g. $1k a month = 25k hryvnias, which is 8 times more than country's minimum wage).
It's not true that it is cheap because of the local currency low value: the IT wages were approximately the same when $1k was 8k hrn.
Ukrainian IT market is mostly outsourcing and does not depend much on the internal market and local currency, outsourcing developers usually get paid in USD (or equivalent) regardless of the hryvnia value.
Re: Ask HN: Which developing nations have interesting tech stories at the moment?
#48I'm surprised that no one has mentioned Tunisia. Its main advantage is that the country produces SF-grade engineers for 10% of the cost. https://techcrunch.com/2016/02/11/tunisia-is-becoming-mena-n... https://www.wamda.com/2015/11/why-accelerators-are-flocking-... http://www.tunisia-live.net/2015/07/10/tunisia-start-up/ Some nuance: https://medium.com/@ostl/tunis-as-a-startup-city-or-not-2d4d...
I'd love to put this to the test. Do you happen to know of any good places to advertise our open developer positions there?
Re: Ask HN: Which developing nations have interesting tech stories at the moment?
#49Vietnam has quite a strong startup ecosystem relative to its development stage. I think it has a lot to do with its government having laid out a plan since the 90s to develop its IT industry. Results are: 1) Lots of IT grads 2) Lots of funding 3) Okay-ish infrastructure If we add this to the interests in entrepreneurship among Vietnamese people, it results in a strong tech scene.
This blog post from Google engineer Neil Fraser made the rounds 4 years ago: https://neil.fraser.name/news/2013/03/16/ He traveled to Vietnam and observed a high quality Computer Science education in primary / secondary school. Talking about grade 11 scholars, he wrote: After returning to the US, I asked a senior engineer how he'd rank this question on a Google interview. Without knowing the source of the question, h…
TBH, I think I would expect grade 11 students the world over to be able to answer the question on display.
Re: Ask HN: Which developing nations have interesting tech stories at the moment?
#50South Africa is fascinating - contrasting bad news and great innovation. Although there have been setbacks from recent government shenanigans the wheels of law are turning (albeit slowly) and the ruling Zuma faction is daily facing more and more resistance. In the meantime the weak rand makes SA cheap, and their interesting ideas enter the world market. Amazon has a strong presence in SA - and (this is generally a li…
Interesting stuff, thanks. As a Zimbabwean I'm always envious of how tech-enabled S.A is.