Sanaga Peregrinations

Il y avait cette année: Un lecteur de DVD & Divx Un sac à main (désolée mais je ne mets pas la marque...) Le livre Peuls de Tierno Monénembo La collection complète des bandes dessinées Aya de Yopougon . Le Tome 3 vient de sortir et je ne saurais que vivement le recommander. Merci à J pour cette attention :) Un rattrapage de la hotte de 2006 : le CD Savane d'Ali Farka Touré Du vin  Un magnifique tableau venant de la "galerie" de rue derrière le marché des fleurs à Douala  Un disque dur USB 2"5 hyper pratique. Mille mercis à tous ceux qui "me pensent"!!! Ils font ainsi mentir le chanteur Douleur qui dit " ti mè ni ti mè, yon a tabé ". (Littéralement " toujours donne moi, donne moi, jamais tiens ").

C'est la saison des listes, celle pour le père Noël (eh oui Christelle, je suis mono focussed ces jours-ci :) ) et les 50 Top 10 lists of 2007 du Time Magazine. Une des listes intéressantes est celle des 10 histoires les moins rapportées par les médias en 2007 . Sur les 10 histoires, 3 ou 4 concernent le continent Africain. Extraits: " #1 Somalia, the Other Darfur - Infighting in Somalia causes more than 1 million civilians to flee their homes, in a refugee crunch whose scope and severity rival that of Darfur's. "We have a major crisis," says Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the top U.N. envoy for Somalia, "and it's being ignored." The violence is hampering humanitarian aid and the work of U.N. troops. # 3 U.N. Dials Back HIV Estimate - The U.N. reports it had overestimated the number of people infected with HIV by some 6.3 million worldwide and lowers the 2007 total to 33.2 million. The reduction is based on better reporting methods, particularly in Ind...

Après la guerre des navigateurs, voici la guerre des smartphones qui s'annonce . En lice : Apple et son iPhone contre RIM et son Blackberry. (via Silicon Valley Insider). Pour ma part, rien ne vaut un bon Blackberry, il me suit partout et s'interface de manière simple avec le serveur mail de mon entreprise. Question look & feel, simplicité d'utilisation et gadget j'opte évidemment pour l'iPhone. Mais quand il s'agit d'interface simple pour accéder à ses emails, rien ne vaut un BB selon moi. Quand je suis en vacances au pays, il me permet de lire mes emails même au fin fond de mon village où il n y a pas de cybercafé avant des kilomètres à la ronde. Dans cette guerre, j'ai déjà choisi mon camp...quoique si les prix venaient à baisser, je pourrais en changer qui sait? Souvent consommateur varie... Euvin Naidoo 's keynote address at the 15th annual Wharton Africa Business Forum. The theme was " Putting a Different Face on Africa: Hope for an Ec...

Tube of the day found on YouTube. It's really funny when you listen carefully to the lyrics :)  "Thought I had the perfect plan, took the job at WebVan "  "Suffered through the market crash, lost a giant wad of cash"  "Make your elevator pitch, code it up and flip the switch "   Hat-tip to Don Dodge .

TGIF : Thank God It's Friday.  Not only it's Friday but it's Xmas season with some time off for me... Happy Holidays to all.

Obama learns a party trick from Blair (Financial Times). " Mr Blair often used the hard left’s barely veiled hostility as a means to entrench his power [...] The Obama campaign may be weighing the same strategy, for use if not now then after his hoped-for victory in the primaries. Angry progressives are as repellent to the centre that Mr Obama aims to recruit as the Republican fundamentalists at the other extreme. If the centre counts – and there lies the gamble – then the squirmings of the Democratic base are an asset to be exploited." Google gets ready to rumble with Microsoft (New York Times). " COUNTLESS decisions by corporate technology managers, office workers, university students and rank-and-file computer users of all kinds will ultimately determine Google’s success. How easy and inexpensive will it be to do e-mail, word processing, spreadsheets and team projects on Web software? Will high-speed network connections soon become as ubiquitous and reliable as Goog...

Source image: Charlie Hebdo

If you can't see anything, move back a bit and see what appears behind the lines. Pretty cool, isn't it? Image via Amazing Illusions blog .

I'll be attending the Le Web 3 conference that will be held in Paris on Dec 11 & 12th. Posting may be lighter than usual. This year's theme will be:  Evolution in technology, revolution in behavior. I'll try my best to post a summary at the end of it.

Ok ok Nino. There's nothing personal about this song except that I've been playing it on my Ipod over & over. Well, maybe, maybe not... Anyhow, just enjoy this lovely song by Dido , see you when you are 40.

We are here on Earth to do good to others. What the others are here for, I don't know. - WH Auden

Back in 2005, BusinessWeek (via Gapingvoid.com) had an article about blogs entitled " Blogs will change your business ". Back then, blogs were said to be a "prerequisite". Were they really? Maybe, maybe not, that's not the point of this post. The article continues stating " blog power simply doesn't translate yet into big bucks. For now, it's running mostly on people's passion to communicate ". That was 2 years ago, did that change a lot? Well, quite not much if you read this post from Alex Iskold on ReadWriteWeb : There's No Money In The Long Tail of the Blogosphere . " Because of the power law, the long tail of the blogosphere is huge and so any individual blog is not easily discovered. That is, the chance that a random Internet surfer will find a blog that is part of the long tail is nearly zero. Whatever monetization means the blogger in the long tail settled on, be it Google AdSense or Amazon affiliate codes, it can only work...

This week issue of Business Week is on Africa. " Can greed save Africa? " Will private investment succeed where foreign aid almost failed? The continent is the investing world's final frontier. " Thanks to the global commodities boom of the past few years, sub-Saharan Africa's economies, after decades of stagnation, are expanding by an average of 6% annually—twice the U.S. pace. And like bees to honey, investors are swarming into the region in search of the enormous returns that ultra-early-stage investments can bring. " Tags: African development , african can markets , trade , africa , entrepreneurship

The Highs and Lows of African Oil (Time Magazine). A small account of " the promise and pitfalls of business on the world's second fastest-growing continent. Africa? That's right. In October, the IMF predicted that sub-Saharan Africa's real GDP will grow 6.75% in 2008, versus 7.2% in Asia, 3.2% in Europe and 1.9% in the U.S. Growth rates in several African countries evoke the Asian tigers of two decades ago, prompting keen international interest. " Spotlight: Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala – Nigerian reformer (Financial Times). Ok, ok I am a big fan of her, but one must say she did a great job while she was Nigeria's finance minister. Now she up to a lot more : " For the past year, Mrs Okonjo-Iweala has chaired advisory boards on Africa for Renaissance Capital, the Russian investment bank seeking to repeat in Africa the success it had in the former Soviet states during the 1990s. She has set up an opinion poll back home as well as a $60m fund to promote African w...

via Rodrigo Sepulveda blog, petite liste exhaustive des papiers à fournir pour acquérir un iPhone en France :) Pour ma part, je me tâte toujours pour savoir ce que je vais demander au père Noël cette année. Si vous avez des idées... Tags: decale , humour , iphone

Quand le Mali s'exporte ca donne quoi? Des tubes magnifiques, des chansons qui vous donnent le vague à l'âme ou la joie de vivre et qui sont non sans rappeler la richesse musicale de ce pays. Une petite escapade musicale au Mali sans quitter vos écrans, merci qui? Merci YouTube :) Ok, on tourne le son des hauts-parleurs à fond, on s'incruste dans son fauteuil et hop c'est parti... Commençons par la voix d'or du Continent , Salif Keita en duo avec Cesaria Evora parle d'amour avec Yamore . Fantani Touré nous chante une ode au Mali avec son Mali Ba . Cette descendante d'une grande famille noble de Bamako nous a ébloui avec son premier album produit par Salif Keita et intitulé "N'tin Naari" (littéralement, "je vous salue"). Oumou Sangaré sur scène avec Alicia Keys et chantant "Falling", j'en tombe à la renverse.... Ali Farka Touré , qui nous a quittés l'année dernière mais dont l'oeuvre s'inscrit dans le patr...

Sharing with you some of the tabs opened in my browser. Le Cameroun simplifie la prise en charge du Sida ( Le Figaro ). According to the article, around 500,000 people are currently infected in Cameroon, that makes 1 person out of 34 has HIV. nc No picnic - A teddy bear row in Sudan ( The Economist ). " In more elevated western circles, it is becoming commoner to hear the view that Islam itself (rather than any extremist interpretations of the faith) is posing a challenge to western values that must be resisted. And if that view becomes more respectable, so too does a defensive Muslim reaction, which is often tinged with geopolitical grievance. " Facebook search expands — will it take on Google? ( VentureBeat ). New questions (read speculations) are raised about " Facebook’s ambitions, as it finds itself the David against the Google Goliath. Will it pull out the ultimate slingshot: a full-fledged search engine for the web, not just the Facebook site? This question is ...