Edwin's Corner

If you look at the greatest inventions of our time, you will note that each of these inventions has gotten better, and more efficient as people have tinkered at them, given time. Ford Model T The Ford Model T, first produced in1908, is generally regarded as the first affordable automobile. The car had a top speed of 72 km/h and its fuel consumption was 11-18 L/100 Km; the engine could run on gasoline, kerosene and ethanol. Today we have the BMW i8 plug-in hybrid concept car, with fuel consumption at 3.76 L/100 km and an electronically limited top speed of 250 km/h. The ENIAC 1 computer of 1946 was financed by the military and contained 17,468 vacuum tubes, 70,000 resistors, 6,000 manual switches and 5 million soldered joints, all covering 167 square meters of floor space, with a “tonnage” of 30 tons and consumed 160 Kw of electric power, enough to cause brownout in adjacent towns. In comparison, Samsung Galaxy S III is consumer oriented, has a 1.4GHz, Cortex A9 processor, cove...

“What really does it mean to be alive at such fortunate times as these”, is the question that stems me every time I think about the fact that we are living in a period when equality is touted globally and in some quarters it is considered an advantage to come from a “minority” race. Martin Luther King Gone really are the days, when Abraham Lincoln, Booker T Washington, and Martin Luther King fought for the equality of the black man, with time the physical and mental freedoms that were implicit during this war of emancipation have been embraced by subsequent generations of Africans. But from time to time, I am brought before certain interactions with people and I start asking myself, are we really free? Or are we corporately languishing in certain mental and economic cesspools. Before you castigate let me share my thoughts.   Today as we speak, Kenya has more people on the internet than the population of Sweden, Norway and Denmark combined, these people are constantl...

People are known to achieve exceeding levels of success when faced with adversity. The Helots, a subjugated group of people in ancient Greece, caused the collapse of the revered Spartan nation when they eventually rose up against their masters who habitually tortured and slaughtered them.   Creating and managing a super team, can be a daunting task that requires extreme patience. In pursuit of the best, there is need to define what great means and who an ideal team member should be.  Steve Jobs famously quipped "It's too easy, as a team grows, to put up with a few B players, they then attract a few more B players, and soon you will even have some C players....A players like to work only with other A players, which means you can't indulge B players. From the onset what this means is ensure that all the required skills are known, and have a blend in the team of different backgrounds, perspectives and personalities. Not everyone should be modeled in the leader’s image....

The Roman Empire was originally poor and small, unique and austere of virtue. With time it became corrupt, spoilt and rotten from its vices. Thus, at its fall, its acts of grandeur were obscene to both man and God.    A virtually unknown presidential aspirant in the run up to the 2013 Kenya elections, spoke in metaphor when he theorized “when you want to be healthy, eat when hungry, and when you are hungry you do not fill your belly with food, you need a third for food, a third for water and then the other third should be breathing space”.    If you will allow me, I would like to break down this statement into something that makes sense to someone who drives information technology in any organization. One of the conclusive declarations one can make about technology is that there is a progressive trend and “new” is always the norm, it is also a fact that what is innovative and essential today, may become defunct and unnecessary tomorrow. Having made that st...

If you take a train from one of the suburbs in Nairobi and snail your way through the industrial area section of the city, you will notice corroded train tracks weaving into shells of industrial complexes that have shuttered-in broken windows with clear signs of wear and tear, and a heavily applied coat of aging dirt.   If you are from another bygone era you will probably shake your head nostalgically, as you remember the well-oiled industrial vibrancy that preexisted in this area, when beer brewing and cement producing factories would ship in raw material and ship out finished products on the same rail tracks. NAIROBI RAILWAY STATION All we have nowadays is infrastructure covered with grass-bushes and oversized weeds competing to get some lazy sunshine in an era of laxity and waste. The One Laptop per Child initiative was one of the most ambitious projects to come out an Ivy League technology lab. Behind it lay an ambitious effort to leverage digital technology in...

One Saturday afternoon, as I struggled with the immobility of time, I observed one of the wonders of this world. Four 3-year old boys, who proceeded to become touts on the back of a packed pickup. They seemed the least pressured by societal proclivities, and relished the very sense of inviting invisible passengers into a well-designed, glitzy public service vehicle. According to them the best ever seen in the city, which mind you, they described about eloquently in the intense conversations they were having mimicking grownups. I would like to remind the reader that all I could see while this was happening was an old worn-down stooping flat-tired packed pickup, swinging precariously from the weight of these toddlers. I would like to move our thoughts to another part of the world, to digest this paradox. Japan was arguably the electronics powerhouse of the 70’s, 80’s and early 90’s. The name Sony, Hitachi or Panasonic was synonymous with quality and longevity. It seemed at that ...