Now into its 3rd year, Tech4Africa is gearing up for its next mobile, web and emerging technology event that starts on Wednesday the 31st of October. This year’s theme is “Unlocking the next billion consumers.”
Sessions will be focused around mobile and content, the enterprise opportunity, entrepreneurship and financing, social business and innovation, while the audience will cut across the tech ecosystem of developers, social media marketers, technologists, corporates, students, investors and media.
The Developer Day and Hackathon on Wednesday, 31st October includes three tracks – a day on Agile software development, a Hackathon with sessions on Ruby on Rails, Python, Raspberry Pi, PhP etc., as well as workshops for social media marketers on apps ecosystem, monetisation etc.
The conference on Thursday,1st November, includes keynote speakers Tom Rosemalia, Vice President of Corporate Strategy and General Manager of Enterprise Initiatives at IBM and Ralph Simon, Founder & CEO of Mobilium, with other speakers being Amolo Ng’weno, MD of Digital Divide Data in Kenya; Neal Ford, Director, Software Architect and Meme Wrangler at ThoughtWorks; Vérone Mankou, CEO of Way-C in the Democratic Republic of Congo; Emma Kaye, CEO of Bozza, Josh Adler, social entrepreneur and others.
IBM’s Global Entrepreneurship Programme has been brought into the Tech4Africa 2012 agenda and Claudia Fan Munce, Managing Director at IBM Venture Capital Group, will introduce GEP and an award programme. Tech4Africa 2012 will also be running Ignite again – a start-up workshop and pitching competition, which is being run by AngelHub and Deloitte.
A Google G+ Hangout will be held live at the conference so that tech hubs from around Africa can be part of the conference and so that delegates can interact with a panel, asking questions and finding out more about what is happening on the ground in Senegal, Liberia, Uganda, Tanzania, Egypt, Kenya, Congo and other parts of Africa.
On Wednesday night, 31st October, there will be a CEO dinner to bring together senior business leaders to network, share ideas and discuss key tech issues with like-minded people, as well as the conference’s international speakers and expert guests … and then there’s the Tech4Africa after-party to close off the event!
For more information check out the agenda.