Friday 6 June 2014
Cheki, BrighterMonday boss dies after armed attack
Updated Thursday, June 5th 2014 at 15:15 GMT +3
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| The late Carey Eaton, co-founder of One Africa Media group. [PHOTO: COURTESY] |
According to a press release sent to newsrooms by One Africa Media representatives Redline Public Relations, Eaton died following an armed robbery in Nairobi on Thursday morning.
"It is with great sadness and regret that we announce the untimely death of Kenyan businessman Carey Eaton, who passed away in tragic circumstances after an armed robbery at a friend’s home in Nairobi in the early hours of this morning," reads the statement.
According to the statement, Eaton served on the boards of many companies and was well respected as a leader in the emerging online business sector where he also played a mentorship role to young technology entrepreneurs.
"Carey was the co-founder of the One Africa Media group of companies and one of the inspirational leaders of the technology revolution happening across the continent of Africa," the statement reads.
One Africa Media comprises Cheki, BrighterMonday, BuyRentKenya and StayNow in Kenya, as well as similar Internet businesses across Africa.
"Previously CIO of the Australian classified group SEEK, Carey returned home to Kenya in 2011 to start Cheki. From humble beginnings he grew Cheki into Kenya’s number one car portal and the larger group of companies into Africa’s largest classified group. The Kenyan operation now includes over 150 people spread across the country," the statement reads.
"Carey was intelligent and bold but wielded this gift with a humility that gave all around him the confidence to achieve more than they knew was possible. However, it is not Carey the business leader that we will miss as much as Carey the man: energetic, passionate and connected to us all in some special way," it reads.
"What can never be taken away is the legacy around us in the team and the brands that he built. When we have mourned the loss of our friend we will, with renewed resolve, get back to building his vision," reads the statement.
Carey leaves behind his wife Steph, and children Noah, ILola, Ted and Archie.
Wednesday 4 June 2014
Will Google Glass Live Up To Its Hype In The Classroom?
Technology has had a massive impact in the classroom over the last
decade but rarely has the arrival of a new device been so hotly
anticipated. While it is still early days, trials of Google Glass are
already giving an insight into whether it will live up to its hype as a
teaching tool.
Google Glass has only been available to the public for a few weeks, but over the past year educators have been signing up to the Explorer Program to trial it in schools.
Many are understandably enthusiastic, but their experiences have also highlighted issues that schools will need to address before it can be widely adopted.
At first sight this excitement appears justified. A wearable computer with an optical head-mounted display (OHMD) has myriad applications. Among the most intriguing possibilities is allowing the teacher to see a lesson from the student’s perspective, at the same time as keeping an eye on whether they’re paying attention.
This seems to have massive potential. For the first time, teachers will get an idea of what it’s like to be a student in one of their lessons. The gain in understanding not just how much students understand but what made them understand it could be a significant step forward in helping educators analyze their own practise.
Activities recorded by Explorer teachers include students using Glass to create videos of projects, seeing how pupils approach new tasks, and using it to capture and archive parts of a lesson for future review and reflection.
There is no shortage of teachers recounting their experiences of Glass. Among the many blogs worth reading for an insight into the practical implementation of Glass – as well as some of the challenges – is 365 Days of Glass, written by Margaret A Powers, working with pupils at a lower school just outside Pennsylvania.
She has used it for everything from recording dance to tackling maths problems. “Seeing how students work and respond to a problem-in-the-moment is always a great tool for educators,” she writes.
Others are more circumspect. Wisconsin tech ed teacher Josh Fuller’s verdict
after his three weeks using Glass was up that although it enhanced some
aspects of his teaching it was difficult to see it becoming a
necessity. Silvia Tolisano, a teacher at the American School in Sao
Paulo, Brazil, is recording some of the advantages of using Glass, as
well as some of the practical issues, in her blog.
For teachers considering the impact Glass could have, these and other Explorers’ blogs are essential reading. By detailing how Glass is actually being used they provide a solid base for evaluating it as an educational tool
While it is still early days, there are signs that Glass could make a difference in the classroom. But you don’t have to be a sceptic to be cautious of every new gadget that comes along. It’s true that many of the ways it is being deployed could just as easily have been achieved through a smartphone or tablet. Students may love using Glass now, but the novelty will soon wear off.
Schools also have to address the issues thrown up by wearable technology, not least of which is privacy. The devices also have an obvious potential for disruption in the classroom, way beyond the distractions caused by smartphones.
These should not be insurmountable – similar concerns were raised over smartphones – but existing policies will need to be updated and new protocols may need to be put in place (not wearing Glass in school bathrooms, for example). The debate over allowing calculators into exams will also seem a mere sideshow when Glass is up for discussion.
Price is obviously an issue. At $1400 a headset it is beyond the reach of most school budgets on anything but an experimental scale. The assumption is the price will come down; whether it fall enough for schools to adopt Glass on any scale is another question.
But Explorers have barely scratched the surface of what Glass can achieve. The augmented reality function is one that seems underdeployed as yet but has undoubted potential. Field trips could be transformed if students saw a full description of what they’re looking at alongside the object itself.
School cupboards are full of tech that was hailed as a major innovation but bit the dust because teachers lacked the know-how to use it fully, or found that its amazing capabilities were rarely called upon. It is unlikely the same fate will befall Google Glass, but there is more exploring to be done before the jury gives its verdict on whether it will make a real difference in the classroom.
Google Glass has only been available to the public for a few weeks, but over the past year educators have been signing up to the Explorer Program to trial it in schools.
Many are understandably enthusiastic, but their experiences have also highlighted issues that schools will need to address before it can be widely adopted.
At first sight this excitement appears justified. A wearable computer with an optical head-mounted display (OHMD) has myriad applications. Among the most intriguing possibilities is allowing the teacher to see a lesson from the student’s perspective, at the same time as keeping an eye on whether they’re paying attention.
This seems to have massive potential. For the first time, teachers will get an idea of what it’s like to be a student in one of their lessons. The gain in understanding not just how much students understand but what made them understand it could be a significant step forward in helping educators analyze their own practise.
Activities recorded by Explorer teachers include students using Glass to create videos of projects, seeing how pupils approach new tasks, and using it to capture and archive parts of a lesson for future review and reflection.
There is no shortage of teachers recounting their experiences of Glass. Among the many blogs worth reading for an insight into the practical implementation of Glass – as well as some of the challenges – is 365 Days of Glass, written by Margaret A Powers, working with pupils at a lower school just outside Pennsylvania.
She has used it for everything from recording dance to tackling maths problems. “Seeing how students work and respond to a problem-in-the-moment is always a great tool for educators,” she writes.
Google Glass OOB Experience 27126 (Photo credit: tedeytan)
For teachers considering the impact Glass could have, these and other Explorers’ blogs are essential reading. By detailing how Glass is actually being used they provide a solid base for evaluating it as an educational tool
While it is still early days, there are signs that Glass could make a difference in the classroom. But you don’t have to be a sceptic to be cautious of every new gadget that comes along. It’s true that many of the ways it is being deployed could just as easily have been achieved through a smartphone or tablet. Students may love using Glass now, but the novelty will soon wear off.
Schools also have to address the issues thrown up by wearable technology, not least of which is privacy. The devices also have an obvious potential for disruption in the classroom, way beyond the distractions caused by smartphones.
These should not be insurmountable – similar concerns were raised over smartphones – but existing policies will need to be updated and new protocols may need to be put in place (not wearing Glass in school bathrooms, for example). The debate over allowing calculators into exams will also seem a mere sideshow when Glass is up for discussion.
Price is obviously an issue. At $1400 a headset it is beyond the reach of most school budgets on anything but an experimental scale. The assumption is the price will come down; whether it fall enough for schools to adopt Glass on any scale is another question.
But Explorers have barely scratched the surface of what Glass can achieve. The augmented reality function is one that seems underdeployed as yet but has undoubted potential. Field trips could be transformed if students saw a full description of what they’re looking at alongside the object itself.
School cupboards are full of tech that was hailed as a major innovation but bit the dust because teachers lacked the know-how to use it fully, or found that its amazing capabilities were rarely called upon. It is unlikely the same fate will befall Google Glass, but there is more exploring to be done before the jury gives its verdict on whether it will make a real difference in the classroom.
Facebook Couldn't Kill Snapchat. Can Apple?
Here-today-gone-in-10-seconds photo-sharing app Snapchat has been
doing its best to dig itself a shallow grave, with a series of pretty
significant problems for an app built to appeal to privacy-lovers. In
January, a hacker published a list of millions of Snapchat’s users and their phone numbers. Last month, the FTC revealed that it had pursued a legal complaint against the company for security problems and lying about user’s photos disappearing — they do in fact stick around.
Then last week, Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel, 23, was regretting that his
college emails didn’t come with a self-destruct option when Valleywag
published them, revealing that Spiegel just a few short years ago was using very crude language to refer to the ladies who inspired he and his friends to build an app for safer sexting. Rough year! It may have gotten rougher this week, when Apple AAPL +1.14%
announced it’s entering the self-destructing marketplace. In iOS8,
Macheads will be able to send photos, videos and audio messages Mission Impossible-style.
Apple is not the first tech giant to come at Snapchat. After Facebook’s reported $3-billion-dollar offer to Snapchat got rebuffed, Mark Zuckerberg offered Facebook users a Snapchat clone called Poke, but it never took off. Part of its problem (beyond it’s terrible name) was that Facebook’s private messaging was not very popular to begin with, which is likely part of the reason why it purchased WhatsApp, an app people actually like using to send one-on-one private messages. Apple is in a very different position from Facebook. Apple iMessaging is already popular and Apple has taken Snapchat’s ‘ephemeral’ business model and turned it into a feature.
An obvious advantage for Snapchat is that it is device-agnostic while
iMakeItDisappear will be limited to iDevices. Only 25% of the American
population has an iPhone according to Pew.
iPhone ownership though is higher among the younger demographic who may
be more likely to use a feature like this. According to Pew, among
18-24 year olds, 31% have iPhones and 43% have Android, while among the
25-34 set, the split is 34% iPhone and 40% Android. If nothing else,
it’s a reason for Macheads to start dating their own kind.
Regardless, a tech giant like Apple incorporating the deletion feature (in the same week that tech giant Google GOOGL -0.17% released an End-to-End encryption Chrome extension to make Gmail more private) is a sign that privacy enhancement is catching on as a business trend. Do these giants entering the space lift the tide for all privacy players or threaten them? Snapchat is far from the only company trying to turn privacy into a money maker. Wickr, SilentCircle, and Glimpse are but a few of the start-ups duking it out in this space. I asked them what they thought of Google and Apple wading in in a big way.
Wickr created a self-destruction app two years ago that promises better security that Snapchat. “It’s not intimidating,” says Wickr chief technology officer Robert Statica. “It’s reassuring that Google and Apple are copying us and our technology. It means that we’re doing the right thing.”
While no one has played around with Apple’s iDestruction feature yet, Statica thinks it will be similar to Snapchat in erasing the image from the app but not from the phone’s memory so it can still be recovered forensically. “It’s a validator for us, but our technology is better,” says Wickr CEO Nico Sell.
Elissa Shevinsky, the founder of another photo deletion app Glimpse, voiced a similar sentiment. “It’s awesome that ephemerality is catching on, but companies like Apple are hindered by legacy apps and legacy code,” she says by email. ” We have the advantage of being able to create a fully ephemeral experience, building exactly what younger users want right now.”
SilentCircle, meanwhile, is an encrypted messaging app that’s targeting the same people Google is with its End-to-End Chrome extension — which makes a message appear as gibberish until it reaches its destination, so that it can’t be intercepted or read while in transit. “ All in all, we are cheering about this,” says Silent Circle CEO Mike Janke by email. “It is a very positive sign of how the world is starting to demand privacy.”
But he called the offerings from Google and Apple “only cosmetic in nature.” “For instance, Apple doesn’t claim that the messages actually expire -in fact they don’t,” he writes. “It is still on Apple’s servers for any warrant and they are still on your phone’s flash drive. Same as Snapchat, it is not secure and it doesn’t really disappear. What Google is doing is also very cool. However, it doesn’t stop Google from decrypting and reading your emails with a Bot, in fact it might even do that before you encrypt it.”
Google for its part says that won’t happen and that it won’t place contextual ads on encrypted email.
The privacy space is heating up, and it’s not just small start-ups offering innovative ways to protect data anymore. Soon “threat profile” may be as en vogue a term as encryption and ephemerality, if consumers start thinking hard about who exactly they want to protect their data from — and then choose their providers accordingly.
Apple is not the first tech giant to come at Snapchat. After Facebook’s reported $3-billion-dollar offer to Snapchat got rebuffed, Mark Zuckerberg offered Facebook users a Snapchat clone called Poke, but it never took off. Part of its problem (beyond it’s terrible name) was that Facebook’s private messaging was not very popular to begin with, which is likely part of the reason why it purchased WhatsApp, an app people actually like using to send one-on-one private messages. Apple is in a very different position from Facebook. Apple iMessaging is already popular and Apple has taken Snapchat’s ‘ephemeral’ business model and turned it into a feature.
iPhone vs Android users
Regardless, a tech giant like Apple incorporating the deletion feature (in the same week that tech giant Google GOOGL -0.17% released an End-to-End encryption Chrome extension to make Gmail more private) is a sign that privacy enhancement is catching on as a business trend. Do these giants entering the space lift the tide for all privacy players or threaten them? Snapchat is far from the only company trying to turn privacy into a money maker. Wickr, SilentCircle, and Glimpse are but a few of the start-ups duking it out in this space. I asked them what they thought of Google and Apple wading in in a big way.
Wickr created a self-destruction app two years ago that promises better security that Snapchat. “It’s not intimidating,” says Wickr chief technology officer Robert Statica. “It’s reassuring that Google and Apple are copying us and our technology. It means that we’re doing the right thing.”
While no one has played around with Apple’s iDestruction feature yet, Statica thinks it will be similar to Snapchat in erasing the image from the app but not from the phone’s memory so it can still be recovered forensically. “It’s a validator for us, but our technology is better,” says Wickr CEO Nico Sell.
Elissa Shevinsky, the founder of another photo deletion app Glimpse, voiced a similar sentiment. “It’s awesome that ephemerality is catching on, but companies like Apple are hindered by legacy apps and legacy code,” she says by email. ” We have the advantage of being able to create a fully ephemeral experience, building exactly what younger users want right now.”
SilentCircle, meanwhile, is an encrypted messaging app that’s targeting the same people Google is with its End-to-End Chrome extension — which makes a message appear as gibberish until it reaches its destination, so that it can’t be intercepted or read while in transit. “ All in all, we are cheering about this,” says Silent Circle CEO Mike Janke by email. “It is a very positive sign of how the world is starting to demand privacy.”
But he called the offerings from Google and Apple “only cosmetic in nature.” “For instance, Apple doesn’t claim that the messages actually expire -in fact they don’t,” he writes. “It is still on Apple’s servers for any warrant and they are still on your phone’s flash drive. Same as Snapchat, it is not secure and it doesn’t really disappear. What Google is doing is also very cool. However, it doesn’t stop Google from decrypting and reading your emails with a Bot, in fact it might even do that before you encrypt it.”
Google for its part says that won’t happen and that it won’t place contextual ads on encrypted email.
The privacy space is heating up, and it’s not just small start-ups offering innovative ways to protect data anymore. Soon “threat profile” may be as en vogue a term as encryption and ephemerality, if consumers start thinking hard about who exactly they want to protect their data from — and then choose their providers accordingly.
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