Montreal Tech Watch

I stumbled today upon a newly launched website done by Chezola Systems, a Montreal/Laval company which is also planning a mobile payment system in Africa for this year, with GSM cellphones and prepaid cards. The website is named link with africa, and is presented as a social and business networking utility for anyone interested to find business opportunities in Africa.

I find the idea great, i.e. leveraging the Internet to find like-minded people. Africa has huge ressources and untapped potential, and development is slowed down partly by lack of information and business opportunities by locals. If entrepreneurs had more information about what kind of services and products they could build and sell to North America and Europe, then one part of the equation will be solved.

By seeing a website like linkwithafrica.com, it’s clear the guys at Chezola Systems have a lot of connections with locals and this is the kind of website that was started after requests by locals and field experiences, in contrast to what’s happenning usually in technology entrepreneurship (read: a bunch of tech heads who meet over coffee/beer and try to imagine their new “cool” web service thanks to the new toy or language they just discovered). As such, linkwithafrica has all the merits. The only problem I have with it is that it’s really poorly executed. You have to sign up to interact with the website, the user workflow is broken, English is the only language supported etc. If you are a UXP designer, this is really the anti-thesis of what should be done. If I were in Africa, with a slower Interent connection, using the website would be really dreadful. This is really too bad; I would have liked to support this initiative, but I really can’t.