The financial crisis has brought to the forefront a message we've been trying to hammer into the techie community in Kenya for a long time, the importance of building applications that have strong and sustainable business models. It's become quite evident that applications based on the advertising revenue model may be the first to suffer as advertisers and marketing departments cut costs due to the fact that people will be inclined to spend less and save more during hard times, with that model out the door, what happens next? According to industry veterans such as Tim O'Reilly companies and developers need to focus on building applications that people care about.

We haven't built a technology industries that rely on this revenue model mainly because so far it hasn't worked for the majority of web based businesses (the exceptions are companies like the Nation Media Group that make a tidy sum of cash based on advertising). Africa still relies a lot on the "build and sell as much as you can model" which though not the best has kept as running.

I think this is an important point as it opens up the door for a wide range of opportunities for developers, especially in Africa where the market hasn't been fully tapped. I think it would be fair to say that in Africa the application development market hasn't been saturated to the point where we build fun and senseless applications (Poke pro on facebook) which means that developers are still focused on apps that solve problems or address concerns such health,information distribution etc. This is a strong point for us, in that we still understand what technology can do for society and we live in an environment that faces day to day challenges that aren't common in developed countries, not many application developers can boast of such exposure and interaction.

One thing needs to be pointed out that focusing on applications that solve problems doesn't mean that the creative bone needs to be thrown out. Developers in africa can still come up with applications that are not necessarily business-centric (fully focused on solving business needs) but that complimentour day-to-day lives and yes FUN!! after all without fun what are we left with?

Let us take this time to reflect on what we've been doing over the past few years as developers and focus our energies into getting it right. This is the time to show the world that Africa is the place to invest in, that we unlike the rest of the world have always been and continue to be focused on building applications that affect lives in a positive manner.