19 July 2005
Stories from 19 July 2005
The WSIS Youth Caucus in Ghana
I've just completed an interview with Leopold Armah and Regina Banini of Ghana's WSIS Youth Caucus, chatting about the role of African youth in the UN's World Summit on the Information Society. Have a listen to the podcast. -andy
Smartphone+Bluetooth: Ghanaian Video Blogging Paradise
A few moments after I posted my blog entry about the potential use of smart phones and Bluetooth wireless as a workaround for Ghanaian video bloggers, lo and behold I was approached by Lebanese blogger Mustapha, who introduced himself and sat down to chat, one Mac owner to another. He then pointed out he had the new Handspring Treo 650 smart phone, which just so happens has both video and Bluetooth capabilities. Lightbulbs went off, and in a matter of a few minutes we were able to post the following video clip. I wonder if it's the first smart phone video blog entry from Ghana?
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Andy and Mustapha try video blogging from Ghana with a smart phone: |
Video Blog Test from Accra
It's my second day at the BusyInternet cyber cafe in Accra, Ghana, and I'm expermenting with video compression to see if I can work out the ideal size for uploading and downloading video clips. The bandwidth here is slower than in the US, so I have to be careful about how large a file I post. Here are two versions of some footage from BusyInternet, one low bandwidth and the other medium bandwidth. The low version is around 600k, while the medium version is 1.3 megs. (For those of you keeping score, the uncompressed version of this 40-second clip is over 30 megabytes - pretty useless here in West Africa. Anyway, here are the results. Click on the appropriate link to try each version.
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BusyInternet montage: |
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The Devil's Excrement isn't happy with the 
Next time we will be there again :)