The African Mobile Revolution Narrowing the Technology Divide

By Chilumba Mubashi – SDET II, Windows Mobile

Mobile Phone Use Growth
According to the International Telecommunications Union, there are over 3 cell phone subscribers for every landline subscriber. This plays in well to support the idea of developing countries having a bigger share of the cellular market, as mobile infrastructures are much easier to put up than landlines which involve massive underground cabling.

 

Global Telecom Indicators for World Telecommunication Service Sector

	2002	2003	2004	2005	2006	2007	2008
Main (fixed) telephone lines (millions)	1'083	1'135	1'204	1'262	1'263	1'278	1'267
Mobile cellular subscribers (millions)	1'157	1'417	1'763	2'219	2'757	3'305	4'100

Source: © INTERNATIONAL TELECOMMUNICATION UNION, 2009
(http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/statistics/at_glance/KeyTelecom99.html)

In the last few years, there has been a huge growth in the mobile cell phone use. Various mobile operators have entered different African markets to cover this demand for cellular services. This of course has also opened the door for mobile technological innovations which caters to the phone users.

Traditional voice calling by means of cell phones is still the most common use of the mobile devices. But voice calls are still regarded as pretty expensive. This has encouraged phone owners to use their phone by going for a cheaper option using Short Message Service (SMS) text messages. This service is widely available on most phones, and does not have the restriction of the device having to be internet capable. This is the most popular way people will interact with their device. The SMS blow up has even enabled petitions to be signed on the phone – an example is the African Union “Protocol on the Rights of Women in Africa”; organizations urged mobile users to support the protocol by sending an SMS with the word “petition” and their name in the message (http://www.afrol.com/articles/13702)

With popularity of the service also comes innovations. In the 2008 Messaging Conference in Cannes, France, delegates were amazed by ground-breaking ways SMS was being used in Africa; especially in innovations such as banking services. I can immediately think of the M-Pesa story that Tawanda Sibanda touched on in the December 2008 Africans at Microsoft blog post .

But as internet capable phones become more widely available, there is now an increase in the number of people in Africa using their mobile to access the web. In a 2008 IT News Article, it was identified that internet penetration has become an indicator of a country’s financial well being. "for every 1% increase in a country’s internet penetration, GDP per capita increases by US$493, and a 1% increase in mobile penetration results in a per capita increase of US$240"
"In developing markets such as Africa, the mobile phone often provides consumers with their first exposure to the internet".

This development is aiding to bridge the digital divide in internet access. Because there are now more internet users in Africa (accessing the web on the phone), firms are being innovative, and starting to provide services that combine SMS and internet. Plus, bytes of data over internet are cheaper than bytes of data over SMS.

Sembuse: Kenya’s Social Interaction Mobile Platform
I just recently read about a company, Symbiotic, which has taken advantage of this Internet and SMS marriage. This East African firm based in Kenya, has come up with a product called ‘Sembuse’ which is an application you download onto your phone. The application provides social networking aspects by making available a way for people to setup profiles, and presenting a way to meet other people with similar interests or backgrounds. But the service also lures users onto it by providing SMS functionality built into the application. I believe the reason they can provide SMS much cheaply is because they use the internet to relay the text messages data across the phone networks. Traditional SMS has a restriction of only supporting up to 160 characters, but ‘Sembuse’ has expanded that by allowing up to 1000 characters for a single message, and at a lower cost than the 160 character message. The lower SMS cost is similar to South African’s MXit which Tawanda had also touched on in the December 2008 blog post.

An Opportunity For The Future
I believe there is still an opportunity in the mobile space to expand further, by providing ways to integrate phone camera pictures into applications, since most internet capable phones have cameras on them. Once the camera is considered, solutions integrating tag technology, like the one offered by Microsoft (http://tag.microsoft.com), would provide further web navigation usability. Tag technology provides photo to website functionality; user takes picture of bar-code like tag, and they are directed to a website. Phone tag technology is already being used by some marketers to veer potential customers to special promotions websites. So I see a lot of potential in this space.

Africa’s Rapid Mobile Growth Bridging the Divide
African countries are becoming role models for making technologies work in developing countries. The businesses coming up are also targeting people who ordinarily might not have been exposed to the technologies available. These success cases build on the opportunities that are being spoken about in the media, such as the recent 1 May 2009 headline in the issue of ‘Balancing Act News Update’ - “Africa’s rapid mobile Internet growth will drive network expansion and media spend”. The example cases are the stories which are reminding the world that the digital divide can indeed be reduced. We do not have to think of it through personal computers anymore, as mobile phones now have the capabilities to do most of the computing tasks that a traditional computer can do.

Africa's Mobile Revolution

By Tawanda Sibanda

Being African can be depressing at times.  Every day I read discouraging stories about hyper-inflation in Zimbabwe, piracy in Somalia, and massacres in Congo.  Even an eternal optimist cannot help feeling that the continent is cursed.  Perhaps we are doomed to countless decades of suffering and underdevelopment; perhaps the dreams of our forefathers will not be realized in our lifetimes.    I have good news!  The picture is not all gloom.   There is a new, unprecedented wave of technology sweeping across the continent that threatens to propel Africa into the economic limelight of the 21^st century.  300 million networked devices run from Cape to Cairo connecting people, spreading information, empowering the poor, and bringing in billions of revenue and foreign investment   … the PC? No.  The laptop?  No.  The $100 laptop? No.  I am talking about the mobile phone.

It is a little known fact that Africa has the largest growth rate of cellular subscribers in the world, nearly twice as fast as Asian markets.  In 1998 there were 2 million phones on the continent:  today people estimate the number to be around 300 million. Africa’s average cell phone penetration is only 20%, so there is still room for continued growth.  More impressive is the range of uses these cell phones have found in Africa.   In this blog article I am going to explain some of the new mobile startups that have emerged on the continent.  The ideas presented are truly innovative.   First, let’s quickly analyze how this mobile revolution began.

The Past

The conditions in Africa in the early 90s were perfect for the emergence of the cellular phone.  Less than 1% of the continent’s population was connected by landlines controlled by inefficient government-owned monopolies.  A few clever entrepreneurs realized that a) erecting base stations for cell phones was considerably cheaper than running cables through Africa to increase landline penetration b) 99% of the continent had no access to phones.   And thus the revolution began, first in South Africa, and into East and West Africa. The major players were:

MTN:  MTN was first granted a cellular license in 1993 in South Africa and quickly grew a large local customer base using innovative pay-as-you go business models.  From 1997-1999 it expanded to Uganda, Rwanda and Swaziland.  In 2001, MTN acquired a license to operate in Nigeria in the country’s much-storied GSM spectrum auction.  As of December 2007, MTN has 61.4 million subscribers (16.5 million in Nigeria alone).

Vodacom:  Vodacom was the first cellular network in South Africa.  In its first 6 months of operation, it was the fastest growing network in the world.  It now offers service to more than 34 million customers in South Africa, Tanzania, Lesotho, Mozambique and the DRC.

Celtel: Celtel was originally founded by Sudanese-born Mo Ibrahim and began operating in 1998.  It was acquired in 2005 by MTC (now Zain) a Kuwaiti operator and spans 15 countries with 20 million subscribers.

Safaricom:  Safaricom is Kenya’s leading mobile network operator with over 8 million subscribers. Formed in 1997, it is jointly owned by the UK’s Vodafone, and Telkom Kenya.

These are just four of the pioneers of Africa’s mobile revolution.  Other big names include GloMobile, Vodafone Egypt, Cell C, Meditel and Econet Wireless.  If you get a chance, read the stories of how these companies were founded.  You will definitely be encouraged by the integrity, intelligence, and persistence of the industry legends, including Sudan’s Ibrahim and Zimbabwe’s Masiyiwa.

The Present

Presently, Africa has somewhere in the region of 300 million cell phone subscribers, mostly on 2G GSM networks. Companies like Vodacom and MTN are enjoying annual revenues of 5-10 billion dollars.  This is BIG business.   According to http://eprom.mit.edu adding 10 mobile phones per 100 people boosts a typical developing country’s GDP growth by 0.6 per cent.

Most of this growth comes on the back of innovative companies that have formed around Africa’s cell phone boom.   In America, where PC penetration is around 81%, people do not use their phones for much more than calling each other.  In fact until recently, text messaging was not very popular in the US.  In Africa, PC penetration is only 4%.  Cell phones are Africa’s PC.   Let’s take a look at some of Africa’s novel cell phone applications.  I have categorized the innovations into five groups:  innovative pricing, financial transactions, health initiatives, political initiatives, and social networking. 

Innovative Pricing:  Over 90% of African subscribers use pre-paid services.  Within this payment model there are some novel developments:

-          Vodacom offers a “reverse” charge service that allows a Vodacom customer to call a contract customer and have the charge billed to the receiver if the caller has no “air time”

-           Several carriers offer a “call me” service – free text messages that a caller can send requesting a call back from the receiver.  

-          Celtel recently established the world’s first cross-nation unified network.  A Celtel subscriber can move freely across Celtel’s 15-country network in Africa without worrying about roaming costs!

There has also been some innovation from handset manufacturers.  Vodafone and Nokia provide feature-rich phones at ultra-low costs (US$10-45).

Financial Transactions:  Around 80% of Africans do not have a bank account.  Recent developments in mobile technology may change that.  In Kenya, M-Pesa is a service offered by Safaricom that allows customers to conduct financial transactions using a mobile phone.  A customer hands cash to a registered M-Pesa agent and receives confirmation via SMS.  That person can then pay a 3^rd party by simply sending them money via a text message.  The recipient cashes the money at an agent by showing the received text message and relevant ID.   Customers can withdraw cash from their virtual bank using special M-Pesa ATMs. 

WIZZIT a similar South African company has taken this m-banking idea further.   WIZZIT customer, in addition to being able to send money to each other using cell phones, receive a debit card that they can use like any other Visa card!

Social Networking:  Like their Western counterparts, African young people like to socialize. A South African company, MXit, is capitalizing on this common human desire to “network”.  MXit provides free instant messaging software that runs on GPRS GSM phones with Java support.  People can send person to person messages for as little as 1 South African cent (compared to 75 South African cents for SMS messages).  MXit has 9 million users, 230 million messages sent/received per day.  The next Facebook perhaps?

Health Initiatives:  Project M in South Africa aims to overcome AIDS stigma by sending messages in 3 languages, English, Zulu, and Sesotho, to millions of South Africans every day.  An example message: “HIV+ and being mistreated by your family or friends?  For confidential counseling call AIDS helpline”.  Each of the messages points to the national AIDS helpline.  How do they send millions of messages like this for free?  Well, remember those “call me” messages I mentioned earlier?  It turns out 30 million of these messages are sent per day!   The African providers have agreed to embed Project M’s positive AIDS messages in the free “call me” texts.  Sounds like an incredible advertising platform…

Political Initiatives:  In recent elections, mobile phones have helped keep African governments honest.  Radio stations send correspondents to various polling stations and the correspondents call in the results as soon as they are published at each station.  Information spreads rapidly, preventing possible tampering with the results later on.

The Future

As you can see, Africa’s mobile explosion is incredible.  But this is just the beginning.  By 2012, it is estimated that 485 million people in Africa (or 38% of the population) will have cell phones.  Furthermore, broadband is coming to Africa in the next 2 to 3 years in the form of enhanced 3G GSM networks, WiFi networks, and even WiMax.   So what does the future of mobile technology look like?   Here are my big bets:

-          E-voting:  Wouldn’t it be cool if people could vote privately and confidentially from their phones, without having to wait in some horrible line?  Furthermore, wouldn’t it be great if votes in Africa were electronically counted and verified by a secure platform? 

-          More m-banking:  M-banking is a really cool idea.  Most of the big banks in Africa require a minimum balance and have exorbitant transaction costs.  These new m-banks are light-weight, inexpensive and provide people an easy way to keep their money safe.  Imagine how cool it would be in Zimbabwe to be able to pay with your phone, instead of lugging a wheel barrow of cash!

-          Advertising:   With few TVs, not enough print media, and limited PC penetration, Africa’s biggest advertising platform could well be the mobile phone.  Expect to see novel advertising platforms emerge in Africa that operators can use to sell “advertising space” to emerging pan-African organizations.

Speech Technology is becoming ubiquitous in our daily lives

By Dieudonné Mayi

A decade ago, who would have heard of Interactive Voice Response Systems (IVR) speaking almost as clearly as a human operator, let alone walking the user through phone menus, or intelligently routing calls without the need of expensive telephony hardware?  Speech technology has come a long way and it is now becoming pervasive in our daily lives. Call any major companies, from Amtrak, Qwest, Microsoft, to T-Mobile, and you get a non-human voice which is seamlessly guiding you through phone menus, asking questions, giving suggestions, and even placing a joke here and there.  

The experience has gotten better than a few years back. Remember the rush to press 0 to bypass the speech agent? No more.  Nonetheless, there is a little bit of frustration, when the speech system does not understand what you just said and keeps prompting you to speak your selection. These are due to non-native English accent or when you are in a noisy environment like driving on a freeway.  Regardless of the limitations intrinsic to voice recognition, the speech technology has come a long way.  In this blog entry, I am looking at an overview of the disciplines emerging in the Speech Technology field.

Why speech automation?

The core value proposition for speech technology for call centers is to reduce enterprise communication costs of hiring, training, and retaining thousands of call support workers to handle routine calls.  Other opportunities are revenue generation. Most call centers are embracing speech technology, not just as an alternative feature in addition to human voice, but as a cost saving.  Therefore, call centers are becoming a strategic asset for companies with the ability to analyze customer calls and extract valuable data (Speech Analytics). 

Speech technology has not been used exclusively on call centers.  A number of desktop applications have been developed to help people with speech impairment, voice command tools for hands off operation for both the physically challenged and normal users, dictation software (e.g. Dragon Naturally Speaking, Microsoft Office 2007), and electronic book readers. 

The Speech Industry

The speech industry is growing at a fast pace. With the latest introduction of VoiceXML (based on Speech Application Language Tags or SALT standard), more IVRs have been shipped, also multimodal communication using voice is gaining footage in the area of wireless mobile devices (cell phones, navigation systems, etc…).  Following areas have emerged or are emerging:

Speech engine

In 2007 and 2008, the speech engine market has seen significant growth in size of recognition engines, as well as the number of supported languages. Also, the number of embedded devices with speech recognition support has grown steadily. The most growth is in the Asian and Eastern European markets.  This growth is due to advances in natural language processing, expansion of vocabulary, and faster processors. According to Speech Technology Magazine (Sept. 2008), the leaders in this segment are LumenVox, Nuance Communications, and Loquendo; with Nuance maintaining a lead in accuracy. IBM and Microsoft have also been called out as contenders in this space, with Microsoft built in Speech engine in Vista.

Speech self service suite

With the maturation of the IVR systems market, more vendors are adding capabilities to the speech suites.  The general trend is a move from legacy and proprietary systems to open-source with VoiceXML-based applications.   According to Speech Technology Magazine, the leaders in this segment are Avaya, SpeechCycle, and Voxeo. Intervoice is a contender in this segment.

Speech Security

Speech security is involved with adding voice biometrics to speech for consumer facing deployments. How does it work? The provider saves prerecorded phrases from the user and saves them in a database. When user calls, the IVR directs the user to speak the phrases and compares with the stored voice. If there is a match, the user is routed to the live operator who then verifies other credentials before letting the user access resources via voice.  The hardest is the non-existence of standard compliance tests.  In this segment, Speech Technology Magazine calls out the leaders as Agnito, VoiceVerified, and VoiceVault.

Speech analytics

This segment of the speech industry has grown by 106 percent in 2007. Speech analytics is mainly used by call centers to analyze customer calls, and extract data that companies can use for opportunities and business benefits. They can apply the same analytics as for chat, e-mail, and web-data to understand customer behavior, customer problems, and feed that data back to making strategic business decisions for the company.  Speech Technology Magazine identifies the leaders in this segment as NICE Systems, Verint, and Nexidi; with Nuance Communications joining this landscape.

Mobile speech applications

Voice powered applications are gaining ground in the mobile phone and navigation arena. Here are a few systems:

·         Nuance Communications has a vSearch engine on the iPhone

·         Microsoft subsidiary TellMe Networks has a large number of devices running speech enabled applications and control on various devices including Samsung, Motorola, Sony Ericson

·         Vlingo introduced the Yahoo! One Search with Voice, as layered speech capabilities on top of Yahoo’s OpenSearch application.

Future directions

I believe that speech technology will continue to grow and gain space in both profitability and applications.  One question is will the computer speech agent replace the human agent completely? Maybe and in some cases, but is it desirable to totally eliminate customer service agents for speech robots? Not sure from the customer satisfaction standpoint, but all is a matter of getting used to new ways of doing things. One hurdle is to expand the speech recognition to various languages beyond major European languages and Eastern languages.  Another area of ongoing research is to add emotion to the speech agents and more intelligence to the IVRs.   The horizon is not distant when the human will be fully able to interact with computing devices via speech. 

___________________________

Speech Technology Magazine: http://www.speechtek.com is a good source of information on the speech technology industry.

The Life of a Software developer at Microsoft

You wake up late in the day and rush into a scrum developer meeting to update your status on the current project to your team members often arriving late and surprising others that you just made it at last. A developer (SDE) friend will then ask about the LINQ code that you wrote last time, a tester (SDET) asking what changes you last made that broke the UI automation code, a Program manager(PM) asking you how much the risk is in meeting the deadline you committed before, your developer lead talking about the amazing project and actively watching how he could cut out newly arriving requirements to avoid an ever changing design. Jumping from one meeting to another meeting, trying to deliver the design documentation and arguing about which technology to use for the project, going through a bunch of code reviews in late afternoons and squashing active bugs with focus after flying around the kitchen area (to stimulate the self with a Starbucks caffeine) are the day to day activities of most developers at Microsoft.

Microsoft has so far been a place where one could say with a full mouth that they have had a United Nations meeting; thanks to the great diversity with colleagues coming from all walks of life and culture. If you pick one team randomly, it is highly likely that it has people coming from all continents. It is possible that an African developer works with a Chinese tester on a project that is being managed by an Indian whose code review is being done by an Australian and whose manager is from Europe and all reporting to a group manager from Latin America. That is the composition of most teams at Microsoft in different order. This diversity makes it fun to work here and enables everyone to feel at home at anytime, either in the team meeting or during lunch time. Despite such cultural differences and all kind of differences in the work place, one thing that glues teams together is the desire to solve problems and come up with a solution that satisfies the basic requirements of our customers.

Basically the life of a developer starts with a problem for a new project and/or a list of active bugs and new feature requests to an existing project. Developers usually prefer to work on a new project for it brings with it the flexibility of using new technologies and the possibility of knowing the details of the whole project first hand. The start of the project is where the fun is with so many new ideas flying around, going through a list of ideal designs to be downgraded to workable pieces as time goes on. Once the design starts, the managers will be hitting hard to get the developer estimates of the whole project. For the developer, the costing is an art for it is hard to determine the complexity of the whole piece and requires at least a draft design documentation showing the various pieces along with their level of complexity.  With small to medium sized projects, it is even tempting to forgo the design piece and start coding from scratch and write the design documentation on the go.

Once the project is in development mode and the focus is on, it is tempting to finish the whole thing and get over with it even though it is unrealistic. That is when developers start staying late in the office and arriving late in the morning scratching their head and thinking about the problem they could not fix last night. The focus to work on the new features almost consumes the whole time, and sometimes forces the developer to bypass some of the key deliverables in software development cycle, one of the most famous being "Unit Testing". A very good and experienced developer who thinks about having less trouble fixing bugs in future always starts working on his unit tests along with the main code base despite the overload. The payoff for this approach starts to come when lots of change in design starts to be introduced and all the unit tests start to fail signifying pieces of code that require developer’s attention. Had it not been for the Unit Tests, changes introduced late in the development cycle might create a lot of semantic bugs that could not be caught by the compiler or the human eye for that matter, and are very hard to find easily.

No matter how big a project is, the code base of the first iteration is usually a throwaway. It is from this throwaway code that the developer will learn a great deal about the system under development, it is from this throwaway code that the current design will be reassessed to come up with a better one with good and “lasting” modifications, it is from this throwaway code that some unclear requirements will start being more clearer. It is at this stage when the developer feels at ease and has an idea on how to approach the problem and when it is possible to deliver the basic deliverables.

Once the software is developed and all feature requests are implemented, it seems like the work is over for the developer, "the beginner developer". However, having all features working is the first deliverable. At the same time, more deliverables are expected to be worked on at the same time and be delivered. Developers are expected to produce an extensive unit test that has a very good code coverage (around 70%) which by itself is a big code base comparable to the main code under testing and is easily runnable in one box despite the complexity of the system. An automated deployment MSI (engine for software installation) for deploying the solution is another deliverable that is expected as part of code complete. A solution without a means for monitoring the health of the application once in use is not a complete solution hence developers are expected to provide SCOM (System Center Operations Manager) packs (or MOM (Microsoft Operations Manager) packs) that will alert the users of the application when something goes wrong.

So the work of a developer is as much stressful as it is fun, it is as much joyful as it is frustrating when a though out solution to a problem does not work out forcing the developer to go into thinking mode the whole time before and after work. Development as described above is more than providing a solution, it is about providing a very good solution, that is easily testable, predictable, monitorable, and deployable. This has been my observation so far in my short stay at Microsoft and I continue to learn new processes.

Pursuing an MBA

MBA Speaker Panel hosted on Campus - Spearheaded by our VP for Membership Development, Chika Ekeji, Africans at Microsoft recently sponsored a speaker panel on our corporate campus entitled, "Pursuing an MBA – Motives, Value, and Opportunities." It was designed to be a candid discussion with business school admissions and career services people, current students and MBA graduates on a range of topics, including:

• What it really takes to get into business school;
• How to best employ time as a student to position oneself for the right job;
• What opportunities exist at Microsoft for MBA graduates;
• How experienced business leaders view & value the direct impact of the MBA on their careers;
• The real tradeoffs/considerations one should be ready to make in pursuit of an MBA; and
• The importance of professional networking.

The event was well attended, with over 150 people in the room and another 50 or so dialed in from remote locations. Many of our diverse communities were represented, with members of our Blacks at Microsoft, Indians at Microsoft and Chinese Employees at Microsoft diversity groups joining us to learn about business school options.

We had representatives from some of the best schools in the country, including Harvard Business School; Sloan School of Management at MIT; UC Berkeley; University of Washington; Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern and Wharton, among others.

Speakers included business school representatives as well as Microsoft employees who had, or were studying an MBA - one of our panelists, Shola Aluko, discovered a new career path through his MBA. You can see a video of him here, as one of our Senior Product Managers for Internet Explorer.

See the attachment to download a PDF file containing the full transcript and panelist information:

After the panel, attendees practiced a core MBA skill - networking - getting to know people from different business groups and inundating panelists with offline questions. All in all, it was a successful event and much value was derived by all who attended - thanks to all who volunteered, attended and participated!

EXCITING UPDATE:  Africans at Microsoft is very proud to offer a recording of “Pursuing an MBA – Motives, Value, and Opportunities” through MBAPodcaster, one of the premier web destinations providing information about the MBA degree to prospective students and other audiences. The audio clip is now available to you and over 50,000 other listeners at the following link: http://www.mbapodcaster.com/MBA_MoreInfo/BizSchoolPanelMicrosoft.asp?iEpisode=74

Choice and Impact: Going Red

Did you know that your choice of a PC can dramatically improve the lives of people living with AIDS in Africa?

Windows® has partnered with Dell™ and (RED) ™ and the result—(PRODUCT) RED is one way you can help people living with AIDS in Ghana, Swaziland and Rwanda.

The purchase of any (PRODUCT) RED branded item means the company selling that item makes a contribution to The Global Fund to help eliminate AIDS in Africa. By choosing a (PRODUCT) RED PC running Windows Vista Ultimate (PRODUCT) RED, you are driving a contribution of between $50 and $80 (depending on which PC you buy) to The Global Fund. That money goes towards fighting AIDS. Put in perspective: $80 is 6 months of antiretroviral drugs for someone suffering from AIDS.

DELL AND WINDOWS ARE PROUD PARTNERS OF (PRODUCT) RED.

Performance Testing

“The thing about performance, even if it's only an illusion, is that it is a celebration of the fact that we do contain within ourselves infinite possibilities.” By Sydney Smith

Software performance has been one of the challenging topics that I am continually expressing interest in; that is why I was very excited joining the CLR Performance Team at Microsoft Corporation.

So what is so interesting about software performance? I find it challenging because of the different breadth and depth levels you have to touch in order to understand and define the performance characteristics of a system. Needless to say that what is even more challenging in performance is the ultimate feeling of success when you see your own application loading / running faster, consuming less memory, and more responsive

Perhaps it is a human nature to explore and push the limits of the system, like designing supersonic airplanes or “disappear before blink” carsJ. I think designing high performance applications is the beast that lies within each software developer of us.

This blog will be an effort to free that beast out, it will be a modest effort to touch on performance engineering topics and how to explore, test and enhance the performance of .NET applications.

The success of this blog will be really based on the readers’ feedback, I will try to capture the feedback and touch on their interesting topics. I would be more than happy to provide assistance and recommendations for any customer scenario. Just feel free to ping me and use my processing cycles

Today’s blog will be addressing the general performance metrics that most of us should think about before evaluating the performance of the system.

So let me ask you the following question, what are the performance metrics you are tracking and measuring in your application?

The answer to this question is not as easy as it seems, the answer will always be: it depends on your application and what it is intended to do.

For example if your application is a server side component you would be more interested to track different metrics than for a client side WinForms application.

But software components share certain performance characteristics like:

1- Startup time performance: The time your application takes to completely load into memory and starts executing the Main Method.

2- Working set: Defined as the amount of memory your application consumes. This memory is code / data. Data could be static or dynamic.

3- Throughput: number of iterations / operations per time unit, the more the better.

Basically performance investigation will fall on one of these three factors.

During the next posts, we will discuss each one of these factors, how to optimize them and more importantly, how to troubleshoot and investigate performance problems in these areas.

Well, enough for now (considering this is the first post ) and will see ya really soon with more posts.

Cairo Microsoft Innovation Center (CMIC)

At first I was very happy about the fact that Microsoft is making serious efforts in the Middle East regarding research, so I went to know more about it.

Dr Tarek el Abaddy (CMIC director) was our host during the session; he walked us through the main objective for the research center, currently active projects, and CMIC vision.

One interesting thing I learned in this session is the difference between Research, Applied research and product development, basically they resemble the following triangular diagram

Applied research seems to be a very logical choice to begin with in the Middle East for two reasons.

                First, we are in need to bridge the gap between science and the market. Though we have a very good software engineers in the Middle East and Africa we lack true research activities as those found in Microsoft research centers.

                Secondly, applied research is easier to manage and to make successful given the fact that we do not have renowned universities like Berkeley and MIT. However, with applied research,  a new horizon is open to compete with such great universities.

I am very excited about this opening and hoping for great success and potential added values to the Middle East and Africa through this center.

More innovation, more creation, more challenges …

For more information please have a look at the following link J

http://www.miscrosoft.com/middleeast/Egypt/CMIC/

Our mission

The Africans at Microsoft group (a.k.a. Diversity Advisory Council for Africans at Microsoft) is an association of full time Microsoft employees who are of African origin or have an interest in Africa. This organization is dedicated to supporting the African community at Microsoft by providing initiatives related to technology that advance African prospects through promoting our cultural diversity and providing a medium to communicate within and outside Microsoft.  We strive to uphold Microsoft’s mission to enable people and businesses to realize their full potential in the African community at large.