Carrier Pigeons, Competition, and the Need for Technological Infrastructure

by Nathaniel Whittemore · 2009-09-10 19:08:00 UTC
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Some days I get a single story sent to me from everyone I know, and today's Mashable article "CARRIER PIGEONS: Still Faster Than ADSL" was one of those stories.

The premise of the article is about an "experiment" in South Africa where a company called the Unlimited strapped a 4GB memory card to Winston, an 11-month old pigeon, and sent him from their office in Pietermaritzburg to Durban. The trip took the pigeon around 3 hours, at which point only 4% of that data had transferred over South Africa's Telkom DSL service.

Part farce, part sorry reminder of the state of quality broadband service in Africa, the article has been streaming around the web today. While it's important not to look to glib stories as the only source of information about a place, the piece highlights how detrimental slow access is for people on the continent, a theme often riffed on by folks like Erik Hersman and Jon Gosier.

This is what I talk about when I mention the "ecosystem" of social entrepreneurship. Is the technological infrastructure for coordinating business available? Are their payments systems? Communication systems? Are government policies enabling ease of business? Are their training programs to better help people translate ideas to action? These are the sort of questions we have to answer if we want to unleash the power of social entrepreneurs to change the world.

(Photo: Fiona MacGuinty)

Nathaniel Whittemore is the founder of Assetmap. Previously he was the founding director of the Northwestern University Center for Global Engagement.
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