Ghana: Mobile Entrepreneurship Training starts in Accra
By Peterking Quaye, Shout-africa.com Correspondent, Accra,Ghana – Mobile Web Ghana is a community of Ghanaian mobile entrepreneurs, and people interested in the Mobile Web. The training will provide participants skills in mobile technology and business, to help local talent build applications for local communities as well as serve as a discussion forums, networking events and links between application developers, mobile network operators and established businesses.
Program Manager Dr. Max Fou
This is the first training program started on the 24 February 2011 and the training According to the Dr.Max Froumentin Program Manager will provide tuition covering subjects ranging from creating mobile applications to putting it to market. “We are looking for entrepreneurs who are passionate about leveraging mobile phone technology to develop applications that will bring useful service to local communities and create prosperous businesses.
The training consists of three weeks of day courses. Typically a training day will last from 9am to 1pm, with the afternoon free for trainees to revise, or develop their projects. (Sessions may be extended to evenings, on an ad-hoc basis.)
The training is open to two audiences: technology specialists, and business specialists, and is split into two tracks, one for each: Technology track: Voice, SMS, Mobile Web and Mobile Apps, Business track: business models, revenue, dealing with operators, IP issues, dealing with regulators.
While each track is primarily designed for its intended audience, business-track trainees will be able to attend the technology module, and vice versa.
After the training, there will be a period of support and mentoring, during which the trainers will provide support for the development of project prototypes, or for starting new projects following the training. either in person on Monday 21st and 22nd, or online the following weeks. The community will be able to take advantage of online tools to stay in touch, or attend future community events. Invited speakers includes
Nii Okai Quaye for SMS Applications , François Daoust for Mobile Web, Deborah Dahl for Voice Applications User interaction / user experience and Mobile business with Franco Papeschi. The speakers are seasoned professional with over 15 years in the mobile web industry .Dr. Deborah Dahl is the Principal at Conversational Technologies, a consulting company in the area of speech and language technologies and applications which she founded in 2002. She has over twenty-five years of experience in the speech and natural language processing industry. Her primary research interest is in multimodal spoken dialog systems, in particular as applied to assistive technology for individuals with disabilities as well as for the elderly. Dr. Dahl has published over fifty technical papers and is the editor of the book Practical Spoken Dialog Systems. In addition to her technical work.
Dr. Dahl is active in speech and multimodal standards. She is the Chair of the World Wide Web Consortium’s Multimodal Interaction Working Group, serves as one of the editors of the EMMA (Extensible MultiModal Annotation) specification and is also a member of the Voice Browser Working Group, and the HTML 5 Working Group. She has served as co-organizer of numerous W3C workshops, is a member of the Board of Directors of AVIOS (Applied Voice Input/Output Society), a major organization for speech professionals, and has served as a reviewer for many journals and conferences in the speech and language field. François Daoust , Before December 2007, François helped develop an on-portal mobile search engine called MotionBridge from its first minimalist draft within a small French start-up to a full-featured version within Microsoft.
This kept him busy for more than seven years. Then he joined the W3C where he learned the theory behind all that stuff he had used in the past, and now happily tries to conciliate theory and practice within the Mobile Web Initiative. He maintains the online W3C mobile OK Checker, contributes as a tutor to the online training sessions on Mobile Web Best Practices and serves as Staff Contact for the Best Practices Working Group. François holds an engineering degree from the Ecole Centrale Paris, and Franco Papeschi, joined the Web Foundation in January 2011, working on the creation of mobile training and innovation labs. Prior to joining the Foundation, Franco worked as User Experience manager in Vodafone Group, taking a human-centered approach to envision innovative and meaningful services.
Franco has over 7 years of experience leading projects on the design of web sites and applications, mobile services, IPTV, change and knowledge management systems. He has been lecturer at the Politecnico of Milan from 2004 to 2007, teaching Communication and cognitive systems.
The training will end on to 19 March after which a group in the training project with the best project technology will be funded by Vodafone , the major sponsor of the program to implement their project. According to Mr. Derrick Appiah, Vodafone Business Enterprise Manager ,the company will give an amount of 10,000 Ghcedis and 5,000 Gh respectively to winner and second best project teams .
