Ademola Morebise's Blog

The Gist Bookmarklet makes it easy for you to share any webpage on Gistcaster, it works in all major browsers and is very easy to install and use.

Getting the Bookmarklet

To use the bookmarklet, just drag the Gist This button to your Bookmarks Bar, browse for a page you like and then click it. The Bookmarks Bar is also known as the Favourites Bar or the Bookmarks Toolbar. In some browsers you may need to go to your View menu to choose to show it.

You can also create it manually. To create the Gist Bookmarklet you need to copy the code below into the URL field of a new bookmark.

javascript:(function(){document.body.appendChild(document.createElement ('script')).src='http://www.gistcaster.com/tools/gist_express/gist_express.js';})();

We’ve tested it in the most popular browsers, but if you have any problems using it, please let us know.

I just added another feature to Gistcaster, a cool, handy bookmarklet! doesnt even take you off the page you are viewing!

We are pleased to announce formally that Gistcaster is out of beta. Beta is a label Software developers use to indicate that the product is still under active development.

Gistcaster logo without beta tag

Gistcaster has completely evolved from an early and buggy ALPHA release, the platform is now stable, reliable and more user friendly than it was in the past. We’ve learnt so much over the past eleven months of operation and we want our users and lovers to know that Gistcaster will never stop innovating!

Some Screenshots:

Gistcaster Alpha

Gistcaster Beta

Gistcaster

We are now on full course to getting mainstream attention. To God be the Glory!

Its Official, We've decided to remove the beta tag, but make no mistakes... Gistcaster continues to innovate and set the pace!

Through centuries, Africa's Masai tribesmen have struggled against marauding predators.

Now a virtual version of that struggle may be happening on an iPhone near you. "Defend your village by feeding and driving away the animals before they crash it and feed on your livestock and garden!" explains a summary of the game "iWarrior" in Apple's App Store. Threats include "thundering elephants," "mighty rhinos," "swift cheetahs" and "crafty hyenas."

The game has won praise for its graphics, music and concept. And it illustrates the global influence of Silicon Valley. Technologies like the Internet and companies like Apple are often credited with "flattening" the world economy, giving anyone, anywhere with the requisite skills the opportunity to, say, build a game for the iPhone or create an app on Facebook.

"IWarrior" is "a feed 'em up game, not a shoot 'em up," as co-creator Eyram Tawia put it. But what may be most remarkable is that "iWarrior" indeed comes out of Africa, the hinterlands of computer innovation. Tawia, a Ghanan, and Wesley Kirinya, a Kenyan, overcame considerable obstacles to develop the first product of their startup, Leti Games.

The game has been described as Africa's first commercial contribution to the multibillion-dollar computer gaming industry — certainly the first from "true Africa," as Kirinya put it, smiling. By that he meant the broad swath of Africa south of the Sahara and north of South Africa, with its

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extended legacy of colonialism and apartheid. Every element of "iWarrior" — the mechanics, the graphics, the music — was created by Leti, which means star in the Ewe language, or outsourced to techies in East Africa or West Africa, Kirinya said.

In Silicon Valley, the collaborations that produced Apple, Yahoo, Google and other companies seem like the natural order of things. For the Leti guys, both 26 years old, the journey has been more of an Odyssey — one that recently led them to attend the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, where they hobnobbed with engineers from Electronic Arts (EA.) and hot startups like Playdom.

Leti has been nurtured by the philanthropic arm of SanFrancisco-based Meltwater Group, an Internet business services company, which in 2008 founded the Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology (MEST) in Accra, Ghana. Leti is one of two startups in MEST's fledgling incubator; the other, Streamio, makes music streaming technology for mobile devices.

"We believe talent is everywhere," said Meltwater founder and CEO Jorn Lyseggen, a Palo Alto resident whose own biography is a tale of globalization. Korean by ancestry and place of birth, Lyseggen was adopted as a small child and was raised by Norwegian parents on a dairy farm. His own talent in math, computing and business led to success in Europe before he decided to move Meltwater's headquarters to Silicon Valley to compete in the massive American market.

Africa's talent, Lyseggen said, represents an untapped resource that has lacked the opportunity MEST was established to provide. Tawia was selected for MEST's first class of 17 fellows from hundreds of applicants, Lysegger said.

The son of an art professor, Tawia created fanciful comic books called "Sword of Sygos" in junior high and later learned to program on a clunky computer while reading Russ Walters' "Secret Guide to Computers." At age 17, partnering with two friends, Tawia helped create a distance-learning program for Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, which he would later attend. They were paid $700 and promptly bought a better computer.

While his friends pursued studies in medicine — the socially favored course for bright young Africans — Tawia stuck to computers. He developed software for the radio industry and turned "Sword of Sygos" into a 3-D game for his senior thesis.

Later, he was stunned when the local newspaper reported — wrongly, thought Tawia — that Africa's first 3-D computer game, called "Adventures of Nyangi," had been created 2,600 miles to the east by a Nairobi University student named Wesley Kirinya.

A Kenyan economist, James Shikwati, commented on Kirinya's achievement to Cox Newspapers at the time: "People will say, 'Kenyans, computer games? No, we don't make computer games.' He has shown that computer games are not a preserve of the Western world."

Through a tech blogger, Tawia contacted Kirinya and discovered a kindred spirit.

Kirinya, as a teen, was steeped in console games like "Super Mario," "Streetfighter" and "Lara Croft," and augmented his formal education with computer books and manuals. "I knew I wanted to make games," a pursuit many people considered frivolous, he said. "I felt all alone. There was a lot of alone time."

A demo of "Nyangi" — which Tawia describes as "Lara Croft in Africa" — may not impress consumers of EA. titles, but techies would recognize it is an impressive achievement for a single programmer, Lysegger said.

Tawia and Kirinya would correspond by e-mail for 18 months before meeting in person. Not only did MEST pay for the ticket to bring Kirinya to Ghana, it later awarded Leti $100,000 in seed financing.

The "iWarrior" game, the Leti guys say, is only a start.

Contact Scott Duke Harris at sdharris@mercurynews.com or 408-920-2704.

5 Things about Leti Games

1. The startup was founded last year by Eyram Tawia of Ghana and Wesley Kirinyaof Kenya.
2. Tawia and Kirinya, both 26, were unaware of each other's existence when each was credited with being the first African to create 3-D computer games.
3. Its "iWarrior" game is available on the iPhone. Another game, "KiJiJi," has been developed for Nokia and Sony Ericsson devices.
4. The non-profit foundation of Meltwater Group, a San Francisco-based Internet services company for businesses, has supported it through the Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology, which it established in Ghana in 2008.
5. "Leti means a Star" "” in the Ewe language "” "and that's what we hope to be in the world's mobile games arena," says its Web site.
Source: Mercury News reporting and the Leti Games Web site.

Ademola Morebise is a young Nigerian software developer on a mission to change the world byte by byte. He recently founded a new, exciting privately funded startup called Gistcaster.

We got in touch with him and asked him a few questions.

TechMasai: What is Gistcaster?

Mr. Morebise: Gistcaster is an online tool that lets you share and discover what’s happening right now, post a message (called “gists”) autotagged with your location and follow your friends on the go.

TechMasai: What inspired the development of Gistcaster and what do you aim to achieve?

Mr. Morebise: The idea for Gistcaster sprang up from a series of thought processes that started early 2008, I wanted a quick and fast way to share and discover information, and I wanted something made especially with the Nigerian community in mind, we live here and we know what they want.

Gistcaster was initially been confused as a microblogging service, however it’s not so, Gistcaster is not a microblogging service; it allows up to 1024 characters (the exact value of 1kb) per gist and allows upload of small media files (clips) like pictures, audios e.t.c from your everyday experiences. Gistcaster is simply what we wanted it to be: a robust communication tool.

We want Gistcaster to encourage nigerians to generate more local e-content and one of the central visions of Gistcaster is to become “An instant reflection of what’s happening in any specific location in Nigeria” as more and more people joins the network.

TechMasai: What are the problems faced by Nigerians or African entreprenuers in starting a start-up?

Mr. Morebise: I think the main problem faced by Nigerians in starting a start-up is lack of funding. You can find someone with a very good idea but the money is not there to start the project. Some might have the money but don’t have the brains and might not even understand what it takes to be an entreprenuer.

I seriously think we need more Angel investors in Africa.

TechMasai: What opportunities do you see the internet having in improving everyday problems and services?

Mr. Morebise: The internet is now an integral part of everyday living, it’s brought a lot of information available to us at our doorsteps. The problem is no longer “will I get information bout X” rather it’s now “How much information do I want about X”. With the internet you get real-time data to work with and you can easily collab with others.

We’ve read about how people used Twitter to track criminals, resue people stuck in buliding(after Haiti earthquake) and spread alerts. This all shows how much we’re now relying on the power of the internet to improve everyday living.

TechMasai: Nigeria not to mention Africa faces a bad reputation which limits growth and stalls investment. What in you perception can be done to present a more business friendly picture of Africa?

Mr. Morebise: We need to get the right publicity, let blogs like yours (TechMasai), Loy Okezie and the StartupsNigeria movement continue to talk about the Entreprenuership and determination that lives in most africans. Then the African tech community should really produce innovative products, something fresh, for instance imagine what would happen if TechCrunch or Mashable posted a news headline that: “Young Nigerian launches Gistcaster: Twitter and Facebook should be on the lookout”

Things like that always goes a long way.

You can learn more about Ademola Morebise by following me on Gistcaster http://www.gistcaster.com/demola

Techmasai interviewed me recently with respect to Gistcaster, what are your views about the interview?

Beta testers, this is your moment: the WordPress 3.0 Beta 1 has arrived!

This is an early beta. This means there are a few things we’re still finishing. We wanted to get people testing it this weekend, so we’re releasing it now rather than waiting another week until everything is finalized and polished. There’s a ton of stuff going on in 3.0, so this time we’re giving you a list of things to check out, so that we can make sure people are testing all the things that need it.

You Should Know:

• The custom menus system (Appearance > Menus) is not quite finished. In Beta 2, the layout will be different and a bunch of the functionality will be improved, but we didn’t want to hold things up for this one screen. You can play with making custom menus, and report bugs if you find them, but this is not how the final screen will look/work, so don’t get attached to it.
• The merge! Yes, WordPress and WordPress MU have merged. This does not mean that you can suddenly start adding a bunch of new blogs from within your regular WordPress Dashboard. If you’re interested in testing the Super Admin stuff associated with multiple sites, you’ll need some simple directions to get started.
• We’re still fiddling with a few small things in the UI, as we were focused on getting the more function-oriented code finished first. For example, we’re getting a new icon for the Super Admin section.

Things to test:

• Play with the new default theme, Twenty Ten, including the custom background and header options.
• Custom Post Type functionality has been beefed up. It’s really easy to add new types, so do that and see how it looks!
• WordPress MU users should test the multiple sites functionality to make sure nothing broke during the merge.

Already have a test install that you want to switch over to the beta? Try the beta tester plugin.

Testers, don’t forget to use the wp-testers mailing list to discuss bugs you encounter.

We hope you like it! And if you don’t, well, check back when beta 2 is ready.

Download the WordPress 3.0 Beta 1 now!

WordPress team has released the beta version of WordPress 3.0 software. The popular blogging platform has been providing great features to entire blogger community.

WordPress 3.0 has also been developed to fulfill the needs of bloggers. The most interesting feature of this version is the merger of WordPress and WordPress MU. Now, bloggers can access different sites through single WP dashboard.

Custom Post Type functionality: You can now have post types like Photo posts, Videos, Quotes... anything!

Once more, as I always declare: Wordpress is simply the best out there, are you suprised we still get it free?