Bad Names Not Exclusive to American Startups
Continuing with yesterday’s theme of global technology initiatives, I decided to expose several startups located throughout Africa. Africa remains a drastically different continent than North America and Europe with different technological demands. However, the same bizarre company names are still apparent. The names are most likely a response to common domain scarcity and the desire to create a new dictionary entry, but could be demonstrative of the universal insanity of technology entrepreneurs.
Afrigator is a blog trending site similar to Digg, aptly named to represent the long tail of the African blogosphere. According to analytics on Afrigator, the site directs approximately 400,000 users per month to blog posts from specified African channels. The user base does not, however, appear to participate heavily in the ranking functionality of Afrigator (both the home page and South African list are littered with zeros in the voting section). Language barriers may be to blame and have plagued similar efforts in Europe from gaining mass acceptance.
While a number of the African 2.0 companies listed on Black Looks pertain to blogging, video and picture sharing platforms are represented by Zoopy. Think Flickr meets YouTube with a uniquely South African twist. Curious why the opening credits from Who’s The Boss and The Nanny are featured on the home page (even Zoopy’s holding company - Full House Technologies - references early 90s television).
Filed under: Infonalysis