My Boarding Pass to Dadaab

As I boarded the twin engine turbo prop charter aircraft at Wilson at 7.43 am on Wednesday 22^nd May, I didn’t know what to expect on the other side. I had heard so many stories about Dadaab Refugee Camp; many negative stories of insecurity, dust storms, unbearable heat and scorpions. That sort of gave me a sick feeling in my stomach but I remembered Eleanor Roosevelt’s advice – “Every day do something new that scares you.” I wasn’t going to turn back. I was going to do this.

We arrived at about 9 am and were received by the UNHCR team of Erin and Rocco. We immediately got some chilled bottles of water (dude, that place is hot!) and boarded 2 armoured trucks to Hagadera. Dadaab is nothing like I expected. Immediately you get through the main gates from the air strip, you see a “Dadaab Equity Bank Branch” sign post. There are also several M-Pesa shops all over the main town. Seeing that Safaricom green sort of gave me a calming feeling – Some sort of reassurance that I could use my Saf’com number to call in case I needed help. We drove through a long stretch of road. Interestingly, we had to drive on the road’s shouldes which were a lot smoother than the actual road. Possibly the effect of rain water which I hear rises to knee level when it rains. Onward onto a police check-point where had to stop midway to Hagadera to get our assigned police escorts. Nothing too fancy, just 3 APs at the back of a blue police Land Rover. The same blue Land Rover I (and possibly every other Nairobi youth) is used to avoiding in Nairobi became my sense of security in a strange and forgotten land. There was a fire exchange incident between police and bandits just the pr Read more »

Everyone needs to re-invent themselves at one point in time.

HP has done exactly that. They have a new logo. Well, almost.

This is the doing of their current CEO, Meg Whitman who was handed the tough mantle of leading one of the world’s largest computer manufacturing companies.

The big-wigs at HP have probably realized that the HP brand is ‘just there’. IT does not evoke any excitement anymore and needs a restructuring.

HP has not changed their logo. Here we thought this was going to happen. This comes in the latest as HP has been having a bad case of fumbling with the CEOs as this project is rumoured to have actually started in 2008 but has not yet been implemented.

As you may have noticed from the image above, the new proposed logo is a clever play that eliminates the vertical planning whilst tilting the logo to a 13 degree turn in a clockwise fashion.

HP started on working on this logo modification. Find the images here.

Looks pretty cool if you ask me. They should adopt it. Anyone else think so?

HP has launched their long-awaited tablet, the TouchPad.

The TouchPad will run the company’s WebOS 3.0 (the exclusive operating system that is expected to take over most of HP devices), which it acquired alongside the acquisition of Palm and their products back in April 2010.

The tablet features a super fast 1.2GHz dual-core Snapdragon processor, 1024×768 pixel display (basically 9.7 inch screen), weighing in at a measly 1.5 pounds, 13mm thick, front-facing cameras for video enabled-calls, comes in two choices of either the 16GB or 32GB of built-in memory, supports Adobe’s Flash and Beats by Dre speakers.

The device shall come as a WiFi only option but will very soon be offered on 3G or 4G by about the 2^nd Quarter of 2011. Read more »

There’s been a lot of noise in the late 2010 and early 2011 about who is creating what to battle the Apple iPad.

Here’s a list of what we think are the most worthy opponents:

1 – Motorola Xoom: The first in its class to host dual-processing capabilities and is the debut choice for Android’s Honeycomb (Android Version 3.0) and is loaded with a whooping 1GHz dual-core Tegra 2 will power this 11 inch device. Read more »