This article was written by Leila Janah, the founder and CEO of nonprofit outsourced services firm Samasource. You can watch my recent video interview with Janah here. Also see her recent article The Many Bottom Lines Of Businesses.

This week in Johannesburg I had the pleasure of keynoting Tech4Africa, the first major social web conference in South Africa, alongside crowdsourcing guru Clay Shirky.

Sub-Saharan Africa is the global economy’s last frontier. The majority of people in Africa live on less than $2 a day, adjusted for purchasing power. It's not the first place one might expect to host a technology conference.

Since I started working in Africa 10 years ago, I’ve seen a steady rise in the number and quality of African technology training centers. Schools like Ghana’s Ashesi University, founded by former Microsoft executive Patrick Awuah, are churning out math, science and engineering talent. Hundreds of developers turned up when Samasource hosted Facebook Developer Garages in Accra, Nairobi, and Kampala in 2008 and 2009. Several technology incubators and co-working spaces have sprung up around the continent – here's a brief list (Thanks to Erik Hersman, founder of popular crowdsourced mapping platform Ushahidi, for a primer on African tech incubators):

-iHub (Nairobi, Kenya)
-Appfrica Labs (Kampala, Uganda)
-Limbe Labs (Limbe, Cameroon)
-Meltwater Entrepreneurial School (Accra, Ghana)
-Geekspaces (Johannesburg, South Africa)

At Foo Camp this June, I tried to convince Paul Graham to start a Y-Combinator in Nairobi; he chuckled and said he’d rather fund an incubator for less glamorous businesses, like gas stations and plumbers. High-tech innovation that achieves global scale, he argued, tends to flow from developed to emerging markets, not vice versa.

The Silicon Valley entrepreneurs I've spoken to agree with Paul, and they have a point. In much of Africa, it’s hard enough to find grid power, let alone Wi-Fi. There’s very little infrastructure or capital for new businesses. According to the IMF’s annual Doing Business report, African countries are the most difficult places in the world to launch startups.

That hasn’t swayed the entrepreneurs I met at Tech4Africa. Many of them are working on mobile solutions for emerging markets, a segment that now includes roughly four billion people who live on $4 a day or less. Their innovations never have to reach the US or Europe to reach scale. Take, for example, the telecommunications firm Safaricom’s wildly successful mobile money transfer service, Mpesa. Mpesa (“money” in Swahili) has facilitated over $4B in transactions since its launch in late 2007 – and that's in a country with an adjusted annual per-capita income of under $1,700.

Based on the success of Mpesa and a similar service launched by Safaricom rival MTN, Pocit, in South Africa, Pagatech in Nigeria, and PesaPal in Kenya are developing bank- and carrier-independent mobile transfer services. These businesses could facilitate billions of dollars that flow in remittances from urban to rural areas in the developing world each year.

Other African startups to watch include Moo.com Co-Founder Stefan Magdalinski's new gig, Mocality, a mobile phone crowdsourcing platform for verifying local businesses in Nairobi; and Txteagle and Mobenzi, which allow people to complete microtasks on their phones via SMS in Kenya and South Africa, respectively.

Editor’s note: Jon Orlin is the Production Director for TechCrunch TV

This past week, formerly unknown actress Elyse Porterfield fooled millions playing Jenny, the fired Dry Erase girl, in a clever hoax. Right now, I guarantee other pranksters are dreaming up new schemes to fool you again. And journalists, who at one time were tasked with protecting the public from such lies, no longer have the same power to block them.

The media has reporters and editors in place to prevent hoaxes from going public. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

The Jenny story was a fun, harmless, light story.  But, hoaxes can involve a story of major global importance.  I was in the CNN newsroom in 1992 when our medical reporter got exclusive information that then President Bush had died at a dinner in Japan. The first reaction was shock. Then, the newsroom got very quiet and we struggled to decide what to do.  Trust our reporter and break the story or get a second source and risk someone else beating us on the story.  If we decided to go with it and we were right, CNN would have become the first to tell the world this huge news and gain credibility. (Dan Rather built a career after being first to report on the Kennedy assassination.) If we reported it and were wrong, we would have spread a huge lie and suffered a major embarrassment.

CNN decided to get confirmation first and soon discovered it was a hoax.   But our sister network, Headline News, started to report on the “tragic” news until a wise producer told the anchor to stop.

For the most part, we were able to prevent the hoax from getting out.  But, today it might be different.  Just one unauthorized tweet from inside CNN could start an unstoppable viral explosion.  ABC’s Terry Moran created a stir last year by tweeting about an off-the-record comment where President Obama called Kanye West a jackass in an interview that had not yet been edited for air. Certainly not a story of major importance, but it does suggest that media organizations can’t control their employee’s tweets.

I always hated working on the early morning shift at CNN on April Fool’s day because I knew we’d have to vet some hoaxes at 4 AM. Our credibility would suffer if we presented fake stories to the world. One year, Taco Bell bought ads in major newspapers saying it was buying the Liberty Bell and renaming it the Taco Liberty Bell.  We reported on the ads, but that it was also April Fool’s day.  AOL ran a headline that life was discovered on Jupiter.  That one generated 1,300 messages on AOL (huge for those days) and was considered by some to have risked AOL’s credibility.

There were many other fake stories the public never heard because they were vetted by journalists.  And without the media, there was no way for these stories to spread.

That’s all changed.  With social media, there are no editors.  There is no waiting for confirmation.  When you tweet or re-tweet, you are not checking the facts or even so much concerned if you are spreading a lie. When the Dry Erase Girl meme hit the Web, 421,000 users shared the story on Facebook, and theChive got 2.5 million unique visits for two days in a row, the same amount it normally gets in a month.

Jenny’s story, which many people wanted to believe, was posted on theChive at 4:30 AM. The site claimed they got the photos from someone who works with Jenny, but they even admitted Jenny’s name was not confirmed. It was then re-posted at College Humor, and by many others including TechCrunch, on which Jenny had claimed her boss spent 5.3 hours a week reading.   Really just bait for us to run the story.

TechCrunch’s first post included a link saying “via The Chive.”  It was a water-cooler story about a spreading internet meme with the playful headline –  It’s Official: The Best Bosses Read Techcrunch.  It was an amusing slideshow, regardless of whether it was true or not.

At the same time, our reporters were trying to contact Jenny. Were there some red flags? Sure, Jenny, if that was her real name, had no last name and the name of her company wasn’t mentioned.  But, this is how process journalism now works.  It’s journalism as beta.

In the days before social media, I think news organizations might have held the story.  Now with the instant viral spread of information that happens even without the media, the story is out there whether we report it or not.   The man behind the hoax, theChive’s John Resig told TechCrunch “we didn’t need mainstream media to make this happen.” We certainly helped to spread it (and debunk it) faster than it would have on its own. But did TechCrunch and all the other media who published the fake story suffer a loss of credibility?  You tell us. But my sense is, not really.  We helped move the story towards the truth.

Peter Kafla at All Things Digital was the first to publish some skepticism, saying the story was “almost certainly made up.”  TechCrunch was first to confirm the true identify of Jenny that night and followed with a video interview the next day. Yes, we extended Jenny’s 15 minutes of fame and it was also our most popular video of the day. Jenny told us she just taped an interview with Edward R Murrow’s CBS News before our interview. Even if a news organization didn’t report the initial hoax, many will do the story behind the story and what, if anything, it means. Guilty here too.

So, what’s a reader to do? Enjoy the story and smile at the clever hoax? Get angry and don’t trust the media or your friends for spreading a lie? Blame the creators and those who spread it? Shrug it off, and look for the next meme? If you don’t want to get fooled, be more skeptical of anything you read—whether it is in a newspaper, a blog, a tweet, or status update. Just because it’s on a web page doesn’t make it true. The top-down journalism filter that once prevented lies from going public is now much less powerful. But journalism is now much more distributed. As such, it is a process and still capable, eventually, of getting the truth out.

While we’re still likely a few months away from seeing the first Chrome OS devices, work continues to move forward on getting the OS ready to go. And some recent discussions on the Chromium OS (the open source version that Chrome OS will be based on) Google Code page suggest that not only is wireless connectivity going to be a part of some of these devices, but that Verizon may be a partner.

As you can see in a few of discussions on the Google Code pages for the projects, a lot of work is being done to figure out the UI for network connectivity. For example, they’re thinking about how will the OS will alert users when they’re running low on data they’ve purchased. The interesting part is that the latest mockups for these UI changes are in a folder called “Verizon”.

Granted these are just mockups, so it’s perfectly possible that the person who made them simply chose one carrier to make the mockups with. But remember that Verizon itself has said they were working with Google on producing tablets earlier this year. And while those would likely run on Android, they’re probably likely to partner with Google on Chrome OS devices as well. After all, thanks to the Droid phones, the two are all buddy-buddy.

And, of course, the two even see eye to eye now on net neutrality. I’ll avoid suggesting that this agreement may entice Verizon to do things for Google in the future, such as partner on Chrome OS devices.

Also consider that one of the instructions for the UI includes the need for the following notification:

Autorenewal Failed: Show notice and link to "VZW Account Management"

VZW stands for Verizon Wireless.

Another topic discussion suggests users may be able to buy 5 gigabyte plans from the carriers for their Chrome OS devices. This sounds like it will work in a similar way to the deal Apple has with AT&T for the 3G version of the iPad.

But imagine if Verizon offered Chrome OS netbooks at a subsidized price if you buy a data plan. That could certainly be a hot-seller. I’d buy one in a second.

It’s hard to imagine anything more vapid than a daytime soap opera. They’re seriously the worst things in the world. But they’re also great for parody as LG is obviously aware. Sure, their The Young and the Connected YouTube series is one big ad, but it’s also pretty damn hilarious.

In the series of short clips, LG has beautiful people talking seriously about the things many of us use everyday. You know, like Facebook, Twitter, and even Foursquare.

Watch some of the best ones below. In the first, a man worries his affair will be outed because his lover checked-in on Foursquare. In another, two women fight over who has been “poked” more by a lover. Below that, a mother stalks her son on Foursquare as he’s “going for a wax.” And finally two men worry about where one of them is going to ask a woman to marry him — Facebook or Twitter?

Late last night Japanese Twitter user @sskhybrid tweeted out the following 2,135 character tweet, which was inevitably retweeted by more than 100 people. Translated it seems to be a jumbled version of his experiences using Twitter.

User @esehara has also jumped on the long tweet bandwagon, tweeting out Genesis 1 in its entirety (3,157 characters). The Twitter bug which has left many befuddled is exploiting a length limit flaw in the new t.co URL shortener, allowing users to tweet out non-URL links of outrageously more than 140 characters.

If you’d like to reproduce the effect, and it seems to be catching, you can visit http://twitter.com/share?text=&url=yourtext, add whatever you want in place of “yourtext,” copy and paste your new t.co URL to Twitter (or use the handy TweetButton) and long tweet away.

The 140 character limit is basically the definition of Twitter. It’ll be interesting to watch what, if anything, changes now that you can go way longer. In any case I’m really looking forward to Annotations.

Update: Looks like the nimble engineers at Twitter have disabled the feature within the hour this post went up, much to everyone’s dismay. Scripting News’ Dave Winer went so far as to create a web app for the Fat Tweets.

With parent company eBay’s continued focus on mobile, PayPal has been adding a number of compelling innovations and features to its iPhone and Android apps. Most recently, the company added Bump technology to both of its free apps, which allows you to transfer money and initiate transactions by simply by tapping smartphones together. In the next versions of the app, PayPal has a few nifty features in store for users.

PayPal’s President Scott Thompson tells me that an upcoming version of the company’s iPhone app will include the ability to make a donation to a charitable organization directly from the app. PayPal has partnered with 20,000 various charities, including Autism Speaks and Save The Children, to allow users to make a donation at any time on the go directly from their PayPal account.

As shown by the massive fundraising efforts via texting in the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti earlier this year, consumers are looking for simple ways to make donations. There’s no doubt that this feature is good news for charitable organizations everywhere, considering the million-plus downloads PayPal’s iPhone app has seen.

Another interesting feature to be incorporated in an upcoming version of PayPal’s iPhone app is one that will save you the trip to the ATM or bank. When you receive a check, you’ll be able to take a picture of the front and back of a check and and PayPal will deposit the amount from the check’s account into your PayPal account. You can then use the funds to make any purchases on the web via PayPal. Some banks, including Chase, currently allow you to do this, but it’s totally new to PayPal.

I’m told the new version of the iPhone app is to be released in the next few months.

It’s time for the latest installment of OMG/JK, where fellow TechCrunch writer MG Siegler and I do a recap of some of the week’s biggest stories in technology (and take a few light-hearted jabs at each other).

This week, we discuss topics including the new Voice Search features that were just added to Android, the rise of the new Twitter share button, and the Google/Verizon net neutrality fiasco. And MG concedes that Apple has done something badly (I couldn’t believe it either).

Here are some recent posts relevant to the stories we discuss this week:

• Google’s Post On Network Neutrality and ‘The Spirit of Compromise‘
• Google Unveils Awesomely Fast And Accurate Voice Actions For Android
• 25% of Search Queries From Android 2.0 Devices Use Voice Search
• Twitter Takes Over The Tweet Button From TweetMeme
  
• Google And Verizon Reiterate Their Love For The Open Internet
• Google, Just Cut The BS And Give The Gordon Gekko Speech Already
• Google Ventures Invests In iPhone Game Developer ngmoco

While it is my understanding that playing with the actual Jon Stewart is not safe for children over four years of age, it appears that playing with his Star Wars action figure is just fine. This amazing action figure, made specifically for Star Wars Celebration V in Orlando, was created for presenter Jon Stewart by George Lucas. Needless to say this is not part of canon and is not for sale.

The figure comes with two heads, one with a goatee and one without, and Stewart looks surprisingly virile in his while battle dress.
Read more…

Editor’s note: This guest post is written by Dmitry Dragilev, the lead marketer at ZURB, an interaction design firm whose clients have included Facebook, eBay, Yahoo, NYSE, Britney Spears, and Zazzle. They are also behind the Web notation products Notable and Bounce.

Ever read a great book? What do you remember about it? Maybe a few dramatic moments, some wild story twists, and most definitely the ending. Your product is just like a book. You're telling a story to your customers and they'll remember only a select few moments from what you tell them. What are these moments? Can you use these moments to plant a memory in a customer's mind?

There are millions of books, courses and talks out there about building great products online. An awful lot focus on “user experience” as a silver bullet to delighting customers and driving revenue for businesses. Everyone gets caught up thinking it's user experience they need to worry about, but it's what they remember about their experience that's critical. Their memory is what they'll draw on to tell other people about it. Their memory is what they'll project into the future. We should focus on making experiences happen that plant memories in people's heads, like in Christopher Nolan's film Inception.

It turns out there are three different kinds of moments in your story customers remember: transitions, Wow moments, and endings.

How to plant a memory

There are three particular kinds of experiences capable of turning an ordinary moment into a memory that will stick in your customer's head. Focusing attention on these three experiences will help you create memorable products.

1. Transitions

These are similar to those surprising plot twists in a story. Giving customers one sensation and then transitioning to another causes a change customers will recognize and are surprisingly likely to remember. Transitions need a clear end and a new beginning, which will trigger the right-to-left-brain transition and form a memory. Here are some examples of memorable transitions that reinforce the core value of each product:

● Ever Skype with your grandparents in a remote village in the middle of nowhere? Remember how their still image turned into video for the first time? That's hot! You'll anticipate this every time you Skype now.

● Have you tried to use Facetime on the iPhone yet? That initial call transition to the high quality video of the person on the other side is extremely memorable. This is something you'll be mentioning to your coworkers the next day.

● You know how when you type a city into Google Earth and watch the globe spin around to the country it is in and then zoom into the city? That transition is what you probably mentioned to others when you first described the app.

2. ‘WOW!’ Moments

Ever have a moment when you just can't put down the book you're reading? You've got to finish the chapter you're on. The same happens with a product. Very little of what you create for a customer will ever be remembered by them. They will only remember the peak experiences they have and refer back to them to sum up their feelings about your product. Here are some examples of peak moments that give customers a great story to pass along to their friends:

● Ever trip over your MacBook Pro power chord? Remember how the magnetic power cord came out from your laptop without bringing it crashing down to the floor? "Wow! Thank you Apple!"

● Do you remember the first time you won an auction on eBay and got your favorite gadget for half the price it would cost you in the store? Do you still tell this story to all of your family and friends?

● Ever find that awesome movie from your high school years on Netflix and stream it right away? Were you surprised at how good the movie looked?

● I’m continually impressed each time I open Google Maps on my iPhone and Google something in the area, then hit directions and it fills in Current Location > Search Result and just gets me there, by car or walking.

● Remember the first time you used Picasa? The first promise Picasa had was: "Find all the photos you forgot you had." The first run experience delivered exactly that for a disorganized user like me. I rediscovered all sorts of 'lost' photos, like an unexpected walk down memory lane.

3. Endings

If you've read a novel you probably remember the ending. But how often do we worry about how our customers' experiences with a product ends? That last impression turns out to be very important. Endings can put a positive spin on a negative experience or take a positive experience and ruin the whole thing. People remember endings. Here are a few examples of what we're talking about:

● Good ending: Becoming a Mayor in Foursquare. What an awesome ending to your hard work of check ins. Folks get excited about this.

● Bad ending: You've been checking in for months and have not received any messages or earned anything for doing it. You're sick of competing with others without any reward and so you give up.

● Good ending: You contact the tech expert on Crossloop and get your computer virus removed in 10 minutes. You'll definitely be telling others about this experience.

● Bad ending: You contact a tech expert to resolve a problem and you get no response for days. By that time you've given up on the service all together.

● Good ending: You click Google Docs Save and Close button and know that: "Certainty I won’t lose my doc!"

● Bad ending: You click the Close button on a cloud app doc and are not sure if your changes were saved.

● Good ending: Flickr’s Contact updates provide a never-ending ending, a continual positive spin on our initial investment of putting our own pictures in there

● Bad ending: You keep putting pictures online and don't hear about any responses to your pictures for months.

These examples above form memories in customers' minds that sell these products over and over again. If you want your product to sell you've got to start with focusing on transitions, Wow moments, and endings to make it stick in a customer's mind. How sure are you that your customers will tell others about these moments versus another one you'd rather they forget?

Like the author of a book, you are not just making a product or providing a good user experience, you are giving people a story that will plant memories, and those memories will drive their behavior in the future. Make sure they have good ones.

Picture this. You’re the world’s biggest search engine, and you just became the target of a patent lawsuit that could potentially put your massively successful mobile operating system at risk. Your hardware and carrier partners are keenly watching your response, not to mention the constant government scrutiny you see on a day-to-day basis. So, throwing caution to the wind, you pull out your digital middle finger and delist your opponent entirely from search results, then shoot off an internal memo with the subject line “FREEDOM” and a link to the Braveheart Theme.

That’s the story that IPWatchdog published last night, claiming that Google “seemingly tampered with [its] search algorithm and database by eliminating Oracle altogether” from its search engine (okay, there wasn’t anything about an internal memo). Gene Quinn, the article’s author, claims to have confirmed the search issue at 3 PM EST yesterday, stating that it was back to normal a few hours later. Unfortunately, it’s totally bogus.

As Giorgio Sironi spells out on his blog, some trickster used a variety of UTF-8 characters (not from the standard English alphabet) to craft the query, which yielded a mere six results. It’s easy to see why someone might mistake this at first glance — I suspect IPWatchdog “confirmed” it by clicking on a link to the misleading query, rather than entering it themselves.

However, as far-fetched as all of this may sound, Google has had glitches when it came to searching for competitors. Back when the Palm Pre first made its debut, Google Mobile couldn’t find any results for it. That was pretty clearly a temporary glitch, though, as other queries containing the word “palm”, like “palm tree”, were coming back empty as well.