It’s been about a month since Twitter turned on its people recommendation engine, a set of algorithms that enables the service to automagically suggest people you don't currently follow but may find interesting.

Twitter has indicated that these suggestions are based on a variety of factors, including the people you already follow and the people they follow. They are, for now, only visible on Twitter.com and the Find People section.

And based on my experience, the algorithms seem to be doing their job just fine indeed – I have most certainly discovered a lot of new interesting people on Twitter who I wasn’t yet following already, and my own follower count has increased significantly in the past few weeks.

So for fun, I decided to use TwitterCounter to look up the counts for a couple of accounts I follow, to see if this is a general trend of something I’m noticing for my account only.

Watch with me:

Yes, that sure looks like a trend in my book.

Even dropping follower counts can get reversed thanks to recommendations served by Twitter, as we can see with GigaOm founder Om Malik‘s personal Twitter account:

And it’s not just media folks – check out the trend for angel investor Dave McClure and Googler Matt Cutts, for example:

Notably, even the accounts of celebrities, who already have millions of people following them, have seen a spike in new followers since the beginning of August 2010:

Now, I have to say these bumps in followers counts can not be seen with every single Twitter account. Gizmodo and Engadget are both growing, but linearly. Bill Gates’ account is showing steady growth, as is Twitter’s. No bumps like demonstrated above to be seen.

In fact, the Twitter account for Fake Steve Jobs and Google, for example, are both still showing growth, but clearly leveling off rather than increasing rapidly.

Neverthless, I’m going to go ahead and assume Twitter’s recommendation algorithms are working as advertised, and that they’re seeing numbers of engagement and followers across the board go up consistently ever since turning on the feature last month. With 145 million users and counting, that’s clearly a very good thing for them.

Now wait what happens when the company launches an API that will enables third-party developers to integrate suggestions for new people to follow into their apps and services (which they’re planning to release in the near future).

Have you seen your follower count go up in the past month? If not, you will soon I’d wager.

Is Facebook testing its location based service Places for imminent rollout in the UK? Notes on Twitter started to surface over the weekend indicating that might be the case. And as you can see from this screengrab from @kierondonoghue on Saturday, it did work for a short time. However, we've checked with Twitter's official spokespeople and they say "We weren't testing it this weekend contrary to reports." And a simple check of the iPhone app reveals that even if some people can access their location via mobile in the UK, most can't. So there you go. But, the imminent arrival of Facebook Places in the UK and across the rest of Europe is clearly going to have an interesting impact not least on local location-based startups who already compete with Foursquare and Gowalla, to name the two main US players whose services have migrated to Europe.

"He's a classic Aussie in the sense that he's a bit of a male chauvinist." That quote comes at the end of a piece on the recent escapades of Julian Assange, founder and chief spokesman for Wikileaks. It seems apt, because it's becoming increasingly clear that an organisation which aspiries to transparency and the high ideals of open information is going to have problems going forward if it continues to entertain an individual who lacks transparency and whose private life is alleged by his female accuses to be be riddled with low ideals. Because let's be clear, delicate diplomancy and skirting the choppy waters of international issues which involve thousands of lives - like releasing highly sensitive government information about the Iraq war - is not the kind of thing you want someone who is careless about their personal life to take charge of. How would you react if you heard this story: A guy sleeps with two women in quick succession, annoys both with his sexual habits, they talk but he dismisses their concerns. When they go to the Police he calls it an "international conspiracy". Uh... what?

A trusted source has confirmed that French-blogging platform, Overblog, will soon be part of the Wikio family. Rumor has it that the growing Luxembourg-based news portal is apparently trying to develop European Google News for blogs. For anyone who isn't familiar with Wikio, all you really have to know is that it's a news portal founded by Pierre Chappaz in 2005 after his previous company, Kelkoo, was acquired by Yahoo in 2004 for some 475 million euros. For acquisitions à la Française, that's not too shabby.

If ever a trailer did not depict what a movie is actually about it’s this trailer for Universal Pictures’ “Catfish”, a movie about Facebook the subject matter of which could not be further from that other movie about Facebook. I’d like to use this sentence to say “Spoiler Alert” about fifteen times because the next couple paragraphs are going to be full of them.

If you hate spoilers do yourself a favor and stop reading now. That said, the following exposition shouldn’t prevent you from seeing the movie, I’ve seen it twice and enjoyed both times.

“Catfish” is a movie about Nev Schulman, a 24-year-old New York photographer and his relationship with eight year old Abby Pierce and her 19-year-old sister Megan Faccio whom he meets on Facebook in 2007. I’m sure all of you can see this coming, but Megan isn’t who she claims to be and neither is Abby. Nev and Ariel Schulman, Henry Joost and the viewer get taken for a wild and well-documented ride, especially for the last 40 minutes of the movie.

In summary Megan and a bunch of other Facebook identities are characters invented by artist Angela Wesselman’s imagination, as Wesselman is trapped in Michigan taking care of two disabled children and has no outlets for creative expression other than her paintings — which she ships to Nev Schulman under the guise of them being her (real) daughter Abby’s — and her elaborate storytelling on Facebook. “Scam is not the word,” say the filmmakers regarding Wesselman’s bait and switch.

Plot twists aside, the film uses social networking and other tropes unique to the Internet age such as Google Maps, “sexting” and Photoshop in order to give a richer view of the emotional narrative, as Nev Schulman and Angela/Megan’s digital courtship drags on for eight months of phone calls, MP3 exchanges and even Facebook wall “infighting” among the various imaginary members of the Pierce family. At some point Schulman sends Megan an IRL post card, and remarks how odd the act of sending snail mail is.

What’s the most interesting about the film is that Wesselman is a totally new kind of artist, creating a entire world for Nev through multiple fabricated online identities. When asked during a screening last week why he, as a self-proclaimed part of the “Google Generation” never bothered to Google search Abby Pierce or Angela Wesselman or Megan Faccio, Nev Schulman said he did and came up with nothing, not pushing it any further because wanted to believe. “There are plenty of people with no Google presence,” says Schulman. Heh

This ambiguity surrounding “Catfish” (including its bloody Catfish logo) has lead it to be the subject of many attacks most notably from Movieline in their post “Does Sundance Sensation Catfish Have A Truth Problem?” which asserts that both the Schulmans and Joost knew that Megan wasn’t who she said she was right from the beginning. As counter to this, filmaker Ariel Schulman revealed that the movie is not being marketed as a documentary because the “D-word” turns off younger viewers to whom he thinks the film would be most beneficial as a cautionary tale.

While some scenes from the movie tend to reinforce the “they knew the entire time” hypothesis (as does Schulman’s shit-eating grin throughout) the “whether or not any of the boys suspected it” issue is complicated and best left to individual viewer discretion.

What should remain with you after seeing “Catfish” is how convincing the Facebook soap opera Wesselman pulled off could be to someone yearning for a human connection, and also as a side note, that model Aimee Gonzales’ boyfriend, whose images Wesselman used to pull off the ruse, chided her shortly after hearing about her inadvertent role in the film, “See I told you you shouldn’t have put all those pictures online.”

Catfish hits theatres September 17th, one month before the more glamorous “The Social Network.” Both Wesselman and Nev Schulman are still friends on Facebook.

Online publishing company Wetpaint has been undergoing a strategic shift in its business model over the past year. Wetpaint began as a simple wiki/social publishing tool but then started to build entertainment sites for big brands, including MSN. And the heavily funded startup succumbed to layoffs last July and December. But today, Wetpaint is taking the company in a new direction: original content. The startup is launching Wetpaint Entertainment; a TV news site that covers news and gossip from over 15 major TV shows, such as Glee, Grey’s Anatomy, and Gossip Girl.

Each show has a dedicated online channel (the site is launching with 15 channels), and will compile the most popular photos, videos, fashion gossip, and headlines to provide one place for all the information about fans' favorite shows.

Wetpaint’s founder and CEO Ben Elowitz says that each show will have roughly 20 posts of information per day and will include a live updating news feed on the homepage. Roughly 30 percent of the content on the site will be written and curated by Wetpaint editors while the 70 percent of content will be sourced from other sites. However, Elowitz says that editors won’t simply repost another site’s news with a link; Wetpaint will add its own editorial spin to repurposed content.

Wetpaint’s entertainment platform has also created Facebook pages for each show; allowing fans to interact with content and editors via the social network. The company says that 500,000 fans have joined Wetpaint's Facebook pages over the past few months. In fact, Facebook, says Elowitz, is currently accounting for 40 percent of traffic to the site (which soft launched a few months ago). He believes that the cross platform integration with Facebook will help differentiate the site from its competitors. And with limited exposure during the soft launch, traffic to the site is growing by 50 percent monthly.

Starting today, Wetpaint Entertainment includes channels for "The Vampire Diaries," "Grey's Anatomy," "America's Next Top Model," "Castle," "Hellcats," "Nikita," "Glee," "Dancing With The Stars," "Top Chef," "Pretty Little Liar," "Bachelorette," "The Bachelor," "Gossip Girl," "Jersey Shore" and "The Real Housewives of DC."

The startup plans to launch mobile apps later this year and may eventually move into other verticals in entertainment and arts. At the moment, the site faces competition from many of the entertainment and gossip news sites that cover TV news such as Entertainment Weekly, People.com, and US Magazine.

Adam Penenberg. If you call yourself an online journalist, and yet that name doesn't immediately prompt a nod of recognition – a smile, even – then it's time to close your laptop and bow your head in shame. Or at least head over to Netflix.

It was Adam Penenberg who, back in 1998, first forced traditional journalists to sit up and take online reporting seriously. And he did so with a double whammy: scooping them on a big story – a scandal that went to the heart of one of America's journalistic institutions – while also exposing a rising star of print journalism as a hack and a liar.

The lying hack was New Republic wunderkind Stephen Glass and the story of how Penenberg – then a reporter for 'Forbes Digital Tool' (now sadly swallowed by the execrable Forbes.com) – exposed Glass' fabricated reporting was subsequently made into a movie. (Penenberg was portrayed in the movie by Steve Zahn while Glass was played by Hayden Christensen. Weirdly, Jonathan Chait was played by Chloë Sevigny.)

Penenberg, then, is one of the founding fathers of digital journalism. His expose – 'Lies, damn lies and fiction' – sent a clear message to print journalists: "digital journalism is more than just an underpaid, under-skilled subset of real reporting. We web guys are breaking stories and – FEAR US – we're fact checking your sorry asses."

Twelve years later, of course, none of this is news. Digital journalism is a recognised branch of the 5th Estate, particularly when it comes to fact-checking the [sic] mainstream media, and planting the first seeds of reporting, ready to be picked up by print and television. Thanks to the Internet, the traditional news cycle has become a cyclone; a churning, chewing machine that sucks in every fact or rumour that flits past its peripheral vision, before spitting it out – often undigested – in the form of minute-by-minute, second-by-second BREAKING NEWS headlines. Compared to today's digital news output, 24 hour cable news seems almost narcoleptically relaxed.

The idea, then, that a huge story could go unreported in today's news environment – where everyone and his cellphone is a 'citizen journalist' and where one moment's tweet is the next moment’s "BLOGGERS CLAIM THAT…" headline on CNN – is slightly ridiculous.

And yet, three days ago that's exactly what happened.

On Thursday, a Mississippi jury awarded $131 million in compensatory damages to the family of 'star New York Mets prospect', Brian Cole, who was killed in 2001 when his Ford Explorer flipped as he drove home from spring training. Although the damages in the Cole case were the largest Ford has paid in relation to the Explorer (they were based on predictions of Cole’s future earnings), it is far from the only such incident: of the Explorers built between 1990 and 2001, a staggering one in 2700 has been involved in a rollover incident where at least one person in the vehicle has died.

Read that again. One in 2700 Explorers made between 1990 and 2001 flipped over and killed at least one person.

And yet, despite the size of the damages, and the inherent newsworthiness of the story – a sports star, a centimillion dollar verdict and one of America's largest corporations – not one news outlet covered Thursday’s verdict. No wire service, no national newspaper, no cable channel, not even the local Mississippi press.

Fortunately, though, a lone reporter was paying attention: a contributing writer for Fast Company who, back in 2003, wrote a book called 'Tragic Indifference' about Ford’s negligence over the safety of their SUVs. The book (since optioned as a movie by Michael Douglas) told the true story of Arkansas Trial Attorney, Tab Turner, whose client Donna Bailey, who was almost killed in a similar accident to the one that killed Cole. In fact Turner is now representing Cole's family and, moments after the verdict, a source close to his office called the Fast Company reporter to give him a heads up.

No longer involved in day-to-day breaking news, the reporter nevertheless wanted to flag up the verdict to his 2900 Twitter followers. So he went online, and began hitting refresh on all the major wire services, expecting the story to break any moment.

Hours of refreshing later; still nothing.

And that's when he decided: if no one else was going to break the story, he'd have to do it himself. Firing up Twitter, the reporter started to do his job, in dozens of 140 character bursts – starting with the lede: the sports star and the $131 million damages – before moving on to the background, the implications for Ford and finally a play by play of the Donna Bailey accident and how – incredibly – Ford had apparently decided it was cheaper for them to settle the lawsuits brought against them than it was to retool the Explorer so it didn't kill any more people.

Sure enough, as the tweets went on, other journalists started to take notice, starting with Felix Salmon at Reuters and then David Folkenflik at NPR and someone at the New York Daily News. Finally the story began to appear; first on the AP wire and then… and then…. By this afternoon Google News was listing 277 stories about the verdict.

The similarities between the Ford story and Adam Penenberg's Stephen Glass expose are stark. In both cases, the mainstream media was caught napping. In both cases it took a lone reporter, using the oft-maligned tools of digital journalism, to break the story and shame his peers in print. In both cases the result was much wailing and gnashing and playing catch-up by traditional reports – and crowing by online hacks that finally – this time – new media has shown itself to be a legitimate platform for breaking news.

But the biggest similarity of all between the two stories? The $64,000 headfuck? That would be the identity of the latter-day Penenberg 2.0 who broke the Ford / Cole story on Twitter.

Step forward, Adam Penenberg.

WAIT, WHAT?

SERIOUSLY?

AGAIN?

Yep.

Much as it pains me to do independent reporting, I have to ask Penenberg (right) what gives.

"What gives?" I ask when he answers the phone at his home in New York. I mean, what’s wrong with traditional journalism that – twelve years later – he is still the one having to draw attention to its deficiencies?

I'm expecting him to shrug: this was just another example of how lazy the print media has got. How newsroom headcounts have been slashed how no one is searching for stories any more. How this one just slipped under the radar. But no. The story he tells is far more sinister.

"Ford is a scary company."

He says that like a man who knows. And, turns out, he does know: "A few years back I got into a dustup with a magazine – I'd better not name it – over Tragic Indifference. I won a reader contest and they were going to write about the book. But then just before publication, they pulled the plug." In fact, an editor called Penenberg to explain that Ford had bought a majority of the ad pages in that month's issue, and running such an anti-Ford review would be commercial suicide. The review was pulled; the ads remained.

"Jesus," I say.

"Yeah," says Pennenberg. Then he pauses. "Ok, I'll name the magazine – it was Fast Company." His current some-time employer – although he takes pains to say that the censorship episode occurred under the previous regime. "It wouldn't happen now."

Judging by the initial lack of media reaction to the Cole judgment, though, the attitude seems to still prevail in the rest of the media. Once again, in scooping his print rivals, Penenberg has drawn attention to a malignant cancer at the heart of old media. Last time it was a lack of fact-checking, this time it’s the relationship between advertisers and editorial. Ford is one of the world's biggest advertisers at a time when print advertising is declining and magazines and news publications are bleeding red ink.

But, says Penenberg (only slightly prompted by me) that’s not all that’s wrong with mainstream journalism today. "What's discouraging," he says, "is the he-said-she-said… this so-called objective journalism". He points out that even when the rest of the media finally reported the Cole story, they still felt obliged to give equal prominence to a denial from Ford:

“Brian Cole had been driving over 80 mph when he drifted off road for unknown reasons, suddenly turned his steering wheel 295 degrees, lost control, and caused the vehicle to roll over more than three times… He was not wearing his safety belt and died after being ejected from the vehicle. His passenger, who was properly belted, walked away from the accident.”

Simply not true, says Penenberg. Yes, Cole was thrown from the vehicle "but he was wearing his seatbelt at the time of the accident…. the problem is, it didn't lock." Indeed, he adds: "in the Donna Bailey case, it was found that her seatbelt had eight inches of 'give'".

"No wonder you're such a fan of online journalism," I suggest. No-one would ever accuse bloggers – or Matt Drudge – of balance. Wisely, Penenberg ignores my fatuous point and instead continues his point. Another problem with the state of journalism today – both online and off – he says "is this obsession with being first – wanting to beat your rival to the story by two minutes. Is it really that important to be first?"

This is something that really bugs Penenberg. And it bugs me too. So much so, I forget to take notes for the next few minutes as we rail against how today's news journalists are expected to churn out half a dozen stories a day, often with little-to-no fact checking, simply to make sure they're first with every tiny development. Whether they're right, or whether they're missing a wider, bigger, more important, story becomes secondary. Fuck it, we can always go back and edit.

Except they never get the chance to go back and edit: not when that have five more stories to file that day. Look at the 277 stories about the Cole case. See how many reporters just rehashed the lede – the size of the damages – and Ford's response, without asking a single new question, or presenting so much as half a new fact. But then again, how would they? That would have involved a single fucking phone call.

Which brings us to the question of mentorship. "When you started out in journalism, new reporters had editors as mentors," I said. “Today, reporters are often their own editors. Who is teaching tomorrow's Adam Penenbergs?"

"Well, we're trying," replies Penenberg, referring to his current gig as a journalism professor at NYU.

"Of course," I say, "but we both know that, after they graduate, your students are going to end up at Associated Content, churning out shit like everyone else."

Pausing briefly to defend against the slur – pointing out that his students all go on to jobs with respectable media companies ("but then again, there are only, like, 15 students in our class – you're right generally") – Penenberg says he has faith that good journalists will come to the fore, even without mentorship. "I really believe quality rises to the top," he says.

So, has he created a new kind of hybrid journalism with his Ford tweets – somewhere between breaking news and long-form journalism. We've become used to seeing stories unfolding in real time through social media – are we now seeing the potential for professional journalists to use Twitter to tell properly researched news stories, in a way that makes the events feel very personal, and even more dramatic? (After getting off the phone, it occurs to me that what I was describing is similar to how Jules Verne first published 80 Days Around The World in daily installments in major newspapers around the world. Even though the story was already completed before the first installment was published, the format meant that readers felt they were watching it happen in real time.)

"I have no idea," says Penenberg, "I'd be lying if I said I did.. but I'll definitely use [the format] more from now on." Certainly if Penenberg has invented a new journalistic form – New New New Journalism? – then he's one of the few reporters with both the chops and the freedom to practice it. Getting under the skin of a story like the Ford one can take months of research, and involves countless sources. Says Penenberg: "I know a lot about this shit – I wrote the book on it." And yet, he acknowledges, "If you work for the New York Times you can't do this." There's a process, there are editors, there's a cycle.

So one last question: are we now at the point where online journalism is on a level playing field with "traditional" journalism?

Pennenberg laughs. "I'm sure certain journalists would prefer to write for the New York Times, [in print, rather than online]. But the truth it doesn't matter any more. The only question is are you a good journalist or a bad journalist?"

I laugh too. Penenberg was, perhaps inadvertently, quoting himself: the final lines of his Stephen Glass expose back in 1998. Words which served as a rallying cry for a whole new generation of online reporters that followed in his wake. And words that are just as relevant today.

"It is ironic that online journalists have received bad press from the print media for shoddy reporting. But the truth is, bad journalism can be found anywhere. It is not the medium; it is the writer."

In print, or on Twitter, Penenberg is one of the good guys.

This weekend, I’ve been catching up on some reading. One post that was of particular interest to me was David Beach’s article from last week about developing for Android. Beach, who is a product manager at eBay Mobile and a co-founder of 12seconds, basically says that the experience sucks for a number of reasons (all of which Google can fix, but will take quite a bit of work and time). But one quote in particular stuck out to me:

Android has succeeded despite Google. In fact it’s safe to say that Android is successful for one primary reason. The iPhone is only available on AT&T. If the iPhone was on Verizon a year ago. Android would be no where near as popular.

Obviously, Beach isn’t the first person to bring this idea up. But he brings it up in a way that he’s able to back-up his feelings from a developers’ perspective, while at the same time roping in what isn’t ideal from a consumer perspective about Android as well.

This is going to sound like flame bait, and everyone knows that I love the iPhone — but I have to agree with Beach. I’ve used no less than six Android phones for extended periods of time over the past couple of years. I really am trying to like them. But I just can’t.

Now, don’t get me wrong, almost all Android phones are a million times better than the phones we had just a few years ago before the iPhone burst onto the scene. And if the iPhone didn’t exist, there is no question that I would use an Android phone and would probably be very happy with it. But the iPhone does exist. And I simply can’t bring myself to use an Android phone when I know a superior device is out there. That’s my only requirement for me to use a product: it has to be the best.

The only valid argument I can see for the iPhone not being the best is the AT&T requirement. So let’s put that aside for a second.

While I obviously understand that people have different tastes, I can’t see how you can objectively say that the overall experience of using an Android phone isn’t worse than using an iPhone. There are a dozen or more elements that are better about the iPhone. Everything from the big: the App Store versus the Android Market (from the consumer perspective) — to the little: the multi-touch and overall touchscreen responsiveness.

Even the most diehard Android loyalists I know (like Jason and Mike) will readily admit that the iPhone offers a better user experience. So why do they love Android (again, besides the lack of AT&T requirement)? The openness. They hate that you can’t get Google Voice on the iPhone (I hate it too). And in general they hate Apple’s restrictive policies for the App Store (which I don’t like either). But those are problems that most regular consumers don’t think about — or realize exist at all.

Instead, like Beach says, the thing some consumers don’t like about the iPhone is that it’s AT&T only (in the U.S., obviously). Even if you live in an area where AT&T doesn’t absolutely suck, having no choice of carriers is a big restriction. People have work plans, family plans, etc, etc, that they just can’t switch. Or they don’t want to.

If the iPhone was on Verizon (which is a larger network, remember), is there any question that it would be selling at least double the amount of units it is right now in the U.S.? I don’t think so. What if it was available on all the networks? And what would happen to Android sales if that was the case? That is the big question here.

Next year, it’s looking increasingly likely that we’ll get at least a partial answer. If the iPhone is available on Verizon or even just T-Mobile, will the pace of Android sales slow down in the U.S.?

I know a number of people who are Android users simply because of the iPhone/AT&T restriction. If and when the devices comes to Verizon, they will jump ship. The big question is: will millions of others follow? Or, perhaps more importantly, will millions of new users that would have gone with Android now go with iPhone?

I’m seriously curious to know why you like Android over the iPhone if you do. Is it because of the openness ideal? Is it the variety of devices? Is it the variety of carrier choices? Or is it something else?

The Market is a mess, the media situation is arguably worse, and the user experience is still just off when compared to the iPhone. Google is working on improving all of those things, but Apple is rock solid in all of those areas right now. Both sides will keep improving, but Google’s problem is that Apple is ahead and has remained ahead. Can Google surpass them? I’m just not sure I can see how unless Apple regresses — which they’ve shown no signs of doing. What I can see is a Verizon iPhone. And so do plenty of others.

Apple and Google are in the midst of a PR war for who is activating more devices each day. Google is doing 200,000 a day. Apple is doing 230,000 a day. But Apple says Google’s numbers may include upgrades. Google says Apple is wrong. This will go on and on.

It’s great that there is competition in the market right now. But would it be as fierce in the U.S. if it weren’t for the AT&T situation? Would most people just be using an iPhone? Beach states it as a fact, but I don’t think it’s an unreasonable question to consider. And it’s something I’m sure Google is considering as the Verizon iPhone approaches.

[photo: flickr/laihiu]

Bob Dylan once said that ‘money doesn’t talk, it swears’, but in Hargeisa the capital of Africa’s Somaliland it stinks. It literally stinks, reeking of rotten paper, like a leaky library in a monsoon.

That’s because there’s so much of it. For every dollar there are almost 17,000 Somaliland Shillings and the highest-denomination note is 500 Shillings, which is by no means the most common note in circulation. Money-changers sit within self-built stacks of money (picture left, video below) and children take wheelbarrows of it from one place to another, reminiscent of 1930s Weimar Germany when the Deutsch Mark became worthless.

By all criteria, cash doesn’t work here. Could tiny, unknown Somaliland become the first nation to become a cashless society? It is not only possible, it is almost certain. There is already a surprisingly strong base for this to happen. Thanks to a cobbled together-by-necessity system of money-transfer posts from Somaliland’s diaspora and a surging mobile banking industry, the country has to do away with cash. But first some background.

The currency is not formally recognised and neither is the country. Somaliland has no ATMs and credit cards are not only impossible to use, but are regarded as ridiculous items by local people. The country declared itself independent in 1991 after a brutal civil war with Somalia and now has a free press, a free market and a recent election was widely perceived as free and fair.

A significant diaspora send American dollars home by using Dahabshiil, an African version of Western Union that is extraordinarily efficient. Wherever in the world money is paid in, Somalilanders can withdraw American dollars within five minutes of funds being deposited via 24,000 agents and branches in 144 countries. Moreover they receive a SMS before that time telling them their dollars can be picked up.

I was thankful of Dahabshiil after arriving overland from Ethiopia. I had flown in from India after acting in my second Bollywood movie and was used to people escorting me from my trailer carrying umbrellas and catering for my every need. I would have needed a trailer if I had changed all my dollars; an obviously insane and unsustainable system.

Consequently, Selesom, the major mobile carrier has launched a service where cash is completely bypassed. Mobile banking in Africa is nothing new and is far more advanced in the West or Asia, but Somaliland can take this to a further level because the country itself doesn’t officially exist. The state itself runs on a budget of only $40 million dollars so entrepreneurship and innovation is vital to keep the country going as it strives for formal recognition from the rest of the world.

In less than six months more than 80,000 people in Hargesia have signed up with Selesom for its ZAAD mobile money service for money transfers, retail purchases and bill payments, a significant number in an already buoyant mobile sector of five carriers in a ‘country’ the size of England and a population of only 3.5 million.

Calls from Somaliland are the cheapest in Africa and fierce competition between the country’s carriers means calls from Somaliland are five to six times cheaper than other African countries. Mohamed Saed Duale, the founder of Dahabshiill has joined the fray and recently launched Somtel and joins Telesom, Telcom, Africa Online, Nationlink and Soltelco as the country’s sixth carrier.

The implications are clear. Somtel will use the 18-year money-wiring experience of its parent company to take on Selesom in the mobile money sector. The diaspora will continue to wire money home but the recipients will no longer need to go to a bank or visit the money-changers.

They will only need their mobile for all transactions and it means the money-changers will be kicked out of the Somaliland cash temples forever. Where Selesom has led, Somtel will attempt to dominate while the four other carriers will undoubtedly emulate.

So while the world wasn’t watching, a small peaceful country in the Horn of Africa that doesn’t officially exist will set an example that the rest of Africa will inevitably follow. Funny old world. Perhaps Dylan should write a song about it.

…
Monty Munford has more than 15 years' experience in mobile, digital media, web and journalism and returned to the UK in September, 2010 after living in India for two years. In that time he consulted clients such as Paramount Digital Entertainment in LA and Liverpool FC to deliver their content to an Indian mobile audience, spoke at events in London, Dublin and Singapore and landed two speaking parts in two big-budget Bollywood movies that will be released in December 2010.