I'll be in DC tomorrow night launching (or launch partying, rather) FishbowlDC and TVNewser. I haven't actually been to DC in a couple of years, unless you count the various airports, and the last time I was there I was conducting due diligence on a technology startup that was selling a sort of ISP-in-a-box product to various underdeveloped countries. The company was losing money, losing employees, etc., but they had big shiny offices with a popcorn machine in the lobby and a seemingly endless supply of nerf toys. And this was post-crash. (It was the year of immaturity masquerading as childlike whimsy. To this day, foosball tables in corporate environments fill me with an unmistakeable sense of impending doom.)
So it was all I could do to keep from banging my head against the wall when the CEO excitedly told me that the company was going to rescue itself by selling the product to a handful of companies in Nigeria. The same Nigeria where the electrical blackout rate is somewhere in the mid-double digits? Where the literacy rates eliminate approximately 30% of the population from using the Internet in the first place? Where the monthly per-monthly usage fees for your product equal 82% of the country's annual average per capita income? Where getting cash in and out of the country is almost impossible? Yes! That Nigeria!
Every time I get email from the only living son of the late Charles Taylor confidentially offering me 26,000,000 USD if I would be so good as to provide him with my bank account number and routing directions, I can't help but wonder if somewhere one of those dead dictator's sons is snickering over the huge wodges of cash he just got wired from an ex-technology entrepreneur in D.C. But then again, someone's obviously been building Internet infrastructure there or I wouldn't be getting so many of those confidential offers.
Posted by Elizabeth Spiers at March 22, 2005 11:16 PM