Open space for technologists, investors, tech companies and hackers in Nairobi.

This month’s BitMagic will be held this Saturday – 30th April, just before the Ubuntu Release Party.

As you remember, BitMagic is a forum for techies to celebrate Techiness! As techies we know that it’s the technical tinkering that keeps us ticking. It’s the no-business-sense inventions of today that turns the wheels of innovation and drives business in the long run. BitMagic is an event to unveil whatever’s under the hood, showing off the technical magic that creates our daily reality.

This month, we have the following main speakers:

(1) Phares Kariuki - A virtualization guru at Westcon, Phares will be speaking about his experience setting up his own EC2 “Cloud” using normal PCs. He claims that the infrastructure is simple, open and pluggable. You be the judge, because if he is right, then his job is in danger…

(2) Athman Mohamed - Athman’s ‘Factcha” was awarded an honorable mention at this year’s World Bank’s Apps for Development contest. He is going to give us the story behind Factcha. He contends that it is simple technologies that solve critical social problems and will talk about how he has used just such for other applications at TradeMark East Africa.

Athman is also big on Government Data and apps for development, so he might have a word or two about that.

This month’s session will give way to Natty Narhwal (Ubuntu 11.04) release party.
“The combination of Ubuntu Linux’s growing popularity with all the big changes coming up in the next version mean that Natty Narwhal, or Ubuntu 11.04, might just be the most widely and anxiously anticipated release of the open source operating system ever.”, outlines a post by Katherine Noyes – Thu Mar 31, 7:30 pm ET.

And true to the post, it brings to GNU/Linux this huge list of cutting-edge features. Try Before you Buy which enables a user to test an application before installing, Love Handles which introduces to Gnu/Linux a set of drivers for your touchscreen devices and more security features, all coming as a single disk. This follows their announcement to discontinue maintaining a separate netbook disk (iso) image.

In addition to these, there are a myraid of other changes that have stirred mixed reactions in both the Ubuntu community. This are such as Mark shuttleworth’s announcement that Ubuntu will be replacing Gnome with Unity as the default desktop environment on Natty Narwhal, the replacing of Open Office with Libre office, replacing Rythmbox with Banshee as the default multimedia player among others.

Join us on April 30th, 2011 at the iHub and be the first to find out whats true about all this talk. The Release party will be preceeded by an hour of BitMagic.

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