enewcomer

I love goats. Out of curiosity, would you be willing to share how well goat attack packs have been selling?

The point is that by addressing the non-US markets, WhatsApp helped their position everywhere -- including the US.

You only need one friend you care about using a Blackberry or Nokia for it to matter though. The long tail matters when it comes to communication.

The phone number as an id is a very important component to their adoption indeed. So do you posit that WhatsApp's adoption rates being what they are (compared to say Viber which does the same thing) is purely due to first mover?

They aren't paying for a J2ME app and the requisite testing. They are paying for the results of the network effect made possible by it.

Unless everybody switches, few will switch. Network effects also create some pretty powerful stickiness.

That's not really an option at all, at least not to your house. At the kLab we have a 15Mbps line allocated for us, but the realities of oversea (well, undersea) bandwidth purchases means we often don't really see that.

Most people not at kLab get mobile data connections that in good areas when it's working well can get downloads between 200KBs up to 1MBps (those are bytes, not bits) depending on the time of day. Up oftentimes is about the same as down. It's not heavily throttled as you see in many other countries. These data plans are also very cheap.

Really, the biggest problem here isn't so much the speed these days, it's that the connection occasionally just stops working altogether.

We'd love to have the .com, but it's not in the cards. But ya, we chose the India TLD for exactly the reason you suspect.. text it in.

I just renewed mine this week without any trouble, but of course YMMV.

As I'm sure you already know, gay rights have a long, long way to go in the region. If I were gay, it probably wouldn't be at the top of my list :(

I've certainly heard some of that, but I don't think it applies quite as much to tech entrepreneurs -- and I've seen more evidence of that in say, Kenya. If you are coming here to build a software company, I would be surprised if Rwanda's arms weren't opened pretty wide.

At this point, Nairobi has more going on in it's tech scene and certainly a more mature market to sell into, but you are right, it's definitely not as safe and transparent as Kigali.

I don't have a lot of experience for what school is like generally, but I can speak about it from an ex-pat's perspective. Our kids go to a Rwandan school (though a prestigious private school). It's far, far cheaper than private school in the states. Like most schools, the experience you have is highly dependent on the teacher you get, but we've been pretty lucky in that regard.

In some ways the academics are a step down and in others they are step up. For example, some of the subjects can be a bit rote, but my youngest has half of his classes taught in french (even though we are not french speakers). On the whole we are quite satisfied with their school. We also remind ourselves that as humans, we learn in so many ways and having our kids experience life in Rwanda (or anywhere outside of America for that matter) is one of the finest gifts we can offer.