Mark Davies
CNN - May 15, 2008
ieee spectrum - Mar 02, 2008
Out of Africa: the Evolving Web Cafe
Mark Davies is one of the great unsung heroes of the information-technology scene in Africa. The founder of the finest Internet café in the sub-Saharan – the spacious and stimulating BusyInternet café in Accra, Ghana – Davies is true original character who recognizes the monumental deficit in African scientific and technological communities. The signal problem is not money, or opportunity or “bandwidth” or even brain drain. Rather the big deficit in Africa for technical people is social networking...
the economist - Jan 25, 2007
Buy, Cell, Hold: A plan is afoot to create a pan-African market based on mobile phones
TradeNet, a software company
based in Accra, Ghana, will unveil a simple sort of eBay for
agricultural products across a dozen countries in west Africa. It lets
buyers and sellers indicate what they are after and their contact
information, which is sent to all relevant subscribers as an SMS text message in one of four languages. Interested parties can then reach others directly to do a deal...
Ethan Zuckerman - Feb 1, 2007
Tradenet - how mobile phones might revolutionize agriculture in West Africa
...Mark is one of the key figures in Ghana’s IT scene. After retiring from the dotcom world in 2000 (he was one of the founders of Metrobeat, which became part of CitySearch), he poured his energy into the founding of BusyInternet, a remarkable cybercafe and business incubator in downtown Accra. In more recent years, Mark has been helping to build software businesses in Ghana, working with programmers around the world...
bbcnews - Jue
16, 2003
Dot.com tycoon turns to
Africa
Welsh entrepreneur Mark Davies has, so far, managed to stay one step ahead
of the game. This dot.com millionaire escaped before the crash, and carried
on making money through start-ups in the most unlikely of places. In the
UK, he is best-known for co-founding First Tuesday...
Esther Dyson's Release 3.0 - Mar
20, 2002
Getting Ghana Going
"The kind of people who turned up with money to use the offices represent
just the type of entrepreneurs you could have picked with a complex development
plan and careful analysis of local needs, but they selected themselves: small
IT-dependent business people, some e-commerce folks, but mostly Web development
or programming professionals...."
New YorkTimes - Aug 23, 2001
High-Tech Center to Open in Ghana
The plans put BusyInternet in the middle of a debate over the role of technology
in developing countries. Some people, including William H. Gates, the chairman
of Microsoft, have argued that such countries need basic amenities like food
and medicine more than they need personal computers...
IDGNews.Net - Jan 6, 2003
First Tuesday founder pioneers Net in Africa
Busyinternet in Accra hosts a dozen startups as well as conference facilities,
a restaurant bar, a 24 hour copy center and an Internet café that
has an average of 1,500 visitors per day and boasts the fastest Net access
of any café in the city...
On Ghana's Tech Frontier, Internet Start-Up Flourishes
Mark Davies wants to make serious money... the only catch: His plan might be illegal. Mr. Davies, a Welsh-born American, is the founder of BusyInternet, which provides Internet access to Ghanaians. By any standard, the company is already a tremendous African success story. Started with $1.7 million...
The Boston Globe - July 23, 2001
Entering the Queue at Africa's No-Frills Cybercafes,
Thousands Are Flocking to Get Online
elsewhere on the continent, cyber-entrepreneurs see good opportunities. Mark Davies is a Welshman who went to New York and started an Internet business, which he sold to Ticketmaster-CitySearch in 1998. His new firm, BusyInternet, is building a massive public Internet facility, in the heart of one of Africa's most competitive Internet environments: Accra, Ghana. Davies fell in love with Ghana when he visited the country as a teenager. He originally planned a philanthropic venture to provide better communications to people in Africa. But as he considered the failures of other misbegotten African aid programs, Davies had a change of heart...
World Bank - May 25, 2006
The Independent - January 22, 2001
Is it last Tuesday for the dot.com dream-makers?
The dot.com that made dot.com dreams come true is on the verge of collapse. First Tuesday, the networking concept that started as a get-together of would-be internet entrepreneurs in a Soho bar, and was bought for £33m six months ago, holds the next of its monthly London meetings tomorrow - but it may be its last...
Los Angeles Times - July 29, 1996
Doing the Local Motion
Ever since moving to New York a decade ago from his native England, Mark Davies has been frustrated by the big city's lack of a comprehensive entertainment guide. So when the Cambridge University graduate discovered the Internet last year, he got to work. Cadging money from his friends and stretching his credit cards to the max, Davies began building Metrobeat, an online service featuring all the movie, theater, restaurant, museum and other listings available in local print publications-and more...
New York Post - Feb 29, 1996
Free Cyberservice tells What's Happening Where
Davies, a British expatriate, started telling New Yorkers where to go as a listings editor for 7 Days magazine. When 7 Days folded, Davies went into catalog publishing. Then, when a client wanted to publish a catalog on the Internet, Davies had the reaction that many have at some point; "The Internet? What's that?"...