“The Reading Glove is a collaboration between myself and my husband, Josh Tanenbaum,” said Karen. “I have an interest in adaptive and intelligent systems, his research looks at storytelling and video games, and we both like to explore alternative interfaces: tangible, wearable, and ubiquitous computing environments.”

Read more about the Glove project as well as Karen’s take on design education, Steampunk culture and the Maker movement in the interview below.

How did the Reading Glove come about and what are your goals for the project?

Karen Tanenbaum: We wanted to see what happened when we gave people a story that was embedded on real, physical objects that could be played with and moved around. Our original vision was an entire room that told a story when you explored it, responding to objects you touched or moved via light and sound responses — sort of like a haunted house, but intended to tell a specific narrative rather than just be spooky. That was outside the scope and the budget of our dissertation work, so the Reading Glove was our first, more constrained exploration of that space.

We also wanted to explore wearable technology with the glove; the goal there was to invoke the idea of “psychometry,” or the psychic power of object reading. When you pick up the objects, you hear the echoes of the past, what these objects experienced, and then you use this power to piece the story back together. I developed a guidance system that helped to navigate the non-linear narrative, adding an adaptive or intelligent component to the experience. We’ve gotten some really interesting results out of it, such as how people talk about a system that has intelligent components, how much they anthropomorphize it and how accurate their estimates of its “intelligence” are.

What role does data play in the project?

Karen Tanenbaum: We collected a ton of data for this project, and I’ve spent the last year trying to sort through it and make sense of it. It’s a real challenge with these kinds of novel systems to figure out what the most important thing is and to see how to correlate all these things together: how many objects they picked up, in what sequence, whether they interrupted pieces, whether or not they followed the system’s recommendations, etc.

The focus of my analysis was on how people talked about the system and their use of it, particularly the notion of “control” and “choice.” People would say that they really liked the freedom to choose any object and control how the story went, but would also say that since they never knew what story fragment they were going to get when they picked an object, they wished they had more control. It’s interesting how people use technology and feel like they are, or are not, in control of it.

There’s a problem with any simple measure of novel technology, which is that people in general tend to respond positively toward something new, especially if they know they are talking to the person who designed and built it. It’s hard to ask someone “Did you like X?” when X is a new experience, like wearing a glove and picking up objects to hear a story. Of course, they’re going to say “yes” because they don’t have much to compare it to and because it is a fun thing to do. But there are innumerable design decisions that go into the whole experience, and it’s hard to disentangle them to see where a different choice might have led to a better experience. That’s why I think richer, more qualitative data is important to the field. It gets you beyond “I liked it, I thought it was easy to use, etc.,” and you see what aspects of the experience people are really responding to, or what was actually frustrating them but which they didn’t mention in the yes/no survey questions.

As well as being a PhD candidate, you teach interaction design at the university level. What trends are you seeing in design and technology education?

Karen Tanenbaum: I’ve taught interaction design at an art and design school and within a research university, and they are very different experiences. The art and design students were much more wary of the technology, but they had great intuition on how to use it to express their points of view. The students at the big university were more naturally technology-seeking, but they had to be pushed to really explore what it meant to say something with the technology. You really want the blend of both of those things: the technological expertise and the desire and ability to express something via technology rather than simply use it. I teach Processing to as many people as I can — basic coding is an incredibly beneficial skill for people in all fields to learn. There are tools to help simplify and automate a lot of the routines of everyone’s work if you know how to write some basic code or search string parameters.

The other side of the coin, which I’ve had less opportunity to teach directly, is developing a critical stance toward technology. Programming and technical skills are really important, but so are critical thinking and reflective analysis. I don’t believe technology is a neutral force; it is embedded and intertwined with a host of other cultural and societal forces, and we have both the ability and mandate to try to shape technical systems that are socially and ethically responsible. It’s hard to teach both detailed technical expertise and deep critical thinking at the same time, and it seems that most schools end up focusing on one to the detriment of the other.

How is technology changing the experience of art and reading?

Karen Tanenbaum: Despite making a wearable device called the Reading Glove, most of my reading processes are stuck firmly in the last century. The power of technology as applied to art and reading is the connectivity that it can bring about. You can connect to what other people think about the work or you can see related pieces that might lead you to new discoveries. The interesting thing would be to bring that connectivity to the physical books, not to make the books themselves digital.

What other projects are you working on?

Karen Tanenbaum: As I finish the dissertation, I’m also doing a year-long internship at <a
href=”http://techresearch.intel.com/”>Intel Lab’s Interaction and Experience Research Group, which is providing me with a fantastic opportunity to pursue some of the research work I’ve done since the Reading Glove.

My first project at Intel was to coordinate an exhibition of design fiction work called “Powered by Fiction,” which ran alongside Emerge, a conference at Arizona State University on designing the future. We explored how fiction inspires the creation of physical, tangible props, costumes, and artifacts. One of the characters in the show “Captain Chronomek” was developed by me, my husband, and a colleague. The character is a time-traveling, Steampunk-flavored superhero.

The other related project that I’ve got going is an academic look at the subculture of <a
href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steampunk”>Steampunk, picking apart what’s driving its increased popularity. I’m a co-author on a paper on Steampunk at <a
href=”http://chi2012.acm.org/”>CHI this year. That paper looks at some of the implications of the Steampunk movement: the way it re-imagines the Industrial Revolution, the historical story of technology development, and the drive toward customization and artisan craftsmanship in technology.

And finally, I am now working on Intel’s presence at Maker Faire. I had a booth at the Vancouver Mini Maker Faire this year with my husband to represent our fledging production company, <a
href=”http://tf.thegeekmovement.com/wp/”>Tanenbaum Fabrications. We’re putting together a joint booth with some other folks at the Bay Area Maker Faire this year called Steampunk Academy. As with the Steampunk work, there’s something really interesting going on with the democratization of technology design and production that is represented in the Maker movement.

I’m hoping to spend time in the next year working more with the <a
href=”http://arduino.cc/en/Main/ArduinoBoardLilyPad”>LilyPad
Arduino and other e-textile and soft circuitry components since I think that’s a really exciting area for open source, tinker-y innovation.

Who inspires you? Whose work do you follow?

Karen Tanenbaum: I’m most inspired by the people doing the kind of work I was talking about above in the question about education: critical thinking on technology and the fusing of philosophy with technology design practice. Material like Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores’ classic and incisive critique of artificial intelligence work in the mid ’80s, and Paul Dourish’s work merging Heideggerian philosophy with tangible computing and his collaboration with Genevieve Bell on science fiction and ubiquitous computing. I’m also influenced by all of Daniel Fallman’s papers on what interaction design and design research is or could be. I’m also really enamored with some of the more recent work being done in merging “craft” and “design”: Leah Buechely’s Lilypad Arduino and High-Low Tech Lab at MIT, Daniela Rosner’s work applying craft knowledge from antiquarian book restoration and knitting to technology design, and Hannah Perner-Wilson’s amazing and beautiful textile sensors.

Watch a demonstration of the Reading Glove:

This interview was edited and condensed. Photos: Team Tanenbaum, on Flickr.

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I spoke with Denise recently about her experiences writing her book, how that led her to new ways of thinking, how she got started the web design, and other projects.

You’re known for your web design work. What motivated you to explore the more non-technical topics of creative inspiration?

Denise R. Jacobs: During the writing process “The CSS Detective Guide” I had a huge epiphany about myself and my ideas of creativity. I had to do battle on a daily basis with my inner critic and figure out ways to silence it, so that I could just get the work done.

In an industry where people are constantly producing wonderful things, it’s really hard not to compare yourself to others. In terms of the creativity and the inspiration, it’s easy to have panicky moments when you feel as though you can’t come up with another idea, a new design, more content. I wanted to formulate ways to access creativity and channel that amazing feeling that you can take on the world, both for myself to help other people. So I wrote an article as a way to solidify my own techniques and to help anybody else who may need to silence a mean voice in their head as well.

Creativity isn’t always associated with the technical community. Why is that?

Denise R. Jacobs: It’s because there’s such a limited definition of creativity in our culture. People treat artists as if they’re off in their own world or put them on a pedestal. But it’s a misconception that technical people aren’t creative. Developers and coders and database architects are extremely creative, just as scientists are. They have to come up with solutions and code that have never been written before. If that’s not creativity, I don’t know what is.

I’m reading “A Whole New Mind” by Daniel H. Pink, which explores how right-brain is the new wave. We’re entering a new conceptual, high-touch era whereas before we were in a very analytical era. Our industry, the technical industry, is actually a perfect in-between point of left brain and right brain. You have to have both, a whole-brain approach, to be successful in our industry.

What steps can people take to bring creativity into their professional and personal lives?

Denise R. Jacobs: One of my favorite techniques for being creative, and productive in general, is to give yourself permission to be as horrible at something as you possibly can, to even mess it up. That permission actually lowers inhibition filters and allows you to take chances that you would normally not take. Often that ends up making it good because you’re not as invested in it and therefore not as self-conscious about the process.

Another important technique is to set aside time where your brain is resting, where you’re not actually trying to produce something. Give it space to be able to make connections that it wouldn’t necessarily have made before. Insights come when you’re taking a walk, sitting on the beach or the park bench, playing with your dog. Because your brain is relaxing, it can go places that it doesn’t usually go when you’re concentrating or you’re thinking hard.

In this industry, there’s a subculture that is always on — on the computer, on social networks, connecting with people. There is never a time to not be on. When you’re at dinner with a friend, you’re checking in on Foursquare. You’re tweeting. You’re taking a picture to upload to your Facebook profile. Texting friends. To just be off is huge and can make all of the difference in the world.

With social media and other tools for people to come together, both in real life and virtually, what do you think about the state of communities today?

Denise R. Jacobs: I could be biased, but one thing I do see is that despite all of our virtual connections, in real life, it’s kind of awkward. People are so used to communicating with each other digitally, texting for instance, that they’re starting to lose the capacity to have genuine in-person connections to some degree. People aren’t engaging with each other. Yet they try to depict it as such to keep themselves entertained.

A trend I’d like to see is for communities and people who make connections virtually to solidify that with an in-person connection. And if you make an in-person connection, then further solidify that with a virtual connection. Let there be a constant ebb and flow, a circuit going back and forth between both real life and virtual connections so that you can’t really rely completely on either one. That’s why we have these tools — we crave connection. We don’t really have enough of it, but we can’t depend solely on tools to create all of the connection that we need and vice versa.

What trends and people are you following?

Denise R. Jacobs: Location and self-publishing are trends I watch popping up all over the place. There are so many things going on that it’s kind of overwhelming. I rely on serendipity and I focus more on concepts, ideas, and people because they are what underlie the trends. I am inspired by unapologetic creativity and unapologetic cleverness. I admire the younger people coming into the industry who are developing and innovating like crazy.

I admire the work Jane McGonigal is doing, her “Reality Is Broken” book and her whole gaming productivity movement. She takes ownership for being a woman in an industry where that’s not typical and doesn’t tone herself down at all. She’s very feminine and a badass, has a PhD and awesome ideas and that’s just the way it is with her.

I also admire Kathy Sierra because she’s been around for a while and she’s also an incredibly intelligent and clever person, a great speaker, and also someone with a lot of really wonderful ideas.

Tell us about your Rawk the Web project.

Denise R. Jacobs: There are a lot of diverse experts in the tech industry, women and people of color, but they’re not very visible in terms of speaking at conferences or writing articles or books or whatever. It’s not that conferences or publishers don’t want a more diverse lineup, but often they just don’t know who to get or how to go about it.

I was at a conference last year and the organizer asked me to fill in for a speaker who had to cancel. Afterwards, I ended up talking to a woman who really wanted to become a speaker but didn’t know where to start. This was a perfect example of what people are probably saying to themselves. “I don’t know enough. How do I get started? It seems really imposing. There’s no room for anybody new.”

I started Rawk the Web to give people actual information and have experts share their story about how they got started so that other people can see that they can do it, too. I also want to provide resources to people who may be inclined to give women and people of color more visibility, a network of people they can talk to and get inspiration from to take that first step. This is a really good time for it because people see me at conferences and notice I’m often the only brown person there — they’re very conscious of it and glad to see me on stage. I’m hoping to launch it in June and that there will eventually be a Rawk the Web Conference. I know I’m not the only person working on this issue, but I’d like it to be more of a concentrated effort.

How did you get started with CSS and what do you see in its near future?

Denise R. Jacobs: Back in late 1996, nobody was updating the website at the place I was working so I volunteered to take care of it. During that process, I taught myself HTML — it was actually before CSS had really been widely embraced. Over the course of the next few years, I worked in localization for a Microsoft product, then I was a web group product manager at another software company, then later an instructor at Seattle Central Community College in their web design and development programs. Around 2002, web standards started becoming more popular. It was so much better and so much easier. One file to control the whole website — brilliant! It was an amazing, exciting time, to see the changing of the guard, what the web was moving from and what it was moving toward.

I couldn’t call myself a web design instructor in good conscience without knowing CSS and I couldn’t send students out into the world with outdated and inefficient skills. So I keep up with the trends, particularly by reading articles on A List Apart, and blogs by Dave Shea, Andy Budd and Doug Bowman.

As for the future of CSS, there’s going to be a lot more reliance and trust of browsers. Browser vendors know what an important role they play and that browser wars don’t do much good. More browser companies are working together with the W3C to establish and embrace standards.

Because of that, changes are happening faster. There’s a big push for people to get up to speed with current best practices and develop new ones. For things like page layouts and CSS3, there are some really neat properties that are going to change the way people think about their approach to web layouts and the craft of building websites. It’s going to be interesting to see how long those properties take to be adopted and what people come up with for them.

This interview was edited and condensed.

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• Would I attend my own conference?
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During her PhD studies, Alyona Medelyan (@zelandiya) developed Maui, an open source tool that performs as well as professional librarians in identifying main topics in documents. Medelyan now leads the research and development of API-based products at Pingar.

Pingar senior software researcher Anna Divoli (@annadivoli) studied sentence extraction for semi-automatic annotation of biological databases. Her current research focuses on developing methodologies for acquiring knowledge from textual data.

“Big data is important in many diverse areas, such as science, social media, and enterprise,” observes Divoli. “Our big data niche is analysis of unstructured text.” In the interview below, Medelyan and Divoli describe their work and what they see on the horizon for unstructured data analysis.

How did you get started in big data?

Anna Divoli: I began working with big data as it relates to science during my PhD. I worked with bioinformaticians who mined proteomics data. My research was on mining information from the biomedical literature that could serve as annotation in a database of protein families.

Alyona Medelyan: Like Anna, I mainly focus on unstructured data and how it can be managed using clever algorithms. During my PhD in natural language processing and data mining, I started applying such algorithms to large datasets to investigate how time-consuming data analysis and processing tasks can be automated.

What projects are you working on now?

Alyona Medelyan: For the past two years at Pingar, I’ve been developing solutions for enterprise customers who accumulate unstructured data and want to search, analyze, and explore this data efficiently. We develop entity extraction, text summarization, and other text analytics solutions to help scrub and interpret unstructured data in an organization.

Anna Divoli: We’re focusing on several verticals that struggle with too much textual data, such as bioscience, legal, and government. We also strive to develop language-independent solutions.

Strata 2012 — The 2012 Strata Conference, being held Feb. 28-March 1 in Santa Clara, Calif., will offer three full days of hands-on data training and information-rich sessions. Strata brings together the people, tools, and technologies you need to make data work.

Save 20% on registration with the code RADAR20

What are the trends and challenges you’re seeing in the big data space?

Anna Divoli: There are plenty of trends that span various aspects of big data, such as making the data accessible from mobile devices, cloud solutions, addressing security and privacy issues, and analyzing social data.

One trend that is pertinent to us is the increasing popularity of APIs. Plenty of APIs exist that give access to large datasets, but there also powerful APIs that manage big data efficiently, such as text analytics, entity extraction, and data mining APIs.

Alyona Medelyan: The great thing about APIs is that they can be integrated into existing applications used inside an organization.

With regard to the challenges, enterprise data is very messy, inconsistent, and spread out across multiple internal systems and applications. APIs like the ones we’re working on can bring consistency and structure to a company’s legacy data.

The presentation you’ll be giving at the Strata Conference will focus on practical applications of mining unstructured data. Why is this an important topic to address?

Anna Divoli: Every single organization in every vertical deals with unstructured data. Tons of text is produced daily — emails, reports, proposals, patents, literature, etc. This data needs to be mined to allow fast searching, easy processing, and quick decision making.

Alyona Medelyan: Big data often stands for structured data that is collected into a well-defined database — who bought which book in an online bookstore, for example. Such databases are relatively easy to mine because they have a consistent form. At the same time, there is plenty of unstructured data that is just as valuable, but it’s extremely difficult to analyze it because it lacks structure. In our presentation, we will show how to detect structure using APIs, natural language processing and text mining, and demonstrate how this creates immediate value for business users.

Are there important new tools or projects on the horizon for big data?

Alyona Medelyan: Text analytics tools are very hot right now, and they improve daily as scientists come up with new ways of making algorithms understand written text more accurately. It is amazing that an algorithm can detect names of people, organizations, and locations within seconds simply by analyzing the context in which words are used. The trend for such tools is to move toward recognition of further useful entities, such as product names, brands, events, and skills.

Anna Divoli: Also, entity relation extraction is an important trend. A relation that consistently connects two entities in many documents is important information in science and enterprise alike. Entity relation extraction helps detect new knowledge in big data.

Other trends include detecting sentiment in social data, integrating multiple languages, and applying text analytics to audio and video transcripts. The number of videos grows at a constant rate, and transcripts are even more unstructured than written text because there is no punctuation. That’s another exciting area on the horizon!

Who do you follow in the big data community?

Alyona Medelyan: We tend to follow researchers in areas that are used for dealing with big data, such as natural language processing, visualization, user experience, human computer information retrieval, as well as the semantic web. Two of them are also speaking at Strata this year: Daniel Tunkelang and Marti Hearst.

This interview was edited and condensed.

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What inspired you to move into the venture capital (VC) space?

Joanne Wilson: I call myself an angel rather than a VC because I’m doing this by myself. And I am a woman doing this by myself in this space, which I know is not the norm.

I’ve been involved in startup businesses throughout my whole life, and I had gotten off the train for a while. Being home with my kids, I started blogging in order to stay connected to the Internet industry and not lose my credibility. That was eight years ago.

I was closely watching all of the new companies in the space we began to call Web 2.0. One of them was Curbed, and I heard they were looking for funding. I was at a point in my life where I realized I was ready to do something, and I felt like I could add value there. So, I called Curbed founder Lockhart Steele and said I’d be very interested in funding his company. After that, the cat was out of the bag. Everyone came running in the door.

In the beginning, I was thinking of funding one, maybe two startups. But, as my husband [VC Fred Wilson] says, “Your problem is that you wouldn’t want one lemonade stand; you’d want 1,000 of them.”

What’s the difference between an angel and a venture capitalist?

Joanne Wilson: There are three rounds as a company begins. The first is seed, where you have a wonderful idea and need to get things rolling. For that, you go to your family and friends. Then, as the idea gains traction — you build a website, a community, and realize you could really grow it — that’s when angels like me come in. I invest in the round after seed, helping it get to the third round.

VCs are in the business of growing businesses. They bring in seasoned players with a different kind of skill set. A VC will be with a company through many iterations of investments. Angels, on the other hand, usually leave the space once the VCs get in. Angels become more of a friend and a consiglieri to the entrepreneur at that point.

Is an angel someone who gives as much advice as money?

Joanne Wilson: No. I’m not normal in that respect. I get really involved in these businesses. It’s not like I call them, but if they want to call me every day, I am happy to answer any questions. If I don’t know the answer, I’ll find it out for them. I open up my Rolodex and think about the big picture. I’m pretty accessible, and I want them to reach out to me.

You called yourself a “chick magnet” at Web 2.0 Expo. Do you think your accessibility is one of the main reasons why women founders seek you out? How do you get “found”?

Joanne Wilson (left) judging the Startup Showcase at Web 2.0 Expo NY 2011.

Joanne Wilson: One of the topics that I always come back to in my blog has to do with being a woman and how you can do it all, just not all at the same time, and the frustrations of balancing life and family. I think that topic resonates with a lot of women out there. I also have put the majority of my investments into women-led companies. I’m a big believer, but this whole nonsensical thing of not enough women in tech, not enough women CEOs, not enough women on the board — guess what? If we invest in women entrepreneurs, we’d change the game because they’re all CEOs. It’s pretty easy to do.

I also put on a conference called the Women’s Entrepreneur Festival with Nancy Hechinger, a professor at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. Ten businesses were started at that conference, and many connections were made. This year, we’ll have about six panels, five people on each panel and a moderator for each panel, highlighting “the makers” — community makers, taste makers, art makers. What’s fascinating is that only one man has signed up to come.

Do you have any advice for angels or VCs looking to invest in women-driven startups?

Joanne Wilson: It’s no different than the advice I give to kids who graduate and want to work in a startup or be an entrepreneur. There are meetups all over the city every single night. Eventually, you meet people and hear what’s going on. It’s a very open, embracing industry. There’s a lot out there and there are a lot of bloggers writing about what’s going on and about new businesses. If you can’t find women-led businesses, then you’re not reading the right things and you’re not looking in the right spots.

I would love to see more people who have created wealth for themselves and their families take a chunk of their change and invest in women-led companies. It would be better for the economy. And, again, better for women. By the way, it’s not always about women — companies should be mixed. Women bring something to the table and so do men. It’s about the best ideas.

Any advice for new founders?

Joanne Wilson: For first-time entrepreneurs moving forward and going up for more money, remember to use the people you have. Engage them in your business.

Second, consider how big you want to be. You don’t have to be a $1 billion business. For instance, Dave McClure is doing a really cool thing: funding 500 new startups. He’s giving a lot of people an opportunity to be entrepreneurs, but they won’t all be $1 billion market cap companies. You could have a nice $4-million-a-year lifestyle business in the local community, something you love to do every day. That is an amazing thing. You’re making enough money to live your life and do good at the same time. Create economies, hire people, and maybe have a family. That’s okay. You’ve got to think big picture, and you’ve got to think reality.

What are some of the notable companies you’re involved with?

Joanne Wilson: There’s a void in the market for businesses in the $50-$60 million range, where investors exit at the second round. These are not niche businesses — $50 million is significant. But, they’re not $1 billion market caps. Many of the businesses that I’m involved in, women-led businesses, are at that level and going out for their VC round, which indicates that they’re successful.

One of the biggest successes is Daily Worth, Amanda Steinberg’s company. She has created tremendous traction and sells advertising at lightning speed, to the point that we don’t have any inventory. She’s done an amazing job. If she pivoted in one direction, she could be a huge, huge business.

I’m also in Catchafire. Founder Rachael Chong is about to launch a product that I think is going to change her business. That could be a massive business, surpassing $100 million.

I also just invested in littleBits. We have yet to see where that goes, but Ayah Bdeir has created a really interesting product. She was just acknowledged as a TED2012 Fellow.

Have social media or other technologies changed the way you make investment decisions?

Joanne Wilson: No. I invest in the entrepreneur, and then the business. I have to love what they’re doing. Think about it like a house: when you buy a house, you can renovate it, but you can never change the location.

What do you think of some of the recent studies pointing to women-led startups tending to be more successful?

Joanne Wilson: Women say “we.” Men say “I.” That’s both a positive and a hindrance. Women say, “What’s my role here? How is this going to work for all of us? Am I doing as well as I think I should be doing?” Men don’t think that way. If you ask five men and five women to be mentors, men say “Yeah, sure.” Women say, “What’s expected of me? How many hours do I have to put into it? Does this make sense for me?” It’s different. Women run families.

Do you think the different vocabulary and thought process is part of what’s hindering women founders from getting investments from mostly or all-male angels and VCs?

Joanne Wilson: No, I don’t. I’m sure people would smack me for this, but going to back to the void in the marketplace for $50-$60 million businesses, I think that many VCs invest only in businesses that they hope are life changing — the $1 billion market cap.

If you look at many women-led businesses, they tend to invest in things that fill needs in their lives. The women who started ZipCar probably figured it would be great to walk outside and have a car waiting. The Apgar test and Scotchgard — these were invented by women. Fire escapes, Liquid Paper, windshield wipers, life rafts, cleaning tools for the home — all created by women. They create what they need, which, incidentally, adds up to a much bigger economy.

I would rather invest in 100 startups that will become $50 million companies and will change economies, that will change communities, that will change families. The long-tail of the Internet revolution is that there are no longer companies with one president, seven vice presidents, and then all of these different levels of people underneath them. It’s over.

Is the economy changing investment trends?

Joanne Wilson: The greatest thing about our country is that the people see what’s happening before the government. There’s a wave of entrepreneurialism, of returning to our communities — whether it’s the local grocery store or butcher, customers are having conversations with their local shopkeepers. There’s something really powerful about that. It was something we had right a long time ago, and there’s nothing wrong with going back to that model.

Who inspires you?

Joanne Wilson: Hillary Clinton rocks. What she has done, from being the wife of the president to where she sits now — I think she’s an amazing, incredibly inspirational human being. My husband inspires me. He’s fantastic at what he does. We’ve been partners since we were 19 years old, and we’ve created everything together.

In general, I’m pretty inspired by the entrepreneurs that I meet every single day. I feel incredibly lucky that I get to meet people whose synapses are going so fast I can barely keep up, who think about ways to change the way we live and to change the economy that we’re in now, who think about the world at large and are figuring out how to make money, and who want to get things done quickly and efficiently. To have those conversations every day is pretty damn inspiring.

This interview was edited and condensed. Photo by Pinar Ozger.

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The chance to hear about technology innovation in Africa from a personal perspective is rare, so I asked Tyitapeka to share her thoughts on the Angolan tech scene.

Give us the 10,000-foot view of the technology industry in Angola.

Nyanga Tyitapeka: Today, Angola is certainly not a bountiful country when it comes to tech goods and services. The industry is only just starting here — Angola is one of the last frontiers for big tech giants.

However, the industry is expanding at a fast pace, pervading societal interactions and becoming a source for change in the lives of many Angolans in a significant way. It will be extremely difficult for Angola to stay immune to the wave of technological development that has hit the rest of world in the last decade or so. There’s a concerted effort by the government to lay down the regulatory foundations, and it’s also investing in infrastructure that will allow for faster development. Fiber optic cables, for instance, are being installed, and we expect to have a telecom satellite by 2013.

Large tech companies have, in the past, adopted a wait-and-see approach toward the Angolan market, either opting to not come or to use middle-men; this scenario is definitely changing. Companies like Google, which held a conference in Luanda during the first week of November, have recognized that this moment is propitious for serious investment.

It’s not surprising that telecommunications has benefited the most from tech innovations. For decades, civil conflict was a de facto bottleneck in the flow of information. Once peace came and the right conditions were set, it was as if a can of soda had burst open. Angolan telecommunication companies, with the help of Siemens and Portugal Telecom, along with business leaders (both men and women) who turned to Brazil, Dubai, the U.S., the UK, Portugal, and China as suppliers of mobile phones and computers, all moved fast to respond to the demand of the market for telecommunication goods and services. The number of newly installed landlines dwindled, pay phones never took off, desktops are mostly confined to the office setting — yet communication soared.

What are the biggest challenges facing Angola today?

Nyanga Tyitapeka: Low levels of literacy, in general. There is not enough brain power devoted to the tech industry and, consequently, there is little to no production capacity. Development issues are the biggest problems for Angola and for a significant number of countries on this continent. There are other challenges, but those are minor in the face of basic needs. Literacy is obviously a prerequisite to achieving reasonable tech-literacy.

Where are the biggest opportunities?

Nyanga Tyitapeka: Like in many other African countries, Angola will soon experience vertiginous growth in mobile tech applications. Mobile platforms and the introduction of GSM, coupled with some interesting payment options, have allowed a war-torn country to bypass huge infrastructure investments. Here, both individuals and businesses rely heavily on USB modems to browse the Internet and on cell phones to stay in touch. An Angolan with a bank account can conveniently check her account balance by sending an SMS, bypassing traffic and long queues at the bank.

Some predict that in the next few years, services like buying a movie ticket, downloading an MP3 file, or using a vending machine in Africa will not require cash nor a credit/debit card, just a cell phone. Cell phones as wallets work well because while an illiterate person may not know how to read and write, she can count and use numbers. Therefore, she can learn how to send an SMS, so long as the message is a number. The possibilities are endless — think about it. When a business can receive mobile payments from a customer, everybody wins: the business’s bank, the customer’s bank, the telephone services provider, the business, and the client.

What is fascinating about Angola and sub-Saharan countries in general is that they compensate for weak infrastructure and overcome major obstacles by embracing solutions that are nearly grid-free and simple to use.

There’s also plenty of room for growth for some device makers who want to establish a presence in the region. Angola, in particular, imports virtually all of the tech devices it uses. Creating regional industrial subsidiaries would greatly cut down the price of imported devices, which sell well here, in spite of the fact that they are extremely expensive due to low supply.

You founded your own company recently — how would you characterize the startup environment in Angola?

Nyanga Tyitapeka: The startup environment is heavily skewed toward restaurants, beauty parlors, corner stores, and small fashion boutiques. Angolans are known in the international business community as entrepreneurial; however, the success rate of startups is still very low. Starting up a business is relatively easy and cheap. I did it in one month’s time. However, maintaining it is a whole different game. Some 60% of businesses fail within the first year. You want to start out as lean as possible, say by running a home office by yourself. But working from home is often looked down upon, and working alone can be extremely hard — running administrative errands around town with heavy traffic and without the support of an assistant is a nightmare here.

More troubling for the startup environment than dodging heavy traffic, avoiding high rents, and overcoming cultural barriers is the small pool of enthusiastic people who are OK forfeiting a salary in order to join a startup.

Are you working on any new projects?

Nyanga Tyitapeka: I am currently building Infograficus. It’s a hobby platform and a place for Angolans who want to start using the data I’ve been tracking to make their lives a little easier.

I’ve started playing with the data I’ve collected to get some visuals, mostly mapping how prices of the same product vary in different areas of the city. I am also interested in using the information to visualize the economic geography of street vending and to understand the civil response capacity to an emergency situation. It is one way I can help people who face the same problems I face on a daily basis.

Is big data having an impact on the work you do? Where else are you seeing its influence?

Nyanga Tyitapeka: I am not aware of how companies and governmental agencies are harnessing the power of big data, but it is out there, especially in the energy, financial, telecommunications, retail, travel, and public and health sectors. The truth is that Angola is at a stage of the evolutionary process where data itself is a product. Companies and government institutions are, knowingly or not, collecting loads and loads of data.

Data is a natural resource that can assume many forms — from cash transactions to video footage in a store. I call it a natural resource because it is a byproduct generated almost automatically in every business transaction. My hope is that aside from just storing data and running the risk of losing it, economic agents will start looking for companies like mine to figure out what to do with data they already have: how to get better data, how to analyze the data by asking the right questions, and how to turn data into actionable information and a competitive advantage.

This interview was edited and condensed.

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