Technology & Litigation

Your friendly neighborhood technology legal counsel here:  I recently saw an article over at PC World that security firm AVG recently did a study of the safest countries in which to surf the Internet.  Seven of the top ten are in Africa, with Sierra Leone rated the safest.  The study is based on incidence of attack by a compiled list of virus and malware attacks.  The study found that Sierra Leone's average incident rate was one attack in every 692 surfers.  Niger also fared well with 1 in 442 rate. 

Now, I'm not going to get into the details of the survey, and there are obvious flaws.  Particularly since you have a significantly lower number of users logging-on in Africa when compared to the U.S. or Europe.  However, the results do bode well for that continent.  Result like these may well attract private equity firms who are interested in doing more in the cloud or with SaaS. 

Way back in January, 2009, David Castor wrote a good post entitled "Now is the Time to Invest in Africa" (blog.alerdingcastor.com/blog/business/0/0/now-is-the-time-to-invest-in-africa).  I can only imagine that findings like the ones from AVG are only going to continue to continue to fuel the investment potential there.

For those interested, the worst places to surf are Turkey, Russia, and Armenia.  The U.S. ranked ninth.