The use of mobile internet in Kenya rose by 615.4% between November 2008 and November 2009, quite a heavy increase compared to other countries placed top 10 by  State of the Mobile Web, November 2009 a report by Opera, the most popular mobile browser currently. Got me thinking, Ghana is the biggest riser in this list, with over 4000% increase, followed by Kenya, the number of local mobile websites is ashamedly low and the increase within the said period of local mobile websites (or visits to them) is barely unnoticeable.

While the use of mobile internet is rising, content is lacking and this is where I say the African developers are sleeping on the job. We have most of the African traffic headed to Google, Facebook, Youtube, Yahoo and other major American sites, while the local websites remain unnoticed. Its funny that on that list, Safaricom’s wapsite is not even on the top 10 of the Kenyan traffic while its the start page on default browsers on mobile phones if you are using their connection.

I have mentioned before that corporates need to brace up to these stats and start giving mobile web the place it deserves. Nation Media is one of the most visited website in Kenya on the web but its also not appearing on the list because their site is not mobile friendly and they do not have a wap version – Standard group appears at number 10 because they actually have a mobile news site.

For the next few years, the best traffic you will get on the African web is mobile and this is a challenge to developers to provide mobile content for Africa and you will create traffic like never before.

Facebook is the biggest social network on the internet today. With over 300 million users worldwide and at least 150 million logins each day, nothing comes close. Based on statistics found on their Press Releases, Facebook’s fastest growing demographic  is those 35 years old and above, making it the best place to reach people who you can easily convert to customers for your business. People know that you can use Facebook for traffic generation to your website but very few people have the correct means to do that.  You have a business running online and the more people you can get to view your website the more customers you can get.

Here are a few tips I have learned from experience and research throughout the time I have been on Facebook as just a social platform or as a place for traffic generation. There are a few ways you can advertise for free on using Facebook, here is a few ways:

1. Status Updates on Your Profile:
Whenever you update your status message on Facebook, your friends (in this case its the people you have added as friends on Facebook) can see it when they log in on the homepage stream. This may not have an impact as so big because you can only reach the number of friends you have and most likely only half of them will get to see your update because say for instance, I have 700 friends, if I log in, I can only see about 40 updates on my homepage. With 700 friends, there is a good chance that more than 40 of them will have an update each hour meaning unless am on Facebook the whole time, I will miss most of the updates. Again, consistent advertising on Facebook Status makes people loose interest because that is not what the Status update is meant for.

2. Facebook Groups
Facebook groups have been over used as a means of advertising by a lot of people although in my view, its not very effective. Groups allow administrators to send messages to uses directly into their inbox, users can reply to everyone and threads can continue endlessly. There are also discussions that are allowed on the groups page and there is a wall that user can post into.  Group advertising may not be very effective as only members interested in the groups can go to the groups homepage. A lot of people join groups that they never return to just because they were invited by a friend or the group had a catchy title.

3. Facebook Notes
Facebook allows you to write articles and post them on your profile, allowing you to tag friends which means your friends and their friends can view, comment and share the notes. This to me is a great way of spreading word on new things and it makes the network larger. Creatively written notes can really work to help you market your product or website.

4. Facebook Events
When you create a Facebook event, you can invite your friends and their friends can invite their friends. This means your event gets multi-level advertising from the list of your friends. This works but it takes a huge interest in the list of people to start spreading word about your event.

5. Facebook Pages
Ask me, I will tell you that this is the most effective tool on Facebook. When you create a page for your business or product, it allows members to become fans/supporters. Facebook pages allow unlimited number of fans and this means unlike friendships which are limited to 5000, you can keep close contact with your fans. The page now has a profile of its own with picture galleries, status updates, wall and almost all the features of the normal profile page. This means that if you have 30,000 fans and you update your status, the message is shown on your fan’s homepage. This gets a huge reaction and it translates to proper traffic. The fact that it allows you to stream updates into the fan’s inbox is an added advantage, you can send messages to all your fans as updates. It also allows members to post on your wall and you can discuss things just on the wall which is the most common way of communication on facebook.

6. Facebook Paid Ads
Facebook pay-per-click ads work more like Google Adwords although they are more specific on demographics. You can choose to target people aged 30-35 from Nairobi, specific to gender and interests. This makes it a huge value for money. Basically if you have money to spend on advertising, my advice is you spend it on Facebook.

In conclusion, Facebook can be a great source of traffic for your website or business, if you were to take advantage of all of the above factors, you will achieve great results. My advice before you pay for a Facebook ad, create a fan page first and advertise the page instead of advertising your external website directly. Below are a few reasons why I think this is more effective than direct advertising:

1. Facebook Pages are more like permanent advertisements because you keep your fans from the moment they join.
2. Its cheaper to advertise.
3. When you create a new fan, you create a connection that will allow you to be able to continuously communicate with your fans while if you advertise your website directly, one may click and if at the moment they are not interested, they will never remember the website to go back to it.
4. When a member becomes a fan of your page, all their friends can see it as part of the wall streams and that means that they can also get into it out of curiosity or interest.

The First Android TV - Scandinavia

Google last month announced a plan to enter the television market by creating the first internet TV developed in conjunction with Sony and Intel. The TV would be a revolution in the sitting room with access to all Google Apps, Youtube, Twitter and RSS feeds of your choice, powered by the Android OS. Ahead of any official launches by Google, a Swedish company has announced the launch of the first Android TV, the Scandinavia.

People of Lava, the manufacturers of this new TV made announcements of  the launch of the world’s first fully internet enabled TV.

The Scandinavia Android TV – which will first be released in a 42” version, followed by 47” and 55” – is built without compromises. It features top-of-the-line components and is carefully put together by hand to ensure the kind of quality that customers expect from a People of Lava Full- HD LED TV set. Its Android platform and internet capabilities provide a wide range of functionalities, including:

• Out of the box Android TV applications such as: – YouTube, Google Maps ,Weather, Time, Calendar, Internet Browser
• Downloadable Apps, both free and from coming App-store: – Facebook, Twitter, Email and more
• Internet connection
• USB connection

The remote control comes with a QWERTY mini keyboard which helps in browsing the internet and working out this smart TV.

While everyone took a ride of the free lift that was and still is Makmende in the the last 2 or so weeks in the Kenyan social media, it has helped make Makmende a brand that unofficially has become a large topic to a point of getting airplay on local FM stations. Just-a-band, the group behind the Makmende comeback has gone ahead to copyright “Makmende”. In a statement released on their official website, they say:

“We (Just A Band) have obtained the sole rights to the Makmende character likenesses (the characters being Makmende, Britannia Zimeisha, First Bodi, Big-G, Wrong Number, The Askyua Matha Black Militants, Black Sahara, Godfrey and the Laydayz, Abscondita and Taste of Daynjah), “Nyoyo na Uji Films”, “Deluxe Nyeuthi”, “Finger of Nebula”, the “Makmende Amerudi” lettering and images thereof.”

They have further denounced websites that have got massive traffic over the last two weeks riding on the Makmende hype, Makmende.com and Makmende.net although the administrators of the websites had already said on the said sites that they are not official Makmende channels.

The viral blast that is Makmende was a surprise even to the owners and hence the lack of readiness in brand capture. Now they have gone ahead and taken the .ke domain Makmende.co.ke and only placed a landing page with links to their official social media channels. This shows how ignorant people can get of the power of social media. The opportunity that the character Kelvin ‘K1′ Maina and the entire Makmende Amerudi crew have to make it big on social media is about to fade out and they only come out later when the real business opportunists have taken full advantage of this wave and all they can do is a landing page.

Makmende went as far as getting attention of Kenya’s biggest bloggers, it got on the Nation Newspaper and as of today, Makmende.com has an Alexa Ranking of 388,554 worldwide and 147 in Kenya – a position most websites will never see in their entire life.

Its time people learned from this. Take advantage of the social media wave.

Searching for fonts can be one tiring process especially when you have to download each file in a zip and extract it then install. Before you get the number of fonts you need you will have faced a million problems. Here is a freebie for anyone looking for free graffiti fonts to enhance your designs.

These are a collection I have done over time and they include fonts from different sources including graffitifonts.com.

Click here to download the free pack of fonts.

Enjoy and leave a comment here. A link would also help someone else looking for graffiti fonts.

Just two days after they entered Makmende into Wikipedia, the great story that is Makmende decided to unplug power cables at the Wikipedia data center. I hear he is sitting on the live wire with a bomb ticking next to him and as we talk, Jack Bauer is trying to negotiate with this great terrorist Mr. Makmende who does not like to be referred to as Mister since he thinks that male is the weaker sex and female a little more weaker.

Talking to Dr. Charm on his Safaricom line from the data center, Makmende said that he was very offended that Wikipedia had allowed gutter to be published about him on the site. He said that no one really knows him so no one could write anything sensible about him. I have tried to offer him toothpaste which he uses to clear his mind off small things as those but he says he is looking for Cleartone cream and Treetop, the old Kenyan juice and without those, he will not leave. His other demand is genuine fish from Kisumu and cooked by our superstar striker one Oliech’s mother.

He claims that the other day he went to his usual fish joint near Yaya center and got really offended when he found some guys refering to him as Makmande. He says that he is here to take over the internet, starting with Wikipedia. Next he is eyeing twitter because everyone has their own version of who he is.

On the other hand, he has given me an SSL certificate which I have printed and framed to verify that am the official press for Makmende. He will start paying me a salary the moment they complete printing dollar bills bearing his portrait with his pet, a 3 legged gorilla which he got from Uganda before he bought Migingo Island.

He has just flashed me on Skype and I know this means bad news so let me stop before he gets angry and pulls down this blog. Long live Makmende.

Before I talk of hindrances, I have to admit that am in love with where Kenya is and where its headed with the ICT craze and the trends in technology acceptance in our corporates, SMEs, homes, schools and other institutions, including government which has extremely deployed moves to take us to the next step. Our information ministry PS, Dr. Bitange Ndemo is a great asset and I do hope he gets to finalize his ICT dreams for the country.

Now back to the hindrances, talking of this from my at least 8 years on the industry.

Kenic
Kenic to me has always been a major drag of the web industry in Kenya. With heavy pricing, the number of Kenyans who own TLDs compared to those who own the local domain is greatly a pathetic comparison. I own and manage for clients at least 245 domain names. Out of those, only 12 are .ke and its a shame most of my clients are Kenyans. If only Kenic could work on a better pricing, I am sure we would see the rise of local names in a good trend.

The other thing Kenic needs to take care of is automation of the registration process. I know there are registrars in between but Kenic should allow them to have an API to have automated purchases of domain names.

DNS refreshing is another of Kenic’s flaws. I hear they refresh DNS every 2 hours but to me it sounds like a big lie. I have registered a name and waited over 5 hours for DNS while if I register a .com, it takes under 5 minutes.

We have people in the web industry sitting on the board and Moses Kemibaro is one of them and these issues should be raised and addressed to have more people going for the local domain.

Mobile Operators
Am not one of those people who carry multiple phones (Neither do I have a chinese phone with 2 lines and a fire extinguisher). The greatest way to push content into the end user is by use of the mobile phone. A huge percentage of Kenyans who have access to the internet are on mobile connections. Niko na Safaricom, so I will talk about them. When you get to their Wap site, you get a host of content that they are vending in partnership with their providers. When you scroll further they have a ticket sales for the travel industry, again which they co-run with Bernsoft. After that, there are “LINKS”. Its funny that all the links are to Facebook, Twitter, Goal.com, Google, Gmail, and only like 2 links to local sites. I feel like the big player is afraid of boosting local talent maybe coz of competition? Well, my point is that as a service provider to us developers, our mobile operators should compliment our services and not kill us with their big resources.

While we have projects like the iHub, where are the operators? We are busy trying to develop more content that can drive traffic (which will make money for the operators) to our local sites. The operators as part of their CSR should get involved and support local developers and not fight them. Someone do something.

ISPs and Bandwidth Prices
The general consumer has their mobile operator as their ISP as well. Bandwidth is extremely expensive and embarrassingly slow compared to some countries that we are competing with. I urge the players to come up with innovative ways of reducing costs like Loopnet (Read a post by Moses Kemibaro) has done. The more accessibility we have, the better for the industry.

Creative Content
Finally, consumers are not choosy of where the content comes from as long as its great content. So developers need creativity and innovation to come up with great content that everyone will appreciate.

Mainstream Media
The media should embrace nu-media and move with times. While Nation media thinks the money is at classifieds, we know how much power there is in information. Nation media and other corporates need to start looking at the great potential that is in local content and start investing in it. The mainstream media controls trends of how things are ran in our kind of economies. Promote local content and our nation will be moving ahead.

Challenge
While its great to use Facebook and Twitter, I think we need to get  a little local. Let innovators come up with great local social networks that we can all be members of. Iborian.com is a great social network (with a few flaws that we can get the owner to work on), Whive.com is at it, John Karanja is doing a good job on it and even has a mobile version. We should promote our own and not view them as competition. Local Q & A at Majibu is also a great innovation that I think we should all engage in solving small issues and keeping a database for future reference since most issues are issues that other’s have experienced.

It is everyone’s duty to keep their role.

You must have always thought that Makmende is Kenyan. You are wrong. Makmende is a Pirate, not sure where from, maybe Somalia or somewhere else just around the Indian Ocean. Makmende is actually the “jini” you hear about on the Mombasa highway. Makmende wanders around waiting for prey, he spends a lot of time crossing people’s minds, especially Kenyans and I have to admit, he got me as well.

So Makmende is now the latest trend on Kenyan social media, am surprised that Kibaki hasn’t formed a commission of inquiry to look into the commission formed by Moi to investigate Makmende and his plan to overthrow the government. He is slowly doing it.

Makmende has hijacked the Kenyan Internet Ship (MV Internet) saying the the M in the MV is for Makmende. He started with the leaders, got one Moses Kemibaro wondering if he should quit the MV Internet and become official blogger for Makmende. He is got into the gossip streets of Nairobi with Muchene Crew wondering if the gossip that Makmende is a life member of Kanu and that he hangs his clothes on your Safaricom line is true. Makmende has hit out like Macarena did back in 1996/7 from nowhere and now he is the one your girl is wishing he would find and ran away with him.

It is also official that Martin Luther King Jr. had a dream until Makmende woke him up. He also is roumered to have been the one who happened to explain the meaning of Kubaff to our president but explained all wrong like what happened when the watchmen in  high school caught up with sneakers and asked them to write their names and the names went like:

• Bunsen Burner Omari
• Canabis Sativa
• Mjinga Wewe

Makmende actually happens to have been my home science teacher in high school, then he went to Chiromo campus to study pharmacy before he became a farmer. So twitter, Facebook, Forums, everyone is talking about Makmende, just making sure I stay in the trend before he catches me not talking about him, lets continue wondering…

I feel very offended when I go through articles and forums online discussing and debating whether it is safe to travel to Kenya. Kenya according to me is very safe and the fact that some western powers do not agree with our politicians on policies does not make Kenya unsafe.

There are a number of questions that have come up on the Q and A section of Majibu.com asking the same thing and the latest being this one from one of our new members. I agree, its alright to be concerned about your safety wherever you travel to. I can not blame anyone for being careful with their life but it pains me when travel advisories keep Kenya loosing huge revenue that would have been from tourism keeping the Kenyan economy wanting.

The so called “Friends of Kenya” are only seeking to glorify themselves and try prove involvement into running of our affairs. I agree that we have a political system that is not too stable, but this is the point of growth. Before a democracy is made, there are struggles to it and this is where we are at this moment.

I would like to boldly say that Kenya is safe, you are welcome to visit our rich cultures, wildlife, natural resources, falls, lakes and our beautiful coastline. Kenya is safe and I would like to call anyone who believes this with me and anyone who has recently visited Kenya to leave a comment here to insist on this fact.

Kenya is indeed safe, plan your trip to Kenya worry free.

Kenya also received the Government Leadership Award.

Zain’s ZAP mobile money service also received Best Mobile Money for the Unbanked Service which also includes its service in Kenya.

Africa is really showing potential in software and mobile innovations and this is a great improvement from where we have been in the past.

Get the rest of the award winners at the GSM World website