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

Michael Joseph, CEO, Safaricom Ltd, has asked the government, specifically the licensing and regulatory commission, CCK to treat each operator equally and charge new players same fees Safaricom paid for their 3G licence, a whooping $25 million.

Its a nice thing that Safaricom has served us with all its might, while enjoying a monopoly and making a killing out of it. Safaricom has so far recovered their license fee and made more than enough profits from the users by over charging and in my view, we should let other players get easier terms since they have lesser subscribers and times have changed. Bandwidth is cheaper and more available too.

I really do not think its fair to the consumers not to allow the other players come in with easier terms because Safaricom will continue to control the prices.

As much as Safaricom has the best mobile internet service, its also the most expensive available. CCK, do us good by licensing other players and lets see where this takes our country.

I was in Nairobi when Safaricom launched the 7-day unlimited internet offer and I still had some data left on my account so I decided to use that until its finished then i can try the offer. Unfortunately I had to travel out of Kenya on Wednesday and at the airport, I managed to finish the data. When I got to my destination, I recharged my line and subscribed to the 7 day offer (Which I had actually just received an ad of via SMS a moment earlier while still out of Kenya). Unfortunately, I tried to connect and the connection was established but no data available. Connection kept timing out. When I called customer care, which got through to really quickly, they told me that I could not get the offer while roaming and as disappointed as I was, they promised to follow the case through to see what help I could get. I couldnt even get to connect using my normal airtime billing so I had to stay without the connection.

Next day a lady from Safaricom calls to just let me know they are working on the issue and they will be in touch. Another day later, they refund the airtime to my account, am able to use my account. Now that may sound like nothing to write about but please try call customer care in Tanzania, I have tried Vodacom, I will never try ever again. You just have no rights with the networks in Tanzania. Zain has an “unlimited” package for data which happens to be limited to 400mb. Try call them about it…

Congrats Michael Joseph, Safaricom made me proud to be a Kenyan today.

Safaricom and Equity bank have moved a step higher to strengthen their working relationship by introducing new ATM withdraw for M-Pesa through the Equity Bank ATM network. Equity Bank, Kenya’s largest bank in the aspect of account holders joins hand with Kenya’s largest money transfer service. Currently, M-Pesa has over 8 million users while Equity Bank offers 550 ATM points countrywide.

Just recently, Equity partnered with the 3rd competitor of Safaricom’s M-Pesa, yuCash offering similar services.

Well, the ever growing unlimited email storage on google is now a thing of the past. You still have your free account but now you need to pay for anything above 20GB. The plans are between $5 and $256 per year although the storage is quite big compared to other services. Below is the pricing structure:

20 GB ($5.00 USD per year)
80 GB ($20.00 USD per year)
200 GB ($50.00 USD per year) includes free Eye-Fi card
400 GB ($100.00 USD per year) includes free Eye-Fi card
1 TB ($256.00 USD per year) includes free Eye-Fi card

Although compared to other services this is relatively cheaper, Google started out offering these high end free services and with that it got to everyone. Eventually, they have almost every internet user in one of their free services. Gmail makes most of its money from advertising and its grown quite fast compared to its competitors, Hotmail and Yahoo.

Question is, will it keep the same pace? Poeple shy off from services easily the moment they start billing. Lets watch how it goes. I got this on my account, the official Gmail blog hasnt mentioned a thing about this yet…or I havent seen it. Hopefully they will soon, I noted the pricing when they introduced the Eye-fi card.

Make your website work for you

Being a web developer for more than 8 years has taught me quite a number of things and given me some experiences that I am not sure I want to witness in the near future while at the same time its given me quite a lot to learn and use in the future. One of the biggest trends I have noticed is 1 year websites. These are owned by people who come up with an idea and someone gives them advise on how good it would be to have a website for their idea or business. The person looks for a web designer and gets a cheap website done (cheap is OK, we do not need to spend money where not necessary). The person does his business, say for instance, its an outside catering service. He gets business from people who know him and expands it through referrals. You get a lot of people attending events because they want to learn what the other person is doing so, the person gets more business from his good work.

3 months pass by and the person has never got a single business from the website, the only value in it is decoration of his business card and probably the use of branded email – which he could have paid much less for anyway. By this time, his excitement about the website is gone and he stops updating the site. 3 months later, his site is no longer appearing anywhere near the front page on search engines. At the end of it, a year goes and nothing comes off the website, yet the site needs some money to stay online for the second year. He needs to renew his domain name and hosting. Being a normal business person, he will start questioning if he still needs the website and to some point, he will even feel conned even by the idea of having the website. So most people let it go or just keep the domain for emails. And off goes another website that would have made a difference in business.

I will drop you a few tips on how to make your website work for you, directly or indirectly.

1. Have Proper Content
   If you manage to get a few people on your website, they are likely to send more people to it if you have informative content about your business or services. If you do not have the right content, people do not even return to the site.
   
2. Include Your Website in Your Branding
   This helps your site get noticed. Its the cheapest way of advertising anyway.
3. Advertise
   Let people know you exist, no one will think you do unless you tell them. Put a little effort and a little money into targeted advertising. With the presence of affordable pay per click advertising programs, you can afford to put out your word to the right people. With Adwords and Facebook advertising, you can choose demographics of the people your adverts reach, you can pick specific countries, ages, category of interests among other things. You only pay for people who actually visit your site.
   
4. Update Your Site Regularly
   When you have a section of the website that has regularly updated content, it makes it a reason for any users interested to keep coming back. When they come back, its means they will remember your site easily and for them to refer someone to it would be easier.
5. Online Newsletter
   Keep in touch with your visitors by offering them regular newsletter updates via email, simply have an opt in newsletter service on your site. I have recently visited a website that I saw 4 years ago because they sent me a newsletter. I ended up spending some cash on it.

With these and more tips that I will put up here soon, you will be seeing your website live longer than a year and with value for your business. Feel free to contact us for specialized consultancy on your website, whatever kind it is. Contact admin at majibu.com

If you are web/mobile application developer in Africa, you have a great chance to win the $125,000 set aside for African developers by Nokia and get to sell your product on the Ovi store.

“We’re inviting all mobile and web application developers to create best-in-class applications to run on Nokia devices. This competition is aimed at the development of applications relevant to Africa. Whether it’s wallpapers or widgets, if it’s bold and brilliant and African then submit your content now!

We’re looking for applications that are as uniquely African as bunny chow and biltong are and ones which will add value to the lives of the Africans who use it.” Reads http://callingallinnovators.com/africa/

So…get creative and tap this great opportunity.

This is the Blackberry smartphone that we are giving away

Majibu.com is on and its getting into motion with a big bang! We have just announced a Blackberry 8100 give away for 3 Users who will be the first to reach 5000 points on our new question and answer blog. To enroll, you need to be a member by signing up at http://majibu.com/register and its free! Users who have had accounts at http://dearkenya.com and http://qanda360.com do not need to register again, their logins will work at Majibu.com.  Your display name will act as your username unlike in the past where we have used email addresses to login.

How to Earn Points:
You earn points by login in, answering open questions, voting for questions and answers and inviting friends. Each time you ask a question, you loose 5 points.  The more you answer, the more points you make. You earn extra points if your answer is voted the best answer.

Participation:
Participation is open to members from all African countries. The winners will be announced on the website as soon as we have our first 3 members to hit 5000 points. The phones will be shipped to owners within a week after that.

Blackberry 8100:
This is a smartphone like no other with all the features and a slim design. It will be open to work with any GSM Network in Africa. Please see features at http://na.blackberry.com/eng/devices/blackberrypearl8100/pearl_features.js

What if I dont win?
Everyone has equal chances to win, unfortunately, only 3 people will walk away with the smart phones. However, this is a great chance for you to be able to interact with people from Africa and share knowledge and help solve someone’s problem or get yours solved. So everyone is a winner.

Requirements for Winners:
You will need to have 5000 points at Majibu.com supported with a minimum of 30 question from you, votes and a minimum 20 best answers. This is to ensure the quality of content is not compromised as the main aim of the website is to provide solutions to issues raised by members.

So, get on it, start making your points now! All new members get 100 bonus points. Dearkenya and QandA360.com members get 100 points as well on first login. Lets do this!

Majibu, Swahili for answers has unveiled its new question and answer website which starts running today, 17th August 2009. A walk through it shows a lot of adaptation of Yahoo! Answers, probably the most famous question and answer website. This launch narrows the reach for the African, making it easy to find questions and answers relating to the everyday life in Africa. Majibu.com is simply a nice place to seek simple and complex answers to issues.

Majibu borrows from the creators of DearKenya.com and soon will complete acquisition for the Kenyan question and answer website that has been running for close to 3 years now. Dearkenya has at least 15000 questions and 49,000 answers posted so far. That makes it a great archive for research, so if the merger moves as predicted, Majibu might just be among the biggest bases for local content. We are happy to be Majibu! Congrats on the launch of majibu.com.

Rahasms.com offering free sms to East Africa

A new website offering free SMS within East Africa went live yesterday, or so I seem to think. Rahasms.com to me seems to work like previously running sms websites which somehow shut down at some point. You register, activate account, activate number and there you are, 5 SMS messages to any mobile network in East Africa for free. I tried it and sent one to myself, you get 100 characters for your message and the rest of the message is an advert, clearly the business point of it.

While we get these innovative products, one cant stop to wonder, what happens to the consistency of such services?  There was Sasanet, SMS-East Africa, Niaje, someone answer me, where did they all go?

I guess the best thing we can do is enjoy this while it lasts….hope it does!