Safaricom has launched a new offer for their mobile data at only Kshs. 8.00 per day, you have unlimited mobile internet. This offer is however for people accessing the internet using their handsets. Safaricom has recently been promoting usage of mobile data with lots of giveaways for their customers ranging from airtime to MacBooks.

Safaricom has also been massively promoting Facebook mobile which clearly is their biggest data revenue. This is just another way of Safaricom telling its competition they are ahead of their game and they are big enough to afford crazy offers!

To subscribe, users are supposed to dial *544#

Jamie Yang, speaker at TEDxDar 2010

Jamie Yang is a player in the alternative energy industry in Tanzania, working mainly in rural and semi-urban areas within the country. It is notable that he worked for IBM at a point. Jamie’s talk was kicked off by a strong statement on the commercialization of poverty in Africa and he had with him 2 pictures of the same farmer, one posing to be the poor guy and the other of the same man, dressed in the same clothes, too happy, probably because he got paid to pose for the other picture. The tales told of poverty in Africa do not reflect the actual state of the matter here.

Jamie stressed the need to empower communities by working with them on the ground to use their available resources to better their lives other than begging for help to solve temporary issues. He explained how EGG-energy, a company he founded stands in the gap between non-governmental organizations and venture capital which he termed as “evil capitalism”. How they use social investment to empower communities where they work to providing lighting in areas where electricity supply is not available. While they work to make profit and still keep the community at an advantage, he explained his approach which he recommended, to do business with the poor at their affordability. To treat the poor as a consumer of their products.

Jamie explained how everything costs more to the poor person as compared to the rich. How access of services for the poor is harder because resources are concentrated along developed lines.

In my view, Jamie, who is among the 2010 Echoing Green Finalists spoke a blunt truth that people fear either because it would be too expensive for them if Africa was not seen as poor or because they are beneficiaries of the commercialization of poverty.

Why are NGO and non-profit organizations among the richest in the African economy? It is they who live in mansions and drive luxurious cars whose cost is amounts that would do something to change someone’s life forever. Why is it that it is they that “fight” poverty that first serve themselves with huge salaries from the money they got by using posed photos of non-existent poverty? Where is civil education on our resources and why is our economy still poor while we have gold, diamonds, copper and all sorts of minerals in this country? Why is it that the richest people in our economies find it wise to invest out of Africa? Just my mind running wild. Jamie was a great speaker at TEDxDar 2010.

Pete Mhunzi at TEDxDar 2010

The genius that planned the schedule for the day at TEDxDar picked a brilliant Pete Mhunzi as the first speaker for the event. Pete Mhunzi started out as a guitarist doing rhythm and blues before he decided to enroll into college in Afro-American studies. He studied Swahili which later grew into a passion.

His talk at TEDxDar was about the need for equal bilingualism, the pride that should be Swahili and its value to Tanzanians (and East Africans). Professor Mhunzi spoke of the pride and recognition that we have given English in the African countries, our rich culture and linguistic art is going to the drain while we should be selling it out and riding high on it internationally. He made quite some strong remarks about the override that is English over Swahili in Kenya and Tanzania, saying that to him, the idea of going to Africa and depending on English was like going to hell. He called it slavery that we see it necessary to elevate English over Swahili while it is the solo language that would contribute to the unification of African economies.

As a personal observation, I could not agree more with him, being a web entrepreneur, I have preached the need for local content and its promotion continuously. Google recently did a Swahili Wikipedia contest to try and grow the amount of Swahili content on Wikipedia. Swahili is one of the translations on Facebook and Microsoft launched Swahili translations of its popular operating systems and office software. This clearly shows the importance of our language and the more reason why we should do all we can to develop it.

Besides the language, Tanzania is populated with a lot of foreign products that we could produce locally. For example, why do we have American Garden sources on retail shops as opposed to local brands? Why are we buying South African and Dubai made juices while our fruit is rotting in the fields and on the streets trying to be sold? Why are we selling coffee to countries to process it and selling back to us at higher prices?

Donor dependency is another import of foreign strategies and cultures into our system. When donors LOAN money for development, they should not treat it as grants, its a loan and we live paying the loans. Lets be focused on being self dependent in anything that we can achieve.

First of all, I was not able to do live blogging, I only made notes so I could post a series of posts on the fruitful event, this being the first one. Am doing this at 1.26am so this will be the only one I do before I sleep, guess the events of the day took me past what I expected, I was too captivated by the sight, the sound and the presentations made at this first TEDxDar. First of all, like a lot of other people, I could not find my way to the venue, had to make a few calls but eventually, I made it. I got in the earliest I could and I think I was the first guest to arrive and register. It felt friendly already, the registration desk was full of life and love. It felt good to see my logo on the sponsor’s banner.

TEDxDar 2010 Sponsors

Had not had a moment to take some breakfast, maybe intentionally because Kathleen Bomani (@KateBomz ) had made it clear that there will be plenty of food, serving both breakfast and lunch, true to this, there was quite some delicacies. I had a nice Tanzanian mahamri, a cup of tea and an apple. At this point I was busy tweeting directions to a few of the lost ones, including Vanessa Mdee (@VanessaMdee) who I met a couple of minutes later. I was also making good use of my iPhone camera and the new Twitter application for iPhone taking pictures and tweeting them. I was not quite sure of how the event was going to turn out and my expectations were kept low to avoid disappointment. I have been a keen follower and e-vangelist of TEDxDar and I had a few people who actually thought I was in the organizing team, so it had better be a successful event. The crowd started building up bit by bit and familiar faces started showing up…familiar from twitter and not people I had met before. This was like being inside a reality twitter show for a moment only a few people looked either taller or shorter than my expectation. People were ready to socialize and exchange ideas, everyone was friendly and no one bashed me for taking a picture or uploading it, in fact, they loved it.

A few of the speakers were at the event much earlier than lots of us and this was great and it was encouraging for me and am sure to the organizers. Live stream equipment setup, high speed WI-FI connected and the place was starting to feel tech.

Just as I would have expected, TANESCO (The electricity distribution company) did its thing and there was no power at all. DIA was well prepared for this and a generator got us moving immediately. I had a nice corner at the back of the sitting, the only crew besides the sound technicians with a table. The session started on time, the schedule was well followed.

Maya "The Poet" Wegerif

Speakers were on fire (Will do detailed posts on their presentations/speeches individually within this series). The audience was keen and totally engaged. Most people were on their Blackberries, iPhones and Nokias and my assumption is that they were all twittering it. We had a great timeline with the #TEDxDar tag on twitter. Each speaker sounded very relevant and maybe its me but I think the choice of speakers was the best it could have been, although Nakaaya who was still on the programme was missing from the show, I hear she had “things” to do and she could not show up. The room had life, humor, teachings, love for our heritage, culture, tradition, technology, art and no one could miss the lady in blue, Maya the poet. Her performance was stunning, her composition moving. There were great TED videos and lots of lessons for our needy economies, our corrupt political system, the rich leaders of the poorest nations in the world, the mistold story of the poverty in Africa, the imported things that we produce, the hope and promise of our generations, the eventuality and necessity of change and self engagement in being agents of change, the reality of life as it is in Africa, the cost of living compared to the so called first world, how the rich get it easy and the poor spend more money that they do not have to make a living and so much more.

There was breaks within the sessions and first one there were refreshments, nice drinks and snacks, a visit to the sponsor’s desks and chit chats. Among the sponsors was Push Mobile who had a few of their products showcased and explained.

Lunch at TEDxDar 2010

When time for lunch came, we had great African delicacies. It was indeed looking and tasting great, had time to physically chat the people I normally see on twitter. Issa Mwamba, Sajjo, Gilsant, Technodesigns and more. It was a fun. As the day proceeded towards an end, the fire was heating up. The event was well arranged and we had one of the speakers address the crowd from a live skype stream and the quality was great and oh, she was great, made very clear points about things that we all need to touch on to change the way we live. (A post dedicated to this speech will come in the series).

And there was an after party, people were to meet the speakers and chat them, discuss anything and get familiar, unfortunately, I didnt make it for that one, got diverted elsewhere by the people I met today. It ended up well after watching a nice soccer game.

I also made it out of the place with a T-shirt carrying a really good design with Mwalimu Julius Nyerere and TEDxDar on it, some really nice Tanzania and Zanzibar facts postcards that i must commend whoever did them highly.

I got more than love at the event, I socialized, tweeted and replied to posts made by people I could see smiling at me from the other end of the room and it felt fabulous.

I will be posting a few more articles focusing on the speeches and presentations at TEDxDar 2010. I have to sleep so I write the real intellectual stuff when am fresh!

Jamie Young, a co-founder and CEO of EGG energy spoke at TEDxDar this morning. I love the brilliance in his thinking. He starts by giving facts that we probably are all aware of but we choose to ignore. Africa is rich in natural resources. It is however others that end up enjoying this wealth, probably return it back as aid to Africa.

It is a fact that the richest people are the heads of states of the poorest nations in Africa. Everything costs more to the poor than it does to those with the money to spend. Its just an ironic world. It is Ethiopian and Kenyan coffee that is considered the most expensive coffee in the world for its quality, we export it, they process it and sell it back to us 4 times more the cost. It is the gold and diamonds in Congo that has come to a war and conflict instead of wealth for all.

Jamie Young mentioned how often the stories about the poor are mistold. They are twisted to portray need that is not there and make the situation look worse than it actually is. It is the people who make money from poverty that twist it so they can continue living off donations and grants in the name of the poor. Africa spends more than half of aid money importing food.

In a strong statement, Africa is not poor, poverty is capital for a number of individuals who have taken it to themselves to live off “poverty”…

The official poster for the event

TED is made from initials of 3 words: Technology, Entertainment and Design. TEDx events are independently organized events which are about ideas worth spreading – here is an interesting blend, TEDx meets a rich Swahili culture when it comes to town in Dar es salaam this coming Saturday 22nd May 2010 in an interesting inaugural TEDxDar. Am a foreigner, who has found a home in the sweet welcome of Dar. The warmth of the people of Tanzania is exceptional. The love for people within them is something you will never find anywhere else in Africa. They have passion for soccer more than anything else I know. They are a united people. Despite having too many tribes, they all speak a common language, Swahili.

Entertainment in Tanzania is unique. Local content is highly valued as compared to western content. The movie industry is booming. Local musicians are entertaining us in Swahili and making it to our hearts. They are expressive and they are passionate about their culture yet very careful to not let it keep them off connecting with the rest of the world. Nightlife is great, everyone becomes familiar too quickly. In the last few months I have seen great international musicians perform in Tanzania and corporates really believe in the power of music and art as a way of outreach. I have seen Busta Rhymes, Beenie Man, Angelique Kidjo, Sean Kingston and more just within under a year visit and light up Tanzania.

I have seen the great Naomi Campbell in Tanzania, mixed with Hasheem Thabit, Tanzania’s own NBA star, had a drink with Nancy Sumari, former Miss World Africa and Miss Tanzania, shared a cab with the famous Canavaro and attended my first ever soccer match in Tanzania. Its a land of great influence.

Technology is quickly elevating Tanzania and while the rest of Africa takes a step into the mobile and internet sweep, Tanzania ranks 8th in Africa on the state of the mobile web report. Mobile phone companies are in price wars to ensure the consumer gets the best and young innovators are fast moving to create localized content and get things moving towards the first lane.

TEDxDar cant come more interesting. It blends all this and puts it in a single event, a great Saturday to share ideas, mix and socialize. Great speakers in the list to take the very interesting themes, my favorite being “What Would Nyerere Do?” Its not specified with what but since am in the ICT industry, I would like to imagine what Nyerere would do with my iPhone, 6 Telecoms’ 5MB/s connection and probably a handy PSP. There is no telling, I bet Nakaaya Sumari (Tusker Project Fame 2006, musician and politician) who is among the speakers will be there to tell us what she sees “In-Between Spaces” the other theme at the event.

Selemani Kinyunyu, a slim young man who I met back in 2008 at my Nairobi office came to me to do a website for what I found as a really interesting idea about carbon offsets will be there too, maybe I can understand a few lines I missed then. In simple words, TEDxDar brings a unique diversity together and it sure is the ultimate event and am proud to be associated with this event.

I will be blogging about it here on that day and also doing twitter updates (Follow @raidarmax, @pushmobile, @majibuanswer, @TEDxDar and @tristarafrica for live updates on the event day. Also, use the #TEDxDar keyword on tweets and tracking software for live posts from the event). It is an exciting moment and lets keep it TEDxDar!

And for party animals and those of us with the energy to stay up late, there will be an after party to go with it! Its also about entertainment, isnt it?

When I said I was on the right side of life banking with Equity and using Safaricom’s M-Pesa, I was 100% sure of what I was saying. Now, the two giants have joined hands to make the most incredible service in mobile money worldwide, a bank account you can open, operate, save, withdraw, access loans and micro-financing and any other service within it just from your mobile phone. Not WAP enabled phones or complicated methods of getting that achieved but the world famous STK service from Safaricom, M-Pesa.

M-Kesho (I still dont get the name – M is definitely for mobile, Kesho is Swahili for tomorrow so combining the two…I guess its the future banking) is the new baby in town.

From my view, its a great product especially for the unbanked and those who find it difficult to access loans. While banking services are important, lots of Africans have no access to it due to poor infrastructure, lack for value of banking, processes involved in our banking systems, requirements and all that. During the short while that M-Pesa has run, its managed to handle more transactions in a day only in Kenya than Western Union handles in the entire world. It is proof that there is need and that innovation can be greatly used to improve the livelihood of the common man whose income is way less than average. So now you can open an account with only Kshs. 100 which is roughly about $1.25 and no operating cost. This for me makes up what we need to bring our economy to scale.

M-Pesa is serving over 10 million people in Kenya of all classes. That is where the mark has been drawn. I like what Michael Joseph has done with Safaricom and the fact that they are huge and not developer friendly does not make me like them any less. Safaricom has played its role in society. Thanks to Safaricom, there are more internet users in Kenya now.

That said and done, Safaricom can do better -  by working with local developers and allowing them to develop on their platform. Safaricom needs to learn from the likes of Apple, the success of the iStore is because each developer is given an equal chance. We can turn round Africa if only corporates were not as selfish as they are currently. Still on Safaricom, we would like to see you promote local websites in the same strength you are putting behind Facebook with the Safaricom Live brand. Lets hope someone from Safaricom actually sees and forwards this link to someone “BIG”!

Congrats on the launch to both Safaricom and Equity – BTW…none of their websites had information about this by the time I started to write this blog. Pull up your cables people!

Tigo Campaign

Mobile operators in Tanzania are at great war, price wars that is. When Tigo lowered its call costs to Tsh. 1 per second (1USD = Tshs. 1350), all the other networks branded it as the inferior network. Tigo is considered the village boy by the other players, its the only mobile network in Tanzania that has not bothered to sell expensive data plans, not bothered to improve its data platform (still on GPRS) and not even bothered to offer any corporate services to its subscribers and instead concentrated on the small consumer who is the majority. This concept has worked for them greatly, they have turned out as one of the biggest networks in Tanzania by subscriber base.

Zantel, a CDMA/GSM network which is leading in EVDO data services in Dar es salaam was second to introduce the 1 shilling per second calls and a 3.45 shillings across other networks. With a very small subscriber base compared to the other networks, this was not very notable even with really colorful branding, very well done campaigns featuring popular artists including Lady Jaydee (Leading Musician) and Nancy Sumari (Former Miss Tanzania & Miss World Africa) among others.

Early this month, Vodacom followed and introduced 1 shilling per second for Vodacom to Vodacom calls and went down to serious campaigns featuring AY, a popular Tanzanian hip hop artist. The most surprising thing is that in a week of this launch, Tigo hit back with a half a shilling campaign titled “Tigo Thumni” with calls from Tigo to Tigo costing only half a Tanzanian shilling, meaning a call is 30 shillings a minute, which is literally the cheapest call rate in East Africa coming to about 1.65 Kenya shillings a minute.

Zain which for long stuck to its “corporate” outfit, today decided to unveil its 1 shilling per second campaign, not an offer but a rate reduction on Zain to Zain calls. So literally speaking, Tanzania is officially the country with the cheapest calling rates in East Africa if not Africa generally.

Data rates are also reasonable compared to Kenyan rates with Zantel’s EVDO service being the fastest in Dar es salaam and only going for Tshs. 10,000 for 200MB and Tshs. 70,000 for 2GB, way cheaper compared to Safaricom’s 3G which is the only service that comes closest in Kenya to what Zantel is offering.

Tigo is also rumored to be launching a mobile money transfer service in Tanzania to try seal the wholes which have seen Vodacom’s M-Pesa and Zain’s Zap fail to hit the market as expected and reflected by the growth in Kenya.

While the call rates may be cheapest in Tanzania, customer care is worst in Africa here in my opinion, a shame because Tanzanians are among the most hospitable people I know.

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.

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.

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.

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.