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.