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#

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.

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.

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.

Well, Safaricom, thanks to M-Pesa, has done it again by scooping the Gold Award on the category Best Mobile Money Services for M-Pesa Money Transfer Service. Makes it the solo African winner. Below are the final winners of the Mobile Content Awards 2009

Winners – Mobile Content Awards 2009

Best Operator

Gold – Orange UK
Silver – CSL
Bronze – FREEDOM4 WiFi

Best Handset

Gold – HTC for HTC Hero
Silver – Nokia for Nokia 5800
Bronze – Research in Motion for BlackBerry Curve 8900 Smartphone

Most Innovative Business Model

Gold – Orange UK for Orange Dolphin
Silver – Spin3 for Mobile Casino Partner Program
Bronze – i-wood for Permission Based Mobile Marketing

Best Handset Application

Gold – Financial Times for FT iPhone Application
Silver – Alchemy Content / MSHK for Ministry of Sound Clubbers Guide to Ibiza iPhone Application
Bronze – Airborne Mobile for Homes on Mobile Phones Real Estate Application

Best Marketing Campaign

Gold – Samsung Mobile UK for Carphone Warehouse Interactive In Store Window Display
Silver – OgilvyOne for Kodak Snow Stories Mobile Application
Bronze – Clickatell for SMS Speech Excerpts to Global Citizens by President Obama (From Cairo to Ghana)

Best Social Communities and UGC

Gold – Utel for FOTOCHAT
Silver – aka-aki for The People Nearby Application
Bronze – Cellufun, Inc for Cellufun

Best Technology Innovation

Gold –  Movidia for MA1110
Silver – dotMobi for Instant Mobilizer
Bronze – DeviceAnywhere for DeviceAnywhere Proof Center

Best Mobile TV and Video Service

Gold – Vantrix Corporation for Media Profiler
Silver – QuickPlay Media for PrimeTime2Go
Bronze – Mobix Interactive for 3 on Demand

Best Mobile Game and Gambling Service

Gold – Spin3 for Mobile Gambling Software
Silver – Cellectivity for Bet2Go Mobile
Bronze – HeroCraft for High Speed 3D

Best Mobile Money Services

Gold – Safaricom for M-Pesa Money Transfer Service
Silver – Accumulate for Accumulate Mobile Everywhere
Bronze – Valimo Wireless for Valimo Mobile ID

Best Start-Up Company

Winner – eyeSight Mobile Technologies

Industry Personality of the Year

Winner – Pieter de Villiers of Clickatell

M-Pesa is what it is today because of Safaricom and its subscribers, the Kenyan People

This is not the kind of mood one likes to wake up with but I read an article yesterday by Olga Morawczynski (Whose page at CGAP gives a 404 page maybe for a good reason)  which she wrote for CGAP trying to tell us what we don’t know about M-Pesa, Kenya’s mobile money transfer. I feel obliged to say that his research (If any) is biased. Her findings are inaccurate and his theories incorrect. This article was published in July which means nothing much has changed since then.

I am here to talk about the role of Safaricom, the Kenyan citizen and the unseen push to the success of M-Pesa. Am here at the perception you have put up and the mentality you have created that M-Pesa is only for poor people. I may not be rich but am not poor. I am one of the millions of people using M-Pesa. I feel the racial divide here. If this product was implemented anywhere else in the world, it would have worked just as well, because its a great product. Because its an innovative product. In CGAP’s article base, there seems to be a big percentage on M-Pesa but most of it coming out as a poor man’s solution. I want to put out a few points here.

1. Safaricom’s role in M-Pesa was vital. Maybe because no one else believe in the idea enough to try it on their platform. If we go by Olga’s findings or insinuations, seems like Safaricom and the Kenyan people were being used as an experimental pad, we took all the crap and when there was success, here comes Europe trying to show how the success was theirs. Well, no one disputes the fact that they did a good thing, but we did too. I feel part of the M-Pesa success as a user – and it has been of great help to me. I feel insulted by this article, I feel downtrodden. Maybe I should ask how much money one has to pay to get an article published at CGAP on them – I guess the answer might be am from the poor Africa I cant afford.
2. Kenya was right for the product: The same product has been launched in Tanzania by Vodacom and almost a year later, its still to get off the ground. It maybe the people’s reception to the idea or the company’s marketing strategy for the product. Mobile money transfer in Tanzania has many players with 3 different competitors but its not as popular as it is in Kenya.
   
3. The European companies that came up with the idea to use Kenya as a testing pad for M-Pesa had just designed it as a Micro finance loan repayment solution. Kenyans made it a money transfer platform. Safaricom and Kenyans played the role of making them believe that it could grow as big.
4. M-Pesa has been beneficial to Kenyans of all classes, not only the poor as stated in his article.
   
5. M-Pesa was really popular in Kenya way before the post-election violence, so that did not play the major role described in one of your articles

In conclusion, I think this writer owes Kenyans and Safaricom an apology. Am sure she will get a glimpse of this article and I hope she does the right thing or responds to this article with his view. Africans have been over the years been used as research pads and its unfair, its time you took us for what we are.

Sleek Looking Chinese Phones designed to just cheat the mind of the buyer

I lost my Blackberry the moment I arrived in Tanzania a while ago and when when I went shopping for a phone, I wanted something simple yet a phone that I could get to achieve a few basics like blog, facebook, email, IM and a few things. So I hit downtown Dar es Salaam and went phone shopping.

I thought that we had quite a bunch of Chinese phones in Kenya but that was just like a third of the number in Dar. I wanted a Nokia in the ranges of 5310 and I knew just like every little gadget I have, I would over use it to get what I wanted. Unfortunately, it was too expensive in Dar. I came across an iPhone on the shop counter and I looked closer only to realize it was a Chinese fake. I actually went ahead and bought it.

It had TV instead of U-Tube, GPRS instead of 3G, quite some fake browser and only Java application support made it quite closer to getting me anywhere. Even the Gmail app could not work. I spent about $160 for it, not too bad for the look, it was an exact copy of the iPhone, physically.

Question is how good is this Chinese mobile for Africa? It may be cheap but how long does it last? Within 2 months, my iPhone was useless. A waste. This is what happens to the thousands of the cheap quality mobile phones distributed to Africa from the Chinese market. The Chinese have found a way of putting a media player, a GSM radio, an FM receiver and a Bluetooth platform on really cheap material and have it flooded to Africa for near future waste. They make money off it as they dispose their trash to us. I feel so bad knowing what this does to our environment. The thing is that our governments are not looking at these effects and they are just allowing cheap imports without regulating the quality.

What is the work of bodies like Kenya Bureau of Standards or CCK for that matter? Where is the civil society in environment? This is a challenge to anyone who can put a word forward, lets think of the effects of cheap stuff before we buy them. I challenge mobile phone service providers to put up campaigns to support proper quality of phones and help save our people from these fake things.

Motorola Cliq

The war of high end mobile gadgets initially dominated by Apple’s iPhone and RIM’s Blackberry has a new player threatening to take over the market. Motorola has unveiled their first Android based smart phone, The Cliq. This new gadget has a sleek design more resembling the iPhone at a glance but moves slowly to prove better reliability when you pull up the slide with a QWETY keyboard that has always given Blackberry a lead ahead of the iPhone.

The phone has a touch screen and a physical slide-out keyboard, a 5-megapixel camera, Wi-Fi, 3G connectivity, the ability to shoot video at 24 frames per second, a standard headphone jack and GPS capability.  A price for the device has not been announced yet but its not expected to go too far from the current prices of the high end iPhone and Blackberry.

The Cliq is lovely to hold. It feels quite slim (about 0.62 inches thick) and light (weighing 5.6 ounces). Comparatively, the Palm Pre is 0.67 inches thick and weighs 4.76 ounces, while the iPhone 3G is 0.48 inches thick and weighs 4.7 ounces. The sliding keyboard on the Cliq is smooth and the physical(!) keypad offers fantastic tactile feedback, making touch-typing a very real possibility. The phone comes in a polished black the company calls “Titanium” and “Winter White.” The 3.1-inch display is bright and easy to read — at least under the florescent lighting where we put the phone through its paces. The screen is touch capable and very, very responsive. It’s certainly on par with the iPhone.

The device will have a custom interface called Moto Blur that will bring together e-mail messages, text messages, Facebook and Twitter feeds, and photos into a single interface.

The new social Motorola

The Cliq has a 5.2-megapixel auto-focus camera. We tested it briefly by shooting some pics in low light and comparing it to photos from the iPhone’s camera. Guess what? The Cliq’s cam captured finer details and offered a brighter picture with true colors. It’s easy to share and upload photos, in the spirit of Cliq fun. The user interface on every photo has four choices: Share, Gallery, Set as Wallpaper and Delete. Clicking on the Share tab means you can post the photo to MySpace, Gmail, Picasa or any other photo-sharing site you have set up such as Flickr.

As usual, it launches the American and European market before it gets to Africa but am sure we shall have access to it real soon. It seems like the perfect gadget for anyone torn between the iPhone and a Blackberry, combining the business features of Blackberry and the social that is an iPhone.

Color Rings - Lets electronize the Jewels

Technology has proven to be leaning towards beauty and love for sleek devices. The iPhone is a good example, sleek and beautiful – and its a toy for men. Now this is heading to even personal reach and soon girls will be demanding diamond rings with blutooth and all the tech talk… BCK has come up with a very innovative way of using just your fingers to talk…forget your bluetooth headsets, here comes the Color Rings

“The color rings are an accessory for cell phones that are inspired in the gestural language of the use of the phone. It is conceived as an extension of the hand, which makes their use a more natural one, and more comfortable and more attractive as well. The rings are thought to be either an electronic component, or a fashion accessory. They were designed to be worn in the thumb and pinkie fingers, and work as a microphone and headset, respectively. These, interconnected wirelessly with the phone, allow responding calls only by separating the fingers and speaking, using distance sensors between rings to activate the call.” Says BCK’s portfolio page.

Color Rings

Working together with your cellphone (presumably via bluetooth), the ‘rings’ are worn on your thumb and little finger. One ring works as the microphone, and the other is the headset.

Now this is the new version of the rings and I assume that soon some diamond company will get innovative and start spreading the love with technology. Each day gets better with technology! This is an amazing innovation, just imagine where we are headed!! Your hand has just become the new headset.