NAIROBI, Aug 21 (Reuters) Kenya’s mobile firm Safaricom (SCOM.NR: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) said on Thursday it was buying a 51 percent stake in Kenyan IT firm Onecom for $2.6 million to boost its product range.

“Safaricom intends to acquire 51 percent in Onecom,” Michael Joseph told a news conference in Nairobi. “The reason is to broaden our product offering. The acquisition of Onecom provides us with a good position to offer these services.” (Editing by Paul Bolding)

http://www.reuters.com/article/rbssTechMediaTelecomNews/idUSLL8231320080821

I get really sad seeing consumers charged Ksh. 10 per alert to know what a certain stock is trading at, or that the CDSC is charging a premium to tell its 1 million plus customers how their CDS account is faring.
Twitter is defined on its website as – a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

Now the concept of reverse twittering, nothing revolutionary, but we are thinking that all your essential services should be able to tell you how they are doing. From your stocks, to your doctors diary, to your examination timetable, your children etc. With Zunguka, you can effectively budget how much you want to spend on being kept in the loop. Good thing is, it costs much much less than all these premium rates services.

Here is an example; you check the status of your Safaricom shares using the Nationmobile service that charges say Ksh. 10 (USD 0.154) per alert.But you would also want to check the status of the other 10 counters that you have invested in.That would essentially cost you Ksh.100 (USD 1.54), for 10 alerts right. With ‘reverse twittering’ on Zunguka you can set up all your stock counters to update you say when they get to a certain value or when the stock moves (whether up or down) but at the ridiculous rate of Ksh.1.50 (USD 0.023) per alert. You can therefore work withing certain budgets and control the frequency of your “twitter” service updates.

Power to you.Why? Because even basic personal service or business updates are meaningful to you—especially when they’re timely.

From the Skunkworks grapevine and confirmed form the local Google office is a “partnership” between Google and Mobile Planet. While full disclosure is not available at the moment, speculation is rife as to the nature of the investment by Google into Mobile Planet.

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Disclosure made

http://google-africa.blogspot.com/2008/08/announcing-new-investment-in-kenya.html

Announcing a new investment in Kenya

Tuesday, August 5, 2008 | 6:20 PM

En Français

Here at Google, we know that information comes in all sorts of shapes and sizes, through all sorts of media. And we know that you can only use information if you have access to it. That’s why we’re so excited to announce that we’re making a minority investment in Mobile Messaging Solutions, the parent company of Mobile Planet, a Nairobi-based company that specializes in the development of wireless voice & data applications for mobile devices in Kenya, with a special focus on SMS-based products and services.

Mobile Planet offers one of the most exciting services in the region. For example, during the 2002 & 2007 Kenyan elections, their platform provided up-to-the-minute election results — as the results were tallied, subscribers were sent updates via SMS. We met the founders, and it became very clear that Mobile Planet was an innovative force striving to link Africans with information, and that we shared a vision.

Mobile telephony is already popular in Africa, and has seen significant growth over the past few years, particularly in countries like Kenya. SMS is clearly a very important technology that provides access to the majority of mobile subscribers. Mobile Planet’s expertise with SMS related technology and mission to “empower the African people with information” make this a very exciting partnership for us. We’ll be sure to keep you updated on how things go!

Posted by Joseph Mucheru, Office Lead – East Africa

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Some interesting thoughts by Hash

http://whiteafrican.com/2008/08/05/an-opportunity-to-make-real-money-in-africa/

An Opportunity to Make Real Money in Africa

by HASH on August 5, 2008

Just today Google has shown that they are willing to invest in African mobile phone businesses. Does Google’s purchase of an equity stake in Mobile Planet mean the big web/mobile money will start flowing throughout Africa? Not necessarily, but it made me think of a conversation that I tend to have a lot in my travels.

The topic of conversation usually turns to this; what type of web or mobile application can you build to make some serious money in Africa? Though there are many answers to that question, as I believe there are many options for successful web and mobile companies in Africa, there are only a few that I think of as “sure things”.

Any entrepreneur is looking to either a) create a company with solid cash flow and grow it, or b) create a solid company with value and then sell it (or have an IPO). On the web that takes some well-known paths, and the most common is option “b” where the entrepreneur’s sell their company to a larger web entity (Amazon, Google, eBay, Nokia…etc).
A “Sure Thing” Formula

Create a Jabber-based chat application that works on the mobile phone and the web, grow it to a 1-2 million users within a region, sell to Google.

Why does this work?
You build your chat application with Jabber since it can interface with Google’s GTalk. Jabber is free, and also happens to be the what a couple other major applications are built on (see South Africa’s Mxit). Google is trying to grow in Africa, and I assume would be extremely happy to pay a very healthy amount of money to acquire an application with millions of active users that is built on the same protocol as their own chat system.

Challenges

The formula for this particular idea is built on two premises. First, that you can actually get a couple million users within an African region using your chat application. Second, that Google wants more users on their platform(s).

The first challenge is born from the fact most mobile phone users in Africa don’t use data enabled phones, so they can’t run a Jabber application on their phone. Mxit’s answer to this in South Africa was to show that for 10% of the cost of a normal SMS, you could send a message through their system (which happens to be a highly bastardized customized Jabber app). Your goal is to get people who don’t have a data enabled phone to upgrade to one.

The second challenge is beyond your control. You’ll never know if Google wants to buy you out until they come knocking. However, if let’s just say you shouldn’t have to many problems monetizing a system that has 1-2 million users on it anyway…

Your goals to overcome these challenges is found in tapping into communities and spreading your app virally to gain critical mass with speed. Once it spreads, the first application like this to reach a decent amount of saturation will be the winner, even if it has some faults (see Twitter).
Opportunities

Though chat is the core of your application, that is both web and mobile phone accessible, it’s not the only value added service that you can provide. With some creativity, you can add services that allow more people to tap into, including locally relevant events, news, marketplaces, personals, jobs, etc…

On top of these services, you’ve got the advantage of building on an open source platform that other services use as their core.

Lastly, and most importantly. If you were to reach even 500,000 users you would have an incredibly viable opportunity for advertising revenue. The ability to target specific advertisements, or sponsorships, through the platform make it a marketers dream. Basically, you might not need, nor want, a buy out after all.
In Summary

Is it really a “sure thing”? No, every business move has inherent risk and depends on execution of the strategy.

Is it a good basic idea that could be built into a real product with a solid exit strategy? Yes, undoubtedly so.

We’ve already seen the booming success of Mxit in South Africa. There’s no reason to believe that you couldn’t have a margin of that same success in East, West or North Africa with the same type of service. If you build it with an end-goal of Google integration in it at the end, you also set yourself up for a real possibility of a buy out.

From our viral marketing campaign started yesterday, we hit out first thousand users at 1:32pm – 4th August 2008.
Our target over the next two months is to get a healthy 250k users consuming services daily on zunguka even as we seek to refine the products based on user experience and feedback

While these numbers may seem low and inconsequential if you know the levels of service adoption in the US and UK, but for us it is an exting start for a service that will be rolled out in 7 African countries (Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, South Africa, Egypt,Nigeria and Ghana) with products also developed with the diaspora in mind.

Do you zunguka?