Part 2 – Part 4 coming up
Part Two

Part Three

Closer to home though, is the launch of a new platform from the team that brought Ushahidi to the world…sounds like copy for a trailer Swift River. Apart from the fact that the first app riding off Swift River – Sweeper App looks gorgeous, the platform addresses the need for an “easy” to set up and self managed platform, that sorts me out quite beautifully. I also like the fact that right off the gun, there is an obvious business model to it, though the pricing etc is yet to be put up. There’s no guessing what am going to deploy…!

SwiftRiver Open Beta Announcement. from Ushahidi on Vimeo.

From the horses mouth, SwiftRiver is a free and open source platform that helps people make sense of a lot of information in a short amount of time. The SwiftRiver platform was born out of the need to understand and act upon a wave of massive amounts of crisis data that tends to overwhelm in the first 24 hours of a disaster. Since then, there has been a great deal of interest in this tool for other industries, such as news rooms and brand monitoring groups.In practice, SwiftRiver enables the filtering and verification of real-time data from channels such as Twitter, SMS, Email and RSS feeds. This free tool is especially useful for organizations who need to sort their data by authority and accuracy, as opposed to popularity. These organizations include the media, emergency response groups, election monitors and more. This might include journalists and other media institutions, emergency response groups, election monitors and more.

The SwiftRiver platform offers organizations an easy way to combine natural language/artificial intelligence process, data-mining for SMS and Twitter, and verification algorithms for different sources of information. Swift’s user-friendly dashboard means that users need not be experts in artificial intelligence or algorithms to aggregate and validate information. The intuitive dashboard allows users to easily manage sources of information they wish to triangulate, such as email, Twitter, SMS and RSS feeds from the web.

Sarah Lacy and Paul Carr discuss the week’s big tech story from outside Silicon Valley. Sarah has a country crush on Kenya

http://www.techcrunch.tv/why-is-this-news/#ooid=szbGRvMToxDAF72SuauqRZRgZorVRi61

The mobile phone has become more than just a tool for voice and sms communication, which is unfortunately the only front on which the mobile operators are currently waging battle. The biggest transformation for mobile network operators will come when they open up their platforms – think billing, messaging, location and profiling, to allow for others to plug in and add value to their subscriber bases.

The one thing that the mobile operators should realize is that as subscriber with an active mobile phone number is not just their subscriber but the customer for a myriad of other businesses from which they would want to interact on a more personal level. This essentially creates a long tail of needs that the mobile operators could not in their best of times, fully service.

Such opportunities would only be fully realized if and when the operators open up. Not only do the operators need to open up, they must also change their business models around the content that will be generated. Currently the operators take a significant percentage of revenues generated by content providers, resulting in high costs of access and the resultant low uptake of the same services. This situation is disenchanting and has seen content players exit the market or attempt to bypass the operators. The first move can only come from the operator side as they are the current owners of the pipe that delivers the content.

If mobile network operators can look at the average return per user (ARPU) game differently, embrace and support their content partners and open up to alternative thinking, especially around business models, then they can make the shift to value propositions for their subscribers and their bottom-line will take care of itself quite easily without the need for pricing wars on the most basic of network services.

- this article appeared in the Business Daily: August 26 2010

Effective today midnight, both Orange GSM post and pre- paid customers will enjoy a new call and SMS rates of  Ksh 2.00 per minute for calls and Kshs 1 for SMS whereas calls to other networks will be charged at Ksh 4/- per minute and Ksh 2/- per SMS respectively.Ghossein confirmed that the new tariffs were developed in tandem with Telkom Kenya’s integrated business model and stated that Telkom Kenya would soon announce new tariffs for its Orange Wireless and Telkom Fixed (landline).

The CEO noted that the market dynamics had shifted, requiring the industry to focus beyond voice and text messaging. “We do not intend to engage in price wars since our strategy is clear on providing value for our customers, better customer care and quality of service. Despite the current market frenzy, Orange is determined to keep leadership in data and value added services’,” he said.

As a local company partnered with a global player of international acclaim, France Telecom,  Mr. Ghossein said that Telkom Kenya was committed to the development and sustainability of the Kenyan market, as the upcoming hub for regional telecommunication and has therefore taken long term view of the industry in rolling out its business model.
To this end, he explained that Orange would keep its focus on growing its bouquet of unique value added products and services to its customers as one-stop shop (fixed, mobile and internet)
“With our extensive national coverage of infrastructure which carries voice and data, our customers should rest assured that we will continue to give them better integrated services at the most competitive price, “he said.
While lauding CCK’s move to address the interconnection rates, Ghossein confirmed that Telkom Kenya had officially taken issue with CCK’s decision to set the interconnection rate for fixed lines with GSM at Ksh 1.67 on the basis that it was too low to be sustainable and did not take into consideration running costs as well as network maintenance costs.

Like I told you before, you better stop this price war maneno or you will all soon go out of business or best bet see massive hemorrhages on your bottom line. Micheal Joseph has said time and again – he has investors to take care of, and I have to agree with him on that point, coz I would expect a divided on my shares, if I had bought like 1 million of those “papers” when the country was going green and this not alluding to the referendum. My boy Rene is willing to take a hit for the next 5 years because he has a big brother with deep pockets. Deep pockets get depleted, and if your strategy doesn’t work out, you will be out of a job – tail tucked and the Kenya operation will be spun to some other hapless investor with big visions and their head in the clouds, with grand plans of a turnaround.  Rene was on Business Daily explaining their strategy…you will remember the Vuka tariff that was discontinued…hmmm

Bwana Atul of Yu, jumped over the cliff late last night and put it out that they too had “amuad” and dunked prices to 5cts per second or more directly 3 bob per minute and 50cts per sms on onnet messaging.

Mickael Ghossein has been quiet thus far after the sparing between the Pinks, Greens and Blacks, but I kinda guess he too is thinking of their new lower price point. I am sorely hoping that his decisions will have a good measure of thought and not some knee jerk reflex.

Unike in the west, where mobile phone operators are now suffering from Alexander Syndrome: ‘When Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer.’ There is still alot of telco land to conquer and alot of “cities” to put up…which is why these price wars don’t make sense.

I will complete my thoughts in abit, got to go for my morning jog Actually cut  whole 10min from my normal time! And noticed that all the storm drains on State House road are missing! Like the ones right next to the State House fence

Simply put, value wars would be more like it… anyhow, Mbugua ain’t complaining. On the contrary he is very very happy. He’s had 4 sims for as long as he can remember, so there’s no real switch for him. These games will make him a pretty sum.

Mr. Meza said despite having made requests to Safaricom, their competitor had remained uncooperative. “We requested  Safaricom through the  agreed contact persons for  the reconfiguration of the Points of Interconnection to accommodate increased traffic going from Zain to Safaricom to accommodate our new tariff offer to customers. We simply requested for a swap out of some circuits from the Safaricom to Zain link to the Zain to Safaricom link. In our experience such a request can be accommodated in a matter of minutes and at no cost. Much to our surprise, we could not get a commitment from Safaricom as to when the configuration would take place,” he said.

Mr. Meza said the continued delay was affecting the quality of service and was also denying customers an opportunity to take full advantage of the new price offering on calls to any network in Kenya, and in this particular case when calling Safaricom. “This is a clear sign of abuse of dominance where customers are being penalized for choosing a much better value proposition.  This leads us to conclude that Safaricom is deliberately trying to frustrate our customers by making the experience of calling Safaricom unpleasant. Such behavior is in our view also anti competition and is intended to stifle competition,” he said.

Following the 50% cut in cross network rates yesterday, traffic from Zain to other networks is expected to rise steeply. The company says the new pricing model is part of its strategy in its “new journey towards market leadership”.   Mr. Meza said the delay by Safaricom in “expanding” the route to accommodate the incremental traffic from Zain customers will not stop Zain’s quest in attaining the market leadership position.

Zain Kenya is now imploring the regulator to invoke Kenya Communications and Information (Fair Competition and Equality of Treatment) Regulations, and declare Safaricom a dominant operator in order to check against anti-competition tendencies.  “In view of Safaricom’s dominance in the retail voice market and monopoly of its own network, they should be subjected to the much needed regulatory oversight which we believe will instill discipline and safeguard the telecoms market from anti-competitive behavior and protect consumers from erosion of their welfare,” said Mr. Meza.

Micheal Joseph, had his chaps swing into action with this rejoinder -

Safaricom moved to reassure its competitor Zain Kenya, saying concerns raised by the latter over Safaricom’s handling of traffic originating from its network were somewhat premature.

“We must admit that we are quite surprised by the claims made by Zain that we are trying to stifle the delivery of their traffic to our network. These claims are quite insincere considering that Zain is fully aware of the procedures that all operators must adhere to when seeking to increase their inter-connect traffic capacity,” said Safaricom CEO Michael Joseph. “Under the agreement the inter-connect pipe belongs to them and they should have upgraded it long before yesterday to accommodate their changed tariff plan.”

Quoting the inter-connect agreement between Zain and Safaricom, Mr Joseph stressed: “The inter-connect agreement between Safaricom and Zain provides for a minimum notice period of seven working days before a request for increased capacity can be effected. Zain’s formal request was received by us late last night (Wednesday 18th, August 2010) and we were in the process of processing it alongside other capacity requests received on the day.”

Safaricom would continue with its unflinching commitment to integrity in all its operations including honoring the terms of agreements between it and its competitors.

“Safaricom has now and in the past continued to adhere to the terms of the inter-connect agreements signed with all operators and wishes to urge other operators to do the same. We have always been ethical in the way we conduct our business and our integrity is the greatest pillar of our success in Kenya. We will however not take responsibility for the consequences of poor planning by other operators,” said Mr Joseph.

“We feel that their request to the CCK to declare Safaricom dominant so soon after the launch of their new tariff is insincere, particularly as it was the result of poor planning on their side.”

“We have always been courteous to Zain, even to the extent of accommodating them when they were unable to clear the significant debt that they owed us. This notwithstanding, we shall continue to cooperate with them as guided by the inter-connect agreement and other industry rules. We invite them to engage us within those parameters.”

The opportunity here is very real and would offer great benefits for the first mover.  Brands need to start developing and implementing mobile strategies if they are to engage their consumers on a personal level. The battle for mindshare and eventually consumer purses will be won by the brands that will offer truly compelling and personalized experiences. The foremost benefit of creating mobile strategies is that it allows for the reporting of a key metric in business which is measurement. Marketing budgets for blue-chips are forever being choked, while for SME’s the same could very well be nonexistent, hence why the ability to measure your interaction with your market becomes crucial. One can easily see if the interaction is beneficial to the business and its bottom line and adjust accordingly.

Early movers in this space will have a better chance of getting attention and building a profiled database of their users. Think about it this way, currently its only financial institutions, large retail chains with loyalty programs and most recently mobile network providers who have comprehensive profiles of their users, though limited mostly to their service offering. How would your business benefit if it had consumer data that would allow you to personalize your product or service experience?

In the local ecosystem there are currently three ways that you can leverage mobile to connect with your consumers.

The first is the use of the sms channel.SMS campaigns should be nothing new, unless you have been living under a rock. These messaging campaigns have been extensively used in promotions where one would participate by buying a product and sending feedback or a keyword back to a shortcode – usually four digits and charged at a premium rate, to get the opportunity to win prizes. This is just but one of the ways sms campaigns can be rolled out. Another model would involve free consumer opt-in to receive coupons, and exclusive discounts or offers.
Mobile web is picking up with Kenya being top in Africa in number of pages accessed via mobile. The mobile web space is still virgin, with many brands having not made the leap. This gives your brand a damn good chance of standing out if you craft your experience well.
Mobile applications are the latest kids on the block, with smart phones increasingly being the order of the day. Access to the phone book, camera, location services and other phone features allow applications to take things up a notch to deliver unique product or service experiences.
Mobile email, mobile video and QR codes are also options that you can look at. The aspects of interaction on mobile are many and it would be up to you to choose the best mix. The worst you could do is ignore the fact that the consumer has gone mobile and is yearning for a different type of engagement. Ignore this and your brand will be headed to the dead pool sooner than you might imagine.