A few years ago election monitoring and reporting was a tricky, tiring and often thankless affair. Dealing with Kenya‘s elections processes in the last decade, in particular, has largely involved sending hordes of polling clerks, election observers and monitors, with paper files stashed in their underarms, to far-flung areas to help record the goings-on election and referenda. Apart from being slow, unreliable and erratic, such processes have proved risky for election officials especially if violence broke out.

But things are changing. Mobile phone technology is rapidly transforming the way these national and other crucial life-changing activities are carried out, bringing with it faster, reliable and credible relay of information from outlying areas.
Apart from elections reporting, the ubiquitous device, owned by nearly 20 million Kenyans, has also helped stem incidents of violence that have in the past rocked various parts of Kenya notably in 2007 elections. A lot depends on how transparent such processes as elections are but the mobile phone is taking a lion’s share of the contribution toward this positive change.

In a ground-breaking project in conjunction with the Interim Independent Electoral Commission (IIEC), Safaricom, Kenya’s largest network operator, the world’s leading mobile handsets-maker Nokia supplied over 18,000 Nokia 1680 phones to be used by the electoral body’s returning officers and clerks in various part of the country.

IIEC had picked Safaricom after, inviting Kenyan telecom operators for a partnership with it with the objective of running an efficient and credible referendum process. continue reading »

Knight News Challenge 2010 winners talk about their projects – in just a few seconds each.

Getting the news and information needed to improve our communities is more important than ever. The Knight Foundation holds an annual $5 million annual Knight News Challenge contest seeking  innovations that use new or available technology to distribute content in local communities. Anybody worldwide can apply.

There are three rules to apply:

1. Use digital, open-source technology.
2. Distribute news in the public interest.
3. Test your project in a local community.

Some of the ideas that got funding this year are :

Just a day after launching the “industry-shaking” low cross-network charges, Zain Kenya is accusing competitor Safaricom of sabotage. The company has written to the Communications Commission of Kenya, asking the regulator to stop Safaricom from “abusing dominance” by offering only limited capacity for cross network calls coming from the Zain network. “Our customers are experiencing congestion and call set up issues when they call Safaricom and not when calling Zain. This is purely for the simple reason that our main competitor has been delaying the capacity increase request from our side to accommodate the incremental traffic coming from us after we launched our new offer in the market,” said Mr. Rene Meza, Zain Kenya Managing Director. continue reading »

Recognizing that many development companies may not have specialized marketing people or the resources to conduct formal research,Safaricom, Airtel, Orange and Yu can help fill this gap by opening up access to their customer base to encourage co-creation and testing with real end users, free of charge.

That said, developers need to figure out how to make their applications stand out from the crowd. Giving your app away for free doesnt mean a damn thing and won’t hack long term. This is business…at least I want to make some chingching. If there is no emotional or financial bond between your application and the user…then your sunk even if you were to pay guys to use your app

Key to ensuring your app will appeal to consumers is working directly with your intended audience at an early stage. Why waste time and effort if you don’t have an understanding of the following critical questions:

• Which features will make a difference to people?
• What is your addressable market?
• How much are people prepared to pay you for your trouble, if anything?

Whats the point in working on a closet killer application that is not so killer once you go to market coz you essentially build a product for yourself? #sadbuttrue

Maybe a mobile subscriber volunteer initiative that would see developers get access to real world users to test their apps. The feedback would be vital to the creation of sticky mobile utilities.

“What do you wish you knew before you started a business?” Aggregated feedback from across the globe

1. I wish I would have known how unpredictable things can be at ALL times. I read a lot before starting my business and realized unexpected things happen, but never did I realize the frequency in which they do. You really need to learn how to adapt everyday to things you may not have forseen waking up that morning. – Scott Fineout, http://www.607magazine.com

2. Before going into business I wish I knew the importance of having an established “Advisory Board”.  Having a mentor is one thing but having a counsel of people who are not only experts in various business
related functions but are also cheerleaders and coaches for your success is another. – Kellie L. Posey www.keleventsllc.com

3. I wish I knew about the value of keeping it simple. Starting out young with plenty of energy and great ideas led me down many paths of distraction. Instead, by focusing first on what sells, why and at what price and then staying true to that over time, I would have saved a lot of headaches, time and supported profitability a lot sooner. The saying KISS is popular for a reason and particularly applicable when you’re an entrepreneur. – Deborah Osgood www.bdki.com

4. The one thing that I wish I knew before starting a business was how much time you spend learning – it is constant – from self development, to business basics, to social media, – talk about wearing many hats! Oh my and thought motherhood was challenging. I love to learn new things but had no idea it was going to be like this. You have to learn how to act, how to present, how to close, how to keep in contact, how to prospect, and how to keep customers! – Michelle Morton http://www.sochomebusiness.com/

5. Focus on yourself as much as your product/service. The recipe is only as good as the Chef preparing the dish. – Mujteba H. Naqvi http://www.bonvoy.com

6. That whatever my start-up budget is… I should have multiplied it by three – Aliya Jiwa http://spunkystork.com continue reading »

“Once I was deliberating on matters constitutional with a friend and needed to refer to a certain clause in the now famous document …while i had the doc in softcopy as pdf, how could I refer to it while away from my laptop? Next time I was going to be prepared. – Joe Njeru”

This is how Joe Njeru of Zilojo came up with the idea of the mobile constitution. It is to be found on www.katiba.mobi and even offers the document in Swahili using Google translate. Simple and it works…now you can argue from a point of knowledge next time you are engaging in constitutional discourse.

We have fallen into the cycle  of giving out our hard earned knowledge to the world…if not on tv its in the newspapers. Immaculate Karambu hunted down Bwana Salim and got him to say a couple of things on online banking, the opportunities / benefits and the all important issue of security and fraud. Here is the piece as appeared in page 27 of the Business Daily on 5th May 2010. continue reading »

I got wind of these chaps called Pewa Hewa Music Limited who have implemented the Ipay payment gateway from Intrepid Data systems which I covered here, for their online music store. So the first thing i did was dash to their website to check out their user experience, but all I found was a splash page, saying “exciting new albums being uploaded”.

I have some issues with the Pewa Hewa chaps. continue reading »