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.

Want to understand the regulatory space…in Nigeria, you can pull the full doc here

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

Interested? drop my pal Ravi an email with your CV on -ravinder(at)kulwantadvisory.com

On M-ganga and her Phd she says -

Silvian Wanjiku Gitau - courtesy University of Cape Town

“This raises an opportunity for a more proactive means to provide healthcare through this traditional means, which can be optimised through technology.” Her proposed system includes a web-based application that will capture and disseminate traditional healing sessions through a cell phone. The system records the sessions in both audio and video, and stores them in an online database. It will also show where the medicinal plants are available, how they should be used, and whether they are endangered or not.

“My motivation is beyond a degree, and my biggest fulfillment is to see people’s lives change for the better. It will be pointless if my PhD in computer science is not relevant in addressing people’s real life problems.”

Good stuff I must say, plus the fact that she wants to get back home ASAP and explore the opportunities that have been opened up by mobile tech. Kudos Shiko!The Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship was established by Google in 2004 to honor Dr. Anita Borg, a computer science pioneer who dedicated her life to changing the way we think about diversity and technology. Anita’s namesake scholarship continues to support women completing degrees in computer science and related areas, recognizing and encouraging the next generation of technical leaders and role models.

2010 marks an important milestone for the Anita Borg program: for the first time ever, students at Sub-Saharan African universities were invited to apply. This year, Google awarded a total of two scholarships and two finalist positions to female Sub-Saharan African students, representing three countries and four universities.

……………………………………………………

Dr. Anita Borg (1949–2003)

Anita Borg believed that technology affects all aspects of our economic, political, social and personal lives. A technology rebel with a cause, in her life she fought tirelessly to ensure that technology’s impact would be a positive one. It was this vision that inspired Anita in 1997 to found the Institute for Women and Technology. Today this organization continues on her legacy and bears her name, The Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology (www.anitaborg.org).

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.

In not so many words: Bad for business but good for strategy students. Safcom have lost the advantage they had on price perception. Zain has gained the price perception advantage and taken the lead. Safcom have become followers. Game has changed. Territory ni ya bharti. New field for safcom. Zain had better have cash for the fight. Safcom has war chest just never been used.
•    strategy – zain wins
•    response and speed to market – safcom & yu
•    overall gain -  consumer
•    overall loss -  orange
•    overall winners – cck as regulators.
next
1.    challenge for sms based businesses like yours Mbugua
2.    challenge for PRSP’s in general
3.    sms aggregators have cost issues
4.    new area for fights is data/content

Here goes: The move by Bharti to reduce its Kenyan operation’s voice tariffs by 50% is an unsustainable pricing strategy. Zain (Bharti) seem to be banking on the Indian model of low tariffs and high volumes to increase MOU in a market with an elasticity of less than 1.

Safaricom has no intention of getting engaged in a similar pricing strategy that would undermine our business and erode value for our shareholders. Safaricom will launch aggressive promotions to limit any market share gain by the competitors and at all times protect our revenue share. Reduction in MTR’s to KES2.21 will not have a significant impact financially on Safaricom as we are net receivers of off-net calls.

Safaricom has moved away from being a pure voice player to a total communications provider. We have always assumed that voice would move to be a low cost commodity and therefore we embarked on extending our offerings. We had provided for a reduction in tariffs as well as heightened competitor activity in the short term in our forecasts and in our discussions with the investment community in the past year.  And to this end, we have amplified our focus on cost efficiencies across the board and will continue to do so going forward.  Expectations on EBITDA margins are still within the guidance we have provided to you and we should maintain it at the same level as last year’s. Our data strategy continues to gain traction as well as M-PESA which is growing from strength to strength.

Safaricom has invested significantly in its network, having spent KES139bn since inception – more than any other operator in the country.  Over the past two years, we have invested significantly in our data network; fibre, 3G and Wimax. Safaricom is the only operator with a 3G network with over 600 3G-enabled and 140 Wimax base stations and a mobile money product that contributes positively to EBITDA margin.  We are committed to our continued investment in our infrastructure to leverage on our strengths. Data combined with M-PESA will ensure that we will continue to benefit from the growth that we see in the Kenyan market.

We do expect that there will be some volatility in the market place, but we firmly believe that Safaricom is in a significantly better position to weather this volatility than our competitors.