Reflections with Michael Joseph from Al Kags on Vimeo.
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Factors that govern the economics of service and product delivery are the same across different industries and sectors. To draw a parallel with the mobile industry and give perspective, it is said to be more expensive per unit to transport goods within Africa than it is to Europe. Poor infrastructure by way of dilapidated or nonexistent roads, railway lines with different gauges, poor logistical planning and business models have made intra Africa trade a costly nightmare. Plans to address this have been floated, with the ideas being a focused on consolidated pan-african road and rail networks.
So how does this related to uptake of local content on mobile? In the rapidly changing world of technology, mobile network operators introduced mobile data, that has seen an increase in the consumption of services brought about by increased mobile phone utility. With this increased uptake, there has also been an increase in the demand for services that rely heavily on mobile data. This has seen all mobile network operators invest capital to own shares in the various undersea cables that connect us to the rest of the world to reduce reliance on satellite connectivity that is expensive. This initial surge by consumers on mobile data was driven by the need to access information and content which more often than not was created or resided outside the country. According to the State of the Mobile Web report released in July 2012 by Opera, the top 10 visited properties are Facebook, Google, Twitter, Waptrick, Tagged.com, Eskimi, Goal.com, BBC, Nation and Wikipedia. Of these properties, only one would be considered local, and I think differently about the social networks on the list as they would probably dominate the ranking in other countries as well . Continue Reading…
The growth of the mobile industry in Africa has been nothing short of amazing, with the mobile phone becoming a defacto part of day to day life across all levels of society and innovation happening rapidly to increase its utility. One of the pain points that individuals and corporations are trying to address is that of taking services closer to the consumer and with that comes the issue of payment for services.
Mpesa, which I consider an outlier service in respect to its runaway success in person to person mobile money transfer, is trying to add value to its service offering by going for the business end of things. This has seen larger utility companies leverage this to increase consumer satisfaction and improve on collection of revenue. In Kenya, the Mpesa service commands a 90+% share of the market, which doesn’t lend itself well to the replication that mobile network operators are trying to do across the world as the dynamics vary greatly. Continue Reading…
Mobile strategy for a business is not one of those things that you can cover extensively in one post, but I figured I could at least give you a primer on some of the things that you will need to think through when creating it.
With everyone jumping onto the mobile apps bandwagon, the decision makers will be forgiven for being clueless about where to begin or even what would provide best fit for their operations given that agencies are also not doing a good job of education.
Many are just getting to realize the impact of web and the mobile story may be a bit too heavy to digest. As the year comes to a close and we begin to strategize for the coming year for our business operations and looking at how to connect in more meaningful ways with our consumers, mobile needs to form a key component of digital strategy.
In the same way that the web ecosystem evolved, you may want to take baby steps to discover what mix works best for you as well as ease into the whole environment. This process includes looking to see if mobile is necessary in your customer experience and what assets are available for mobile consumption – think product information, alerts etc.
Perhaps the mobile strategy will be inward facing, looking to improve certain parts of your internal business. Strategy goes deeper than application and, mobisite deployments and has to link back to deliverables that impact your bottom-line in one way or another. Continue Reading…
syndicated from: IT News Africa
Dr Pieter Streicher lends this thoughts to what the messaging space will look like in the coming year. I concur on many of the points the raises, and believ we will see the same in the East African market.
2012 is the year the electronic communications opt-in vs opt-out debate is going to come to a head, and the fallout is going to have a significant impact on both businesses and consumers. Related telecommunication regulatory decisions are going to affect both the price of SMS, as well as the amount of SMS spam consumers receive every day – directly impacting the efficacy of the medium.
So, an important year for both SMS as a channel, particularly when used as an alert service, as well as consumers and their exposure to SMS spam.
Here then are Dr Pieter predictions for 2012 in more detail: Continue Reading…
The tariff wars between the mobile operators was bound to have a resounding effect at some point in time, with the day of reckoning coming by way of Safaricom announcement of their half year results that saw a 47.4 percent dip in half year net profit to Ksh 4 billion. Traditional voice and messaging has in the past been majorly peer to peer and served as the cash cow for mobile network operators. With consumers calling for lower tariffs on both these fronts, mobile network operators are having their work cut out for them, if the plum profits they have enjoyed in the past are to remain constant.
TNS Research International East Africa released a report last year dubbed – Digital Life 2010 that looked into what Kenyans are doing online. That alongside other research can help in determining where to place effort and financing toward the creation of compelling new services for mobile network operators. What is important though is that this innovation need not come from within the operators but they should look to the growing local developer community.
My growth area forecasts are as follows.
It is always interesting to hear discussions around emerging technologies or industries that seem to capture the minds of everyone; from your barber to the executive at a FMCG company. More often than not, if the discussion is based on mobile technology, a lot of assumptions are made as to who plays what role and where the opportunity lies.
At the very top of the mobile ecosystem is the regulator CCK – Communications Commission of Kenya who are in charge of issuing licenses to mobile network operators, premium rate service providers – PRSP’s and content providers. The different tiers of licensing attract varied fees with the current cost of the PRSP and content provider license standing at Ksh 100,000, on top of an application fee of Ksh.10, 000. The license fee is annual and from year two, it is based on a percentage of revenue generated by your firm with the lower limit of Ksh.100,000. Continue Reading…
The fact that mobile is big in Africa is undeniable with more people seeking to understand how to derive maximum value from this channel. What most seek to know is how to generate revenue from the various services that they can offer. To generate revenue, one must have the ability to bill for services and there are various ways of doing this.
Shortcodes
Shortcodes are 3-4 digit numbers that are availed by Mobile Network Operators (MNO’s) to Premium Rate Service Providers (PRSP’s) for purposes of setting up services. At the time of setup, shortcodes are assigned billing bands which range from normal sms rates to premium rates of up to 100 shillings. Shortcodes don’t offer flexible billing and you must choose the best fit for your service. Shortcodes attract a monthly rental fee from the operators and may attract a premium one-off fee if the code is considered “golden”, such as an easy to remember 5544 for example.
Mobile operators usually reserve the use of 3 digit short-codes for network centric services. Continue Reading…
Total prize – Ksh 1.5 million
Grand prize – Ksh 200,000 + Samsung Handset
The winners from the first round are:
Mikul, Nelly, Samsung Don,Paul and Bernard
Mikul Shah
Eat Out Mobile is Kenya’s first mobile restaurant guide, allowing us ers to search for restaurants using location, cuisine and budget. The application also benefits from having a popular website www.eatout.co.ke and facebook.com/eatoutkenya presence.
Paul Mungai– Tweet Drill Down
Using the phone’s current geographic location as a reference point, the application will retrieve geo-located tweets within a given geographic radius and provide the capability to filter the data based on certain criteria e.g. crime, food, sports, politics & people.
Sam Kariu – Geuza
Geuza is a Swahili-English translator game app that test’s your knowledge in Swahili vocabulary and helps you improve your fluency.
Nelly Ndonye – Nelly Data
Mobile application for providing real time data from the Nairobi Stock Exchange (NSE)
Bernard Owuor – Zynde Money Manager
This application plugs into Zynde.com – A Kenyan money management (budget, expenses, income, tax etc) web site. The Bada application allows individuals, employees and SMEs to track their finances through their Bada phones on the move
The *iHub_ Nairobi and the Elimisha_us initiative are pleased to announce that Michael Joseph, the CEO of Safaricom Ltd, who is due to retire on November 1, 2010 will come to the *iHub_ Nairobi to meet with young techies, entrepreneurs and tech creatives and reflect on various issues including his last decade at the helm of the most successful company in East Africa.
In a candid discussion (just ten days before his retirement), Mr. Joseph is expected to share the wisdom gathered in his many years as a technology leader and his decade at Safaricom with young future technology leaders who are on the rise today. Among the issues that he may cover in his honest reflections are – his experience setting up and running Safaricom, the values that have driven him, his views on Kenya’s ICT development and its future direction and innovation.
In addition, as October 20th 2010 is Heroes day, the young developers, bloggers, tech creatives and entrepreneurs, will toast to the success of this leader, who through his visionary leadership at Safaricom has made significant contributions to the development of the opportunities they have today. Continue Reading…
