iKatiba Mobile Application Suite

Whive.com through its Whiver service has just released Swahili and Sheng applications to the general public and is also set to release Kikuyu, Luo/Lwo and Luhya applications over the next few days.

This is consistent with one of the goals of  Whive.com which is to provide information through mobile technology to African masses.

Whive.com recognizes that in order to achieve Vision 2030 Kenya has to utilize its rich cultural diversity as one of the tools of development.

In this regard we have worked very hard to bring to you a suite of applications in local languages collectively dubbed as  iKatiba.

These applications will be available shortly on the Nokia Ovi store for Kenya. You can view the entire Whive.com application space and timetable for release at ikatiba.com

See Business Daily Feature [Click Here]

JohnKaranja.com @ Barcamp Nairobi 2010

So I spent the better part of the day not blowing my Vuvuzela endlessly (like i did yesterday) but listening and interacting with some of the techiest minds in Kenya.

Here are my rough  notes on what happened throughout the day.

I would summarize the Camp as having been one which laid an emphasis on the Openness and Transparency of data access from the myriad of  web and mobile platforms that exist in Kenya and in Africa today.

It was also nice to see Government and Web operators singing the same song for once.

THE SONG:Transperancy and Openess

Tariq did a useful demonstration of data use and how governments in the UK were and are providing their Aid data on open platforms for citizens to track how their taxes where being used to in other countries.

Thuo spoke about outsourcing governments simple functions using a framework to know what to outsource. The end result i smaller government with better processes and using subcontractors.

Paul Kukubo in defence of government talked about increased Government transparency  and activeness  through programs such as subsidized bandwidth in Universities.

Digital Villages and Grants for innovative content for government (worth $10,000 and $50,000) for building Government applications and digitization of Government records.

I had a chance to talk to Kaburo who is running the grants program applications are made online on their platform to enhance transparency (Apply Here).

End Result: You will be able to search for company records in minutes that means government is your laptop.

Other examples

• Influence both laws and projects.
• Cisco teleconferencing for Judges.

Paul lamented that connectivity and innovation doesn’t see response from the techie activists on the web. Being good at technology doesn’t mean good at business.

Therefore greater response to government tenders is needed.

Tariq came back with another live demo i.e. opengovernance.info

Alex Gakuru raised issues on openness and governance and the negative effects of crony capitalism in Kenya.

Interoperability of Government Data

Surprisingly government has an inclination towards open source and is supporting local applications.

Infact Government bills on Data Privacy and Protection are already tabled in parliament. We need to turn our attention to these issues .

Tariq indicated that XML is a useful tool in open data this we find to be true as our mobile platforms are both using and sharing XML data (see here).

Final word from Paul is you need to protect your ideas and knock doors for partnerships.

OPEN STREET MAP and GEOTUBE

Mike Maron talked about mapping Kibera using GPS units and walking papers with QR Code.  Access to Open data is the motivation of building this GEOMAP

Voice of Kibera talked about their Ushahidi install http://www.kibera.ushahidi.com you can contact them to help at contact@mapkibera.org

Issues that came up is Geo-Location is not precise as opposed to Geo Mapping.  GEOTube is doing Geo mapping in USA and collecting Geo spatial data. The application is built in WebFlex and has a set of Widget and Console containers.

whiteafrican

Total registered members at #barcampnairobi was 600+ today!

moseskemibaro

intellectual property question from a developer to Mike Micharia at #barcampnairobi. How is this addressed in Kenya?

tandaaKENYA

Sevenseas have set up innovation lab to develop skills in market. Very fwd thinking #barcampnairobi

tullyme

calling kenya devs! tweet @lkamau if u have experience working w @ushahidi code or skilled in php. putting together dev list #barcampnairobi

mdailey919

Cool! RT @butterflyworks: iKatiba.com Kenya’s 1st Mobile App store http://bit.ly/dix7YE #BarCampNairobi via @afrineurs @afrinnovator

kaburo

So looks like won’t talk about the tandaa grants today afterall. Time run out. Talk moved to tmrw 11am. #barcampnairobi

IKATIBA MULTILINGUAL VERNACULAR MOBILE APPS

On day 2 I will be showcasing to anyone who is interested our Mobile Application for Kenyans, including 9 vernacular languages.  We want to collect as many views as possible so we will be there till they kick us out.

The Mobile APP store is at http://www.ikatiba.com

The Web platform is at http://www.whive.com

Do come back on Monday Evening for a fully updated post.

GTUG Silicon Valley

I spent the better part of my Saturday interacting with the boys at Google Kenya.

Amhed  Maawy gave us a brief overview of what services Google is offering within the Kenyan Space.

They are:

1. Google Search
2. Google Site
3. Google Mail
4. Google Blogs
5. Google News
6. Google Chrome
7. Google App Engine

He also officially invited the members to the group. You can also join at

http://groups.google.co.ke/group/nairobigtug?hl=en

Next up was Andrew Wachira who gave a detailed description on how to use Google Sites and AppEngine, in that single session we learnt how to make simple Forms and collect data in SpreadSheet and CSV format.

We also learnt how to install and develop applications using Python and Google OS Databases.

We discovered that google basically offers huge space and bandwidth for you to develop your web applications.

Jeremiah Kamau showed us how to integrate and manipulate the Google Maps Engine and also announced that Google maps .co.ke for Kenya had been launched.

http://maps.google.co.ke

All in all the GTUG meeting was succesful with many questions and discussions on how Kenyans can succesfully use the google cloud.

For more details do join the group and learn new skills that could help you in future.

John Karanja at MWEA2010

Opening  Remarks
Welcome Ladies and Gentlemen to the second day of the first Mobile Web Conference in East Africa. Technology today, in particular Mobile and Web technology is increasingly becoming an essential part of our life. Today more than 30 percent of East Africans have access to mobile phone technology. Internet adoption in this region is also amongst the fastest growing in the world.

This has improved the livelyhoods of many citizens of EA by allowing them to interact more easily with other individuals, many whom are in far flung areas of the region.

The mobile phone for example allows us to  conduct business at an interpersonal level which is crucial for the economic development of the entire region as a whole.

Today we have a line up of fantastic speakers, in many different sectors that make up social life in Kenya as well Africa.

Closing Remarks
Many of you might recall, when just 11 years ago Kenya and much of the region was at the cusp of the mobile revolution, communication was difficult and our telecommunications infrastructure at the time was unreliable, if it existed at all in many parts of this region.

The last 10 years has seen a rapid growth of not only mobile technology but internet use of which many in this room rely on for their day to day livelyhood.

Today, we face a new challenge, albeit not very different from the one we faced 10 years ago. We find ourselves situated once again at the cusp of  what is surely a revolution , a revolution that we will not only participate in, but lead as well.

At stake is the economic fortunes of not only the countries in this region but our very own individual fortunes. So, we are called to define the path for this journey we are about to take.

Ladies and Gentlemen in this regard i wish you all the best of luck as you seek out to achieve your dreams and the dreams of this country and continent.

Thank you all once again.
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Mobile Web Applications

The Mobile Web East Africa conference will be held in Nairobi on 3rd and 4th February at the Hotel Intercontinental. I will be giving a lecture on Web/Mobile technologies and social progress.

Also speaking will be a whole host of leading experts and businessmen from the East African region and beyond. You can see the full list here [Faculty Speakers]. They include the Kenyan Minister for ICT  Mr Samuel Pogishio.

JOIN US

All Amber has negotiated a special rate at the venue for all Mobile Web East Africa attendees.  This allows you to secure a Superior Room for $205 instead of the normal price of $320.  To take advantage of this special rate please contact Elias Rachier on the telephone number above or email - Elias.Rachier@icnairobi.com

We also plan to set up a Live Stream for those who shall not be able to make it to the event.

DATE

3rd and 4th February 2010

THE VENUE

INTERCONTINENTAL NAIROBI
City Hall Way
City Square,
Nairobi
00200
Kenya

Google Earth on Nexus One

Having spent almost 4 days including today moving up and down London’s High street shops looking for the best mobile phone around, and having finally settled on Nokia N97 and the iPhone 3GS as the most likely candidates to meet that requirement.  Google needed to pull one out of the hat to convince me that better was out there.  THEY  DID !!!

Just have a look at the new Nexus One Google smart phone which is in all likelyhood a piece of googles long term strategy of setting up a cloud computing network based fundamentally on its operating system and google ethos of giving everything for free.

In my view the main motivation for google going forward was to mitigate against the damage mobile computing was doing to its internet search(advertising) business. Mobile Apps particularly on iPhone App Store and Nokia Ovi store had the potential of significantly reducing the usefulness of search engines on mobile computing devices hence the reason google joined the game albeit in spectacular fashion.

Indeed the first thing google has done is to place a search bar in the home interface of the Application OS to ensure that search remains a key feature of the phone.

Peter Chou, the CEO of HTC, the company that created the hardware of the Nexus One,  explained the genesis of the phone together with members of the Nexus One Google team.

Technical Specifications:

The specs match previous leaks. It’s a 3.7 AMOLED display with a trackball.

• It comes with features such as a light sensor, GPS, and accelerometer. These are all features pioneered by Apple’s iPhone.
• It’s 130 grams in weight and 11.5 mm in width, about the width of a standard #2 pencil.The camera is 5MP with LED flash.
• The audio has received an upgrade. It has two microphones, one of which is used for noise cancellation.
• Customization is a key to the Nexus One. There are five home screens to cusotmize your interface.
• Google showed off some of its dynamic touchscreen features of the software. For example, one of the wallpapers is a lake with leaves. When you touch it, it has a nice rippling effect.
• They worked with the team at CoolIris to visualize photons on the Nexus One in a 3D environment. If you tap on an album, you’ll be able to quickly scan and load photos. You can also tip and dip photos based on your hand motions and the accelerometer.
• Text fields are voice enabled. Every time you speak, it will process your speech into text. It gets better and better the more and more you use it.

You can find the Google One Nexus at www.google.com/phone

View Video Leak Below

Sixth Sense Magic

Introducing the technologies i believe will change the world in 2010.

SixthSense

Developed by Pranav Mistry who is currently a Research Assistant and PhD candidate at the MIT Media Lab, ‘SixthSense’ is a wearable gestural interface that augments the physical world around us with digital information and lets us use natural hand gestures to interact with that information.

This device promises to revolutionize the way humans interact with computing devices and could mean the beginning of the end of our couch potato existence. [See Video Below]

JooJoo

Named after African term for wizardry and magic is a tablet device that  has been developed by Chandrasekar Rathakrishnan. Chandra is the the Founder & CEO of Fusion Garage. Chandra was born and educated in Singapore and has an Advanced Diploma in Computer Science (Oxford University).

The devices allows you to view web based content on a full screen 12 inch iphone like device. Have a look at the Demo and decide whether you would be willing to spend $500 on this device.

Spammed by Russia

I logged in to the admin section of this website to discover that i had been spammed (SQL Injection Hacks) into yet another tiring routine of deleting comments and lose 20 more minutes of my life carefully perusing through spam and actual comments.

Spam is increasingly becoming a huge expense and burden on almost anyone who uses the internet to check mail or communicate.

Assuming i earn $15 for every hour of productivity. It means i am loosing 1/3 of $15 = $5 every day which translates to a whopping $150 every month due to useless spam.

If a company has 200 people that rely on email that translates to $30,000 monthly loss and an unbelievable $460,000 lost to spam.

The estimate is even worse if we take a country which has conservatively 100 companies with over 200 people employed as staff who face this problem. In this case the country looses $46,000,000 roughly Kshs 3.7 billion to such spam attacks.

Such figures should immediately prompt the Kenyan government to set up safe guards that protect Kenyan websites and servers from Spam traffic that originates mostly from Russian/Siberian servers. This should be a project for the Communications Commission of Kenya and National Security Intelligence Service Cyber War unit.

This country is in a de facto state of war for which its security agencies are inadequately prepared. In the past 6 months the following websites have been hacked.

• StateHouse.co.ke which is the Presidents personal website.
• Capitalfm.co.ke which is one of Kenya’s leading websites.
• EquityBank.co.ke which was cloned by Nigerian scammers [See Proof]

Rumour has it that the most famous hack was in 2008 when the Department of Defence was attempting to transfer money to Ukrainian arms dealers over unsecured protocols (specifically http) when the money (in Billions) got intercepted by Russian hackers who presumably proceeded to have to largest party ever courtesy of Kenyan tax payers.

Hackers are having a field day in this country its time we got organized.

Social media marketing (SMM) gets a lot of press these days – and companies are feeling pressure to jump on the bandwagon.But if you’re like many marketers, you may be unclear about the benefits of SMM and how, exactly, you should use it to your best advantage. Without a clear strategy and specific goals and objectives, SMM can be a low-ROI time sink and it may undermine your other marketing efforts – even email. While email marketing and SMM can be a dynamic duo, you need to ensure these two powerhouse marketing tactics are working together in order to achieve results that are greater than the sum of their parts.

What Is Social Media?

There are a lot of new terms being thrown around about social media. But what is social media exactly? According to Wikipedia.org, social media is “online content created by people using highly accessible and scalable publishing technologies … It’s a fusion of sociology and technology, transforming monologues (one-to-many) into dialogues (many-to-many) and is the democratization of information, transforming people from content readers into publishers.” Because the power of mass communication is being put into the hands of the individual (democratization), the adoption of SMM is skyrocketing – virally permeating our personal and professional interactions. Individuals and businesses are creating, sharing and receiving content in exponentially increasing amounts over highly interactive mediums. These mediums are fundamentally transforming the landscape of how consumers interact with each other and, ultimately, with your company. This interaction can be leveraged in very powerful, yet simple, ways to extend the visibility of your email campaigns. Here are some of the conversations we had during the Oxford Social Media conference on 18th September 2009 at the Said Business School.

Twitter Stream:  http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23oxsmc09

Some musings from the participants.

I got back last night from a conference on social media sponsored by the Oxford Internet Institute. Why would anyone pay to hear me talk about blogging, Twitter and Facebook? They wouldn’t. The conference was free. I certainly tried to give people their money’s worth.

Conferences like this are hard to pull off. You can’t really be sure of your audience. Are they people who don’t know Twitter from Flickr fromFlicka? Or are they hardcore power-users who Tweet constantly? The answer was probably, “Yes,” which means you’re likely to disappoint people on both sides, occasionally by being too obvious, occasionally by being too obtuse.

READ MORE

Guardian article: What we learned?

RESOURCES

The OxIS 2009 Report: The Internet in Britain (PDF, 1.9mb)

Wind Farm

Hey guys, some Kenyan bloggers have done some background research on the Kenyan wind farm projects and there is some indication that the cost of the project has been doubled and is not going to be as effective as it sounds. Please follow the discussion here.

Consensus has been building for a Nuclear/ Geothermal power plant

Don’t invest in Wind Power. It’s too expensive, inefficient and undependable. The only way it survives in Europe and North America is through heavy governmental subsidies. Something that Kenya doesn’t have. Electric customers will end up paying two to three times for it when compared to other forms of generation. I read recently where a Wind Farm at Lake Turkana will provide 300 MW installed at a cost of over $800 million USD. This is about twice the cost of similar size “farms” in the US. I hope the contract includes transmission lines for the several hundred miles back to Nairobi. The 300MW is installed. You’ll be lucky to average 75MW or a 25% load factor. Spain has spent Billions (Euros, Pounds, Dollars…you name it) on wind power but it only provides about 12% of grid demand. What keeps Spain electrically afloat is their heavy investment in Natural Gas Combined Cycle (CC) plants that they began to construct at the same time as their investment in wind power. Spanish law requires the distributor, Red Electrica, to pay the wind power generator, 90% over the prevailing rate for conventional power…and to purchase all the wind power produced. Germany, also with a considerable wind power wattage, has determined that 50% of the time their wind machines only provide 11% or less of the grid’s demand. Observe the variability and undependability of wind power at online sites for Red Electrica at:https://demanda.ree.es/generacion_acumulada.html Keep in mind that Spain has over 16,000 MW installed of wind power. Eolica is wind and Resto. Reg. Esp. is what they call Special Regime and includes Co-Generation and Solar Power. Then go here:https://demanda.ree.es/demanda.html to observe the generation curve for each type of power source for the day. Click on the color coded pie chart for each type. Note for Resto.Reg.Esp. that the “hump” is the daily solar power output. For a comparison look at the Ireland daily wind power output here:http://www.eirgrid.com/operations/systemperformancedata/windgeneration/

Click through the Previous and Next Day choices to see the variability of the wind at one of the windiest countries on the planet. Ireland has about 1300MW wind power installed.

Spain utilizes its Hydro power for Peaking loads and to fill in the gaps when the wind isn’t blowing. CC is used for load following and some base load. Nuclear is baseload only along with Co-Generation.

If you looked at the Resto.Reg.Esp. and the hump you can see that solar is a good load follower up to mid-day. It’s not a waste (as I believe wind energy is) but it’s very expensive. Last year, Arizona State University conducted a study of the cost of various types of power sources and concluded that solar was approximately 3.5 to 4 times as expensive as either Nuclear or Coal. They didn’t compare it to wind power because wind power is not much of an option in the State of Arizona.

If solar is chosen then go with thermal. Photovoltaic is very expensive and upsets the grid too easily when clouds go over. With solar thermal there is a thermal inertia that smoothes the rise or fall in output.

In my opinion, there are three reasons why Spain has been able to incorporate so much wind power into their grid. 1) They have an abundant supply of Hydro power that can be dispatched with minutes, if not seconds, that can follow voltage changes caused by varying wind; 2) Their inclusion of CC plants (built about 24,000 MW since 2001) makes up for whatever Hydro can’t do and 3) They’ve installed one of the more sophisticated centralized grid control centers in the world that can control the outputs of their wind farms.

Natural Gas costs can only increase in the future as every country, every utility, and their aunt, tries to comply with some green agenda. Coal of course is cheapest but it certainly will not meet any carbon reduction goals. Some engineers have called Wind Power simply a variation on Natural Gas Power in that most of the time the utility will utilize CCs, similar to what Spain uses their Hydro power for.

My advice would be to go with as much Geothermal and Nuclear as you can get. Some of the newer reactors are designed for load following. Don’t spend vast amounts on wind or solar. Maybe the Europeans and North Americans can throw away money on expensive and inefficient sources but you can’t. Don’t try new schemes. Only go with the proven. Again, maybe China can afford to try new reactors and such, but you can’t. Go modular if you can and start small. If you need some load following or peaking don’t be afraid to install some CC plants. They might not be completely green but they’re better than oil or coal. And remember…while you’re agonizing over whether to buy that one CC plant because it produces a little CO2 the Chinese are constructing about one new coal plant a week!

My allocation would be:

25% Hydro (Use it only for load following and peaking)
10% CC
40% Nuclear
25% Geothermal (or as much as you can get to replace Nuclear)

Plus…Keep some of your old oil plants ready because the reactors are down about once a year or two for refueling. About 30 days.

Good Luck!

Richard
Tucson, Arizona, USA

Continue the discusson here