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Notes from Mobile Web East Africa 2012

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Interactive MWEA2012 Session

Interactive MWEA2012 Session

The Mobile Web East Africa Conference 2012 was unlike any other I have been to. The conference managed to cover key aspects affecting the Mobile Web space  in East Africa.

It was interesting to get different perspectives from Government regarding Policy and Implementation as articulated by P.S. Bitange Ndemo and ICT Board C.E.O Paul Kukubo.

Investment and Business from Individuals such as Amy Klement, Chris Kirubi, Raj Gollamudi. Of note was the back and forth debate between Chris and Paul Kukubo from the ICT Board. Conclusion there needed to be more partnership between Government and Private Sector particularly in as far as facilitating the growth of Start-Ups is concerned.

Famous blogger Kachwanya also had a lengthy debate with Paul on the Chipuka Certification and the conclusion was that a certification process is important to give self taught developers some form of Professional Qualification which would act as a Industry standard or benchmark.

Another interesting event was the launch of both Sahizi.com and MimiBoard.com by Mobile Planet(of the Semeni Fame) and Umuntu Media. These organizations were ably represented by Karanja Macharia and Johan Nel. Both these platform aim to address the lack of African platforms that provide e-commerce and publishing solutions.

In conclusion this edition of Mobile Web East Africa was particularly informative and I am sure all the attendants did learn a lot from all the sessions. What follows are my opening remarks as Chairperson of the opening session.

Mr Paul Kukubo C.E.O of Kenya ICT Board, Chief Executive Officers present, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen welcome to the 2nd Edition of the Mobile Web East Africa Conference in Nairobi.

My name is John Karanja Founder and C.E.O of Whive.com and Co-Founder of Crowdpesa. Let me begin by giving a brief history of where we have come from since the last edition of this conference. I remember just 2 years ago the fiber-optic cable had just arrived on the shores of Mombasa, Kenya. This was thanks to the efforts of many of the people in attendance at this conference. I remember also at roughly the same time the iHub community had just been formed.

What followed shortly was the emergence of ideas, start-ups and businesses that began to take advantage of the increased access to Internet bandwidth and Opportunities and indeed we have seen many young people move onto the innovation space.

Ladies and Gentlemen another turning point in the evolution of the ecosystem was the launch of Open Data Kenya by His Excellency the President of Kenya Mwai Kibaki in July 2011. This allowed for the very first time access to public information and I think Kenya was the 2nd country in Africa to do so after Morocco. Since then we have seen a number of start-ups including Whive making use of this data.

Despite this tremendous growth if this space in Kenya we still face 3 key challenges as  I see them. Firstly the cost of Internet access is still high for the average Mwananchi. Lowering the cost of this bandwidth would significantly increase the size of the market and therefore facilitate the growth of business.

The second challenge is that of mentor-ship of the start-ups and businesses that are being formed in places like the iHub. This is of concern particularly because many of these entities are being formed by young people who by definition have little experience. More focus needs to shift to the mentor-ship of these individuals by more experienced people.

Lastly the distribution of products and services developed will remain a huge challenge that Small enterprises are ill equipped to manage.  This perhaps will be the role of larger platforms like Nokia Ovi Store/Safaricom store.

Let us examine 3 key enablers that will hopefully help resolve these challenges going forward. They are Social, Location and Mobile (SoLoMo) that is delivering solutions to the right people and the right place and at the right time.

With those few remarks it is with great pleasure I declare the conference officially open.

Other Event Resources are:

 

 

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Whive Connects Africa : Vision2030 ICT Awards

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On Thursday 9th of June 2011 I gave a speech on our Whive.com platform on how we are contributing to the Vision2030 development plan for Kenya at the NaiLab Nairobi (@nailab).  Here is the written transcript on some of the remarks I made.

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The Internet has made the World a global village, that is digitally connected where information flows from one corner of the globe to the other in real time. However, unfortunately for Africa it accounts for only one percent of the World’s Internet activity. The good news is that this is changing fast, with the tremendous efforts by African Governments such as Kenya’s Vision 2030 plan, which has already led to the arrival of fibre optic connectivity to our shores in June 2010.

This new connectivity to the global Internet networks has resulted in an unprecedented explosion in broadband availability and development of local applications to service the digital needs of Kenyans. Unknown to many Kenyans, the popular and ubiqitous service known as M-Pesa sits on a “cloud” service based in Europe and is now connected to Kenya using fibre optic broadband cable that lands off the shores of Mombasa. This has allowed for the rapid expansion in mobile money use and applications.

As such, Kenya being a leading mobile technology innovation hub is the perfect place for us to launch our Internet Service Whive.com which aims to connect Africans by proving localized and contextualized communication and information applications.

Indeed Whive.com is a social media platform that offers SMS, Facebook, Twitter and Mobile Applications that are built specifically for local use within the Kenyan and African context. This has mainly been achieved by the integration of local languages and use case during development of these applications. In particular, Whive offers a variety of important services namely:

Group and Bulk SMS services
This services allows organizations to send short messages to grouped contacts using a bulk messaging system. We already have 600+ organizations using this service.

Social Advertising
We also have SMS, Text and Banner based advertising products for our 12,000+ individual subscribers on our web, mobile and native applications. Here sponsors advertise their products on each SMS sent through our network and these users send this SMS for free.

Importantly, Whive differs from other platforms because we are localizing our mobile applications to meet the needs of the diverse Kenyan and African communities. We have done this by making the application available in local vernacular, which include Swahili, Sheng, French and English. We will be rolling out our SMS application in other colloquial languages.

Whive is seeking to help the Kenyan youth with our Classifieds application. This application currently offers jobs and other essential information to this cohort that has been largely ignored for a long time within society. Recently Whive won the Vision 2030 ICT Award for the youth, gender and vulnerable groups sector. This achievement has emboldened us to do even more and as a result we plan to expand this service by developing a fully fledged Swahili social networking application to expand this service across our borders to the East African Community.

This new application will also form a basis of lingual translation services of key Kenyan languages for up to 10,000 Words. This will ensure that we continue to preserve our rich cultural heritage presently as envisioned in the New Constitutional Dispensation.

At Whive.com we believe that if we succeed in digitally connecting the youth to the opportunities the Internet has to offer we will as a country continue to benefit from the explosion of ideas and the utilization of talent that is plentiful in our country. In addition we will be able to meet the goals set in the Vision 2030 plan that aims to reduce illiteracy, poverty and bring our people to a middle income status by the year 2030.

Additionally Kenya will be recognized as a leading technology hub not only in Africa, but also across the world earning ourselves a prestigious leadership position that is rightfully ours.

In conclusion I would like to invite you all to join www.Whive.com where we are Connecting Africa.

John Karanja is the Founder and C.E.O of Whive.com.

This article was first featured on Business Daily on 10/06/2011 as part of the Vision 2030 Supplement.

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Camping @ BarCamp Day 2

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Stefan of Mocality with *iPad_ @ *iHub_ @ Barcamp (Photo by @whiteafrican)

Barcamp day 2 was kicking with Whive.com, Google and Kenya ICT Board making presentations in the early morning session.

Since i was participating i didn’t have a chance to  take any notes on the other presentations but here is a brief summary of what i talked about.

You can read more on the other presentations at WhiteAfrican.com and iHub.co.ke

I showcased Whive.com as an African social networking platform that is offering social networking tools to Kenyans in their colloquial languages.

I also  showed for the first time our social networking Mobile App for Nokia.

This application will be available on iKatiba.com Kenya’s first Mobile App Store from this week. You can view the release dates here http://www.ikatiba.com. Also See our  iKatiba facebook photo album by our fans here

I got a number of interesting questions from the community on use and business case for this applications and demonstrated that we need to innovate at the local level with global thinking.

Here are some of the tweets regarding this

downeym Looks like Whive.com will be a good competitor to
@naijaborn and @camerborn in west africa #BarCampNairobi

whiteafrican Coolest thing about Whive is that it’s being done in 9
colloquial languages in Kenya: http://www.whive.com/ikatiba #barcampnairobi

Amasy RT @iHubNairobi: First up is John Karanja from http://
whive.com a new mobile & web social network. #barcampnairobi

Had an interesting conversation with Bridgette Sexton from Google about integrating google maps which we currently doing at Whive.com

Thanks to the BarCampers for their participation as i really enjoyed both days of the event.

Come back on Monday evening for a full update.

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