Tag Archives: Maker Faire Africa 2010

The Maker Faire Affair…

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John Interview with Maker Team

Africa has for a long time been considered as one of the least likely places to find innovation. This is despite anthropological and historical evidence that man first started being inventive in the heart of Africa, right around where present day Kenya is situated.

So when a gathering of Makers and Innovators assembled at Nairobi University Main Campus grounds it was just a case of Innovation coming back to where it began, or was it?
Gadgets and Artistic things were on full display, with their creators coming from as far as Ghana and even Wales. Despite being one of the Makers I couldn’t resist leaving my stand and sampling some of the gadgets and amazing things on display. Here is some of what i saw.
See Pictures and more on facebook here.

Emer: Butterfly Works

There were implements carved from bones, spectacles built from scrap metals which were done by Kabiru deservedly won the Out of the Box award. Many Makers and visitors took turns to try them kewl shades and all i can say is that we really got a glimpse into what the future fashions would be like.

Simon Kimani a genius who had in 2008 been featured in Citizen TV for fully automating his house using a mobile phone returned with an even better manifestation of the same that earned him the 1st runner up prize. The overall winner was

Chika Okafor demos his Baggy Inventions

Unicef presented a Computer housed in a drum to allow be used in the harshest environments found in Africa. Chika Okafor from Nigeria brought a multipurpose bag that could be used for carrying Vaccines and housing perishable foods that could be harmed by rain.

Modelling Sanaa Recycled Knit Wear

Sanaa a Student from the Arts department from Nairobi University showcased lovely set of knitted chest scarves and handbags that made use of waste nylon, which i gladly modeled.
Ladies don’t i look cute :)
All in all it was a great event and one that we hope comes back to nairobi soonest.
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Crowd Sourced Whive Appdate

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iKatiba a Crowd Sourced Mobile App

Its been quite a while since i have written anything on Whive, but we have been busy working on a slew of applications all scheduled to be released on Alpha by the end of the year .

Our first and perhaps most important App is the iKatiba Mobile Application which we released on beta about 2 months ago. We currently have almost 800 users who have registered for it.  We are currently Crowd Sourcing its multi-lingual development and adding a few more features including Payments Gateway before we release it on Alpha later this year. iKatiba/Whive.mobi has also had a lot of local and international press for its use in civic education for the just concluded Referendum in Kenya. We will have a report on this soon.

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Our second application is our SMS Facebook Application facebook.whive.com which we have been beta testing in the first 2 weeks of August, we say many thanks to the 193 Users who have helped us iron out the bugs.  We are currently looking for sponsors to sponsor(click here) the application ahead of its showcase at Maker Faire Africa 2010.

FREE SMS http://facebook.Whive.com

Our third application has been in the brewing from 2008 when we acquired PostKenya.com complete with its 3300 users. In this regard we have also had to upgrade our servers to ensure we deliver an effective lite email service that will also be available on iKatiba and Whive.mobi. We are currently Beta testing the service at http://WhiveMAIL.com.

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Find Love Here

NiHuyu.com is the fourth Web App that we are about to fully release. This will eventually be a paid service that allows our members to source from the crowd suitable friends and that special mate. This product has actually been one of our oldest products as those who have been with us from the start will remember that Whive was at one time a Valentines gift service.

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PesaPay Payment Gateway Download

Our last Application is our Stand Alone payment gateway PesaPay which we will be fully crowd sourced and FREE to Download. We intend to give our platform away for free so that Kenyan Developers and SME’s can support epayments as well as mpayments without going through any third party. Whive will also be providing Market Data from our Whiver.com API to PesaPay users to enable them make sense of Kenyan markets.

The Whive Cloud is now averaging 1.2 million hits a month with a 20% increase in traffic each month. We would like to thank our team, members, fans and sponsors who are responsible for this modest progress.

Special thanks to incubators such as the *iHub_, Tandaa and naiLab who have so far provided an excellent forum  for our and other ideas to Crowd analyzed and tested. We have also opened our Micro Data Center dubbed ^bHive¬

Join me John Karanja at the Maendeleo Speaker Series at Nairobi Baptist on 25th August 2010 where i will be giving a speech on Social Media for Business.

Join the Whive Team at Maker Faire on 27th/28th at Nairobi University.

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