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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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A 1 million dollar week in Kenya’s mobile Space

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Who will wall their garden?

This has by no stretch of the imagination been an incredible week in the Kenyan Mobile Space. Why? It seems to have grown in leaps and bounds over the past 7 days. Earlier in the week i wrote about how Safaricom needed to focus its own mobile space initiatives around engaging Kenyan Application developers and coming up with a workable revenue model that would enhance the openness of its platform.

Well Safaricom did test run (its down now) its App store but with hundreds if not thousands of Apps presumably from other App markets. This obviously is better than nothing but adds nothing to sentiment that Safaricom is not interested in Kenyan owned mobile solutions …

This sad state of affairs was also exacerbated by reports in mainstream media that M-kesho was allegedly yet another case of stolen ideas.

In my opinion Safaricom’s Walled Garden approach may definately bring huge profits in the short run but for its ecosystem to flourish it needs to adopt more openness (Think Twitter).

I like what i see in Zain…

Earlier in the year i wrote why Bharti is best placed to launch an App store in Kenya largely because of the favourable sentiment emanating from Kenya Techies.

Indeed, rumour has  it that Zain is already working with established Kenyan Developers in the mobile space to guide the development of not only Kenya’s App space but the Sub-Saharan region as well.

More importantly Zain is being very proactive, it yesterday announced a partnership with IBM to roll out a $1.5 billion infrastructure to be based in Kenya which would support among many other things a Music(think iTunes) and App store (Thin Ovi).

This is very important because it means they are looking to scale application development in this region. A good backbone infrastructure means less costs in the future and rapid expansion of the ecosystem.

Zain can score if adopts a 70 developer : 30 Zain revenue split. In fact if it really wanted to control the Apprican market space it should open it up for free for say 2 years and let the best apps rise above the others by being voted up. This is what made M-Pesa such a huge success, it was near free for the first 3 years. Now they are making a killing considering it is now 10% of Safaricom’s yearly revenue.

Governance and Opportunity…

A BIG leap Pic: Courtesy Nation

IBM president Samuel Palmisano,  Bharti chairman Sunil Bharti , Bharti International CEO Manoj Kohli met with President Kibaki signaling a future Public/Private partnership that will not only open up Government through E-Government but also suggest that huge investments are on the way to the country. Presidents of Fortune 500′s don’t just drop by. President Kibaki notably was quick to acknowledge the presence of a lot of talent in the country (Read More).

The arrival of a more open government would mean more access to data. More access to Government data means more access to social problems. More access to problems means more access to needs. More access to needs means more access to opportunity and solutions.  For example back in 2003 Mpesa addressed the problem of having a large percentage of unbanked citizens who could not save and therefore could not invest. Kudos to safaricom for that.

The next range of mobile solutions will solve the problems of health, agriculture, voting and leisure. They are already here! Read about my idea how iphone 4g or equivalent phone could save lives if used by health sector.

Apps like Mkulima, iKatiba(our very own) are the forerunners of what is a fast expanding African ecosystem. This why you see the emergence of Kenyan owned mobile App stores like MobiSoko (by Juliana Rotich of the Ushahidi fame) and M-Labs led by Ken Mwenda.

iKatiba Application by Whive.org

To cap the crazy week, Nokia have just awarded Ken Waibochi (A.K.A. Murags) and Virtual city a venture fund of 1 million dollars for his B2B problem solver application that has already been deployed at East Africa Breweries Limited.

Nokia has also been funding and training other developers (including us) with impressive results. In this regard  Nokia and Kenya’s Telkom companies are more certainly set to do battle for hearts and minds of Kenyan Techies.

So now we say “Ndovu wawili wakipigana, Poacher hucheka hadi Benki “.

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Google Nexus One smart phone shakes up sector

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nexusone8

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 of the hardware of the Nexus One,  explained the genesis of the phone together with members of the Nexus One Google team.
Technical Specifications are below
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 Google.com/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

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