Tag Archives: Paul Kukubo

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 1

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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.

SOME TWEETS #barcampnairobi

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.

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