CALLING DEVELOPERS - MICROSOFT FIND MY PHONE

Many of the cool features on Microsoft's latest software releases have not yet been configured to Kenya. That figures because North America, Europe and Asia usually get new stuff in that order before Middle East and Africa versions are rolled out.

But there is one glaring one on Microsoft's Live Essentials that even prompted the local office to issue a challenge to Kenyan developers to come up with the application themselves.

It is called Locate My Phone. On Live Essentials, a personal computer cloud where you can back up stuff and files from your PC onto the internet and work on them elsewhere, there is also the provision of adding your phone so that your contacts and other stuff on your phone can be backed up on the cloud.

For North America users, this feature also has a Locate My Phone link where you click if you can't find your phone or if it is stolen.

Since it is disabled for Kenya, Louis Otieno (pictured), Microsoft East and Southern Africa General Manager, challenged local developers to come up with code that can achieve this and they can have it uploaded onto the Microsoft online portal, Marketplace and make money from it.

Essentially, it would probably be a simple program that uses a phone's GPS and interfaces with say Google Maps to point you to the exact position of the device.

The program could have additional features for disabling the phone or erasing sensitive information and all that.

This is not unlike vehicle tracking systems with mapping software like Geofence. In fact this software could easily be tinkered with to do achieve the same effect for the phone.

"We can port the application onto the cloud," Louis said.

To follow up developers can seek out Emmanuel Birech or Vincent at Microsoft Offices.