NAIROBITECH

Data Journalism boot camp comes to Nairobi

2012-02-06T03:37:00.000-08:00

The training kicked off with a background on the Kenya Open Data Initiative before BBC Newsnight investigative reporter took participants through an Excel crash course ending with Pivot tables. The idea is that contained in the mountains of government data online are potential stories, scandals even that journalists using the right analytical tools can spot by for example visualizing data into tables, graphs and maps.

There followed sessions on data scraping. Government information is sometimes posted in PDF format making it difficult to work with. Sometimes this is deliberate and all one can do is to manually enter the data into tables to with it. A case in point is the national budget which is in word tables and rarely put online. One would have to scan such a document with Optical Character Recognition software. Tedious to say the least.

Next was a session on Google Refine for cleaning data. Sometimes there will be double posting of data from counties or double spellings of one particular county e.g. Tharaka, Tharaka Nithi, Nithi may all appear on the same table.

Google Fusion was next for merging of different tables and columns as well as for visualizing data.

Participants were then split into groups and tasked with coming up with story ideas or applications that utilized the information learnt.

There were great ideas all around. One group sought to link lack of toilets in schools with academic performance while another wanted to track fish farming in Kenya.

Yet another group wanted to promote domestic tourism by marketing counties. Different groups also sought to map crime and accident hot spots in the country.

Follow up to complete the projects will be carried out. Participants got certificates at the end of the training.

NOKIA CEO STEPHEN ELOP IN KENYA NEXT WEEK

2012-02-03T05:33:00.000-08:00

Nokia global head Stephen Elop will be in the country next week in what will be a first. No CEO of the Finnish giant has been here before. This comes at a time when the handset vendor has downgraded its regional hub in Nairobi into a sales office moving other responsibilities to Jo'Burg.

It also comes at a time when at the top of the food chain, Samsung is increasingly asserting its dominance with the Galaxy line and rivals like Sony Ericsson and Research In Motion also seeking to increase their share of the pie. The iPhone 4S is also on sale through Orange although we are yet to see how they handle marketing for this latest iteration.

Nokia regional head Ken Oyolla who had announced his resignation before being made the global head of activations will no doubt welcome the opportunity to host Elop. Oyolla has been regional sales manager for Nokia before and together with Samsung's Amit Patel (formerly of Motorola) know the market trends as well as anyone in the business.

Elop used to be an executive with Microsoft and has steered Nokia toward Windows Mobile as it belatedly abandons Symbian.

OLGA ARARA OUT IN GOOGLE MOCALITY SAGA

2012-01-27T06:59:00.000-08:00

The Google Mocality saga has drawn its first casualties. Kenya country lead for Google, Olga Arara-Kimani formerly of Safaricom has been let go by the company. Also axed is a technical guy in Zurich. Company officials contacted said they will issue a statement once investigations are complete. The statement will come from Nelson Mattos, he of, "mortified" fame. It is not clear how Olga was picked for the fall but as one observer noted, sometimes a sacrificial lamb has to be found for the brand name to weather the storm.

It is unfortunate as the Google getting businesses online that ended up causing so much mayhem was one of the first major projects Olga oversaw.

GOOGLE- (minus)? MOCALITY SEES EVIL IN KBO DEBACLE

2012-01-16T06:07:00.000-08:00

Google deserve to take the beating they are getting. Not because of the initial scandal where Mocality, an online business directory firm, called them out for using its database to telemarket its services under false pretense, but because of continuing to exhibit arrogance.

Stefan Magdalinski went to town with the allegations here: (Google, what were you thinking?) and clearly exhibited more tenacity and innovation than Google's staff or its alleged contract workers, Iridium Interactive, accused on Likechapaa and Tech Mtaa of being behind the fiasco.

Juliet Gateri, Business Manager, at Iridium, has denied any involvement.

Back to Google. They get a minus Google-, for one, allowing such a thing to happen, and two, for a weak and uninspiring response.

It is known that during a crisis in which you or your brand is adversely mentioned, you should seize charge and take control of the information flow. Basically, be the source of any new information regarding the issue.

Beyond a one paragraph apology that has been carried by the world press, Google has been quiet.

Bloggers have had a field day tearing into the search advertising giant while business and tech writers are busy researching pieces that will throw new light on the episode.

Businesses that had been contacted or have been part of the Kenya Businesses Online initiative, probably have a negative feeling about the initiative now and;

Government officials particularly the Ministry of Information and Communication, the Communications Commission of Kenya and Kenya ICT Board probably have more questions for Google than before.

Truth be told, confidence in the firm is not at an all time high here.

And yet, despite the feeling that only half or even less of the story has been told, the firm does not seem to be contributing to clarify the situation.

Neither has it demonstrated a social media action plan to engage inaccurate information appearing on Facebook, Twitter, Blogs and so on.

In our opinion, it makes no commercial sense for Google to be engaged in soliciting business that generates Sh2000 per year.

Actually, Nairobitech was of the opinion that another player, KENIC, the Kenya Network Information Centre, the body charged with registering local domain names, should shed light on this matter as it seems more within its ambit.

David Wambua, CEO, KeNIC promised on KICTANet that a thorough statement would forthcoming:

"Allow me to clarify that it is true that KeNIC does not deal directly with Registrants (end users) but does so through our accredited registrars which Google is not a part of.

Following the recent events, KeNIC will also be preparing a comprehensive statement that will shed more light to the issues that you have requested clarification on in the course of this week."

Google on the other hand, has made no such promises.

From a local perspective, the company has dropped the ball on this one.

From work we have done as consultants, we believe the correct way to handle this would have been as follows:

1. Seize the initiative - Even a simple search on their website, will show Google that the conversation regarding this issue is being driven by bloggers, the social media and the mainstream media. Google has not positioned itself to be the authoritative source of information as this story builds. They could, after of course cutting off the practice and apologizing to Mocality as well as initiating a settlement with the firm behind the scenes, issued a general statement.

Basically, Google needs to come up with a go-to person on this issue. Ideally, if they have a team working on the crisis (including their local agency who can bring in fresh ideas), they should identify for example someone who will deal with the mainstream press (local and foreign).

Dorothy Ooko, Comms for Google EA, ideally should be left to deal with local journalists and bloggers since she is quite familiar with them, is familiar with the industry and can establish rapport to control what is appearing on the blogs. Right now, everyone feels Google is too quiet.

Take for example this response on the Kenya ICT Action Network (Kictanet) by a lister.

"Google PR team are misjudging our intelligence with such a flimsy statement. Even a kid can read in between the lines."

Olga Arara, who is country head for Google, should issue periodic statements on what is happening with the investigations and what action Google has taken.

The EMEA head who said he was "mortified" by the revelations, and clearly whose name I can't recall, can deal with the BBCs and Guardians of this world.

2. Google must begin engaging on social media and the blogosphere in general. They are letting the conversation be ran from out there instead of inserting themselves in the middle, quickly rebutting any inaccuracies that are posted and generally setting up listening posts to see what is being said. (This is Google, finding stuff about themselves on the net shouldn't be too hard). Dorothy Ooko is on Twitter and so is Joe Mucheru, as well as the Google Localization manager Gikunda. They should be engaging. [And btw, Google should understand that we have no familiarity nor rapport with their regional, continental or global communications teams]. We will relate better to statements or information coming from the country or regional office not Dubai or London or California. The local teams have familiarity and have interacted with many of the journalists, bloggers, posters and government officials and can take conversations offline to explain the situation off-record.

The Google Africa blog should also be updated with this information. Right now there is no reference to this issue. There is a redeeming quality in saying you are sorry and letting people get the bad news from you not from others. You are telling them," Hey, we are sorry this happened, we are dealing with it." But without that, and with a posting about taking Ghanaian businesses online on the same page, one might be tempted to ask, "Do they know what is about to hit them or Is Mocality in Ghana?"

3. Internally, I expect Google to explain the situation thoroughly to its staff so that there is no confusion and since staff are locals who interact with the rest of us, it would be prudent to establish a semblance of a common line. Not a gag order but to set the record straight. I'm sure a social media policy exists

3. At some point, I would expect that Google would be pay a courtesy visit to the Ministry of Information and Communication, CCK, KICT Board as well as their partners at Safaricom to explain to them what happened, how they addressed it and to assure them that utmost care will be taken that nothing similar will take place.

Google has been working with a lot of government agencies to get their data online and some of them have expressed opposition. Give them no reason to fortify their position.

4. Going forward, I would expect that they will probably hold a sit down with tech journalists and bloggers say for a half day and go through all the issues that might be raised. The idea is that when you answer all the questions that have been asked, you effectively put an end to the story. Secondly, so many issues may be covered that one dominant angle appearing is almost impossible.

The company should establish a social media strategy here and in the region because clearly they have none.

If need be, they can ask Nairobitech to design them one.

China TV (CCTV) to launch in Nairobi on Wednesday

2012-01-09T02:01:00.000-08:00

There's a media blackout to this event. It is only open to Reuters and AP. China Central TV (CCTV) which has assembled a news team from raiding local media houses for talent launches in Nairobi on Wednesday.

Nairobi will be the African headquarters for the pan-African broadcaster that will run news 24/7.

Among the talent sourced locally are Beatrice Marshall, Samuel Kantai, Peter Wakaba, Terry Ann Chebet, Robert Soi and so on. Jemimah Mungai, a radio veteran will be the Managing Editor.

The station will broadcast from Westlands. No word on whether it has plans to ride on the digital signal that another Chinese company is putting together as the second licensed digital signal distributor after KBC subsidiary, Signet.

Perhaps after poaching people from local outlets, CCTV do not want to ask for coverage or frankly, they couldn't give a damn.

The only issue, is for you to get watched people have to know you are on air. Let's see how this pans out. Properly done, it could make for an independent station during an election year or Chinese mandarins interested in contracts may curtail such independence. The jury is out.

Airtel can't handle success? Ericsson system overload!

2012-01-09T01:42:00.000-08:00

Not too many things have gone right for Airtel ever since its first incarnation as Celtel around 2004. Incidentally, this is the time Michael Joseph, former CEO Safaricom, says he realized his company was headed for big things.

In recent times, and especially since Safaricom adjusted its calling rates upwards, Airtel has been receiving subscribers in droves. The only problem, it doesn't seem prepared.

For some time the company's subscribers have been having problems loading airtime and customer service which has been outsourced, is crap.

CCK reported Airtel adding about 550,000 subscribers from July to September just behind the 590K Safaricom did over the same period.

In October the company added about 520,0000, in November just about 500,000 and in December about 408,000.

The problem that Airtel is experiencing can be directly attributed to Ericsson.

Basically, the MINSAT (Mobile Intelligent Network Service Administration Tool) is full and the company is having issues with its SDP (Service Delivery Platform) most likely with Times Ten Database.

Ericsson normally deployes their MINSAT with Sybase 10 database although I'm told the folks at Airtel are using Oracle and DB2 for business services (currently handled by IBM).

Ericsson is likely not getting the funds it needs from Airtel as the company continues to assess whether to invest more in a market that has burnt holes into its budget.

These network problems are made all the more glaring by rival Nokia Siemens which has announced the launch of LiquidNet which is says will unleash frozen network capacity into a reservoir of resources. "This enables your broadband network to instantly adapt to unpredictable changes in end-user demand. We can help you release huge chunks of your unused network resources – up to 80%, in fact, of your baseband radio network capacity."

If Airtel want to put up a fight for this market, they need to put their network into shape. And that long promised 3G seems to be taking forever to deploy despite getting the license before Orange. The latter has already rolled out.

CORRUPT KEBS DIVVIES THE LOOT! JEVIC, MANG'ELI LIVE ON

2012-01-06T07:23:00.000-08:00

Kioko Mang'eli still eats Kenya Bureau of Standards long after he was booted out of the MD's job courtesy of current MD Evah Oduor. The two apparently are not just as thick as thieves, they are thieves. Their company JEVIC, will continue to inspect and verify second hand motor vehicles prior to shipment from Japan, Singapore, UAE, UK and South Africa despite the fact that it had lost out in an earlier tender.

Quality Inspection Services of Japan had won the inspection tender scoring 96 per cent while Jevic in which Mang'eli, current MD Evah Oduor, and people close to the PM have an interest, came in a distant second with 85 per cent.

Mang'eli who was kicked out for opposing the entry of maize that was said to be associated with top figures in government, was said to be close to Oduor.

Despite the fact that the board approved QIS be given the Sh1.18billion contract at a full board meeting on October 31, 2011, Ms Oduor who had chaired the tender committee that ranked QIS first, cancelled the tender on November 1.

This was the third time the tender was being cancelled.

QIS is not an innocent bystander though, the current PS of Industrialization, Karanja Kibicho, is said to have an interest in the company.

To smooth things over, and keep everyone happy, it would appear, Oduor and co. decided to give three companies the contract essentially divvying the loot.

M/S Auto of Japan is the third company. Star Tech has yet to establish if it is another Kenyan outfit masquerading as Japanese.

The fat cats have conveniently given the companies rights in all the major sources of vehicles imported to Kenya.

Japan Export Vehicle Inspection Centre (Jevic) and Quality Inspection Service of Japan(QISJ) have been competing for the lucrative tender. When Oduor backtracked against giving QISJ the tender she went ahead to give Jevic more time to continue undertaking the inspection even though their contract had expired.

Kibicho had openly opposed eligibility of Jevic's participation in the tendering process on grounds it contravened the procurement Act.

This had to do with unsolicited communication from Jevic to the managing director KEBS, the procurement department and the minister for Industrialisation which was in total contravention of section 38(1)(a) of the procurement Act. The Public Procurement Oversight Authority also recommended action be taken against the company for interfering with the procurement process of the first tender. But Oduor did not take any disciplinary action against Jevic and it went ahead to be allowed in the subsequent procurement processes saying the PS was interfering with the process which is against the procurement act.

Jevic has in the meantime enjoyed extensions to its expired contract.

TEAMS TO UPGRADE DOCKING STATION

2012-01-05T06:42:00.000-08:00

Joel Tanui, the former Telkom Kenya man, now GM, TEAMS (East Africa Marine Systems) is confident. By 7AM Saturday, the cable will be up and running. A scheduled maintenance will see the cable down for 12 hours at the most, the GM says. Work begins Friday 6, 2012 at 10PM.

"We are doing some maintenance work at the docking station," Tanui said.

The docking station is where the 4500KM cable from Fujairah, Dubai, terminates in Mombasa and capacity is then availed to operators who have leased or purchased it.

Incidentally, the TEAMS docking station is in the same premises, separated by steel doors on a corridor, with that of the East Africa Submarine System (EASSy) cable ran by the Western Indian Ocean Cable Company (WIOCC).

No word from the players as to whether they will seek to shift over.

Jonathan Somen of AccessKenya is however confident he can carry all his traffic on the capacity he leases on Seacom, the Aga Khan/Cyril Ramaphosa backed cable.

Safaricom on the other hand says it might be affected with some customers experiencing slow or degraded speeds.

TKL said they will assess the likely effect.

IBM INKS DEAL WITH KENYA REFINERIES

2011-10-26T08:01:00.000-07:00

Big Blue clearly didn't come here to sleep. It keeps inking them. Let's tick them. Airtel, Safaricom, Central Bank of Kenya and now, The Kenya Petroleum Refineries.

IBM has announced that it has signed with KPRL to provide a solution to increase productivity and efficiency of the companies operations.

This system called Maximo asset management software, "will allow KPRL to manage, measure and track the life cycle of its oil processing equipment such as pipes, heat exchangers, pumps, valves, boilers, furnaces, compressors, tanks and turbines."

No mention of blackouts though. KPRL has typically wrought havoc on the petroleum market especially around Christmas with its breakdowns which it attributes to power failures from fellow Energy parastatal Kenya Power.

Apparently, the catalysts that kick in the process of refining Super/Petrol take up to six days to bring the process back online.

Of course IBM has also been providing servers to CBK through Symphony for sometime though the last contract was based on the four day cheque clearance system.

With the introduction of cheque truncation, no word yet on what system the reserve bank is using.

And Airtel are currently overworking IBM Kenya's business services team. Tasked with offering business support services to Airtel Africa, the Kenyan team has been especially under pressure given the cut throat competition in the market.

Basically, the former Airtel business intelligence team was ported over to IBM just like IT went to Nokia Siemens.

But things have been hectic with all the departments from sales and marketing to different directors making different requests and terming them all urgent.

Things have eased somewhat with Safaricom increasing their tariffs forcing people to make more of their calls on Airtel. As a result, revenues are looking up.

Enter Safaricom and M-PESA. IBM runs M-PESA operations on behalf of Vodafone after it took over from the company that developed the platform for Vodafone in the first place, Sagentia.

Despite the company issuing two white papers on how money transfer services should be run it seems the platform is yet to get there.

The outage the other day was blamed on lack of connectivity between Safaricom and its M-PESA data center in Germany.

IBM, we were told were working full out to solve the problem.

Indeed they did.

Looking forward it is likely that Big Blue will eye more and more of the business services opportunities that will arise in the region particularly in e-government.

The company is among those slated to take up space on the proposed ICT City in Konza along with Samsung and a host of other companies and universities.

Muthoka to boot Mobicom? AndyForwarders calls CMC EGM

2011-10-25T07:55:00.000-07:00

Mobicom's Paul Ndung'u (left)

It seems the battle over CMC motors is just beginning. Now Andy Forwarders CEO Peter Muthoka has called for an Extra-ordinary General Meeting of CMC shareholders with the agenda being to remove a number of directors including: Paul Ndung'u and Joel Kibe (chairman) both men associated with Mobicom, Andrew Hamilton, and Billy Lay (current MD).

At the EGM to be held at Bomas of Kenya on Monday 21, November, Andy Forwarders will seek to have Mark Ole Karbolo who has chaired East Africa Portland Cement, Professor Francis Mwihuri Njeru of JKUAT and Peter Mbuthia Gachuhi of law firm Kaplan & Stratton to replace them.

Apparently, Muthoka wants Ashok Shah of APA Insurance who is sitting on 12.5 per cent shareholding to back him and probably some proxies of some of the guys who may not like the Mobicom duo.

Muthoka has about 24 per cent shareholding putting him in prime position to stage this move.

Nothing is known of his recent woes. Just recently, one of his bank accounts at Family Bank was to be frozen with Sh180million as investigations continue. We will update on what happened on that front but for now the battle lines are set.

==

UPDATE: We called Paul Ndung'u and he says he has just landed in the country but he says he had seen that mail earlier so it is only now that Muthoka and co have decided to send it to shareholders. He didn't sound ruffled: "Let's talk tomorrow," he said.

NOKIA WINDOWS PHONES TO BE SHOWN NEXT WEEK

2011-10-19T07:19:00.000-07:00

It's confirmed. Nokia and Microsoft will show the first Windows Phone from the Finnish giant next week. After taking a battering from Apple and Samsung with fast rising Sony Ericsson also eating into the smartphone segment, Nokia is looking to rebound with its Windows based phones. On Tuesday, Nokia staff here refused to say anything regarding the Windows phone. "Stephen Elop (Nokia CEO) sent each of of us an email warning us not to say anything," a senior local manager said.

One man Elop cannot gag though is his former boss at Microsoft, Steve Ballmer. Speaking on a wide range of issues, Ballmer today confirmed that Nokia will indeed show some Windows phones next week.

Timing will be key. Apple is still riding the momentum of its iPhone 4S which has already done 4million devices sold over the weekend of the launch. Samsung after waiting for a respectable period since Steve Jobs death has now released the Samsung Galaxy Nexus running on Google's Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) OS.

So Nokia's announcement along with the heft of Microsoft whose Windows platform still runs 75 per cent of the computers used in the world is likely to be a big deal.

On why you might want to buy Windows phones instead of an Apple iPhone, Ballmer told Forbes that, "Your information is front and center, not a sea of icons."

Blackberry offers free Apps to compensate users

2011-10-17T04:49:00.000-07:00

From Me 2 U

We took part in a conference call with Patrick Spence, Managing Director Global Sales and Regional Marketing at RIM.

RIM is offering free premium apps to its customers to compensate them for the recent outage.

Spence says the Apps are worth about USD100 (Sh10,000). He says a switch failed and the backup switch did not kick in leading to massive backlog.

RIM it seems moves 22 terabytes of data on its network every month.

"That caused a situation where we had to catch up," Spence told conference participants made up of ICT journalists from South Africa and Kenya.

The Apps will be available from this week to December.

Spence says the Apps chosen were picked based on downloading trends.

Apps available include:

SIMS 3 - Electronic Arts

Bejeweled - Electronic Arts

N.O.V.A. - Gameloft

Texas Hold’em Poker 2 - Gameloft

Bubble Bash 2 - Gameloft

Photo Editor Ultimate - Ice Cold Apps

DriveSafe.ly Pro - iSpeech.org

iSpeech Translator Pro - iSpeech.org

Drive Safe.ly Enterprise - iSpeech.org

Nobex Radio™ Premium - Nobex

Shazam Encore - Shazam

Vlingo Plus: Virtual Assistant - Vlingo

Where's the Tandaa shortlist? Kenya ICT Board asks for time

2011-10-03T01:35:00.000-07:00

Scribes, bloggers, developers et al this year have an eagle eye trained on the process of awarding the Tandaa applications development grants particularly for integrity and transparency.

While the Board said it would issue the list of shortlisted applicants by end of September, yesterday it said it would do so by October 10.

No explanation were given in this one line response from Kaburo Kobia, the project manager of local digital content when asked for the update.

"We are a week behind the review. We will announce on Oct 10."

However, the board went ahead and updated its Tandaa website:

http://myemail.constantcontact.com/Digital-Content-Grant--Update-on-shortlist.html?soid=1102964298642&aid=vQ4uU9QugiA

Greetings! ,

The review of proposals received for the Tandaa Digital Content Grant is still on going. We had hoped to announced the shortlist at the end of September, but we are yet to complete the review of the 795 proposals received.

The good news is that we are only a few days away from completing the review of the first phase of the Call for Proposals.

As such, we will announce the shortlist in a week's time on October 10.

We appreciate your patience. We are committed to ensuring that every proposal is reviewed adequately.

The following response was also posted on Twitter.

the shortlist will be realised in a weeks time .please keep checking our website and newsletters

Verdict

Being late by a week is fine and understandable but the Board must be cognizant of the apprehension and suspicion that some developers already have about the process. In particular, it has been accused of either engaging in favouritism or not being transparent in how it chooses its judges for these contests. Complaints have been made that the same clique of people is seeing playing different roles at different times from judges, to speakers to award recipients. This should not happen in a field that thrives on disorder and randomness and innovation.

You cannot have an IT industry that is ordered and sequenced and mid wifed by the same people like say the legal profession where young lawyers learn at the knees of the older counsel.

IT is an industry that by its very nature is disruptive! It is an industry where you stop for lunch, you become someone else's lunch.

You sleep like Infoseek, Yahoo comes along and dethrones you. You sleep like Yahoo, Google snaps you up. Like Nokia, Apple and so on. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and so on form the next wave of innovators.

In short, what we expect is freshness and disruption. We don't want to see the same people pitching different apps as if there aren't any more innovators out there.

For its sake and for the sake of the Tandaa Grants, which incidentally, are public funds, should be quick to announce the short list of applicants and the list of those who will judge entries to determine final winners.

TELKOM KENYA COULD LOSE FIBER DEAL

2011-09-30T02:19:00.000-07:00

TKL CEO Ghossein

There is a cable that runs the length and breadth of this country; the National Optic Fiber Backbone Infrastructure (NOFBI) and it is owned by the Government of Kenya. It goes to the remotest of locations where private cable operators like Kenya Data Networks and Jamii Telecom would not venture.

It is run by Telkom Kenya but it carries very little traffic simply because it is unreliable and has too much downtime. Right now, efforts are underway to change the way it is managed and even suggestions of splitting management of different sections and handing it to different players has been floated.

Telkom Kenya which got the deal to run the cable mostly because when it was laid it used to terminate at TKL's offices in different towns as the company was then state-owned.

TKL was to avail the capacity to other operators at a given costs as government wanted it to be affordable.

That however has proved to be unsustainable as TKL claims the money it gets is not enough for it to operate and maintain NOGBI.

Government is pissed. Language coming from top officers in the Ministry of Information and Communication suggests Telkom may just get the boot.

TKL claims it has come to an understanding with other operators where they will share the maintenance costs and TKL will run and maintain the cable and also sign Service Level Agreements but the government is not buying it.

Telkom insiders claim government misunderstands the issue but government claims TKL have messed up and it is time to figure out how to throw them out.

"They are messing. They have messed. I think we'll have to take it (NOFBI) away from them," a source at the Ministry said.

Watchers of all this unfold like Safaricom say they have no strong feelings about the issue. "Between KDN, Kenya Power and Jamii there is enough cable in the country," one Safaricom exec said. "What Mickhael (Telkom CEO) should do is just tell the government, pay me nothing, just give me the cable, let me run it and I'll even pay you."

AccessKenya on the other hand prefers a sort of consortium to be formed to run NOFBI.

Either way, this is an important resource that should not be wasted. Particularly, when counties come into place, some of them could decide to build fiber to home and connect to NOFBI bringing high speed internet access to their citizens.

Not only would this promote growth, it would also thwart telecoms efforts to charge an arm and a leg for data access on the maddeningly, unscrupulous premise that; "We have to recover our costs."

Of course you have to recover your cost of investment but who said it should happen in two years? Should apartment rents be charged at Sh200,000 so that the building owner can recoup his investment? What happens after he recoups? Is he or the telecom going to offer the service for free or at cost since they have recouped their costs?

Nairobitech thinks NOFBI should be placed in the hands of the entity that safeguards such a utility best and promotes last mile projects best.

Dorothy Ooko to Google EA? Nokia's spokesperson says Sayonara.

2011-09-28T07:59:00.000-07:00

Ooko at the iHub

Is Dorothy Ooko leaving Nokia for Google? The Nokia spokesperson for East, Central and Southern Africa and the public face of the handset vendor for many years wrote us an email yesterday saying she was moving on but did not say to where.

Here's the text of the email:

Dear friends, partners and collaborators,

One of my greatest passions is the continent of Africa and being able to provide services that transform the lives of its people. I am glad to have been able to do this at Nokia.

However after almost 5 years at Nokia it is time for me to move on. I am still privileged that l will be able to continue doing what l am passionate about in a different company and serving the people of Africa.

Thank you all for all your support and cooperation while at Nokia. I sincerely hope we will continue to work together as l turn the page to begin another chapter in my life.

My number will remain the same. I will send you an update of my work email once I have it.

Many thanks and kind regards

The Google Angle

Contacted by phone, Dorothy would not say where she was moving to promising to update us in about a week or two's time.

"I'm not saying anything," Ooko told us when we tried to get her to confirm on phone that she was indeed moving to Google.

But Nairobitech can almost authoritatively conclude that it is Google she is moving to.

For starters, the company has been looking for a Communications Officer for the last year or so. A number of PR types and Business/ICT scribes have been interviewed and given regrets by the Google Africa Comms, Julia Taylor.

Secondly, we spotted Dorothy at the Google G Kenya 2011 event two weeks ago. That is very strange given that Google is trying to grow its Android Apps store at the same time Nokia is trying to grow Ovi Store.

She was quite keen to know how the press sessions could have been improved but we didn't pick up on it then.

She says she has been serving notice and had to wait for GM Ken Oyolla to come back to the country to inform his staff before she made public her departure.

Nairobitech learnt that Ooko will still be in the technology field and since Google has been looking hard for a Comms Officer and Dorothy fits the bill/ She is also fluent in French and knows the region like the back of her hand, it seems like an effortless transition.

She will be one of several additions Google has made at its Kenyan office including the appointment of Olga Arara from Safaricom as country head.

For those interested, Oooko's position at Nokia is open and they are searching for a replacement. Break out your CVs.

We welcome Dorothy to Google and congratulate her on the move.

WATCH WHAT U POST: CCK GOES NSA

2011-09-27T08:02:00.000-07:00

Small men can play, talk and sound big when they go online. They may have to ease back into their normal lives once authorities start to call their bluffs. The government is putting together what is by all accounts a cyber-prowling team with mandate to monitor the online space for cyber-attacks (hackers), personal attacks, child pornography and "Material that is offensive with regard to the law." Pause there: Mzalendo Kibunjia has been talking about holding people responsible for what they say online either on Facebook, Twitter and the like and the response has mainly been to scoff at him.

Well we can tell you that as we speak, a team is quietly being assembled and trained within the inner confines of the Communications Commission of Kenya headquarters on Waiyaki Way. The equipment and systems to carry out the monitoring is being shipped in and CCK is working with the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) to train the cyber-defenders and install the systems.

The official name of the team is the Computer Incident Response Team (CIRT) and it is expected to start work by December, well ahead of the coming general elections.

Besides monitoring irresponsible comments and hackers online it will also monitor electronic transactions.

Right now there are four guys deployed to form the core of the team but it will be expanded.

CCK Acting Director-General, Francis Wangusi, confirmed that the team is undergoing training and a budget for it has been set aside.

The team will coordinate with other national CIRTs so that even those people posting abroad can be brought to book.

Of course mischievous characters can evade this by using sites like hidemyass.com, or use of tors or encryption and even connecting through VPNs but from the sound of it, it seems as if the body will have NSA-type powers of surveillance and be able to carry out things like deep packet inspection and information extraction or force service providers to furnish it with user data.

CIRT will also sit at the apex of other CIRTs based within telecoms and banks as well as other industries where they will coordinate threat analysis and incidence response mechanisms.

It is not clear how this will sit with the protection of privacy online but clearly a debate is set to arise.

Okia Chinaman! Counterfeit Nokia's seized

2011-09-26T07:51:00.000-07:00

Over 11,000 fake Nokia items have been seized in shops in the CBD. The Anti-Counterfeit Agency, ACA, along with Nokia staff, raided Sky Building along Luthuli Avenue, Nairobi for dealing with fake Nokia products. A Chinese owner was found at his residence where he assembles parts to make fake Nokia products.

Specifically, the raid netted 2071 counterfeit Nokia handsets (enclosed in boxes complete accessories), 330 separate earpieces and 9084 pieces of batteries.

Kenya Bureau of Standards staff and Kenya Police also took part in the raid. It is expected that these raids will continue. If they anywhere as diligent and concerted as those carried out by the Music Copyright Society of Kenya or Microsoft, then we could see these fake items begin to disappear from shops. But the impending switching off of bogus handsets from mobile telephone networks is expected to deal the back-breaking blow of this industry.

ACA seems to have found some footing at last after dithering about for sometime.

Oceanic oils raided for illegal telecoms activity

2011-09-22T01:12:00.000-07:00

It turns out, that the Safaricom/CCK/Orange sting operation was targeted at an illegal Gateways services provider. The culprit can now be identified as Oceanic Oils of Jubilee House, CBD. Equipment was confiscated from the premises where Oceanic is accused of setting up intelligent SIM servers in the name of GSM Gateways or simply put Gateways. These Gateways have the capacity to transit and terminate international minutes to any telecom network. In the industry, these servers have also been referred to SIM boxes.

The providers of these boxes are now providing very advanced features such as SIM Allocation and SIM Protection. The boxes also include SIM cards storage capacity with capability to store up to 416 SIM cards which can be increased to about 496 SIMs. They do not discriminate on prepaid or postpaid SIM cards, since the boxes can select the most appropriate SIM card according to how it has been programmed such as credit availability, type of service, country, and operator targeted for termination.

To perform this business; one needs a Gateway Licence from CCK. In this case of raid, Oceanic Oil has been terminating international traffic without the requisite licence from CCK. This action contravenes the regulations.

The motivation of this activity is to avoid paying the licence fee to the commission hence denying the commission its rightful licence fees. Besides the licence fees, the government also loses tax money that they would have otherwise collected from the operators. Besides these losses, the quality of these calls terminated are of poor quality this affecting quality of service provided by the operators.

Pictures of the raid will be uploaded soon.

SWAT TEAM CCK, SAFARICOM: ITS GOING DOWN

2011-09-21T23:29:00.000-07:00

A fake phones seller in the CBD is about to be hit in the next 15 minutes by an assorted team of Government agents, CCK, Safaricom and Orange. The agreed time for the operation as of last night is 9:30AM. The owner of the shop (we cannot reveal the name or location at this time in order not to tip them off) is said to be a notorious seller of counterfeit handsets. CCK has issued a deadline for telecom operators to switch off all those using these "grey" handsets and Safaricom says that by looking at its database, it has about 800,000 such users. The Anti-Counterfeit Agency, which is likely to be part of this morning's sting operation, has claimed in the past it needs to be trained before it can carry out raids. Blogger Robert Alai was on their case recently telling them they needed no training to walk down Tom Mboya street and see the number of counterfeit dealers operating there.

Not so said the ACA. We need a complainant. Apparently, unless a handset vendor complains to them that their phones are being counterfeited, the ACA has no powers under the current law to act creatively and proactively. It is a reactionary body.

Today is expected to be one of many sting operations to come.

To check if your phone is genuine, get your IMEI number by pressing *#06# on your mobile phone.

CMC saga - Mobicom men gun for Muthoka

2011-09-20T06:19:00.000-07:00

Ousted CMC Chair Peter Muthoka

Is Peter Muthoka's gig up? After barely warming the seat he took over from Jeremiah Kiereini as CMC Chairman, Muthoka was muscled out and by all indications flung out into the streets. Joel Kibe, CEO of Mobicom replaced him as chair. His MD, Bill Lay, formerly of General Motors, even called a press conference the other day and basically called Muthoka an embezzler who was hitting the firm for millions in opaque transactions. Muthoka is also the MD of Andy Forwarders, a logistics firm (think DHL, Transami, Siginon Freight etc). Andy Forwarders has exclusive contract to handle CMC's logistics including shipping imports, clearing and forwarding (and that includes the Passat's the government bought).

After getting the mighty boot from the other directors, followed by the damaging press conference, Muthoka hit back with press ads where he promised the matter would not end there.

Basically, besides milking CMC through exclusive contracts that he had given himself, Muthoka is also accused of overcharging CMC in clearance fees at the Port. Bill Lay claimed that when he was MD at GM, Muthoka used to charge him a third of what he charges CMC basically implying Andy Forwarders was inflating the bills.

Muthoka claimed he gives CMC serious business by buying trucks for his business from the firm. CMC is the vendor of heavy commercial vehicles like Nissan Diesel (UD). But according to management, Muthoka was buying the trucks at under quoted prices.

His logistics contract was cancelled.

Muthoka says he will not take it lying down although he hasn't been taking phone calls. By any measure, the man has formidable resourcefulness. CMC was not his only contract, otherwise he would not have shaken President Kibaki's hand at KICC when Kenya Revenue Authority was was issuing certificates and trophies for best taxpayers in the country.

He also does business with Safaricom and EABL. For starters, it seems he is a good man to do a favour for. Reports claim the man routinely hands over brand new Range Rovers to win business. It is said that at Treasury one lady found herself the proud owner of the said vehicle after the Passat deal was inked. Two guys at one of the two companies named above also received Range Rovers while at one of them, a briefcase full of cash was enough to secure business.

At EABL both DHL and Transami were booted and Andy Forwarders given the logistics contract.

At the last meeting where he ran out of aces, Muthoka is said to have threatened Bill Lay.

Enter Mobicom: Unfortunately for Muthoka, in this latest battle he seems to have come up against a formidable and implacable foe. The Mobicom duo; chairman Paul Ndung'u and chief executive Joel Kibe. Mobicom has an interesting story behind it but the long and short of it is that Ndung'u has promised to deal with Muthoka completely. To finish him. This puts Muthoka, who is said to also do business for Moi in some places, in a sticky situation. The forces ranged against him may call upon influence from highest echelons in the land. Mobicome has also made a lot of money first as the biggest Safaricom dealer for about 10 years (it's now a Super dealer for Orange) as well as running SMS lottos like Shinda Smart which raked in hundreds of millions.

Given that Muthoka is not that well liked by those who've met and dealt with him, many palms must be rubbing with glee across the business world. So the question must be asked, Is Peter Muthoka's gig up? It may perhaps, be early to draw the curtains but one thing is for sure; It is unlikely that Andy Forwarders will make the cut for best taxpayers in its category this year.

Internet Governance Forum comes to Kenya

2011-09-20T05:18:00.000-07:00

So you already know that Kenya is now one of the hosts of the internet's root servers. These are servers that hold the basic lists of top level domains. Connected together, these servers form the internet. The root server based near YMCA was set up by the ICANN. Anyway, the Sixth Annual Internet GovernanceForum (IGF) conference is scheduled to take place in Nairobi Kenya from 27-30September 2011 at the United Nations Office in Gigiri, Nairobi (UNON). The issues to be discussed include:

Whatrole are mobile networks playing in providing Internet access to citizens andwhat needs to be put in place to promote mobile Internet and enhance localcontent development?

Cybersecurity and Privacy: What policies are required to increase and improveco-operation in this area to ensure that strategies are consistent withpolicies that protect society while advancing innovation, growth anddevelopment?

· CloudComputing: What is cloud computing and what are the critical issues indetermining the pace and level of development of the cloud?

· Otherthematic areas such the concept of creation of “Knowledge Societies” incyberspace, content generation, guarding Internet freedom, preservinglinguistic diversity, particularly promotion of multilingualism in cyberspaceas a commitment toward supporting the Universal Declaration on CulturalDiversity adopted in 2010 and the Recommendation on the Promotion and Use ofMultilingualism and Universal Access to Cyberspace adopted in 2005.

Activities on these dates:

26^th September 2011- High level Ministerial Meeting at UNON

Cocktail &Launch of GSMA Report at Tribe Hotel

27^th September 2011 – Opening Session at UNON
28^th September 2011- Business Round Table at Tribe Hotel (2-4)

-Cloud Computing Research at UNON

29^th September 2011 –IHUB Visit
30^th September 2011- Public Lecture at KICC (9-12)

Khweza consulting of Nairobi is making the arrangements for scribes wishing to attend.

SEO:Search Engine Optimization - Google vs. FB, Twitter

2011-08-14T23:17:00.000-07:00

There is a global industry built around this line: Google does not smile. The industry is called SEO or Search Engine Optimization.

In basic terms, if you are a news site, a marketing site, a website or whatever site online, your presence depends on how easily people can find you.

To find things online, most people, turn to Google and Google turns to its humongous index of web pages and returns results based on its rankings.

Depending on the words a person types in Google Search, Google decides which pages are most relevant and gives the results in terms of relevance.

The more relevant the page, the higher up in the results it shows.

Because websites want to be ranked high, they in turn engage in what is called Search Engine Optimization i.e. they optimize themselves for Google and other search engines.

They do this by employing the use of KEY WORDS that Google looks for.

Hence the saying: Google does not smile. If you are a newssite, writing snazzy, funny or catchy headlines takes you nowhere with Google unless you include keywords.

It is for this reason that newspapers carry different headlines online for the same story in the print edition.

Additionally, it is important to note that Google only reads the first six words and anything after is ignored - it therefore makes sense for you to put important information at the beginning.

However, there is also evidence that SEO may not be the main deal in times to come.

The Entry of Facebook and Twitter into the picture is changing all this. Increasingly, people are coming onto websites not from Google but from Facebook after reading friends updates and following the links or from Twitter.

It then makes sense for you to have an interesting update to your website if you want people to share and read it.

Looking at the Kenyan landscape, there is much yet to be done in the way of optimizing websites and increasing their presence online.

According to Alexa.com, the only Kenyan website among the top ten sites visited by Kenyans is Daily Nation's Nation.co.ke, which comes in at number 10. The 15-year old website comes behind such relative newcomers as Google, Facebook, youtube, Gmail and others.

Of course the site has built a community over the years including in the diaspora that religiously visits it but NMG has also been first out of the gate in adopting technologies as they come.

It implemented a Facebook page and got into Twitter ahead of such venerable names as The Economist which is belatedly making a push into social media to drive traffic to its site.

AS a result, the Nation's updates on Facebook draw hundreds of comments indicating an engagement with its readers that only serves to solidify its relationship with them.

In fact it may be said that the one chink in the Nation's armour has been its slowness in implementing a properly focused mobile website. The largest online newspaper site, The New York Times and the number two and three respectively, The Daily Mail and The Guardian, all have mobile formatted sites that fit on the screen of the small devices.

Conventional sites tend to have frames and heavy graphics that are not optimal for the phone.

In any case, for web designers and PR agencies that need to shape their clients image online and marketing departments, it shall serve to keep all the above in mind to foster better client engagement.

CHANNEL 2.0? Safaricom TV

2011-04-12T00:44:00.000-07:00

Tech stuff happening here and there.....

Safaricom is already in its 2.0 phase and Bob Collymore is in New York for the Africa Investor Conference...he will be back there next month on an investor road trip when he and maybe Les Baillie will meet the likes of Morgan Stanley and other investment banks and hedge funds that invest in Safaricom.

Anyway, the main news is that Safaricom could be seriously considering entering the TV arena.

I posted here that Airtel is considering bring its Digital TV to Kenya to take on Naspers Group owned DsTV.

As we migrate from Analog to Digital TV the game will change of course because Multi-Choice, the Naspers subsidiary that runs DsTV will also be looking to enter the terrestrial TV transmission field. As we speak, the company is looking for a suitable name as DsTV denotes satellite transmission.

Airtel has said it will offer a cheaper content to compete with Multi-Choice's two content generators; Entertainment Media Network (MNET) and Supersport but given that we are still waiting for them to roll out 3G, that might be ambitious.

Enter Safaricom. Details are scanty but it all has to do with data and content which Safaricom wants to parlay into profits much in the same way it did with voice in its first decade.

What seems likely for now is that like media owners, Safaricom will apply for a digital channel and probably partner with one of two digital signal distributors, Signet a KBC subsidiary and another yet to be named licensee.

Digital TV is not just in Safaricom's interest to invest in, it is also a potentially dangerous opponent in the data field for one reason.

The technology we will adopt for digital TV (DVB-T2 or digital video broadcast generation 2) converts each frequency into 18 digital channels.

However, some of those channels, I believe they are two, are reserved for data transmission/internet.

With a TV set in almost every urban household these days, and the mandatory migration to DVB-T2, it means then that the perennial and vexing question of how to economically bridge the last mile to households will have been solved in one fell swoop.

Should another content provider/ISP seek to exploit this channel, they could be in every household and become the preferred internet service provider.

And then Safaricom 2.0 could become derailed.

CARTEL BUST! EVERY MAN A KhZ. NDEMO VS MEDIA MOGULS

2011-01-14T04:24:00.000-08:00

AS has often been the case in Bitange Ndemo's stellar reign at the Ministry of Information, foes are never in short supply.

Whether it is telecom operators opposing regulations, media presenters raising ruckus over amendments to communications laws or sub-marine cable entrepreneurs fighting to get him out of office, Bitange Ndemo has always faced them down.

Enter his latest battle; this one pitting him against a familiar foe/nemesis - Media Moguls.

The issue this time revolves around the migration of TV broadcasting from using analog signals to digital ones. More specifically DVB-T2 (digital video broadcasting terrestrial - 2nd generation).

Media owners claim they are being screwed and have even gone to the extent of organizing for a meeting with Information Minister Samuel Poghisio to push their case against what they see as high handedness on Ndemo's part.

They claim that they have been submitting digital signals from their broadcasts for the trial phase of DVB in Kenya for free, only for those same signals to be resold to Kenyans through SMART TV.

They argue that SMART TV is reaping commercial benefits from their content.

That seems fair enough and in fact the media owners, as is their prerogative, have gone ahead and discontinued provision of these signals to the state broadcaster KBC - the sole licensed digital signal distributor in the country.

AHEM.

Enter Bitange Ndemo - "They don't want to see the future," says the PS.

In fact, the reason behind the media owners resistance, is not the publicly stated content dispute.

It has to do with, says the PS, selfishness and a need to monopolize frequencies in this country which Ndemo says he has refused to assent to.

You see, under the new DVB-T2 format, one analog frequency such as the one KTN, Kiss TV or NTV may be holding can yield up to 18 digital channels (four of them HD channels).

The only problem is that media owners, many of whom were irregularly allocated the frequencies in the first place, want to migrate with the frequencies to the digital world and the gazillion digital channels that come with them.

So each frequency owner could end up owning more than 15 digital channels to then peddle or speculate with.

NO WAY!!! Ndemo says.

Digital channels, will be allocated according to content. If you have content for five channels, you will get five channels.

If you have content for only one channel, that is what you get.

Every man who can come up with content, can have a channel pure and simple.

The Oligarchs are not happy. And so the battle continues!

BIG BLUE TAKES THE RED: AIRTEL IT MOVES TO IBM

2010-12-08T05:20:00.000-08:00

There was much trepidation today at Parkside Towers as Airtel (formerly Zain) IT department trooped to HR to pick up their new contracts.

In its true red colours, Airtel has outsourced almost everything starting with its engineers who were farmed out to Nokia-Siemens.

The IT guys who basically keep all the business intelligence data, configure new tariffs and keep track of new activations, ARPU spend etc etc are next.

Just like in India, they have been moved to IBM Business Services Kenya which set up shop in the country a couple of months back.

Effective, Jan 1, 2011, they will be employees of IBM not Airtel. While most are happy to be working for the Dow Jones featured company, there are fears as to the contract terms. Will they get the same benefits?

The Nokia-Siemens lot was lucky. When they moved, they capitalized on a clause in the contract calling for a two-month notice or compensation for the same period if either party (Zain or its employees) terminated the contract early.

So the engineers were given two month compensation.

According to sources, IT were told at a meeting that "terms would be comparable to what they were at Airtel."

The lot will however continue to operate from Parkside until further notice.

Airtel is trying to replicate its minutes factory model from India where it outsources everything except customer care.

The Kenyan outfit has so far managed to push subscriber numbers to just over 3million.

CALLING DEVELOPERS - MICROSOFT FIND MY PHONE

2010-12-08T04:50:00.000-08:00

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.

MICROSOFT GETS SEXY

2010-12-08T03:33:00.000-08:00

Microsoft Open Door, the software giant's road show, rolled into town this week after making stops in Mauritius and Nigeria.

In an era where the headlines are now hogged by Facebook, Google and Apple, the world's largest software maker feels it is no longer cool and to dent the myth, Louis Otieno and team broke out the fanciworks.

At the entrance to Onami restaurant at Westgate, Microsoft's much ballyhooed video game console Xbox Kinect was on display. Scribe Larry Madowo gave it a go and by the look of it, he would have been sweating bullets had he chosen to continue playing. The player has a sensor that takes in a persons dimensions when they stand in front of the TV screen and from there you control the game by moving your body, jumping, swaying, moving your arms and so on. The folks don't seem to have settled on a retail price but they are coming in from Dubai at about Sh30,000.

Inside the presentation area, Microsoft which seems to have woken up from monopoly induced arrogant slumber with the release of Windows 7 had some serious products.

First, there is Lync previously Office Communications Server.

This is proprietary software for business to integrate its communications. It's touted as a PBX replacement because you can make voice or video calls from PC to PC and even include people in the conversation by clicking on them from your contacts.

The software can work within companies, between different organizations and with individuals and is also available on Windows Mobile.

Windows Live Essentials a freely available download is an exciting piece of software for individual use. It's basically your own personal cloud. You get 25GB in the cloud where you can mirror your PC such that you can even work on it from anywhere with any browser.

You get to also include your various emails, office and personal such as gmail, yahoo and hotmail as well as connecting to all your social networks and you have it all on one screen. You can see who is logging in via LinkedIn or Facebook and also keep up with Messenger.

You can also upload your phone contacts and synchronize them automatically. For example if you have two phones you don't have to keep updating each with a new contact. As long as you add it to one phone it Live Essentials synchronizes it on your Skydrive (the 25GB) and also on your other phone.

There is also a feature on it called Locate my phone. It is only live in the US but Louis Otieno the CEO Microsoft East Africa issued a challenge to local developers to come up with an application to make it work here.

All in all, this was a great start for Microsoft and it looks like they have stuff you can use. Live Essentials especially is worth a try since its a free download although it works best with Windows Vista and above.

KDN FACES WIND UP OVER SH1BILLION DEBT

2010-11-04T05:58:00.000-07:00

Tuesday night's cable cut near Museum Hill disrupted Safaricom's phone services for quite a while. But the industry is worried it has not seen the last of such outtages. You see, Kenya Data Networks the largest cable operator in the country is locked in a row with Soliton Telmec, the company that lays, maintains and supports its cable.

Soliton Telmec, headed by Abdirahman Sheikh, has been with KDN since 2004 when the latter started laying cable and has done most of its network. It also maintains and supports the network.

But with the latest dispute, the relationship seems headed for the rocks. The two firms are locked in dispute over amounts owed to Soliton for work done on the Garissa to Mombasa fiber optic line, the line meant to offer redundancy for the oft-sabotaged Nairobi - Mombasa line.

Sheikh is calm and collected on the phone when speaking about the issue but there is a hint of steel.

"We have been with KDN for six years, and it has been a fruitful relationship. But if it doesn't work out, am sure they have a plan B isn't it?"

Plan B was put to test Tuesday by the China Wu Yi construction company which inadvertently, at we would want to believe so, cut KDN's cable near Museum Hill thereby throwing Safaricom's services into disarray.

Now typically, such faults should take anywhere from 45 minutes to a couple of hours to fix depending on the nature of the damage, JTL guys told us some time back.

But that is if you have support and in this case it seems the fall out with Soliton Telmec has left KDN exposed.

A Safaricom insider had this to say, "You see these guys may not be able to offer clients the SLAs (Service Level Agreements) if they don't have Soliton to do their support."

KDN in Nairobitech's opinion, reflects too much of Naushad Merali's mish-mash business ventures although it is majority owned by Alltech of SA.

Like Sameer Group, KDN is in every sort of business and really comes off as a master of none.

Sameer where Merali also has an interest embraces businesses ranging from tyre making, to real estate (Sameer Industrial Park).

KDN also besides its fiber cable offers WiMax, VoIP, Wi-Fi, Butterfly services, Eazzytalk, CCTV cameras, data warehousing, internet portal, payment systems etc etc.

Its corresponding customer service is abysmal to say the least and both vendors and clients have a hell of a time trying to get their problems fixed.

The company is in need of a major reorganization to refocus it on key core business goals and shed off unnecessary baggage.

Although I don't see it happening, one way would be for the big telcos to take it over say Bharti Airtel or even Safaricom and incorporate it into their larger vision.

KDN says it is willing to settle the issue with Soliton through some reconciliation measures but Sheikh says he is yet to hear anything concrete and is leaving the matter to his lawyers, Ahmednasir and Company Advocates.

UNLOVED? VODAFONE DELAY MJ'S CONTRACT

2010-10-28T06:47:00.000-07:00

Scribes trooped to the Carnivore grounds Wednesday night to bid farewell to outgoing Safaricom CEO Michael Joseph.

MJ has been on the farewell circuit this past month including meeting with corporate CEOS, his staff at Safaricom, journalists and editors ahead of his handover to Bob Collymore.

Collymore officially starts duty on Monday, November 1st.

By and large it has been a happy affair but also with a bit of anxiety for Joseph.

You see, while he is leaving Safaricom, Joseph will remain with the Vodafone Group and will handle various issues for Safaricom's parent company.

But Joseph may be forgiven for thinking that Vodafone were a bit insensitive after the work and the results he has produced in the 10 years he has run Safaricom.

It was not until a few days ago that Vodafone actually gave Joseph his contract for his new duties. It is quite nerve wrecking when your last day as Safaricom CEO is nigh and the new contract is yet to appear.

That and the fact that the Joseph's have mostly been feted by colleagues and partners and not by Vodafone despite the fact that Joseph ran that Group's most profitable company in terms of margins would dent your feelings.

But, come Monday, Joseph will take on his new duties and Collymore will assume the 7th floor office facing Waiyaki Way as CEO. Being that Collymore is already a director on Safaricom's board, the assumption is that he will also take on the title of Managing Director.
Some Quick notes:

Incoming CEO Bob Collymore is looking at doing things a bit differently.

For starters, he is going to be big on Social Media. Not just him tweeting and facebooking, but moving the ENTIRE SAFARICOM onto the social media space.

Secondly, Collymore is going to go after the youth in a big way. One of the ideas floating around is the introduction of different tariffs for the 18-25 bracket through targeted social media campaigns.

Structured interviews: Joseph was good for a soundbite anytime, anywhere and sometimes his handlers wrung their hands dry in anxiety not knowing what the CEO was going to say.

Collymore is going to be having slots for media interviews booked in advance.

As an example starting Monday, he has slotted in some media houses including Larry Madowo of NTV and O'Brien Kimani of KBC.

After the half-year results announcement on 10 November 2010, instead of a press conference, Collymore will schedule interview slots for the 11th with each journalist getting their one one one slot.

After that Collymore will be off to investor roadshows.

Which side of your bread is buttered?

Last year during the media bash, Gina Din Kariuki and her daughter sat at the same table with Michael Joseph. This time, she sat on Bob Collymore's table.

The Sh5million journalist award scheme

Initially announced by Michael Joseph at last year's media bash, the Sh5million award scheme for business journalists was meant to award the Business Journalist of the Year at this year's media party.

Unfortunately, it didn't happen but MJ said Bob would take it up and by next year April or May, the winner should be known.

The award is supposed to be handled by a panel of independent judges who will track articles written by the different journalists. Ideally, it should be an award for a body of work not just one article or broadcast feature.

THE RETURN OF MOTOROLA

2010-10-25T05:44:00.000-07:00

At its height, Motorola was King in Kenya.

From its talkabout, to its RAZR platform, its kabambe phones and the like, Motorola was the market leader in Kenya. It particularly excelled at pushing low-cost handsets that grew wildly popular but returned very low margins.

An ex-motorola man now at Samsung East Africa says the move to push these cheap phones eventually proved to be Motorola's undoing and by 2007 its fortunes had dwindled badly.

The inventor of the mobile phone is back again though: One Wednesday, 27 October, Motorola will hold a media roundtable to unveil its line of products.

The handset maker comes remade and comes to a market that has itself been remade by the rise of the smartphone industry and the penetration of mobile internet with the rise in popularity of social networking and other data consuming online activities.

During that time, it caught the Android bug and has unveiled its popular Droid line of phones. It will hope to ride on both the affluence of a budding middle-class, its Android platform and the availability of a range of applications on the Android Store, and its brand name recognizability to recapture market share.

In the meantime, Nokia remains runaway leader with 40 per cent of the pie, Samsung second at 8 per cent, and the others bring up the rear.

Just last month, another pioneer in these parts, Sony Ericsonn announced its return to the Kenyan market.

'HANDS OFF BOB': COLLYMORE TO ADOPT DIFFERENT STYLE

2010-10-25T05:05:00.000-07:00

Three quick things to note: Bob Collymore will not micromanage Safaricom - His own words. Two - People will be fired at Safaricom -too many highly-paid redundant chaps who add little value it seems. Three - Look for Bob Collymore at a social networking site near you. He is going to be tweeting, facebooking and all that every Friday!

There is a new era dawning at the green house on the hill. The indefatigable Michael Joseph, ubiquitous face of the money-minting machine these last 10 years, does his last tour of duty this week. Come Monday morning 1 November 2010, Safaricom will officially have a new CEO, Bob Collymore.

Joseph who jokes that he was thrown into the then wasteland that was the Kenyan mobile market because some guys didn't like him too much at Vodafone, now retires as a dyed-in-the-wool Kenyan who is in no hurry to go anywhere.

Out with him however, is his iron-fist control of Kenya's most profitable company. Under Joseph's reign, no one was allowed to purport to speak for Safaricom except the CEO. Those who tried like Fred Mburu found themselves on the tarmac faster than you could say MJ. Only Les Baillie, former CFO and now investor relations head seemed immune from such restrictions and could speak at will.

With Collymore, such shackles are set to be taken off. The incoming CEO describes himself as a collaborative person who prefers to get people involved and come to a consensus rather than issue top-down directives. Joseph on the other hand has said he is not democratic. He demands, it is done.

Collymore has also been horrified at the number of titles that report to him. This is set to be changed. He wants to have fewer managers but with defined roles and the greenlight to make decisions. While, some of these managers will be glad to have latitude, some of them may face the axe or be redeployed altogether to have fewer distinct chains of command.

As for issues raised by the press, business partners, customers and so on, Collymore who has a passion for social media will reportedly be using a lot of tweeter, Facebook and the like to communicate both internally to staff and externally to stakeholders. Externally, Collymore will schedule to communicate every Friday via these social engines.

Collymore will also have his first investor briefing on November 8 when the company reports its half-year profits.

NOKIA BARES TEETH AT RIVALS UNLEASHES THE N8

2010-09-14T04:38:00.001-07:00

Everything does rise and fall with leadership. Nokia's senior executives at this year's Nokia World and Developer Summit in London are issuing bold challenges to their glamorized North American rivals Apple and Google just days after their incoming CEO, Stephen Elop said he would take the battle to the only continent Nokia isn't the market leader in smartphones or mobile phones for that matter.

Today at the Nokia event held at the ExCEl in the London Docklands, the Nokia vice presidents were positively jumping with exuberance and relishing the challenge ahead.

Signs that the Finnish giant was issuing a call to battle began with Niklas Savander, VP markets who while acknowledging that Nokia was going through some tough times nonetheless issued a defiant statement of identity.

"We are not going to apologize for the fact that we are not Apple, or Google, or Samsung. We are Nokia!" Savander said. "Today we shift gear in Nokia's fightback!"

Taking a dig at Apple, the Nokia VP in clear reference to the iPhone said, "One product is not going satisfy everybody."

Nokia was ready with numbers to underline its position.

"People on average buy 260,000 Nokia smartphones a day, thats more than Apple and Android combined. It's more smartphones than any other company period!"

Nokia unleashed four new phones in total : The flagship N8, the C6 and the C7 and its modern day version of the communicator, the E7.

All will run on Symbian 3.

"We aremoving from legacy to leading!" a triumphant Savander said. The 55 million N8's that Nokia intends to ship this year is a "conservative" figure, Savander said.

Anssi Vanjoki, VP for markets, who followed the irrepressible Savander on stage, was no less bullish.

Of the N8, which comes with a 12megapixel camera. Vanjoki said: "It's not really fair to compare a regular handheld camera with shot from the N8."

The E7, Vanjoki said, was "hands down the best business phone out there.

The C6's display marks it out as it features CBD Clear Black Display!

Overall, the Nokia World and Developer Summit kicked off in a bullish mood.

Off to the Experience Lounge to see if these phones are actually deliver on the promise.

JIMMY THE MAN! KIBAKI'S AND MOBICOM

2010-09-12T06:04:00.001-07:00

THE first family's hand has not been seen much in business as have their two predecessors save for the traditional businesses such as the Silver Springs Hotel but that can be claimed to discretion.

Nairobitech has established that the much touted Mobicom, lately a dealer of Safaricom and now in the Telkom Kenya camp has no less a personage than Jimmy Kibaki, son of Kenya's current president, behind it.

Speculation has been rife about the publicity-shy Paul Ndung'u, the chairman of Mobicom who also owns sizeable stakes in many listed companies on the Nairobi Stock Exchange but it would appear that he may be merely the front-man for Jimmy.

At their Gigiri premises, it turns out, Ndung'u plays second fiddle to Jimmy who is the effective chairman of a group called Lucia Enterprises.

Lucia Enterprises is the mother of two companies: Mobicom and BMK a company that runs a fleet of forex bureaus.

Those who know Ndung'u will recall he used to run a forex bureau along Kimathi Street together with an Indian businessman.

Before that he was at Uchumi Supermarkets.

Ndung'u and Jimmy are distant relatives.

AARGHH! ROAD CONTRACTORS AND SAFCOM'S CABLE

2010-08-29T06:48:00.000-07:00

The last thing Safaricom wants at a time when it is locked in a vicious price war primarily with original foe Zain as well as the other two mobile operators in the market, is a failing network.

Which is what happened today. Internet services were down.

The most dialled number by IT guys in different companies today was 0722 002222. That is the internet support service line for Safaricom. For a company that buys bandwidth from Safaricom, those are the guys you deal with.

For most part today (Sunday, 29th August 2010), calls to this line went to recorded instructions as Safaricom guys worked to get their services back on track.

From early morning to early afternoon, internet services, mobile phone calls as well as M-PESA services were down on Safaricom's networks.

It transpired that some road contractor working in the Upper Hill area, near Britak, bulldozed through optic-fiber cables laid alongside the road and in the process severed lines belonging to at least three cable operators.

Maximum impact was felt by Safaricom subscribers because Jamii Telecom, on whose metro-fiber Safaricom rides, was one of the casualties.

John Kamau of JTL said it took them almost until 2 O'Clock to fix the problem. In the meantime, Safaricom's services like corporate internet in offices, mobile internet service, GSM calls and even M-PESA were affected.

Kenya Data Networks (KDN) was also affected. In fact, KDN suffered two cuts, at Upper Hill and at Museum Hill where China Wu-Yi are putting up that interchange to link Uhuru Highway with Thika Road.

Vincent Wang'ombe, KDN's marketing manager said the company was working to fix the problem by end of the day today which should see all customers back online.

Both JTL and KDN complained that contractors have been haphazardly cutting their cables and now want government to recognize fiber cables as crucial infrastructure.

Water and power lines, they said, are usually given ample time to shift from the construction area.

Safaricom in the meantime was back in service shortly after 2PM. Media Houses had hitherto had a hard time reaching key personnel to get the official line perhaps making the case for even dyed-in-the-wool Safaricom staff to also maintain another operator's line in case of such disruptions.

YOUR CALL CANNOT BE COMPLETED: MEZA CALLS JOSEPH

2010-08-19T06:28:00.000-07:00

The following conversation took place Wednesday night between Zain MD Rene Meza from his Blackberry and Michael Joseph from his iPhone.

IT Starts with Rene Meza writing to Joseph. Note the times...

On 18 Aug 2010, at 21:53, "Rene Meza" wrote:

Dear Michael;

I hope this email finds you well, it’s been a while.

Not sure if you’re aware of the fact that we started to experience congestion in our route to Safaricom and have escalated to your team, who came back to us mentioning the fact that they need to go through an internal approval process, which is perfectly understandable.

I’d appreciate if you could intervene in our capacity increase request as soon as possible.

Furthermore, I understand we have an overdue payment for interconnect charges with Safaricom which we plan to pay 100% tomorrow.

Thanks for your understanding and look forward to a positive response.

Kind regards,

Joseph then responded:

From: Michael Joseph
To: Rene Meza
Cc: Clare Ruto ; John Barorot
Sent: Wed Aug 18 22:00:14 2010
Subject: Re: Congestion Zain-Safaricom Route

Rene

I will check tomorrow. Did not know about this. Should not be sn issue

Regards

Michael Joseph

CEO Safaricom

Sent from my iPhone

To which Rene responded:

From: "Rene Meza"
Date: 18 August 2010 22:04:49 GMT+03:00
To: "Michael Joseph"
Cc: "Clare Ruto" , "John Barorot"
Subject: Re: Congestion Zain-Safaricom Route

Thanks Michael, really appreciate it.

Kind regards,

----------------------------------------
Rene Meza

Managing Director

Zain Kenya

---------------------------------------

Powered by BlackBerry on Zain.

ANALYSIS AND DEVELOPMENTS UPDATE:

So as at 10 O'Clock Wednesday night, the agreement was that Safaricom CEO Michael Joseph would look into the issue Thursday morning.

When he woke up Thursday, Joseph found that Zain had issued a press release accusing Safaricom of sabotaging their new tariff.

At Safaricom House, they were furious. After steaming over the issue, the consensus that emerged was that Zain had not formally made a request for increased capacity and that if and when they did that, it would be granted under the agreed upon procedures laid out in the two companies interconnection agreement.

At this point suffice it to say that Rene Meza dropped the ball on this one. Having gotten the CEOs word he should not have sanctioned the alarmist press release crying sabotage before getting word back from Michael Joseph.

Even as the publicity war escalated, the engineers at Zain were desperately trying to get their counterparts at SafCom to resolve the issue.

Central to this are Alec Mulonga, the Network Director, Zain Kenya and John Barorot, Chief Technical Officer, Safaricom.

Clearly after the morning attack, Barorot was not taking calls from Alec, but then again, it depends on whether Alec was calling from a Zain line. Frustrated he sent Barorot this email.

From: Alec Mulonga
Sent: Thursday, August 19, 2010 10:25 AM
To: John Barorot
Subject: Request for Zain-Safaricom Interconnect Route Expansion

Dear Sir,

I tried to call but I presume you were busy.

I would like to request your support to grant approval for Zain’s request to expand the Zain-Safaricom interconnect routes. We have been in contact with Mr. Odera regarding this request and he indicated to us that he is seeking approval for the request. We appreciate his support so far at very short notice, but would like to request your intervention for possible acceleration of the necessary approvals.

In summary, the expansion request is two phased as follows:

· Phase1: to give us immediate interim relief, we propose to optimize the existing capacity by declaring more devices in the Zain -> Safaricom direction

· Phase2: for a long term plan, we are working on the ideal capacity requirements with sufficient headroom and will share with your Core Planning team in the course of today.

Looking forward to your feedback.

Regards,

Alec Mulonga,

Network Director,

Zain – Kenya.

THE STATE OF PLAY

Safaricom as of now says it is yet to receive a formal request for increased capacity from Zain. The email from the MD Zain Kenya apparently does not constitute a formal request.

Zain is not backing down though. They have embarked on building their own link which should be ready in a week's time.

The mood is bullish at Parkside Towers.

"This is just the first card we've dealt," a senior manager at Zain said. "We have four more cards to play. We are just waiting for the reaction from the market."

Reaction has been astonishing. Users have flocked Zain shops to get Zain lines and some savvy operators have taken to selling people SIM cards on the lines snaking out of such shops.

In Mombasa, the dealer there was cleverer. As residents awoke to Zain's full-page ads on the new tariff, the dealer opted to hand out lines to everyone who bought a newspaper.

Manoj Kohli, the Bharti Airtel CEO for international operations had this to say about the Kenyan market.

"We are not saying that we will succeed 100 per cent in capturing market leadership. But we will make it extremely difficult for our competitor to operate."

TYCOONS ON THE MOVE! MOBICOM'S PLAN

2010-07-30T05:49:00.000-07:00

Reclusive Kenyan billionaire Paul Ndung'u (left in the picture) came to the limelight this week still protesting that he doesn't like people to know him.

The man who holds the single largest individual stakes in many listed NSE companies also happens to be founder and chairman of Safaricom's largest dealer, Mobicom Ltd. That at least was the case until Mobicom terminated the deal last week.

The move to ditch Safaricom came as a surprise to many but even more astonishing was the announcement that Mobicom would now be dealing for Telkom Orange, the consensus sleeping giant of the Telecom sector.

Just what does Ndung'u and his equally rich partner and MD of Mobicom Joel Kibe see in Telkom?

The simple answer is CAPACITY! More on that later but first ruminate on the size of business that Mobicom will be giving up.

As Safaricom's largest dealer doing just about 10 per cent of its business, Mobicom moved Sh450million monthly or roughly Sh5.5billion in turnover annually.

They had 42 Safaricom shops which in turn fed sub-dealers and agents across the country.

By size they dwarfed Samchi and Capital Real Time, two other well known SafCom dealers.

So why move to Safaricom.

For starters this was a deal three months in the making. It was negotiated not just with Telkom Kenya but with France Telecom.

Secondly, Mobicom stands to have Superdealer status as it is the only among the other 56 Telkopm Dealers that has a national presence. The others are regional and will likely have to deal with Mobicom.

But as Joel Kibe put it, the silver lining is in capacity.

"Telkom has a lot of idle capacity," Kibe said.

Apparently, Mobicom is confident it can sell this capacity and make more money than it was making in Safaricom.

Starting August the company will spend about Sh30million to rebrand all its shops with Orange colours.

It then plans to stock a wide range of products including modems, telecommunication equipment, WiMax radios, CDMA gadgets among others. It will also sell fixed lines to customers.

So this is where matters stand, Mobicom believes it has the footprint to take Telkom's products to places where the latter does not reach. Particularly, it hopes to sell the enormous capacity on TEAMS/Eassy that TKL has as well as on Telkom's terrestrial fiber optic network and the Telkom managed government owned National Optic Fiber Backbone (NOFBI).

Kibe 's parting shot: We could do up to Sh20billion in revenues.

SLEEK BROTHER! MAD MANOUVRES MICHAEL OKWIRI

2010-07-29T05:32:00.000-07:00

I first heard it from the inside, that as jostling and positioning continues within the Zain fraternity following the acquisition of the African operations by Bharti Airtel, one fellow who would probably emerge in a stronger position would be Michael Okwiri, currently in charge of communications, Zain-Kenya office.

"This guy went to school in India, that's the first thing," the Zain employee said. "Secondly, he knows how to read a script, if you don't surprise him and tell him these are the questions that will be asked, he will shine."

Ostensibly, Okwiri knows how to make a presentation and without getting into Ervin Goffman's analysis of "Presentation of the Self" suffice it to say that he has impressed the new big cajunas at Parkside to warrant a promotion.

Nairobitech has learnt that Okwiri will now go to head Zain Africa Communications Office putting him in charge of communications in 15 African countries.

Not bad brother. One person who might be left feeling lonely is Rene Meza. These two were thick as thieves and practically ran Zain Kenya together.

As for Meza, let us hope he learns from his sidekick and makes all the right noises to keep his seat.

BREAKER, BREAKER! CLEAR THE LINE:ARMY VS 4G

2010-07-21T05:47:00.000-07:00

Who is more important? Security Forces secret communication or your mobile internet experience? This is not a theoretical question, it is one that the Communications Commission of Kenya will have to confront soon.

It is emerging that the next step in mobile communication technology, the so-called 4G or Long Term Evolution LTE faces a major hurdle in Kenya. The frequencies at which 4G operates, 2.4GHz - 2.6GHz, are held by Kenya's Armed Forces.

Now that is a problem!

So although Huawei Technologies are ready to deploy the technology for their client Safaricom, they cannot because the frequencies are not available.

I don't see the Army just giving up its frequencies and I wouldn't even want to imagine how much of is tied to these frequencies much in the same way most handsets are only second generation and cannot work with say 3G.

You see, mobile technology is now at what we call third generation 3G stage in Kenya -Safaricom has 3G, Telkom and Zain are rolling it out.

Previously, we were at 1G Analog, then we moved to 2G digital (voice, SMS) where most Kenyans are today. The bulk of mobile phone subscribers have 2G handsets and only now are more and more people on 3G (Multi Media, video etc) enabled handsets.

But there is talk of moving to the next stage, 4G where speeds are seen to be truly blazing.

Which is why the Communications Commission of Kenya needs to step up and reorganize spectrum management in the country.

For example, Safaricom because of the current situation where Armed Forces occupy the frequencies which should be used for 4G had said they would consider using the 2G space to deploy this superior technology.

But the bulk of their subscribers have 2G handsets so they can't do away with 2G or risk cutting them off and it will be sometime before majority of handset makers have affordable 3G handsets.

The situation is further compounded by the fact that the space within our Radio Frequencies that mobile operators have been allocated are similar in size. But Safaricom has 14million subscribers while others have a combined total of less than 5million.

So congestion is all too likely to be an issue. CCK however, needs to come out boldly and say what it is doing about the Spectrum issue and not be a hindrance to development of technology.

FINALLY KCB GETS A GRIP ON THE CASH! T24

2010-07-13T05:44:00.000-07:00

If you don't know why KCB keeps talking about its new core banking system T24 that it has deployed across its 212 branches in the region, picture this.

Before, you could go to your ATM withdraw all the cash there, then walk into the banking hall and do the same all over again and walk out with double the green you had in your account.

Reason? The bank has been running a separate ATM system from the one running inside the banks.

In fact, the banking platform KCB was using was so inadequate that it could serve a maximum of 99 branches. This means, the additional 100 plus branches had to be connected to these others as some sort of extension office.

To run an ATM system, the bank now had to get a separate platform from the already overstretched banking system and this created the gigantic loophole that I mentioned above.

Reconciliation was not instant. Therefore, transactions on the ATM network would not automatically reflect on the main banking system meaning even if you had cleared your account, you could walk into the banking hall and do an over-the-counter withdrawal without the bank suspecting.

Truth would dawn on them much later.

The versatile T24 system solves that and ensures the bank is on top of every transaction carried out within its system.

It also means you do not have to be attached to one branch, any of the 212 branches of KCB that you walk into, be it Rwanda, Southern Sudan, Zanzibar etc, will act like your local branch.

The bank is now installing new intelligent ATMs and upgrading from KCB Quickserve to Visa Electron.

Kudos!

TELKOM VERSUS SAFARICOM ROUND TWO: TEAMS CABLE!

2010-06-21T02:50:00.000-07:00

"We were caught napping," a Safaricom insider told me when controversial new regulations were published. "Guys have been strategizing while we think everything is being played above board."

The strategists, in this case were none other than Telkom Kenya, the former state monopoly provider of telecommunications services.

While SafCom was content to ride its dominant position, TKL was plotting how to bring that dominance to a halt and had roped in the government with various tactics.

Stephen Kiptiness, the suave and ultra-confident head of regulatory affairs at Telkom had sounded the warning shot a few days prior to the explosion over the regulations.

Safaricom, he said should be declared a dominant player. Signs that that was a live wire came when Safaricom immediately protested demanding to tell its side of the story even though the regulations were yet to come out.

When the dust settled down, Safaricom got its reprieve after government decided to invite lawyers from Brussels to look at the regulations and the law of competition in general.

Michael Joseph, the combative CEO of Safaricom, speaking to investors during the annual briefing later said that he had kind of "enjoyed" the bruising battle during the two weeks it took for government to back down somewhat.

It would now appear that he spoke to soon for latest developments now indicate that the two Telecom giants are headed for yet another round of battle - this time over the control of Kenya's undersea fiber optic cable, TEAMS.

Currently, SafCom and Telkom are the two largest shareholders of TEAMS with a stake of 22.5 per cent each. The next biggest stake is owned by Essar at 10 per cent.

But if reports are to be believed, Telkom Kenya is about to ramp up that stake to 42.5 per cent and assume significant dominance over the running of the same including representation on the TEAMS board.

Jaindi Kisero of NMG or Senior as he is known in the business press circles claims in the East African that the Government of Kenya has succumbed to pressure from France Telecom and ceded its 20 per cent stake in TEAMS to Telkom Kenya. This along with a free 3G license, and control of the national fiber optic backbone cable (NOFBI) as well as settlement of outstanding bills owed by Kenya Broadcasting Corporation and other government entities, are some of the concessions that France Telecom has managed to wring out of government for allegedly being cheated in the privatization deal where they paid Sh26billion for a 51 per cent stake in Telkom Kenya.

But Communications Commission of Kenya Director General Charles Njoroge says he is not privy to some of those claims. "They will have to pay me whatever the arrangement is for the license," Njoroge said of TKL.

A Telkom Kenya insider, who admitted that the deal was at extremely high-level (Indeed according to Senior the deal was inked between Treasury Permanent Secretary Joseph Kinyua and France Telecom CEO Michel Barre), it could be that the 3G license fee deal (the license should cost TKL Sh800million) will be a matter of accounting across the books.

On some of the concessions government is giving TKL, he reckons it is to cover for all the plundering and stealing that some GoK people did just before they sold it to France Telecom.

It is however on the TEAMS shareholding deal that trouble seems to be brewing. A senior Safaricom insider told Nairobitech that by no means would they accept the deal. SafCom boss Michael Joseph is the chairman of the TEAMS board.

With Safaricom vowing to block the deal, the stage is set for another round of battle between these two giants for whom the bad blood seems to get worse by the day.

But France Telecom is not backing down. The same insider said FT has taken a bare knuckles approach to the fight. "The French are ruthless!" he said.

IS CFC BANK BONKERS? GIVE ME MY MONEY!

2010-06-06T01:14:00.000-07:00

CFC Stanbic's immediate past chairman Charles Njonjo at 90-years of age is still lucid and articulate. No sign of senility or alzheimer's there-- but then again his father the late Senior Chief Josiah Njonjo died at 103-years of age.

Such sprightly health cannot be claimed for the CFC Stanbic, the bank that Sir Charles founded along with PK Jani and Jeremiah Kiereini.

Customers of the bank last month started getting strange deficits or deductions in their accounts and some could not withdraw any money at all because apparently, it had been held.

Who issued the order to hold my money? Apparently, no one at the bank could explain it. In fact customers have had to be referred to CFC Stanbic's card center where one is asked to check back after an hour when the problem will have been fixed. But nothing doing.

It is now emerging that it all has to do with IT. You see when CFC Bank and Stanbic bank merged, they operated different banking platforms.

CFC, the bride in this marriage, operated the far superior Temenos 24 (T24) system while Stanbic's operations ran on Bankmaster.

A decision was made to adopt T24 for the new bank, and the process of migrating data onto the system begun.

Apparently, this integration is what caused the problems that many had with their ATM cards the whole of last month and for some people as far back as April.

Now what is scary about this whole thing is how long it is taking the bank to fix the problem. Firstly, even the amounts its showing for some accounts are wrong. It would appear that crucial data is not being accessed from the original database and in the end if this is the case, unless a scan of the old records is done, the bank could wind up either losing a lot of money or stiffing customers for a lot of money.

Insiders will tell you this whole marriage has been a rocky ride. Ex-CFC employees have always felt slighted even though they believe they are more knowledgeable than the guys who came from Stanbic.

And then to make matter worse, Stanbic which is a South African outfit, appears to have jobbed CFC alumni by making sure it raised the salaries of its employees just two months before the merger. So pay has been skewed in favour of Stanbic guys compared to CFC guys a matter than does nothing for staff morale.

Then South Africans behaving badly. One senior SA chap had the temerity to bring his wife to head a department in the new entity and when she couldn't perform, created a previously non-existent post for her to occupy.

CFC guys were promised salaries would be harmonized but that has not happened and they now feel that they are deliberately being pushed to make the decision to quit.

If this latest glitch with the IT system has anything to do with ex-Stanbic databases, expect little help from ex-CFC IT guys in solving it.

WHO'S BOSS? TELECOM WARS EXPLODE!

2010-05-03T07:15:00.000-07:00

Les Baillie was confident, even cocky. No, the green giant of Waiyaki Way aka Safaricom was not worried about new upcoming regulations - it was rivals who couldn't up their commercial game who were pining for protection Baillie said Thursday. Safaricom would continue to give customers what customers asked for, exuding confidence, Baillie, the chief investor relations officer at Safaricom told scribes after chairing a charity event.

Come Friday, Baillie's world fell apart! From Baillie, to CEO Michael Joseph to Legal Affairs Chief Nzioka Waita and communications head Washington Akumu, everybody was livid! New draconian and specifically targeted sanctions that will have far reaching ramifications in the telcom sector and possibly corral Safaricom's dominance had just been unveiled by the Ministry of Information with instructions to the Communications Commission of Kenya to implement to the letter.

That they had been expecting new regulations is not in doubt, but when they actually eye-balled the new regulations released by the Communications Commission of Kenya, there was a feeling of having been duped.

Hardly able to restrain themselves, the green machine fired off press releases to media houses that were in fact a carbon copy of full-page ads that would run on Monday but unable to wait they sent copies out to newsrooms on Sunday.

Michael Joseph came out roaring in the week following. Scribes were granted interviews at will and the craggly CEO signaled he is squatting on his haunches for a fight.

I will not take this lying down, Joseph said. I will fight this both publicly, politically and legally.

Meantime, rivals operators rubbed their hands with glee. During the week they issued full-page ads in the dailies congratulating the government for coming up with the regulations.

CCK director-general called Nzioka Waita who was then in Uganda to berate him for overreacting and even spoke with Joseph on Tuesday.

Clearly unsatisfied, the CEO then met with Samuel Poghisio, information minister on Wednesday at the Tribe hotel. Details of that discussion are yet to emerge.

Safaricom's beef is with two of five regulations that were unveiled. One, it is apprehensive about the issue of domant operator where once so declared, it will be forced to submit tariff changes to CCK with 90-days notice for approval.

It says regulations should only target it if it abuses its dominance. Unless that is done, it says, it will automatically be subject to price control which will impact it negatively.

Going forward, Safaricom will definitely awaken its public relations machine and advertising to keep the fire going. Newspapers and TV stations will clearly benefit.

But this fight is far from over.

MANDARINS FIND ICT HARD GOING

2010-04-29T05:10:00.000-07:00

A section of government fat cats gathered at the Norfolk yesterday on invitation by the World Bank and Treasury, ostensibly to showcase strides they have made in the past year in reforming the way business is done in Kenya.

As you can imagine, most of it dwelt on use of information and communication technologies to streamline government operations. Bureaucracy in the people's government is usually the first and most frustrating barrier to doing business.

The taxman was there as well as Kenya Ports Authority. Newly-crowned champion of ministries, the AG's office was there to showcase their progress in computerizing company registration. Lands and the Nairobi City Council made up the remaining numbers.

KRA had some interesting proposals. For starters they want big companies to start filing their corporate taxes online. Uptake has been slow but training is ongoing to show firms how to pay Ceasar's dues via internet. The KRA officer did not say if they have also automated the VAT refund claim process.

For mom and pop-type businesses known by the cliche SMEs, KRA wants them to pay their taxes by M-PESA/ZAP. SMEs have to pay a turnover tax at 3 per cent of their gross revenues.

Another is the single billing system for clients who pay multiple taxes. Traditionally, companies have to physically visit different windows sometimes on different floors to file their taxes. With a new single billing system, a taxpayer can file at one point and get their balance thus saving time.

Still on automation, STate Law Office has digitized company records so the process of doing a company search will no longer require assistance from the broker-types who normally hover around Sheria House.

KPA on the other hand talked of what it calls the National Single Window System to allow importers to clear their goods at one place. Typically, you have to invest in a motorbike to run your documents from KPA to Kenya Bureau of Standards to KEPHIS, Port Health etc etc. Cabinet approval will see the software to integrate all these bodies into one system.

Lands was in for a hiding. After the lands officer presented a paper showing that Ardhi House was now digitizing records to make it easier for filing of applications, a lawyer present protested loudly.

"Practically nothing has changed," charged the lawyer. To renew a lease on land, he said, one needed to start three years before the actual expiry otherwise the process takes so long that you risk finding yourself a squatter on your own land.

Apparently, corruption is so rife that when you ask for your application, you are always told that the file is on the minister's desk.

Also coming in for berating was the City Council. Again it was noted that once a building permit is given, planning officers rarely follow up to inspect the works progress and when complaints about a builder are raised with City Hall, the complainant is asked to bring the name of the culprit.

City Hall was asked to style up and reduce the approval process time from 30 days to about 3 days.

THICK AS THIEVES:THIEVING TELECOMS

2010-04-28T06:35:00.000-07:00

It is said that birds of a feather flock together. It should be added that they tend to sing the same song. The song that Kenyan telecom operators have been singing to internet customers is that despite the arrival of two sub-marine cables at the Port of Mombasa, internet costs will not come down.

The maddening line they have been feeding us is that: "We are giving you more capacity for the same cost!"

Laurent Giraud is the man who runs Telkom Kenya's carrier business. This means he sells capacity to other carriers: telecom operators and internet service providers. TKL has a stake in both TEAMS cable and EASSy. It also runs to national terrestrial fiber optic networks. It's own and the state-owned National Optic Fiber Backbone (NOFBI).

It is his day job to engage with operators eager to negotiate the lowest rates on his network.

I asked him whether telecom operators who were buying capacity before at US$2000 per MB would still continue to buy at that price if he offered to double the capacity he gives them. He said absolutely not.

Operators have insisted on an absolute lowering of rates and now buy capacity on average at US$400 per MB. By MB I mean the size of the pipe that carries the data as opposed to Mb/s which denotes the speed of transfer of data.

You see if you have a water pipe, you can either talk of its diameter or you can talk about the rate at which water flows in the pipe.

The bigger the pipe the more the water that can pass. Fiber is seen as a much bigger pipe than copper cable because no matter what speed you pass data through a small pipe, there is a limit.

Anyway, so telecom operators are not willing to be fed the same line they've been feeding customers. They have insisted on lower rates.

So why is it that when it comes to onward selling of that same capacity, they insist on maintaining their old prices ostensibly because they are giving you double the capacity?

Clearly, prices are about 25 per cent of what they were before. It is time that the Ministry of Information or the Ministry of Trade stepped in to reign in these rogue operators. Clearly, they are engaged in fleecing clients and they are doing so because there exists an asymmetric information structure in the Industry.

The consumer is not aware of the wholesale prices that is why they are getting jacked by these crooks.

CCK should step in and force the publication of applicable prices at every juncture.

The ministry should also call for the creation of a fiber operator to run the national backbone and distribute capacity at proper prices so as to undercut these pirates of the superhighway.

It should be able to sell capacity to anyone who wants it including small ISPs that can then give us bandwidth at good prices.

Let this skullduggery stop fortwith!

CAN CISCO BECOME A VISUAL NETWORK CARRIER? TELEPRESENCE

2010-04-20T07:13:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, Scribes were summoned to Cisco's seventh floor office suites at Landmark Plaze opposite The Nairobi Hospital to witness Cisco Tele Presence technology.

"It's not video-conferencing," Shahab, the Cisco GM here said. "It's TelePresence!" Now, the facilities that Cisco has at their place are of course top of the range. In a custom made room with three giant plasma screens with three cameras all branded Cisco we were sat to hook up with peeps from Sao Paulo, London and Jo'Burg.

The screens, Cisco guys pointed out to us, were High Definition, the audio was spatial. So we clicked start program on a touch screen PABX like phone in front of us and voila! we were connected to three time zones.

The audio I must say was excellent with no delay and the images were really good quality. The question is to what effect?

A good article written last week pointed out how companies fail by misreading their competition. For example, the competition for airlines is not other airlines, the piece sagaciously noted, but videoconferencing that cuts out the need to travel.

For Cisco, this ability to communicate seamlessly say for a bank with multiple branches without the need to travel will be a big selling point. But this in no way makes it a world beater because already other players are testing video conferencing solutions that are getting better and better.

What struck me was the next phase of this thing. Currently, Cisco TP works on intranets that is within one company's network. You can't for example connect on Cisco TP and connect to another company out there.

But it is on the way. The company is coming up with what it calls Cisco TP Exchange Point which will allow companies with TP technology to communicate.

With an intercompany TP exchange, Cisco could be well on its way to being a sort of carrier for high-definition video and audio conferencing. For if this was to take off it could be a way of companies to do business without the hassle of travel or too many back and forth emails.

Companies like Cisco for example, could carry out corporate training for top CIO/CTOs at major firms from their regional HQs if they all have TP deployed.

Locally, it will take time for this technology to be deployed as it is quite expensive ranging from US$100,000 - US$500,000 (Sh7-35m). Further, it still needs heavy bandwidth and as the Cisco guys noted, TP over 3G would be a stretch. 4G maybe.

However, government is a good candidate to pilot this technology both for its own use and for leasing to others to use.

DEpartment of Defence could also deploy this to its regional commands and allow top brass to communicate with commanders.

Universities can also establish this if they have the money for distance learning for example collabos with other universities around the world or for their satellite campuses when faculty is stretched.

For smaller scale businesses, it will take entrepreneurs such as cyber-cafes, network operators or even hotels to deploy this technology and then charge for its use. Much in the same way, Hotels offer conference facilities or even boardrooms for meetings, they can offer this service for say a small NGO wishing to have face to face like meetings with their head offices.

Nairobitech cannot part without mentioning the issue of mobility. This would seem to be a far cry for now but it would seem to be the next natural development. However, it will require far higher capacities.

DEBUG THOSE PROGRAMS!

2010-04-19T05:34:00.000-07:00

One of the agonies of programming whether in college computer labs late into the night or working on software development at work, is debugging. Programming is mathematical and methodical as any code-writer will tell you. But even semantics can drive you nuts. Take C programming for example. One of the commonest errors you'll inevitably face working with this iconic language is pointers where particularly in iterations, referencing goes beyond the bound of the array so that on the next iteration it returns an error and it can drive you nuts before you figure it out. But so can a missing semi-colon. All C commands are supposed to end with a semi-colon but it is quite common to forget it and write lines and lines of codes but when the program is compiled it returns errors.
These are some of the basic but very frustrating aspects of writing code but they get more complex particularly when you lose touch with what the library files that you include in your program or even super classes from which you inherit provided for or even variables change in one function affecting the operations of another separate but related function and so on and so forth.

So when somebody asks you to examine a program for errors as a career, those of us who turned away from writing code would shudder. But apparently, this is a lucrative career and more so now that multinationals are outsourcing software testing to places like India.

The Kenya Software Quality Testing Board (KSQTB) is a nascent group that has just been constituted and it is seeking to train Kenyan developers to become certified software testers.

This area, they reckon has jobs. Jobs that are currently being handled in India. By their reckoning if we have enough internationally certified testers, we could begin to bid for big contracts and could eventually see this area surpass business process outsourcing.

The board will work in a not-for-profit basis with membership free to all those interested but there will be charges for exams and training.

Because it will constitute software developers, nerds essentially, who care little for petty politics, luminaries like Agosta Liko of PesaPal see it taking off.

A number of guys attended a training last week at Jacaranda Hotel in Westlands and drew from such entities as KQ, Kenya Ports Authority, Virtual City, Kenya Revenue Authority etc.

Nairobitech will keep an eye on the nascent group to see how it navigates the terrain.

OF 4G, NETBOOKS, ENGINEERING SCHOOLS, SAFCOM

2010-03-30T09:22:00.000-07:00

Safaricom's CEO Michael Joseph is notoriously impatient with inefficiencies.

Being main sponsor of this year's connected government conference in Diani at the Coast, Joseph took to podium and rattled a few issues that have apparently been on his mind.

1. Kenyan engineers like most technical support people are doing a crappy job of meeting client's expectations. If a gadget blows for example, the technician goes and gets another and if it blows again he gets another. If the third doesn't blow then he says. A-hah..it works!

Basically, Joseph put it across that the level of standards in service provision in technical areas needed to be raised. To this end, Safaricom has partnered with Huawei Technologies to establish a finishing school of sorts for trained engineers where additional skill sets will be imparted.

The school will be hosted at Moi University.

Huawei will provide support while Safaricom through its HR department will provide the resource persons.

2. Joseph spoke about rolling out 4G later this year in Kenya. 4G or Long Term Evolution is seen as the successor to 3G technology and has already been tested in such areas as Stockholm, Sweden. LTE is gaining momentum as the next generation technology beating out WiMax.

To Joseph, nowhere in the world do we need 4G like in Kenya. Joseph had said last year that Huawei was testing 4G for Safaricom but had given no timeline.

Industry regulator CCK had at that time no idea what 4G was so it will be interesting what the event timeline on this including CCK's licensing and fee charged will be.

3. Net books...Safaricom is apparently searching for vendors of cheap but quality netbooks in the region of about US$200 (Sh15,000). This he feels will finally allow the push of internet into the lower echelon households which currently cannot afford the laptops in the market.

Joseph said he had spoken with numerous vendors and currently the main barrier was the licenses for the software that the netbooks would run. Licensing typically adds to the cost of a device.

The connected government conference continues. Will update more as discussions and presentations continue.

SEE NO EVIL? GOOGLE PLEASE!

2010-03-29T08:49:00.001-07:00

Do you know what a US military or NSA intelligence guy would love? To be able to monitor real time conversations held anywhere in the world and particularly these days on the net. Only you need to know hundreds if not thousands of languages to do that.

Not for long it might seem. Google Translate presents in my opinion one of the giant leap for such snoopers and an inconsequential nitwit ranting in vernacular on the web may well find himself hauled in for questioning.

Consider this.

Google's Motto is "See no evil." It's mission: To organize the world's information. It's working environment? Employees spend 80 per cent of their time working on company stuff and 20 per cent working on their own innovative stuff which if brilliant or innovative enough can make it through the vetting teams of top engineers and become the next cool thing from Google.

The company is admired though suffice to say its above reproach image took a battering when it pandered to the whims of the Chinese Communist government and allowed its content to be censored on the mainland so that offending images such as the 1989 Tiananmen Riots during which thousands of demonstrating students are thought to have been massacred could be blocked from innocent civilians eyes.

Anyway, recently, a Google dude was in town. His mission? To meet with scribes and show them cool things you can do with Google's applications such as search (Did you know you can multiply numbers and do other mathematical calculations on the Google Search bar?) as well as convert currency on it? Such is the definition of cool.

Some time back at the Mobile World Congress CEO Eric Schmidt trotted a German techie who works for Google to demonstrate image and voice search along with translate technology.

Basically you can take a string of words from one language enter them into Google Translate and they come out in the language you wish them to. Useful for interpreting a Chinese menu perhaps.

Anyway, this Lan fellow for that is his name demonstrated both Google Translate and Google Books.

Curiously, he let slip that Google is very interested in local language books such as those written in Luhya and Luo as well as Kikuyu and Kamba and so on.

Why? Apparently its all part of the effort to organize the world information.

True it would put our literature out there but Mr. Lan did not mention that it is also a very useful way of helping out Google's Translate application.

For you see unlike other translation programs, Google Translate relies on thousands and thousands of scanned texts which it cross references to make sense of things in different languages.

It works best when it has bi-lingual texts to compare.

So when Google says it is interested in scanning Luhya or Kikuyu texts it is not just to archive such literature but also to help its translation program.

From there you can see that anything typed in Facebook or blogged online in any language can be quickly translated. US Military intelligence guys must be following the project keenly.

It is going to take sometime although with Kiswahili Google has done quite a lot and in Uganda it has been working with Literature scholars and other Academicians to translate some of the dialects.

Of course if they spent enough time on the ground they would also realize that you can simply stand at a religious rally in Kenya especially the pentecostals and evangelicals and tape the preacher plus his translator. Outsource the transcription work to Kencall and you can grow your bilingual texts by multiples every Sunday!

ON THE DOUBLE! SCRIBES GET ON NOKIA'S OVI

2010-03-28T03:04:00.000-07:00

Trust Dorothy Ooko to come up with a way to leverage Nokia's products with the media. THe Nokia Communications Manager, East and Southern Africa last week held what she said would be a monthly Ovi cocktail.

Now scribes will show up at the mere promise of booze but last Wednesday's event held at Blanco's restaurant had a different spin to it.

For starters, there were phones to be won and not just any phone but smartphones. On the winners menu was the Nokia X6, the Nokia E72 and the Nokia E52.

All one had to do was to make a pitch about any Nokia Ovi application to the judging panel consisting of Agatha Gikunda, Nokia's regional head of solutions and a Nokia intern whose name slips my mind.

This of course means that the scribes had to actually explore the Ovi Store and try different applications and in the process learn more about them than a Nokia workshop could teach.

This being the first such Ovi cocktail, attendance though decent was not overwhelming but also participants knowledge of the apps that run on Nokia's Ovi store was quite limited.

The Standard's James Ratemo who also is President, Kenya ICT Reporters Association (KIRA) jazzed the audience with his pitch of F-Secure which he said he used when he forgot his handset in his house on his way to work. Recalling that his girlfriend was in the house he got on to F-
Secure and shut down his phone from another handset. Don't ask me what he was hiding from her. For his pitch Ratemo went home with the Nokia X3.

The Star's James Mbugua another KIRA member took second prize and opted for a Nokia E72 for his pitch of foursquare while a lady named Maureen who spoke about watching CNN on her phone took home the E52.

There were Bluetooth earpieces for all other attendants who braved rain and traffic to make it to Blanco's to attend the cocktail.

All in all it was a great event but more importantly, it got scribes to seriously start exploring Ovi Apps.

I'm sure by the next event, we will have Ovi Apps gurus in the house.

ACCESS METRO-FIBER MAKES IT A MUST BUY STOCK

2010-03-28T01:36:00.000-07:00

If
you live on King'ara road just next to the Gitanga road and James Gichuru intersection, you might be among the first people to experience true fiber optic to the home speeds courtesy of AccessKenya. The firm which recently launched its metro fiber network mostly relies on WiMax radios to transmit to homes but that may all change.

The company will attempt to use a technology called GPON (Gigabit Passive Optical Network) basically where you derive a line from one point on the fiber optic network to serve multiple points such as different apartments in an apartment block. Access will also try out IPTV and will make a decision in three months time.

The recent developments make Access a must buy for the coming few years. AccessKenya's profits dipped this past year perhaps explaining the tepid performance by its stock on the NSE even as other stocks rocket from last year's lows.

But of the shares showing promise on the bourse, it is Access that I would recommend anyone to buy now. At Sh20 it is not only cheap but following the launch of its metro-fiber network two weeks ago, this is a company that is poised for incredible growth.

Now, Jonathan Stichbury the CEO of AIG Investments EA, privately feels Access will sell itself to Safaricom in two years time but the times I have spoken to Jonathan Somen, (above R) Access CEO, he has outrightly denied that he would be looking to sell.

AccessKenya's most low profile investment of the last few years may yet turn out to be its best. Those guys in yellow coveralls that had become ubiquitous along Nairobi roads digging trenches were actually laying out a simple strategy: to connect four parts of Nairobi with underground cable and then use the resultant ring to launch into buildings and homes across Nairobi.

At each of those four locations is a sort of hub or node. Four nodes anchor the network. There is a node at Barclay's Plaza, CBD, one at Rahimtulla Towers, Upper Hill, Bandari Plaza, Westlands and Yaya Towers, Yaya.

Simply put, AccessKenya is the best placed company to dominate the data market in the coming years especially with the launch of its metro fiber.

Its goal is to first of all pipe 250 buildings within Nairobi from where tenants can tap into its capacity. It envisages about 100Mg per building. (I use Mg here to mean the size of the pipe that will be dedicated to each building as opposed to the speed at which data flows in it).

BY using its relative advantage in the data market (Jonathan Somen's favourite refrain is: "We know DATA!") the company will seek to beat back a strong push by the other listed ISP in Kenya, that venerable green giant, Safaricom which has been seeking to extend its voice dominance to the data market.

Unfortunately for Safaricom which has a legacy of voice technology infrastructure, clients have been less than impressed. Its millions of users have been straining its network and dropped connections are common. Last month, I&M attempted to demo its new Visa International partner status by taking scribes through a transaction. Four attempts to go online via Safaricom's modem failed and we had to settle for a powerpoint demo.

Access is also experimenting with fiber to the home and other technology that can rope in residential clients.

AIG Stichbury feels as an investor you can always bet on good management and certainly Access has that.

Jonathan Somen is an astute businessman and takes no prisoners as witnessed last year when he fell out with Henry Njoroge the head of OpenView, a subsidiary of AccessKenya.

Somen felt the OpenView, where he had not only bought 70 per cent shareholding from Njoroge, but also retained him as MD, was not pulling its weight. Testy board meetings were held back in February 2009 where Jonathan pushed to buy the remaining 30 per cent of the business from Njoroge.

By August Njoroge and a few other managers were out and the business has been renamed Access IT. Somen blamed it for the hit in profitability his firm took but he also pointed to the heavy capital expenditure his firm laid out in the metrofiber network.

Now it remains to be seen how Access goes after the data market.

NOKIA COULD SIGN KENYAN ARTISTS IN TWO YEARS

2010-03-16T06:29:00.000-07:00

Nokia set up a research center in Kenya two years ago as part of its 11 world research centers. Nokia Research Africa held its first progress update yesterday to talk about its work in Africa so far.

Of course due to competition they could not talk about what precisely they were doing but NRC Africa team leader did say that typically, 10 per cent of its research findings in Western research centers ends up being incorporated in their phones.

One interesting thing did emerge though. Nokia has been trying to set up a Kenyan online music store where Kenyans can download local music without much success so far because of too many hands in the pot.

Essentially, there are too many people with whom it needs to sign licenses with unlike in some Western countries where it merely needs to sign a deal with one record label and the artists under that label with have their music available on its Comes With Music online store.

Dorothy Ooko the Nokia Communications Manager for East & Central Africa said only one artist, Eric Wainaina was a one-stop shop with whom they could sign with. All other jokers had like a retinue of 5-people with whom the company had to sign contracts with, a tedious process to say the least.

But Jussi Impio, Nokia Research Center Africa team leader, did hint that we could have an online music store here in the next two years.

And get this: NOT ONE of these so-called celebs makes any money from the records they do. Piracy and other associated costs coupled with forgettable actual sales ensures that nothing remains to talk about.

Their money comes from Gigs at concerts and clubs. The only reason many of them are doing records at all is for promotion purposes. So it beats reason why they should make it so hard to sign with an online music store unless someone in these so-called record labels is fleecing them and doesnt want to lose the gravy train when artists move online.

Actually this is a long overdue move. For Nokia which has moved into solutions in a big way with its Online Shop Ovi Store, Ovi Maps, and Comes With Music store, Kenya would have been a quick adopter if it could come up with a deal that artists can sign to.

This is because Kenya has prolific users of internet both on PC and on mobile phones and two, the transactional ability using mobile money is deeply entrenched to pay for online downloads.

Comes With Music could work in Kenya by following the Ovi Store model. On Ovi, developers of mobile phone applications upload their apps onto Ovi which then distributes it to thousands of mobile phone users. The developer gets 70 per cent of revenue while Nokia keeps 30 per cent.

If Kenyan artists were to upload their music on Comes With Music and have users download it, they could similarly be paid for songs sold which potentially could be paid for with M-PESA.

In recent years local and regional music has taken Kenya by storm and gradually reduced the influence of Western Music. Kenyans could for example appreciate a local portal where they could download unique Congolose, Cameroonian or Mozambiqan music.

For up and coming artists who do not have record deals with local outfits, Comes With Music could offer a quick and effective way to put their music out there and combined with other social media such as Facebook, marketing themselves would be a much cheaper exercise.

So really, the Kenyan music industry needs to rethink its stand and make the process of signing with online music stores much easier.

EASSY LANDING

2010-03-16T05:10:00.000-07:00

Finally, the third submarine cable to call at the Port of Mombasa, is here albeit 4 years late. Those in the know will remember this was the first cable that was meant to connect the Eastern Africa seaboard but boardroom wrangles and ulterior moves by South Africans who wanted to control the cable set it back.

In fact, Kenya's own cable TEAMS was conceived when during a meeting of countries in SA to discuss the cable, Information PS Bitange Ndemo stood up and issued an ultimatum from the Kenyan government.

"If the next meeting does not resolve when we start laying this cable, Kenya will go on its own," the then new PS told a stunned but disbelieving audience. The rest as they say is history.

This weekend, the East frica Submarine System (EASSY) a project spearheaded by the Western Indian Ocean Cable Company (WIOCC) will land in Mombasa.

The WIOCC guys have promised that internet costs will drastically come down. But more interestingly, is the cost of calling between African countries which is still higher than the rates at which we call the UK and US.

EASSY has a unique model that brings together African landline operators who will serve as the cable's backhaul and provide redundancy.

Basically by ensuring these African operators are all interconnected, it will cut off Europe as an exchange point for phone calls originating from Africa and destined for other African countries.

Currently to call another African country for example requires routing of traffic to Europe and then back to Africa.

EASSY will now join TEAMS (Kenyan owned) and SEACOM (Aga Khan Fund, Cyril Ramaphosa and American investors) and will provide diversity.

WIOCC CEO Chris Wood and GM James Wekesa have said this is the first fully connected cable because it goes straight to Europe whereas TEAMS connects to Fujairah in Dubai for onward connectivity and SEACOM connects through Mumbai from where it can connect to I-ME-WE (India Middle East and Western Europ) cable.

THe other unique feature of this cable is that it will allow for monthly contracts and sell bandwidth at lower quantities than the other two.

It will be interesting to see how Kenyan telecoms who have stubbornly refused to bring down bandwidth costs (some say its because they had entered into expensive Satellite Bandwidth contracts which they want to first pay off) will react.

Wananchi Group which has spoken of doing 1000KM of terrestrial fiber optic cable looks to be the wildcard here. For, although the Ministry of Information has threatened to crack down on price collusion amongst operators, it is only the market per se which can bring prices down. Wananchi can for example decide it doesnt have the number of clients Safaricom or Orange have and opt to slash prices precipitously to gain clientele.

If this happens, others are bound to follow.

Countries covered by EASSY:

Botswana
Burundi
Ethiopia
Lesotho
Malawi
Rwanda
Swaziland
Uganda
Zambia
Zimbabwe

KENYANS ARE CHATTERS AREN'T THEY?

2010-03-05T03:12:00.000-08:00

Kenyans are a chattering lot. On the web that is. Data from a research commissioned from Telposta towers (that is where the Kenya ICT Board and the Ministry of Information) shows that majority of Kenyans go online to gab.

It is not alas, and to the chagrin of marketers to check out products to shop online for.

89 per cent of respondents surveyed said they mostly go online to chat while another huge chunk said it was mostly to Facebook. Most would like to surf on their mobile phone but are restricted by small screens and pages that are not formatted for the mobile web.

Kenya ICT Board (CEO Paul Kukubo pictured) commissioned TNS International to research internet usage by Kenyans within the borders with a view to creating a useful baseline report that firms and marketers can use to position themselves more appropriately on the net.

In a nutshell, companies need to know a couple of things about the potential Kenyan internet customer.

ONE: Facebook is the most popular destination for Kenyans with 90 per cent dropping in on the popular social networking site.

Hi5 (38%), Twitter (37%), LinkedIn (30%) and Youtube (30%) follow in that order. Tagged (23%) is it even used here?, Yahoo360 (20%), MySpace (20%) and others trail.

SECOND: While most Kenyans do not buy online (mostly because of the cost of delivery and the lpoor of credit card penetration), they do research products online. Apparently, while 78 per cent of users have researched a product online such as a mobile phone, only 51 per cent subsequently went to buy it and this they did directly from a shop and not an online store.

However, 88 per cent said they would be willing to pay for such goods using mobile money services like M-PESA and ZAP.

And they don't like what they are seeing of Kenyan websites - too little information is available and the most important, cost, as Kenyans are price conscious, is usually lacking.

ADVICE TO FIRMS: Have an internet presence, make sure your site shows up quite high on the search engine results and have the information people need.

THIRD: and confirming a suspicion I've long held that Kenyan college students do too much copy pasting from the net, the TNS report shows that knowledge led surfing rules the Kenyan networld.

Wikipedia ( I admit I use it often) ranks high on usage and again this confirms a feeling I've had that there is too little unique Kenyan information being generated by Kenyans. While researches and oral literature reviews of Western writing abounds on the net, you'd be hard pressed to find any meaningful takes on Kenyan books online.

FOURTH: Kenyans prefer to do their surfing on their mobile phones than in cybercafes ( I think I should do a cost comparison for this) .

FIFTH: 92 per cent have seen online ads and 45 per cent admitted to being influenced by them. However, 44 per cent said they trusted product reviews made by people who used the same product.

Some companies are doing something about their net presence.

Nation Media Group whose website is among the top visited Kenyan sites has an active Facebook group which draws on average 30 comments per each posted story. No word yet on how to monetize on FB but clearly it does no harm for DN's brand endurance.

"Internet is dominated by knowledge seeking behavior," Melissa Baker (pictured) who ran the research said when she presented the findings at Hotel Intercontinental.

Interest clearly was high. I came across some guys from Barclay's, Segeni Ng'ethe the guy who started Mama Mikes Online and now has a venture called Hapa TV was also present along with marketers from different firms.

Segeni would have been glad to learn that 66 per cent of Kenyan internet users link with their families outside Kenya. Those who may remember Segeni made his bones right after he left Georgetown University and started Mama Mikes a service that used to link with Nakumatt and Uchumi to get guys in the US to purchase Supermarket vouchers for their families back home.

Mama Mikes would deliver the vouchers to the address given by the sender.

But for guys selling products on the internet, there is still a ways to go.

HP ROLLS OUT THE GADGETRY

2010-03-04T05:05:00.000-08:00

The song may be getting old - yet another IT giant making a courtesy call in Nairobi - a city many believe is on its way to becoming a financial and IT hub for the region.

But Hewlett Packard the world's largest computer maker (remember they swallowed Compaq when Iron Lady Carly Fiorina ran the firm ) broke out some serious hardware when it launched its global roadshow dubbed Printonomics 2010 at the Safaripark Hotel this week. BTW this is the first time the roadshow is starting in Africa.

But before we get to the products you have to hear these guys talk about how gazillions of printouts are done across the world and why they see business only getting better.

By the end of this decade, a guys called Hassan who heads HP Africa explained animatedly, we will be printing 16 billion books a year, 3billion cards, 1 billion newspapers and 1.5 trillion packaging materials.

Hugging the entire wall of one of the presentation rooms was this massive grand piano looking HP Printer that apparently can even print on tiles. Presentations went on for too long we didnt get a chance to get a load of what it could do but from the looks of it, its industrial grade nothome or business.

I can see it being used for these big billboards that meet you at every major intersection in
Nairobi.

Closer to consumers pockets was this rolling-pin sized mobile document scanner that can even do business cards - so I guess at company events instead of the bowl PR guys give us to drop in our business cards they can scan your card and return it to you and save the data electronically.

That baby comes to Kenya in May with a ex-factory price of 249 euros (Sh25,000).

For engineers and architects comes a non-networked printer that can take even A3 paper in its printer like tray and scan immediately and even in colour to your computer. It is the fastest scanner in the HP stable and has 5000 page duty cycle per day.

Another standout was this scanner that sports a keyboard along with a colour touchscreen menu for you to configure your scanning desires. It is also a sheet-fit model apparently people are moving away from the flat bed scanner that you open place a document on and close to scan.

Sheet-fit scanners can take a shuffle of documents and scan them one at a time to your computer or to email.

After scanning, the HP guy said, you can quickly send it as email using the fitted in keyboard.

Quite a few HP customers attended the extravaganza at Safari Park Hotel and were duly taken on a tour to see the range of products.

One thing however that came out of the show is a decisive entry by HP into the solutions business sort of like a utility company.

Instead of buying HP printers, the company is using a rent model where it comes in and assesses your printing and imaging needs, how much you spend on printing and possible wastage areas.

It then proposes a solution, the appropriate number of printers and brings in the equipment itself. You pay a monthly fee and buy your paper but all other things are handled by HP. It also allows you to issue your staff with PIN numbers to use for printing so that the habit of double clicking on the print button that leads to mountain of printouts left beside the printers is reduced.

And it can give you printing reports to see how staff are printing.

Strathmore is apparently on the system for its 2000 students and 300 staff. HP has put in six printers against the recommended 12 and is charging a minimum of Sh200,000 per month for the Managed Service.

I'm hoping HP will me the pics and spec sheets of all the new lines of products any time soon. Nairobitech will also pay a site visit to Strathmore University to see how this is being implemented.

SAMSUNG TAKES ON

2010-03-01T05:55:00.000-08:00

Samsung is bursting at the seams to talk about Samsung IT. You see, in this region they have existed as a consumer electronics and mobile handsets vendors. But, to hear them speak, they are actually a big IT company involved in making of PCS, laptops and now printers which they are seeking to market in Kenya.

They have this laptop which even has fingerprint recognition as the password before it starts up.

Apparently they've given one to Michael Joseph of Safaricom to try it out no doubt hoping he likes what he sees and orders a few for his people or for his retail stores.

For its printers, I was skeptical. Epson and HP are all I've known and experienced in the field of printing.

But no, the Samsung guys said, actually most HP printers carry Samsung engines inside. Samsung and Canon ostensibly, make 80 per cent of the engines that run on printers worldwide and also most of the components that you see on comps such as laptop screens come from Samsung.

AITEC MOBILE MONEY AND BANKING COMESA CONFERENCE PROGRAM

2010-02-23T01:55:00.000-08:00

AITEC have put out the programme for the conference which kicks off tomorrow.

Programme
AITEC Banking &
Mobile Money COMESA
.......................................

Day 1: Wednesday 24 February 2010
BUSINESS STRATEGY BRIEFINGS
7.30am - Theatre 1 Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Breakfast Briefing for Bankers on Mobile Banking (Guests by invitation)
Guest of Honour
Hon Uhuru Kenyatta, Deputy Prime Minister & Minister of Finance, Kenya
Speaker
Claire Alexandre, Senior Program Officer, Financial Services for
the Poor, Gates Foundation, USA
MC
Patrick Mweheire, CEO, Renaissance Capital, Kenya
9am
SESSION 1: Theatre 2
CONFERENCE OPENING
2.30pm
MOBILE MONEY TRACK
SESSION 3: Theatre 2
MOBILE BANKING - NEW TECHNOLOGY AND REGULATORY FRONTIERS AND CHALLENGES FOR BANKS AND MOBILE OPERATORS
MODERATOR: Santanu Sengupta, Secretary, Change Innovators Society, India
SHOWCASE PRESENTATION Mobile payments vs Mobile banking: Where are the Banks? Paul Nilsen, Regional Sales Executive, Business Connexion, Tanzania PLENARY SESSION PLENARY SESSION BREAKFAST BRIEFING
A bank-centric model for mobile banking
Opening Address
MODERATOR: Sean Moroney, Chairman, AITEC Africa
Welcome Addresses
Martin Oduor-Otieno, Chairman, Kenya Bankers Association Bernard Matthewman, CEO, Paynet Group
Mr Nagababu, Delivery Manager, Manam Infotech, India
Bankers respond based on practical experience
• James Wainaina, Director, Personal Banking, NIC Bank • Joseph Arinaitwe, Head eBanking, United Bank of Africa2.30 -4.00PM, PARALLEL SESSIONS (UBA), Uganda
Hon Uhuru Kenyatta, Deputy Prime Minister & Minister of Finance, Kenya
10am Refreshment Break & Group Photo
10.30am
SESSION 2: Theatre 2
KEYNOTES TO SET THE AGENDA
MODERATOR: Jonathan Campaigne, Executive Director, Pride
Africa, Kenya
The benefits of electronic payments in driving economic
development
Charles Niehaus, GM, Visa Sub-Saharan Africa, South Africa
YOUNG INNOVATOR’S 10-MINUTE SPOTLIGHT Electronic micropayments in Third World countries Agosta Liko, Founder, PesaPal, Kenya RISK MANAGEMENT TRACK
2.30pm
SESSION 4: Theatre 3
COMPLIANCE & RISK MANAGEMENT IN THE
POST-MELTDOWN WORLD
MODERATOR Session 4: Sophia Bekele, Executive Director,
DotConnect Africa, Ethiopia
Why data security is crucial for all C- Level executives
Wayne Donnelly, Channel Development Manager, Networks
Unlimited, South Africa
Biometric technology and identity management as integrated risk tools in the banking sector
Louis Siebrits, Head of African Sales & Marketing, Ideco Group, South Africa
Sanctions and PEPs Filtering, why bother?
John Nash, Global Alliance Manager, Sword FircoSoft, UK
Shh, the market is talking. Listen and act!
Bernard Matthewman, CEO, Paynet Group, Kenya
Nigeria’s Economic and Financial Crimes Commission: A mandate for financial security
Bala Sanga, Principal Staff Officer to the Executive Chairman, Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, Nigeria
SHOWCASE PRESENTATION Consumer interaction and response to the evolution of the financial services sector Tim Smyth, MD, MillwardBrown, Kenya Steps to improving network security: PNT/VAS and network audits in securing your network
Steve Chege, CIO, Seven Seas Technologies, Kenya
SYSTEMS MANAGEMENT TRACK
2.30pm
SESSION 5: Theatre 4
INTERBANK PAYMENT REFORMS
– NEW TRANSACTION & SETTLEMENT SYSTEMS – Part 1 MODERATOR: Andrea Bonstedt, Publisher, Ratio Magazine, Kenya
Modernisation of payment systems in Kenya
Stephen Mwaura, Head, National Payments System, Central
1.15pm Lunch Bank of Kenya
2
Network lLearn lDo Business PLENARY SESSIONS
How innovation can drive growth and create differentiation
Rudolf Smit, Channel Manager for Africa, S1, South Africa
Addressing strategic reforms in the interbank payments cycle Marius Krige, Aperta, South Africa
MICROFINANCE TRACK
2.30PM
SESSION 6: Theatre 4
MICROFINANCE INNOVATION AND NEW FRONTIERS – Part 1
MODERATOR: David Cracknell, Africa Director, Microsave, Kenya
Change happens. Are you ready for it? An overview of the innovations in the microfinance marketplace and guidelines for adoption
Laura Frederick, President, echange, Uganda
Linking microfinance and MMT
Cameron Goldie-Scot, Africa Implementation Team Manager, Musoni, Kenya
Microfinance and branchless banking: How and if MFIs should engage
Lauren Braniff, Microfinance Analyst, CGAP, USA & Carol Caruso, Head, MD, Triple Jump Advisory Services, France
Accessibility vs. affordability in mobile payment models
Benjamin Lyon, Founder & Executive Director, FrontlineSMS:Credit, USA
4pm
SESSION 7
MOBILE BANKING BUSINESS STRATEGIES
MODERATOR: Muriuki Mureithi, CEO, Summit Strategies, Kenya
Report-back on the GSMA Mobile World Congress, Barcelona, focusing on how to build strong agent networks for mobile money
Seema Desai, Mobile Money for the Unbanked, GSM Association, UK
The growth of mobile money transfer services: The case of M-PESA in Kenya
Pauline Vaughan, Head of M-Pesa, Safaricom, Kenya
Understanding what works and does not work in mobile payments
Richard Ketley, Director and Head of Banking Strategy and Access to Financial Services Practices, Genesis Analytics, South Africa
Product innovation and access to finance
Dr Keith Jefferis, Economic Advisor, USAID Southern African Trade Hub, Botswana, Former Deputy Governor, Reserve Bank of Botswana
SESSION 8
PANEL DISCUSSION: ARE COMESA’S FINANCIAL INSITITUTIONS WINNING THE WAR AGAINST CARD FRAUD?
MODERATOR: Catherine Mogambi, Chair, Kenya Credit & Debit Card Association
• Director, Banking Fraud Investigations, Central Bank of Kenya • Graham Gilmour, MD, The Business Phone, UK • Reshma Sookran, Fraud Control Executive, Payment System Risk, Visa CEMEA - Sub Saharan Africa, South Africa SESSION 9
INTERBANK PAYMENT REFORMS
– NEW TRANSACTION & SETTLEMENT SYSTEMS – Part 2 MODERATOR Session 9: Barry Ryan, MD, Fintech, Kenya
The future of cheques in the modern world of electronic payments
Rob Muller, Commercial Director, Finteq, South Africa
Operational and technical perspectives on cheque truncation systems
Sekar Ponniah, MD, Global Software Solutions
Fraud detection technologies in a cheque truncation environment
Anand Natarajan, Director & CTO, Image InfoSystems, India
SWIFT and security markets
Vasu Prakasam, MD, Kenya Commerce Exchange Service Bureau (KENEX)
SESSION 10
THE NEW FINANCIAL SERVICES ECOSYSTEM
– CHALLENGES OF INTEGRATION IN CARDS, CHEQUES & MOBILE MODERATOR: Stephen Roberts, Executive Director Neptune Software
Multi-channel payment systems
Barry Coetzee, CEO, iVeri, South Africa
Smart card challenges and smart ways to address them
Hoda Shoukry, MD Mediterranean Smart Cards Company, Egypt
YOUNG INNOVATOR’S 10-MINUTE SPOTLIGHT Online Payment systems in Kenya: Jambopay Danson Muchemi, CEO, Web Tribe, Kenya The ultimate in payment security: End-to-end encryption and VeriShield Protect
David Poole, VP Sales, Middle East and Africa, VeriFone, UK
Beyond simple payments: Leveraging managed services and infrastructure for value-adding partnerships
Raoul du Plessis, CTO, Transaction Payment Solutions, UK
6pm
Networking Cocktail Reception
Sponsored by Kenya Data Networks
3
DAY 2: Thursday 25 February 2010
TECHNOLOGY BRIEFINGS
9.00AM - 10.30AM, PARALLEL SESSIONS PLENARYSESSION
8am -Theatre 4 THINKING OUT OF THE BOX FOR BANKERS
Julius Kipng’etich, Director, Kenya Wildlife Service
9am
• Joseph Tiampati, Head of Retail Credit, Kenya Commercial Bank Fidelis Muia, ICT Consultant, Kenya Bankers Association • Jared Getenga, Project Manager, Kenya Credit Information Sharing Initiative, Kenya Bankers Association Credit bureau establishment
SESSION 11: Theatre 2
MOBILE BANKING IN THE REAL WORLD – Part 1
MODERATOR: Benjamin Lyon, Founder & Executive Director,
SMSFrontine:Credit, USA
Mobile payments and micropayments
David Svarrer, MD, Digital Age Institute, Kenya
Mobile money and banking: The pivot for financial inclusion
Santanu Sengupta, Secretary, Change Innovators Society, India
YOUNG INNOVATOR’S 10-MINUTE SPOTLIGHT M-Commerce solutions for carrying out real time mobile money transaction processing Philip Nyamwaya, Business Development - Enterprise Applications, Intrepid Data Systems, Kenya How Family Bank is leveraging M-PESA and mobile banking into its business
Kariuki Kevin Kihara, Relationship Manager, Family Bank
9am
SESSION 12: Theatre 3
NEW CHANNELS – BRANCHLESS, AGENT & POST-OFFICE BANKING
MODERATOR: Benjamin Nkungi, CEO, Association of Microfinance Institutions, Kenya
Overview of proposed supervisory and regulatory framework for agent banking in Kenya
Matu Mugo, Assistant Director, Bank Supervision, Central Bank
of Kenya
Mrs Nyambura Koigi, MD, PostBank, Kenya
11.00AM - 12.30AM, PARALLEL SESSIONS 9.00AM - 10.30AM, PARALLEL SESSIONS
Antony Ragui, Secretary, East African Credit Bureau Associa
tion, & GM, Compuscan, Kenya
9am
SESSION 14: Theatre 2
SMART BANKING SOLUTIONS – Part 1
MODERATOR Session 20: David Svarrer, CEO, Digital Age Institute
Business process management solutions
Jeff Thuo, Business Manager, Coseke Kenya
Operational excellence and customer service from a banking platform perspective
Martin Heraghty, Sales Director, SunGuard Ambit, UK (in association with Technology Associates
Business Intelligence in banking
Dennis Karanja, Regional Director, Sybase East Africa
Implementing a universal e-Banking strategy – One installation, many banks
Polys Hadjikyriakos, Sales Direcfor, NETinfo, Cyprus
10.30am Refreshment Break
11am
SESSION 15: Theatre 2
MOBILE BANKING IN THE REAL WORLD – Part 2
MODERATOR: Jonathan Petrides, Head of Operations, Mobile Ventures, Kenya
Liquidity management for a mobile banking agent
Frederik Eijkman, MD, PEP Intermedius, Kenya
Mobilizing commerce for SMMEs
Shaun Campbell, Business Manager for Africa, Sybase, UK
The role of m-Banking in enhancing transaction process
ing among SMEs in Kenya
Memba Florence, Lecturer, Jomo Kenyatta University of Science & Technology
11am
SESSION 16: Theatre 1
MICROFINANCE INNOVATION AND NEW FRONTIERS
– Part 2 MODERATOR: David Ferrand, Director, FSD Kenya
Of communities and financial intermediation: Why the
community banking model is better than the agency
banking model for Africa
Davis Kambale Tayo, Branch Supervisor, Bank of Africa, Kenya
Branches all around: Agent banking
Kamal Budhabhatti, MD, Craft Silicon
9am
SESSION 13: Theatre 1
CREDIT BUREAUS: USHERING IN A NEW ERA
OF RISK MANAGEMENT
MODERATOR: James Kashangaki, Head, GrowthFin Financial Sector Deepening Trust (FSD Kenya)
PANEL DISCUSSION ON NEW CREDIT BUREAU REGULATIONS
Panel Members:
• James Manyonge, Manager Legal Affairs, Bank Supervision Department, Central Bank of Kenya Measuring the return on investment in technology for microfinance
Craig Chelius, Global Consortium Manager, Technology for Microfinance Group, Grameen Foundation, USA
Electronic delivery systems for social cash transfers: Lessons learned and opportunities for Africa
Dr Katharine Vincent, Social Protection Consultant, Regional Hunger and Vulnerability Programme, South Africa
4
Network lLearn lDo Business Microfinance: The new frontier of mobile banking
Kahenya Kamunyu, CEO, Virn Instruments, Kenya
11am
SESSION 17: Theatre 4
DISASTER RECOVERY & BUSINESS CONTINUITY
MODERATOR: Tim McGinnis, Communications Consultant, Kenya
10 years on from the US Embassy Bomb Blast: A case study on Co-operative Bank’s recovery strategy
Sam Mutungi, CIO, Co-operative Bank
Capacity building in the context of emergency preparedness for Business Continuity (BCP) and Disaster Recovery Planning (DRP)
Syed Zain Khan, President & Managing Consultant, Alliances Consulting Group, Canada
SESSION 18:
COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS FOR BANKS
MODERATOR Jorge Perez Luna, IT Director,
2.20pm
SESSION 20: Theatre 4
SECURITY FOR AFRICA’S MOBILE BANKING ERA
MODERATOR Steve Schaefer, World Council of Credit Unions, USA
The widespread and rapid adoption of mobile commerce calls for an urgent need for a robust risk management framework
Duncan Oduor, CEO, MobiKash Afrika, Kenya
Appropriate regulatory frameworks for the e-money economy - How ready are COMESA member-states?
Michael Murungi, ICT Lawyer, Kenya
2.30pm
SESSION 21: Theatre 1
OUTSOURCING, SHARED INFRASTRUCTURE AND HOSTED SERVICES MODELS
MODERATOR: Syed Zain Khan, President & Contact centre Consultant, Alliances Consulting Group, Canada
How to grow your ATM footprint: The right hardware, the
right sites and the right partners
Marc Sternberg, MD, Spark ATM Systems, South Africa
Does the changing economic environment present
different opportunities?
Ron Webb, Group Technology Director, Paynet, Kenya
Outsourcing in the banking industry
Eric Nesbitt, Director, KenCall EPZ, Kenya
Technology & skills outsourcing in driving business agility
and competitiveness
Mike Macharia, CEO, Seven Seas Technologies, Kenya
2.30pm
SESSION 22: Theatre 1
SMART BANKING SOLUTIONS – 2
MODERATOR: David Stewart, BPO Consultant, Kenya
Moving to SOA: Supporting new trends in the banking industry
Adam Nyaga, GM Business Applications, Seven Seas Technologies, Kenya
Going beyond payment with integrated services
Roger Mechri, Head of Business Development Services & Rachid Oulad Akdim, EEMEA-Africa Director, Ingenico-Tracom, France
Integrating contact centres with business processes
Solomon Thuo, Technology Business Consultant, Seven Seas
Technologies, Kenya
2.30pm
SESSION 23: Theatre 3
“SOFT” BANKING SOLUTIONS
MODERATOR: Caroline Juma, MD, Kenya Computer Resources
PLENARY SESSION 11.00AM - 12.30AM, PARALLEL SESSIONS
2.30PM - 4.30PM, PARALLEL SESSIONS
Global Development Programme, Gates Foundation
The use of satcoms for the retail banking sector
Issa Odtallah, Regional Manager, Inmarsat, United Arab Emir
ates
.
Secure network in a rapidly changing environment
Kai Wulff, MD, Kenya Data Networks
Effective communications: How intranets can help banks
cut costs, go green and increase ROI
Martin Njuguna, Business Development Manager, Digital Vision,
Kenya
Effective communications systems as a key enabler for
banks in Africa
Chuks Ofor, GM, Gateway Communications, Kenya
12.30pm
SESSION 19:
CIO PANEL DISCUSSION: HOW CAN WE MAKE OUR BOARDS SEE MORE VALUE IN INVESTING IN TECHNOLOGY?
MODERATOR: Joseph Wariungi, MD, Advantech Consulting, Kenya
• Peter Gachau, GM ICT, Equity Bank • Dr Tony Githuku, Divisional Director Operations & Technology, Kenya Commercial Bank • Kasasine Ole Pertet, Chief Information Officer, K-Rep Bank SHOWCASE PRESENTATION Empowering Africa’s new mobile merchants Graham Gilmour, CEO, the Business Phone, UK 2.00pm Lunch Communicating bank marketing messages both through mobile and broadcasting
Salim Amin, Chairman & Asif Sheikh, CEO, A24 Media, Kenya
5
Programme Advisory Board Sean Moroney, Chairman, AITEC Africa & Programme Director Kamal Budhabhatti, Founder & CEO, Craft Silicon, Kenya Catherine Mogambi, Chair, Credit & Debit Card Association of Kenya Waceke Mbugua, Marketing Manager, M-PESA Jonathan Campaign, CEO, Pride Africa, Kenya Barry Coetzee, CEO, iVeri, South Africa David Cracknell, Africa Director, Microsave, Kenya David Ferrand, Director, FSD Kenya Tom Juma, COO, Old Mutual, Kenya Bernard Matthewman, CEO, Paynet, Kenya Jackson Machuhi, GM, East Africa, DELISYS Delivery Systems, Kenya Benjamin Nkungi, CEO, Association of Microfinance Institutions, Kenya Emmanuel Okoegwale, Founder & CEO, Mobile Money Africa, Nigeria Stephen Roberts, Executive Director, Neptune Software Barry Ryan, CEO, Fintech, Kenya Pauline Vaughan, Head of M-Pesa, Safaricom, Kenya George Wainaina, GM, Kenswitch John K. Wanyela, Executive Director, Kenya Bankers Association 6SHOWCASE PRESENTATION Power protection solutions for the banking industry Arlene Nazereth, Territory Account Manager East Africa, APC by Schneider Electric, Kenya This presentation will benefit all IT decision-makers in Corporate organizations, especially if you have concerns about Inefficiency due to over-sizing your datacentre/ server room, down time due to long lead times for maintenance, need to better optimize white space, unpredictability for future growth, or having to wait for scheduled downtime in order to add or change capacity. The presentation will include an overview of APC solutions for desktop, server room and datacentre. Also featuring case studies for: Imperial Bank (Kenya) and First Rand Bank (South Africa)PLENARY SESSION PARALLELSESSIONS Creating a .africa domain for regional economic integration
Sophia Bekele, Executive Director, DotConnectAfrica, Ethiopia
Discover how the banking sector banks on HR technology
Balaji Ganesh, CEO, Adrenalin eSystems, India
4.30pm
CLOSING PLENARY
MODERATOR: Sean Moroney, Chairman, AITEC Africa
Kenya’s 2030 Vision, with special reference to the Financial Services Section of the Athii River Technology Business Park
Dr Bitange Ndemo, Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Information & Communications
SUMMING UP
SETTING A LEADERSHIP & INNOVATION AGENDA
Stephen Mwaura, Head, National Payments System, Central Bank of Kenya & Benjamin Lyon, Founder & Executive Director, FrontlineSMS:Credit, USA
Network lLearn lDo Business

TECHNOLOGY IN NAIROBI THIS WEEK

2010-02-22T04:50:00.000-08:00

Quite a few technology related events will be taking place in Nairobi this week.

Tuesday, 23rd February, 2009: ORACLE/DELOITTE BREAKFAST MEETING

The database maker and vendor, Oracle will together with audit firm/consultants Deloitte hold a breakfast meeting at the Serena tomorrow. 7AM.

The presentation will revolve around the ORACLE SECURITY STACK that includes:
· DATA BASE VAULT
· AUDIT VAULT
· IDENTITY MANAGEMENT ACCESS SUIT

The main presenter will be AVINASH RAMTOHUL from Oracle Mauritius.

Publicity for the event and the presenters is being done by Owens Muhiu of IMG Events and PR: omuhiu@imgkenya.com

Wednesday, 24th February, 2009: AITEC Banking & Mobile Money COMESA Conference

AITEC is facilitating this event at KICC for two days starting Wednesday.

In attendance will be bankers from the COMESA region. Nairobitech spoke to James Mwangi, AITEC CEO who said, "We want to chart a way forward in terms of innovations. What innovations are friendly to the customer in terms of cost, availability etc.."

The Opening Speech will be delivered by the Minister of Finance, Honourable Uhuru Kenyatta.
Preceding the opening ceremony will be a breakfast briefing hosted by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for CEOs of financial institutions from within the region.
· Date: 24th February 2010
· Time: 7:00a.m.
· Venue: Tsavo Room (Theatre 1)
Uhuru Kenyatta will be Guest of honour at the breakfast. Other key guests and speakers at the opening ceremony include:
1. Clair Alexandre, Senior Program Officer, Financial Services for the Poor, Gates Foundation,
2. Bernard Matthewman, CEO, Paynet Group

3. Martin-Otieno Oduor, KCB CEO, in his capacity as Chairman of the Kenya Bankers Association.

Friday, 26 February, 2009: eMobilis Technology and Training academy STUDENTS PROJECTS PRESENTATION DAY.

The academy which trains developers for the mobile platform has already graduated its first batch of students. Students will be showcasing their projects at the academy's 3rd floor, Kipro Center premises on Sports Road opp Parkland's Baptist Church.

NairobiTech will try and bring you the digest from these events.

HOW NOT TO DO A BIG TIME CONVENTION!

2010-02-17T14:08:00.000-08:00

The tragedy of big meetings is that they focus on big things as talking points and too often the very small but important innovations or ideas get ignored.

Take my advice, if you ever attend the Mobile World Congress or any other major industry or international get together, narrow down your purpose to one or two things that you want to learn more about and home in on those for the rest of your time there.

Running around the 8 humongous halls that housed all the major brand names in the world of Mobile Technology and Computing as well as hundreds of others you´ve never heard of, I realized you cannot take in the whole enchilada so to speak as far as things conventions are concerned not even when you are running a team of 10 battle hardened scribes with years of doing this behind them.

I started with wanting to attend all the major announcements headlined by the likes of Microsoft, Vodafone, the GSMA, Research In Motion et cetera et cetera while at the same time hoping to visit the stands of all the mobile payments innovators as well as the stands of all the country galleries where nations were showcasing some of the industries they´ve incubated in their own little Silicon Valleys and hoping to attract more innovators and venture capitalists while at it and so on and so forth.

BY the end of it, I realized I had achieved very little. I had seen a lot without forming any major themes that I could tell others about, only disjointed bits of this and that and half-beginnings of that idea etc.

Now that the event is over, I realize I did not get around to one of the most important topics that is going to become relevant for media in days to come - Mobile Advertising!

While there were many showcasings of mobile advertising solutions, the advertising companies are yet to migrate their dollars from the traditional media to mobile even as the latter is hyped as the current and future big thing.

I have some write ups from PR guys but given anotha opportunity, I would have dissected the convention with the sober precision of a surgeon not the brute passion of a butcher....

GOOGLE BRINGS IT DOWN!

2010-02-17T01:18:00.000-08:00

Google full might was on display last night in the Catalonian City of Barcelona. An hour before CEO Eric Schmidt was scheduled to take the stage for the keynote speech of the day, the hall outside the auditorium was brimming with people and jostling was starting to take place with some beginning to sense they might not make it into the auditorium at all.

While both the Microsoft Windows 7 Mobile announcement and the Nokia/Intel Corp., collabos had attracted full houses, there was a buzz in the crowd about Google and particularly what it intended to do about mobile technology.

Google did not disappoint. At least from a demonstration of cool but useful stuff. When Eric Schmidt strode on stage (the MC said he had to Google the Google CEO to get his background for the introduction) he did not strike as a revolutionary visionary in the mold of Steve Jobs at Apple or Jeff Bezos at Amazon, but rather more like a high school principal (turns out Schmidt, an Engineer lectured at Stanford).

But seeing as he runs the goliath of the internet environment by the way the new catchword being bandied around here is the ¨Mobile Ecosystem) even a staid Schmidt commanded attention.

His message was simple: Mobile First, that is to say everything here on out will concentrate on developments for the mobile Ëcosystem¨ and in fact he revealed that more Google programmers are now working on the mobile applications than for the personal computer.

Schmidt said for the entrepreneur who intends to remain relevant, they would need to bring together three things: Computing power, Interconnectivity and the Cloud. In English, you will need to bring the computer to the mobile phone first of all that is to say have alot more processing power on the device, second, enough broadband to allow the device to communicate (According to Schmidt, one of the areas that will likely grow in the coming years is Person to Person conferencing on the mobile - forget about the giant Cisco Telepresence monitors) and third, the ability to connect to thousands of servers storing trillions of data - the so-called cloud.

Now this makes sense when you consider the other area that the company sees exploding. Giant multiplayer video games being played on the Net. Right now for example, Zynga´s Farmville and Mafia Wars etc are simple games that cannot be played on the mobile environment as yet (But both NVIDIA with a so-called TIGRE chip for the mobile and Google with its latest instalment of Android now say they can support Flash Technology allowing for mobile phones to play these games).

Playing combat games on the net for example requires heavy graphics hence heavy processing power such as the NVIDIA chipset, you need big internet pipes as graphics consume heavy bandwidth and you need of course servers out there processing it all.

Schmidt did show off some cool stuff or at least the two nerds he came with on stage did.

One guy with a heavy German accent but who clearly Schmidt holds in high regard, was hilarious demonstrating how to use Google´s voice search. That is actually worked when he asked it to look for Good Spanish restaurants in Los Angeles must be testament to this features sheer brute force. I would have had to ask him twice what exactly he was asking for with that accent.

Another cool feature was using the phone on your camera to take a picture of a menu item that is written in another language and ask it to translate it into your own. Lastly, Google showed us a feature where you take a picture of an item such as a building and you search it to either see what it is or where it is in case you are using it as a landmark to figure out where you are.

The night ended with Schmidt taking questions from the audience which he was still doing as I made my way out in to the chilly Barcelona evening passing by another group on the lower floor that was huddled around a screen showing the Google CEO live.

Definitely, lived up to the billing!

WHEN M-PESA IS AN INTERNATIONAL IDENTITY FOR A KENYAN

2010-02-16T04:11:00.000-08:00

Right - where there is a crush of international press, all the major media houses, the tech sites, bloggers combined with major IT companies and bankers, a Kenyan will hardly make waves. This is Barcelona, Mobile World Congress 2010 where more than 50,000 people have congregated at the meditarranean City known more for its FC Barcelona soccer team back home and perhaps from a distant past, for its hosting of the 1992 Olympic games.

I count few Africans at this convention of would be pushers of the next frontiers of technology particularly for the mobile and I expect little recognition. It is however a pleasant surprise that hardly have I said I´m Kenyan at most exhibitions that people´s eyes light up, ¨Ah so you know about M-PESA,¨ they say.

M-PESA is a global icon believe it or not. At all the major mobile payments exhibitions I´ve visited, people are instantly more willing to talk about their technology because they feel I understand exactly what they are talking about.

And it seems they not only know about it but they also keenly follow developments associated with it.

¨The difference between this and M-PESA is...,¨started Bruno Errico of beeweeb technologies a firm selling mobile payments systems to SMEs in the US. The import of the statement being that Bruno also knows the intricacies of m-PESA and how it works.

Here at last, I feel on solid and sometimes higher ground than some of the guys showcasing so-called cutting edge technology in mobile financial services.

Gerhard Romen, the diretor of alliances for Nokia Money is another person quite familiar with M-PESA. He uses the development cycle of M-PESA to benchmark the gestation period for Nokia Money service.

¨If you look at M-PESA, they piloted in 2005 and launched in 2007, we see mobile money as a long term development business,¨said Ramen.

Interestingly, for Nokia Money, some of the marketing spiel that Romen pitches are basically ¨Been there, Done that¨for M-PESA.
¨
Par example: ¨We see it (Nokia Money) as a tool for financial inclusion. You can use it the cash for storage if you don´t have a bank account, we are looking at micro finance, government benefits, M-PESA is a great example of this.¨

At the MWC, M-PESA is coming up for yet another award this time as a bulk payments services system but unlike the previous years, the competition keeps getting stiffer even as they use M-PESA as an inspiration and a learning template.

I hope to be in the audience to see how the green giant of Kenya fares against such competition as Monitise International, Fundamo, T Cash from SK Telecom among others. But be warned, unless our regulator, Communications Commission of Kenya gets their act together and ropes in the Central Bank of Kenya to loosen the leash on M-PESA, ZAP and others in terms of innovations, come next year, Barcelona MWC 2011 and M-PESA, CCK and Kenyans in general will be doing the catching up. Time waits for no man not even CCK director general Charles Njoroge.

COULD NOKIA ABANDON MAKING HANDSETS?

2010-02-16T02:09:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was the beginning of an interesting thought taking place in my head. Nokia, the world largest handset maker, took to podium at the MWC talking about merging their Maemo and Moblin platforms.

These are simplistically speaking, the slates upon which you write when you design an application to run on a Nokia or any other phone.

Just like English is the language I´m using to write this blog, mobile handsets have languages which they understand such that if you write an application in that language the handset understands and is able to run it on your phone when you install it.

The tie-up between the two giants; Nokia commands 40 per cent handset market share globally while Intel controls about 80 per cent of the computing chips market (hence the ubiquitous Intel Inside) logo on many PCs and laptops, could signal the future of the mobile computing environment.

Nokia could unfathomably, be moving out of making handsets to possibly, providing the solutions that run on handsets leaving just a few generic makers of handsets to provide the hardware.

This is not so unrealistic. After the proliferation of PC makers following the popularization and licensing of the IBM backed Microsoft DOS (Disk Operating System), the rise in popularity of applications to run on these machines meant that over time, being a software maker rather than a hardware manufacturer was more profitable.

As a result, many of the originals such as Olivetti, IBM, Compaq, etc are practically out of the scene. IBM is now sold as Lenovo after being bought out of by the Chinese, Compaq was swallowed by Hewlett Packard and Dell is only now regaining its footing. Apple Macs generate considerably less noise than their iPhone, iPad and iPod stablemates.

What Nairobi Tech figures is happening here and will seek to investigate is that the field of mobile computing is gearing up for a possible four way battle that will be determined over the next two years.

Victory will be decided by application developers and mobile phone users. Which platform will developers go for and which apps will most capture users imagination?

For that I´m heading out to get an angle on the four major protagonists in this war:

Nokia with its MeeGo platform

Google with its Android platform

Apple with its iPhone platform and

Microsoft with its Windows 7 mobile platform

Smaller players:

Research In Motion with its BlackBerry platform

Samsung´s Bada

etc etc...more later am off to talk to Nokia´s Head of Product Management, Michael Bramlage.

@THE WORLD MOBILE CONGRESS

2010-02-16T02:02:00.000-08:00

Okay this place is huge. Everyone seems to be here, that is except for Apple.

Am doing a round of this place before I start posting whats up.