Author: Cyrus

Mimi is Swahilli for “i”. A Mimiboard is like a traditional noticeboard, according to Umuntu Media. With the Mimiboard anyone will be able to create one, peg it in the ground at a location, add categories to it, and enable a community on hyper-local level to communicate, transact and add notes on the board. Communication to the Mimiboard can happen via SMS, Android, Web, J2ME. Umuntu media’s Johan Nel says that they developed Mimiboard to solve a problem they faced as a publisher. The content need to be  engaging and relevant enough to add value and make a difference to…

Kenya’s newly energized political party, united Republican Party (URP) has this morning been launching their membership drive where they are looking to use the SMS and computers more than anything. Well that is good but the bad news for URP is that it looks like hackers are all over their website. The hackers who looks more Kenyan with their postings have left this message on the website: YOU SHOULD BAFF YOUR SECURITY BEFORE LAUNCHING YOUR WEBSITE!!! AM A PATRIOTIC KENYAN, ALL YOUR DATA IS SAFE BUT YOUR WEB IS HACKED!!! ********************************SECURITY HANDLER  – “AMOR” ************************************* URP needs to secure their…

TED is embarking on a worldwide search for new talent. From April – June 2012, the organisers of the global event will be holding public auditions in 3 African cities – Nairobi, Tunis and Johannesburg – to discover emerging or overlooked talents or the hidden geniuses in almost every sphere of influence. Through presentations covering creativity, invention, business, science and other global issues, TED2013 looks to get half of its lineup of speakers from the auditions. TED has indicated that it is looking for different category of influencers which you can check here. The three African cities will join 13 other…

Since computers are not good at measuring sarcasm, humour and irony in online reputation management, BrandsEye is looking at crowdsourcing virtual reputation management. The South African and world only crowdsourced online reputation management service, has introduced a technique called BrandsEye Crowd to its online monitoring application. This new feature comes with three elements: the all-knowing wisdom of the crowd, managed through the minute attention to detail of computers, focused by the strategic judgement of trained professionals. BrandsEye Crowd uses crowdsourcing to bring local context and judgment to evaluating online mentions. This new feature improves the accuracy rate of typical virtual reputation management…

HP today unveiled its Z1 all-in-one workstation with a 68.6 cm (27”) diagonal display. The innovative HP Z1 workstation snaps open so users can easily swap out parts and make upgrades without any tools required. The workstation packs Intel® Xeon® processors, NVIDIA Quadro graphics which support more than 1 billion colors. The HP Z1 workstation is built for computer-aided design, digital media, entertainment, architects, education and independent professionals. Some of the HP Z1 Workstation features are: Workstation performance. Features professional NVIDIA Quadro graphics, ECC memory, quad-core Intel Xeon processors, independent software vendor solutions and whisper-quiet acoustics.  Tool-less chassis. Users can easily add a hard…

Finally President Kibaki confirmed on Tuesday night that Kenya’s immediate former Environment Minister, John Michuki, had died. The news of death of Michuki was broken on Social media on Monday but the mainstream media saw it as a chance to portray social media as evil and alarmist. Today, this irked everyone; Within few minutes of tweeting the rumoured death and posting it on Facebook, comments started pouring with some people, mainly supporters of Michuki, arguing that nobody should rumour anyone’s death. It did not take long before the infamous Kenya Government Spokesman, Alfred Mutua, sent out a statement to all…

Global IT solutions provider, Hewlett Packard (HP) in collaboration with Kenya’s Ministry of Health and Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) today launched one in a series of five health data centers at Afya House with the aim of speeding information to save lives. The health data centers at Afya House is a project developed improve the quality and efficiency of disease surveillance to enhance protection and prevention by making processes such as HIV testing fast and easy. The Permanent Secretary Ministry of Public Health and Sanitation Mr. Mark Bor, said “This data centre is unprecedented in the history of the…

Orange Kenya has today launched Orange Angukia bonus programme which is a loyalty programme targeted at different subscribers. The Orange Angukia is a bonus scheme where Orange mobile and wireless clients qualification for bonuses is “triggered” by events like the total traffic in minutes spent on calls, the number of local on-net and off-net as well as international SMSs sent, data spend, top ups of one’s account and subscription to offers. Meanwhile, instead of trying to effectively use their strength on data front, Orange Kenya is begging CCK to step in and rescue them from the misery. The company wants CCK to immediately raise mobile termination…

We told you about the Ericsson Applications Award in November 2011. The annual competition for application developers worldwide which is organized by Ericsson Research invited entry from developers with apps under the theme ‘Apps for the Networked Society’. Ericsson has today announced the short-listed apps. The 6 apps from East and Central Africa will now compete for the grand prize while the submissions from West and South Africa were disqualified over failure to meet submission requirements. The short-listed teams are: East MedAfrica Afrosilicon Komunity Bora Central SenMobile Dunde Thinkers The 1st, 2nd and 3rd winners will be selected from East and Central Africa. The…

A startup which is a product of Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology (MEST) has launched a mobile app which it hopes will offer BBM, ZiNG, Mxit and other chat apps a good competition. Saya Mobile whose mobile chat app try to portray SMS as oldskul,was launched today according to Ghanian blogger, Edward Tagoe. Just like ZiNG, Saya is a mobile app that works on virtually any phone including Java, iOS, Android and Blackberry platforms. It also allows group chat. Saya participated on the AppCircus competition earning a place to pitch at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The developers were the national champs in…

It seems that we will have more copy cats than real innovations. I really don’t know if we need an African Pinterest with even the international one not gaining much attention locally. That notwithstanding, South Africa based Umuntu Media is being reported as planning to launch Mimiboard which is just African Pinterest. Nigerian blogger, Loy reports Umuntu Media’s CEO, Johan Nel, as sayin; “We went into crazy R&D mode, we found some of the smartest engineers in the world to work for 7 months, coded for over 5000 hours to bring Mimiboard to live. This is going to be a…

A court in Chiredzi, Zimbabwe, has sentenced a 17-year-old boy to be caned two strokes of the cane after he posted a picture of a woman on Facebook with a caption reading, ‘These are Chiredzi’s prostitutes’. The caption was in Shona language. The boy is reported by The Herald newspaper as having taken the photo with his mobile phone upon which he posted the photo on Facebook with the caption “Mahure emuChiredzi ndiwaya”. The lady discovered the photo and reported the boy to the police. The boy confessed to the magistrate that he pretended that he was making a phone call and then took…

South Africa’s sports pay-TV channel, SuperSport, has set up a new website for the Kenyan Premier League. The website is such an indictment on the management of sports in Kenya where all the support and innovative ideas have been borrowed from elsewhere and imposed on them. The website which features national colours is one of the latest efforts by the South African Pay-TV channel to support the Kenyan football development. Already the site has great news, fixtures, results and column by football greats like Bob Munro. The site also has a video and photo gallery from different matches. Packaged together with the…

After the acrimonious departure of Moses Kemibaro, MIH’s chief head-hunter, Sharon Horne, went on a shopping spree for his replacement. We learnt of the next occupant of the hot seat some 2 weeks ago but couldn’t publish it because it was still sketchy. I can now authoritatively reveal that the new Dealfish Regional Manager for east Africa will be Peter Ndiangui who is a Kenyan based in Australia. Peter is currently a management consultant at SMS Management and Technology in Australia. He has previously been associated with Kenya Imagine and Digital Dialogue, the latter being a competitor of Dealfish since…

LG Electronics has launched its multi-monitor U-series computers in the Kenyan market. The multi-monitor computers which are fit for schools, organisations and cyber-cafes. The U-series workstations will lower the investment needed to acquire multiple computers. The U-Series computer is based on the principle that at any one time, no one person can utilise the full capacity of one computer, therefore, multiple users can tap into the same computer as long as they have a separate monitor and keyboard. Current statistics indicate that the ratio of computers to students in Kenya is 1: 150 against a more recognised 1:15 ratio in…