Author: Cyrus

Hooray!! My prediction just came to happen. I was at CIO100 award ceremony at Safaricom late 2011. At one of the panel discussions / pitching event, Green Bell Communications was presenting their work and one of the sites they really bragged that they did well was Toyota Kenya website. The moderator was a Ugandan who did not want contrary opinion but I still rose up and told the lady that too much use of flash on the website makes her think that the website is really revolutionary. I told her there and then that “the work was shoddy and a…

Samsung has scheduled a press event where they have promised to “unveil its latest mobile business solution and discuss its strategy to grow its business solution”. The event which is scheduled for early morning hours at Crowne Plaza hotel is believed to be where Samsung will officially unveil the much talked about Samsung Galaxy Note phonetab”. I already had a glimpse and test of the phone in South Africa and recorded this short video. [youtube width=”620″ height=”340″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9chT8Gflnw[/youtube] The Galaxy Note is a 5.3 inch touch phone which weighs 178 grams and comes with a stylus (called S-Pen). It boasts of…

This is why I always say that it is great to have a CCTV camera in a shop with very high traffic. The video below is evidence enough. Two smartly dressed women enter a store in the Dar-es-salaam shopping mall, Milimani City, pretending that they want to buy some jewellery. One who is plus size is pretending that she is sampling the different items available while the other schemes on how she can make her way with the cash. The second woman is successful in her mission and so she nudges the other to finish and they make their way…

Kenya’s Pay TV provider, Smart TV, is reported to have shut down its operations and left the country. The provider is reported by Business Daily as having failed to secure funding to expand its operations in the country. The move will leave over 2000 without services pay tv services. The move will leave only Wananchi Group owned Zuku TV as the only challenger to MultiChoice;s local domination. Zuku TV has reported that it has gained a subscriber base of around 35,000 within the last few months of roll-out. Smart TV launched in Kenya in late 2010 with Swedish investors, Next…

The world’s most populous Muslim country has decided to take Twitter’s decision to censor tweets on a country by country basis. The government of Indonesia is studying the country’s citizens behaviour on Twitter with the intention of punishing those who go out of their way to annoy others online.  the government of Indonesia, however, such measures may not be enough. The country’s Communications Minister Tifatul Sembiring, according to Jakarta Globe, said that he is aware that Twitter is full of anonymous accounts which are used to attack persons online. He said he has received complaints against such tweeps. He added; “We are…

Huawei and Safaricom have today awarded prizes to the top 5 winning android applications entered in the first inter-universities Huawei Android Applications Challenge (HAAC) under the Telecom Seed for the Future programme. The programme is a partnership signed in June 2011 is between Safaricom and Huawei on one hand and Moi, JKUAT and University of Nairobi on the other hand. The 5 winning applications were; KaroPay- This is an app that will enable students and parents pay fees at the convenient of mobile phones. This they can do from their Android or Java-enabled phones, and using the following payment methods – MPESA, Bank…

Airtel Kenya has announced a new promotion where its Airtel Money clients will enjoy a 50% bonus on all Airtel money top ups  from Kshs50/- up to Kshs35,000/-. This means that if you load Ksh 10,000 on Airtel moneey today, you will get Ksh 5,000 as the bonus airtime which can only be used on Airtel – Airtel calls and SMS. The promotion will run till 30th April 2012. To get the Airtel Money bonus airtime, one needs to either top up directly to own account or top up to another account enabling the recipient to enjoy the bonus as…

Google has announced in a blog post that its street view maps system is now available in Botswana. That makes Botswana the second country after South Africa to have the street view. Despite concerns of privacy in Europe and America, Google is still pushing its street view project in countries like the ones in Africa with very weak privacy legislations. Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Japan, and Greece have all expressed concern with Street View. With street view, Google cars will start driving around the country collecting images which are then processed and then uploaded onto Google maps. The images stitched together, allows Google…

Nokia CEO, Stephen Elop, is expected in Nairobi this week in a meeting to engage with developers among other assignments. Invites to the event were previously being handled through an Eventbrite posting but was immediately pulled down without warning. Now Nokia has been sending invited to developers discretely, we hear. It is not clear what other assignments Stephen Elop might have in the country but I am sure that it is not that developer meet-up only. Apart from the courtesy calls on senior government officials we will see, I am sure that Elop will be engaging with business leaders and…

A new study to be published has found out that it might be easier to resist alcohol and cigarettes but not a tweet. The findings are by a team of researchers from Chicago University’s Booth Business School who used BlackBerrys to gauge the willpower of 205 people aged between 18 and 85 in and around the German city of Würtzburg. The findings will soon be published in the journal Psychological Science. The participants were signalled seven times each day over a period 14 hours in the day. The routine was repeated for exactly one week. the team gathered 10,558 responses and 7,827  of those were “desire episodes”…

A 100-year-old granny from Scotland believes that her Nintendo DS is keeping her brain in good working order. She even says that she is starting to loose her memory but whenever she consistently use the gaming console, she regains her memory and becomes more alert. On a video posted on YouTube, Kathleen Connell jokingly quips that she doesn’t feel anywhere over 80. She describes the console as “great” and “absolutely super.” [youtube width=”622″ height=”344″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nawe7F8cZ_U[/youtube] Kathleen is constantly using the device, pausing once in a while to make herself some tea. She says that she retires to bed at around 10pm when…

The hackers group Anonymous,  scored a major victory on the F.B.I last month when they listed to a call between the law enforcers and their British counterparts, Scotland Yard. The group then posted the16-minute recording of the call on the Web on Friday . NYT is quoting an F.B.I Source indicating that the group did not hack any of the agency’s systems but gained access to an email which was sent to more than 36 US, UK, France, Germany, Ireland, Netherlands and Swedish security agents indicating when the conference call would be made. The email was sent on Jan. 13 and one of…

Kenya ICT Board has sent out an invite and update on various events happening this month. One of the most notable event is where Professor Randal Bryant, Dean, Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science, is expected to be the key note speaker. The event is named Chipuka loosely translated to mean “emerge”. Prof. Bryant has been among the Computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University who have been working with the Kenya ICT Board to create a certification that will help employers identify software developers with the required skills necessary to tackle modern day challenges. According to a release on CMU website, “the…

Kenya is already enabled among the few countries which can post on their Google+ accounts using SMS. I was just reading tweets from #gTanzania when I was alerted to the impending availability of the service to Tanzanian users. I decided to check if its is possible to Kenyan users. It is very much possible. You can post on your Twitter and Facebook networks using SMS, this is not one surprising move by Google considering the kind of competition it is trying to give to Facebook and Twitter. To enable this feature on your Google+ page, you will have to add…

Airtel yesterday launched its mobile money, Airtel Money, in Uganda. The platform which provides Airtel’s clients access to financial services through their mobile phones. It also allows consumers to top up their phones with air time, send and receive money, pay their critical utility bills, access their bank accounts and withdraw Airtel money across all interswitch ATMs country-wide. Airtel has partnered with various banks to provide customers with access to deposit and withdraw cash, money transfers, banking services and pay bills. The partner banks include Standard chartered bank, Post Bank, Pride Micro Finance, Centenary Rural Development Bank, Equity Bank, Diamond…