Author: Cyrus

Warid Telecom Uganda has launched its mobile money services. The mobile money landscape in Uganda had previously been dominated by MTN’s MobileMoney with players like Uganda Telecom’s M-Sente and Airtel’s Money (Formerly Zap) playing catchup. The new mobile money services from Warid is called Warid Pesa offering users a chance to convert real money into electronic format and vice-versa. Some of the services you will get through Warid Pesa are; Deposit cash and withdraw cash from any Warid Pesa outlet Send e-money to any mobile customer in Uganda who can exchange the Warid Pesa for cash Store and save Warid Pesa in…

Samsung has today introduced to the Kenyan market the Slate Series 7 PC. The Slate Series which was launched globally in August boasts portability while also offering full features of an average PC. According to Samsung’s Regional General Manager in charge of IT, Mr. Nandan Nair, the Series 7 Slate is targeted at the on-the-go users who need a slim, lightweight computer but can’t afford to sacrifice true PC functionality. The Slate Series 7 measures only 0.5 inch thick, runs on Windows 7 and only weighs 900 grams. It is a full-powered PC with a 11.6-inch screen,Intel Core i5 processor, Windows 7 Home…

m:lab East Africa is a mobile technology incubator established through a seed fund from InfoDev. The Lab’s mission is To facilitate demand-driven innovation by regional entrepreneurs, ensuring that breakthrough low-cost, high-value mobile solutions can be developed and scaled-up into sustainable businesses that address social and economic needs. Its vision is “to be a leader in identifying, nurturing and helping to create sustainable enterprises in the knowledge economy.” The Lab and its partners in 2011 organised Pivot25 – a regional mobile apps. developer competition and conference. The competition attracted over 100 applications from across East Africa and culminated in 25 finalists…

Zuku, the home entertainment brand of Wananchi Group, has officially launched its Zuku TV services in Tanzania. The service offers over 60 channels of Wananchi Group. It will cost almost Tsh 62,000 (US $38) to get Zuku premium in Tanzania and Ush 30,000 (US $12) in Uganda as opposed to Ksh 1,999 (US $22) in Kenya. It is not clear why Zuku is so cheap in Uganda. Tanzania becomes the third country Zuku after the September launch in Uganda and August launch in Kenya. Zuku provides great premium entertainment at affordable rates. I only don’t like the fact that special…

Google is set to launch a Nigerian YouTube version today. Nigeria will become the eighth country after Kenya, South Africa, Egypt, Morocco, Uganda, Algeria and Tunisia to get their own version of YouTube with localised look and content. Officially, Google has only announced the launch of Youtube in Uganda, Kenya and South Africa It is not clear what Google will do after the launch of the localised YouTube sites but it has not made a difference to me. When I visit the Kenyan YouTube link, I get the same content listed as popular as when I visit South African, Nigerian and any other.…

Kenyaweb is a professional Mobile and Web application development company with the Head Office in Nairobi, and branches in Eldoret and Mombasa Kenya. We are seeking an interactive Mobile Application Developers with experience in developing full-scale applications on the iOS, Android, Symbian and Windows platform. We are particularly interested in individuals possessing a quality-oriented attitude, attention to detail and the capacity to debug their own code. If you are looking for an opportunity to join a team of extremely talented programmers and designers with an aim to create exciting new consumer mobile products, then we should talk. Responsibilities: Develop new apps Maintain…

Yahoo has launched its portal for South Africa. This is a late move since there was a time when Yahoo was the only website which Africans knew until when the executives grew big heads and did not take emerging markets seriously. Google took the opportunity and stopping it will be so hard. Anyway the za.yahoo.com portal has gone live now after much speculation. The only people who should be really scared of the Yahoo’s foray on to South African localized content in the News24 and Microsoft’s MSN. The Yahoo South African portal syndicates news from the likes of M&G, AP, Reuters,…

The US White House has begun releasing the codes of data.gov to other governments. Through the Data.gov-in-a-box as the open data platform is called, the US government want to see to it that other governments intending to open up their data do not struggle with complicated development of the sites and apps. The White House plans to open source Data.gov platform fully by early next year. On Wednesday last week, Data.gov developer and General Services Administration software architect Chris Musialek  posted some early test code to open source development site Github. The test code seems to be DB management system and Web…

Opera software has today released Opera 11.60. This is the latest update for the company’s desktop web browser. You can now grab a copy of the new Opera browser through Opera downloads page . Opera promises that you will see faster performance on secure pages and less memory usage in the new version of the browser. Opera had previously planned to release an Opera 12 as its next version after 11.50 but it later decided to add the interim 11.60 to get out few of the finished features out to users while it works out more advanced features for Opera 12. Opera 11.60…

Mobile Money has changed life especially in a country like Kenya where almost 75% have access to it through the mobile services provider. Safaricom has more than 14.5 Million subscribers out of its close to 18 Million subscribed to M-Pesa while Airtel Money, Orange Money and yuMoney also services a good chunk of subscribers through the respective networks. Mobile money has been successful in areas where there was need of basic banking and also there was a culture of dependence like in Kenya. Funnily the idea of Mobile Money is also doing well in Somalia through the through the hawala…

This is a view which I have held for the longest time and nothing happening in Kenya will convince me otherwise. I strongly see no sense in the never ending but utterly useless events Kenya ICT Board is holding to stir up content generation in Kenya. Many have differed with me on this but I still strongly believe that the opposition is coming from a group benefiting from the mis-action of Kenya ICT Board. The Tandaa branded events have been held all over Nairobi but never beyond that. The reach of the so called Tandaa events have been limited to…

iPhone usage in Syria has been very much on the rise with many Syrians wanting to identify with the iPhone. Syrian born Abdel-Fattah Jandali was the biological father of the late Apple CEO and iPhone inventor, Steve Jobs. Syria might just be attempting to silence the communications from the anti-Assad protesters or they just believe the latest Wikileaks allegations about US espionage through the iPhone. A ban notice sent out by the Customs Department of the Syrian Finance Ministry read, “The authorities warn anyone against using the iphone in Syria.” The ban is enough to get any tourist in Syrian spotting an iPhone…

You can now jailbreak your iPhone 4S. The JailbreakiPhone4s website has published a jailbreak/unlock solution that will enable all iPhone owners to free the network restriction and install the Cydia application.The jailbreak service from JailbreakiPhone4s will take you back by around US $19. The iPhone 4S is one of the most popular smartphones. It has been been easier to acquire the iPhone through contract but the fact that it is locked on network has made it hard to effectively use it. Most of the listed 5.0.1 jailbreak/unlock solutions don’t work are are very temporary. Redmond pie listed such a jailbreak/unlock…

RIM has announced the winners of the BlackBerry EMEA Innovation Awards 2011. The awards which are in their fourth year are the highlight of the annual BlackBerry EMEA Alliance Summit. The awards recognise and reward organisations from within the  BlackBerry Alliance Programme in Europe, the Middle East and Africa that have delivered compelling applications and services to customers using the BlackBerry platform. There are seven categories in the award with this year seeing the introduction of a new category specifically to recognise solutions for the BlackBerry PlayBook™ tablet. The Playbook tablet is unfortunately being written-off by RIM.  Winners were selected…

Safaricom is apologising for the continued outage of M-PESA services that has affected services. Through a statement, Safaricom CEO Bob Collymore said that “the cause of the outage  is yet to be identified but the company’s engineers are working hard to ensure the system is up and services back to normal.” The outage is said to have started around 1305Hrs and has affected all M-PESA handset transactions meaning that money transfers and other M-PESA services are not going through. “We wish to apologize to our M-PESA customers due to a system outage that has affected all handset transactions. Our engineers are…