Author: Cyrus

Vodacom South Africa yesterday used Twitter to reveal that it will be soon launching Apple’s iPhone 4S in the South African market. The device which is an improvement of the iPhone 4 is the first to have the Siri intelligent assistant.  Vodacom revealed that it will be launching the  iPhone 4S on 16 December 2011 in South Africa. MTN later revealed that they will also be launching the device on 16th December while also saying that they will soon be announcing the pricing for the device. We sought to know from sources within Orange and we were told that Kenya…

Virtual youth community movement, YoungAfricaLive, has launched in Tanzania through Vodacom mobile. Young Africa Live is a mobile community that entertains and educates young people on topics of love, sexual health, gender and relationships which are issues adversely affecting the youth in Tanzania. The portal gives the youth a platform to speak their minds, through a medium that is accessible, and encourage conversations on topics that impacts their lives positively. Hopefully, this will get conversations going, ideas shared and internalized thereby creating behavior change around relationships, good love, safe sex and HIV. Praekelt Foundation runs YoungAfricaLive and the launch was…

Bharti Airtel Limited (“Airtel” has  operations in 19 countries across Asia and Africa. The company is celebrating various milestones key being that its subscriber base in Africa has hit 50. Airtel acquired the former Zain Africa operations 17 months ago with 36 Million clients across the continent. An article appearing in an Indian news site indicate that Bharti Airtel has revealed that it has more than 11.8 Million Airtel Money clients in Kenya and Zambia. The article also indicates that more than 800,000 retail agents supports Airtel Money business in both countries while also offering services like recharge vouchers, news…

MIH calls it Dealify in South Africa and Mocality Deals in Kenya. The company is reported to have shut down the group buying service in SA. Dealify launched almost the same time Mocality Deals was going LIVE in Kenya. Mocality is believed to have not picked up well more to do with strategy than economic factors. “MIH has decided shut down Dealify, that I can confirm,”  MIH CEO of Platforms Stephen Newton told Memeburn. Currently there is no available deal on Dealify with the last deal which was a 60% saving on 36Boutiques’ online shopping vouchers sold out. Dealify is showing that…

India’s largest telecom operator Bharti Airtel has launched free Twitter mobile browsing today, a day after Essar Kenya launched free Facebook browsing in Kenya. The free Twitter browsing will be available till March 1, 2012, according to a report by MediaNama. Airtel users visiting http://mobile.twitter.com will be able to access the website without paying a cent. The move comes just few months after Airtel made the access of Facebook through USSD in India free. Airtel users in India can access Facebook by simply dialing *325# or *fbk# through their phones free of cost. Twitter is also available in India through SMS where users just…

Mentorship in software engineering is such a critical aspect of the life of budding app developers. Most of our universities have no experience centres and since the third world countries also import more apps than they develop, I think we need to send our students out to Europe, India and USA to attain these skills and build products for Africa. The only problem is that most of the students go to these countries and come back without utilising their experience or when they build apps, their target market is not Africa. We need apps for Africa and by Africans. Google…

yuMobile has today unveiled another freebie. The company says that it is not taking its chances with the social media community. From today, all data users on yuMobile will be able to browse all Facebook website addresses for free. This means that any URL with the main domain as Facebook.com will attract zero data charges on yuMobile network. Asked what kind of network yuMobile users enjoy, Essar Kenya CEO – Madhur Taneja – say that “according to CCK report, yuMobile data network  scored higher than the competitions. The network is 2.5G (GPRS).” This has not been convincing considering that 2.G…

All those who thought they could entrench Nokia in the Kenyan market by getting freebies are now realising how they were wrong. Nokia East and Southern Africa management even thought that chest thumping and bravado will make them see the light. It has not worked. They even stole the idea of young Kenyans and thought that because they have money, we should keep quiet. Techmtaa was blunt and now reality is sinking in. Market is won by innovation, prudent management and consistency in pursuing success. You can use bribery as a shortcut. Ok! Dorothy Ooko left Nokia for Google and…

m:lab has launched its application testing services supported by InMobi. The facility which is equipped with mobile devices like Tablets, feature phones and smartphones, will be accessible to both members and non members. Mobile apps developers will have access to the facility for a fee of Ksh 500 per hour while members of iHub, university community and m:lab community will have specially subsidized rates. The announcement was met by protest from the target community who termed the testing fees for non-members prohibitive. The developers, some of who were attending the CIO100 event at Safari Park, asked why they should pay…

Wordpress last night announced that they have been thinking of how to better the experience of the many bloggers using Wordpress platform. They found the solution through a partnership with Federated media. The web publishing solutions company is rolling out WordAds which is more like Google’s Adsense. The program which is optional and is only available for publicly visible with custom domains is such a great idea. We just hope that it will work and not be a non starter like most of the Adsense competitions like Adbrite, Chitika and Tribal Fusion. WordAds might not work for the African publishers or…

The current CIO is living in a generation of stagnant thought. I am at the CIO 100 event and though I would love to portray our current CIOs as very upwardly mobile and innovative in thought, they come out as grumpy, boring and kind of stone age. CIO 100 is an event which is annual and is meant to recognise and out those CIOs who makes the greatest impact in not only their organisations but also to the consumer and the society. The award this year has even introduced categories such as Green Award where the CIOs who try to…

Royal Media has been nudged into action by the recent entry of South Africa’s News24 into the Kenyan media market. Citizen news has had very uncoordinated way of delivering news online but that looks to change as the group is set to launch www.citizennews.co.ke which will have both text and multimedia news. The portal developed by Verviant runs on Joomla and is set to give Royal Media a platform to fight competition on online news. It is only Nation Media and Capital Fm which has at-least some strong footing on online news. Royal Media snatched Julie Gichuru from Nation Media to strengthen…

Telkom Kenya has today partnered with Equity Bank to launch a VISA pre-paid debit card which is linked to Orange Money accounts. These services are not new since Safaricom has a similar pre-paid card with I&M bank while Airtel Kenya has a similar idea but virtual card in partnership with Standard Chartered Bank and Mastercard. The pre-paid card will enable Orange Money clients use their card to conduct purchases through thousands of Merchants worldwide as well as easily carry their money around. The major difference between the Safaricom pre-paid VISA card and Orange pre-paid VISA card is that the latter has…

Garage48, the World famous development weekend finishes it’s year in South Africa, Johannesburg 2-4. December 2011. Garage48 events have proved to be successful motivators among different ICT communities. Richard was the local organizer for Garage48 Kampala in September 2011. He has seen how the event has changed and given meaning and motivation for ICT community in Kampala even within 6 weeks already. Richard says “7 weeks have gone by since Garage48 first event in Kampala and still the IT fraternity here talks about how great the experience was. Garage48 event showed many in the tech community how possible it is…

I finally downloaded the MedAfrica app for Android and before the real owners of my Nokia N8 took it (yes it was stolen), I got a chance to test it briefly on the Symbian platform. Impressive and simple I must say. The app pans out well on my HTC Sensation screen as it is optimised for the big screens not like many of the local apps which are targeted at the likes IDEOS U8150 with the simple excuse that the 3.2 inches screen is the most common screen size around. First MedAfrica app is an app whose objective is to…