Author: Cyrus

Visa has joined the mobile payment fray. The company has today announced that it is enabling its clients to make payments through the M-Pesa system. Clients of Virgin Atlantic would now be able to make payments for tickets, change in reservation fees and upgrades at the same time check for their flight details with the new “tweet bot” a Twitter service. The new Mpesa service allows the transfer of up to KES 140,000 from one phone number per day and will be available to people in Kenya and other countries (like South Africa and Tanzania) where Mpesa is available. David…

Payment services company Visa has announced a news mobile banking product for the developing markets  providing access to pre-paid Visa accounts using SMS technology. The payment service is based on technology from the company recently acquired by Visa, Fundamo, which provides technology for closed-loop mobile payment systems. The technology allows users to send and receive cash on their mobile phones without the need for a bank account or internet access. The system can also be used to pay bills and deposit money into bank accounts or pay salaries. Visa is trying to add a technology which they say is independent…

Tanzania leading retail bank, NMB Bank , launched a mobile-phone bill payment service enabling clients to settle tax obligations and pay for utility receipts. This means that over 550,000 NMB bank customers will be able to use their mobile phones on Tigo, Vodacom, Airtel and Zantel networks to access their bank accounts and settle their bills without visiting the bank. At the launch NMB partnered with TRA and utility service providers like DStv and DAWASCO bills. Tanzanians will be able to pay their property tax and personal tax through the service. NMB is the leading Tanzanian retail bank with over…

The iconic HTC Evo 3D Android smartphone was this week launched in South Africa. The smartphone delivers glasses-free 3D experience while at the same time making it easy to capture and share 3D home movies and still pics through the dual 5-megapixel cameras. The device will be retailing at R6,888 (Ksh 80,000) at selected stored throught South Africa. The official distributor is said to be Leaf International Communications. Leaf announced that the device is available at the following retail centres; Nashua Mobile Altech Autopage Cellular Virgin Mobile Lab88 The phone was first announced in March 2011 and boast of the…

I followed the launch of Google’s new product “Google Music” with keen interest. From my initial experience after the launch, I have come to the conclusion that Google Music is not close to even being an iTunes killer. It is still in the 90s and just cant match the power and cool experience iTunes gives. All-in-all, I was able to access it from Kenya by using tricks I always employ to view the restricted web offerings. One of the tricks I employ on such situations is to use an Open VPN software to “cheat” the web servers that I am…

Snaptu stopped sorking on 11/11 but many users have found a workaround to have it working again. The mobile app used to enable superior social media experience on more than 27 million feature phones and smartphones. Snaptu was bought by Facebook around March 2011 for around US $60 Million. So on 11/11 Snaptu withdrew access to LinkedIn, Picasa and Twitter after this notice. Facebook, Rss news and weather access were left intact. So Kenyans on Twitter have found a better way to get to Snaptu Twitter app without having the native Twitter widget present. Below is the process of getting…

I have been seeing this advert about the Standard newspaper being available on digital format online. I decided to test what the offerings was and I must say I have been impressed. The brains behind Flip Experts is Innocent Ouma who is a Kenyan who came back to the country early this year after a stint abroad. While away, Innocent always wanted to stay abreast with what was happening at hope and it had not been easy. Daily Nation tried to come online through the Newsstand platform but according to an insider at Nation’s digital department, the digital edition did…

The head of Nokia France talked to French LesEchos newspaper intimating that the mobile phone giant will be launching a Windows based tablet by June 2012. He also compared the recently launched Nokia Lumia 800 to BMW Series 5 promising that a Series 7 equivalent will be here soon. There is also the much Nokia 900 (Ace) which is believed to be a Meego phone. There are speculations that some of its specs would be; 4.3” ClearBlack AMOLED screen, HSPA+ data speeds, 8-megapixel rear camera, 16GB and 32GB storage, and a 1.4 GHz single-core processor.

India’s Tamil Nadu state Ministry of Communications and Information Technology has directed all government departments to dump Windows OS for Linux. The state government departments would instead install the BOSS (Bharat Operating Sys-tem Solutions) OS which is a distro of Linux developed by National Resource Centre for Free/Open Source Software (NRCFOSS) of India. The order came into effect on Monday 14th November when all government departments were expected to have complied. The government order was issued on November 9th. It is not clear what influenced the change of heart of the Indian government but the order has far reaching implications on the use…

It is being reported that YouTube is rolling out a new refreshed look as from Monday 14th November. It is very hard to verify this but Google has a select group of testers which always has a first view of products it is developing. The refreshed look seems to be designed to integrate Google+ with YouTube with more focus on letting users discover first what their circles share. Some of the changes you should expect in the refreshed YouTube are; Further integration of YouTube with Google+ with you discovering more of what your Google+ Circles have shared on YouTube. YouTube…

The High Court has stopped CCK from terminating the licenses of radio and TV stations which would not have made applications for their licenses to be renewed. See that stupidity from the Kenyan media owners. On 10th November, CCK threatened to switch off radio and TV stations which would not have applied for the new licenses by 15th November (today). The new regime licenses were announced one year ago and all the media owners in Kenya were informed of the need to acquired the new licenses. They were then reminded on August 5th of the need to renew the licenses…

Tanzania  has joined 37 other UN affiliated countries in the world in ratifying the Open Government Partnership Programme. This effectively makes Tanzania the fifth African county to do so after South Africa, Ghana, Kenya and Liberia. After the signing yesterday, the country’s Minister in the President’s Office (Good Governance), Mr Mathias Chikawe said that the government would soon make public the action plan to implement the programme. The action plan is not yet ready but the minister promises that it “will be prepared transparently and will involve few priorities. Preliminary priorities will be strengthening transparency, integrity and accountability in health, education…

We were inspired by our readers demanding more after our first interview with Craig Newmark, Founder of The Craigslist. We sought an interview with Arianna Huffington, Founder of The HuffingtonPost and she obliged. We have been patient enough to wait for her to respond at her own pace considering the many engagement she has to attend to but all-in-all, we are happy that she agreed to do this. Arianna is the President and Editor-in-Chief of The Huffington Post Media Group after selling  The Huffington Post to AOL for a record breaking figure of $315 Million . She also run for…

The daily deals market in Kenya is getting crowded. After Zetu, Rupu and Mocality, now we have Capital Deals. Capital Deals will be the deals part of Capital Web offerings. The Capital FM deals is indicated to be powered by Rupu Deals. I am not sure what the arrangement will be but it might just be Capital FM getting paid for the marketing or Rupu boosting the traffic on Capital FM website. On the website there is a mention of Rupu while on the radio advert Rupu is not mentioned anywhere. The arrangement might also be that Capital FM is…

I am one fortunate guy. Fortunate in the sense that I can wake up in the morning, sit on my desk wearing nothing but these sexy briefs and just jot opinions then earn money from it. In the most cool terms they call me a blogger. I am not sure if I should be branding myself a blogger because my whole village in K’Obong’o, Onjiko Location, Kisumu county believes that I don’t have a job. They don’t know what a blogger does so in short I just tell them that I still do IT like they knew me before. I…