Author: Cyrus

Scangroup Limited has moved to strengthen its digital marketing arm, Squad Digital, by recruiting an experienced Indian digital marketing guru to lead the agency. Mr. Gaurav Singh has been appointed as the new General Squad Digital. Gaurav is a technology expert who has spent over a decade managing and driving technology solutions both on client and agency side in India and Singapore. Mr. Singh was recognised by Google as Winner of Google Googlies 2010 for innovative use of Search to drive Social Media Campaigns. Besides that, he was the lead on a couple of key initiatives at Standard Chartered Bank: Creator and…

Safaricom and Telkom Kenya Ltd have announced plans to form a jointly owned company to manage aand effectively share the tower resources between the two firms. Though a few of the telcos and ISPs have been sharing towers, this is going to be the first time an independent company is formed to only manage the base station resources between competing telcos. The move is both strategic for Orange and Safaricom since the France Telcom owned Orange inherited the infrastructure of the former state corporation while Safaricom has been in the cellular business for the longest duration in Kenya and has…

The High Court yesterday stopped Information and Communication Minister, Samuel Poghisio, from gazetting the re-appointment of the CCK Director General, Charles Njoroge. That effectively means than Charles  Njoroge has no official confirmation as the CCK DG until when the order will be lifted or the case heard and determined. We reported how Mr Ibrahim Athumani took the Minister to Court arguing that the re-appointment of Charles Njoroge as the DG at CCK was not properly done. Athumani wanted the the court to give advisory opinion regarding appointments for State jobs under Article 163 (6)  and article 232(2) of the new…

Stratus Technologies, a tech industry leader for uptime assurance, has signed a partnership agreement with Fintech Kenya Limited that will see Stratus’s representation in the East Africa region increase significantly. Fintech offers custom-built IT solutions to the financial and business sectors in Africa and will now add the Stratus’s uptime assurance portfolio to it’s mix. “We were looking for a solution that would allow us to offer a complete service to the financial industry, but we were missing a key component that would ensure unrivalled uptime for our customers,” says Tony Mbugua, group general manager at Fintech Kenya Limited. “Stratus,…

At the ongoing Children Protection Online conference organised by CCK in Nairobi, these kids did stand out with a clear message to the participants. The message was that they are young, gullible and needs protection from the society and the government. Parents have abdicated their responsibilities to maids, the media and friends in school. These kids were crying out very loud.

I heard the idea of Pivot25 sometime last year from Jay Ballah. The guy told me about the idea and I really liked it and told him that we will love to know what is in there. Then around 18th February 2011, I received a mail giving us what the details would be. We called few contacts close to the event and realised what kind of event the people were organising. It is the same idea with Africa Gathering, Mobile Web Africa and SocialMediaAfrica and Apps for Africa events. The idea is some person who has run nothing, impacted on…

Yu (Essar Kenya) has sued a data network provider (Kenya Data Network) for threatening to switch off its connectivity over Sh80 million debt dispute. Essar pleaded with Nairobi Commercial Court to prevent KDN from switching it off arguing that such an action will render thousands of Kenyans without communication services. Yu, through its lawyer Julius Kemboy, says that KDN has threatened to terminate its services because of the dispute over billings and other alleged breaches. Yu has succeeded in getting a court injunction against KDN barring it from switching off transmission connectivity or interfering with Essars use of all other facilities…

You might have thought that this government cared for consumer but now you might get the real picture. Safaricom and Orange were very loud in calling for the stopping of the drop of the call charges. The government which holds shares in both Safaricom and Orange has intervened through a Presidential decree. So when CCK through the no nonesense DG, Mr Njoroge, could not agree to be pushed to the wall by the operators, the decided to go to the media which they control since they pay big amounts in adverts and the mainstream media was singing their tune. So…

Broadband telecommunications have the potential to spur rapid economic growth and facilitate job creation, according to a United Nations report unveiled yesterday. Countries are urged to implement national broadband plans or risk losing the benefits of the global high-speed digital communications. “To optimize the benefits to society, broadband should be coordinated on a countrywide basis, promoting facilities-based competition and with policies encouraging service providers to offer access on fair market terms… efforts should be coordinated across all sectors of industry, administration and the economy,” according to the report. “Developing isolated projects or piecemeal, duplicated networks is not only…

Kenya based Seven Seas Technologies, has scooped this year’s VMware Africa Channel Partner of the Year award in recognition of the firm’s cloud computing market development efforts in the wider east Africa region. Arising from Seven Seas Technologies recent investments in developing and delivering cloud computing solutions running on VMware platforms, the locally headquartered firm is gaining global prominence in the ICT world as a major solutions partner. VMware is a computer virtualization and cloud computing solutions provider serving global enterprises. During the awards ceremony held in Johannesburg, South Africa, Westcon Africa a value added distributor of unified communications, infrastructure and security solutions with a…

It seems that the school of computing at Makerere University has had its website hacked. The website has been hacked by the nafsk m3 hackers from Syria. Check the screenshot above. The hacking looks like an SQL injection on the sites databases.

Medic Mobile, formerly FrontlineSMS and a proven innovator in mobile health technology, has announced the development of the first SIM Application for healthcare. SIM apps can generally operate on 80% of the world’s phones from $15 handsets to Android smartphones. The announcement was made by Medic’s Chief Strategist Isaac Holeman at the Mobile Health Summit in Cape Town, South Africa on Monday. The GSMA-mHA Mobile Health Summit runs from 6th to 9th June and has a great lineup of speakers. Medic Mobile is known best for deploying SMS-based healthcare communication solutions on $60 Java enabled phones. Now with SIM apps, Medic…

CCK quarterly sector statistics report for the second quarter 2011 is out. The report paints a very great picture of the growth being realised in the industry. CCK has announced that there was a growth of 12% in the mobile subscriber numbers in the last 3 months, from 22.3 Million to 24.96 Million. Fixed lines suffered a 0.8 per cent drop from 228,391 to 226,587 in the same period. Safaricom market share dropped 6% from 75.9% to 69.9% and Essar (yu) lost 0.3% to stand at 6.4%. Airtel gained from 13.5% to 15.2% in the same period while Orange gained 4.5%…

InMobi has released its April 2011 Mobile Insights Report for Africa. The report provides insights on mobile advertising trends across Africa. InMobi claims in the report that it now serves 4.2 billion mobile impressions a month in Africa, up 21% from 3.5 billion in January 2011. Key highlights of the Kenya data include:· An average of 45 million mobile ad impressions monthly added in 3 months· Smartphone impressions increased 37%, but remain relatively small with only 7% of the total market share· Alcatel and Huawei combined to increase their share by 4.7 points driven partly by a push on affordable…

Huawei and Safaricom on one side and Moi, JKUAT and University of Nairobi on the other side coming together for the greater benefit of Kenyan young minds is such a great thing. Safaricom and Huawei have today signed the memorandum of Association (MoU) with the three local universities under Huawei’s ‘telecom seed for the future program ’ help in upgrading the skills of local Telecomms Engineering graduates. Li Dafeng, President Eastern & Southern Africa Region Huawei believes that the criticism which has been directed at the African education system can only be avoided by bridging the knowledge gap between the…