Author: Cyrus

Groupon is reported to have bought Twangoo, SoSasta and Grouper which is a clone of the deal website. groupon is the leading collecting buying and discounts offerings on daily deals. Twangoo was founded by Daniel Guasco and Wayne Gosling. It offers deals and discounts and group buying services to South African cities like Bloemfontein, Durban, East London, Johannesburg, Cape Town, Pietermaritzburg, Port Elizabeth and Pretoria. “Collective buying is in its infancy in India, Israel and SA and we see strong potential,” says Groupon president and chief operating officer Rob Solomon in a statement.

Internet Solutions (IS) has signed as a platinum sponsor at the fifth annual AITEC Banking & Mobile Money COMESA Conference to be held in Nairobi over 2-3 March next year. Announcing his company’s sponsorship of the event, Loren Bosch, Sales Director said : “The financial services sector is an important target market for IS and through our participation at this event we will be able to network with all our existing clients in the sector – as well as attract new clients. As Nairobi moves towards establishing itself as the financial services hub for the region, effective world-class communications systems…

Safaricom has bowed to pressure of the competition. The company has  drastically reduced its SMS rates tto Ksh 2 across all local networks and Ksh 1 within its own network.  Safaricom CEO Bob Collymore said the reduced SMS rates are a permanent tariff proposition applicable to ALL PrePay and PostPay subscribers. CCK also issued new directive on interconnection rates with an implementation of Ksh 0.60 and reduce it to Ksh 0.05 by 2013. “We are lowering the cost of sending text messages to any local network by giving our entire subscriber base an SMS rate of Kshs 1/- for Safaricom…

Press release The Communications Commission of Kenya (CCK) has issued an addendum to the Interconnection Determination No. 2 of 2010 on Short Message Service (SMS) Interconnection termination rates. Mobile service operators are now required to immediately implement lower SMS termination rates with effect from 1st January 2011.  The operators are expected to interconnect at Ksh.0.60 per SMS and reduce progressively to Ksh0.05 by the year 2013, according to the prescribed glide path. The Determination No.2 of 2010, which was issued on 16th August 2010, noted that the prevailing wholesale termination rates for mobile SMS were way above the incremental costs…

Press Release; Oracle has announced that it has completed the acquisition of Art Technology Group (ATG), Inc. With the addition of ATG, Oracle can now provide best-in-class cross-channel CRM, Retail and Commerce that enables unified marketing, merchandising, service and order management, supply chain, and a seamless, personalised customer experience. To communicate product strategy for the combined Oracle and ATG products, the company will host a webcast presentation, which will be available beginning at 9:00am PT on January 6, 2011. Further information and an overview of the Oracle and ATG combination, including a replay of the webcast, will be available at…

Samsung Electronics is rolling the gloves for fierce competition in the mobile PCs with the introduction of Sliding PC 7 Series. The machine is equipped with Microsoft Windows 7 (OS) and powered by the much rumored ‘Oak Trail”  or Intel Atom processor . The machine is something like a Mule. Something between a Tablet and a Netbook. It is said to maximize the benefits of a tablet PC with its compact, light, and easy to go design.  The display slides up and out to reveal a physical keyboard much like that of a typical notebook. However, the user has the…

Research In Motion , the manufacturers of Blackberry will be previewing the much touted Blackberry PlayBook tablet at the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) from today, January 6 to Sunday, January 9.  If you are an attendee at #CES2011, then you can visit the BlackBerry booth (#30320 in the South Hall) to check out the new tablet in action. The Playbook might just be the only serious competitor to the iPad yet but many Tablets or Slates are expected to debut at #CES2011. Blackberry says, “Initial feedback about the BlackBerry PlayBook has been outstanding”

Flexus Technologies has entered into a partnership with data services company, Quintica that will see it offer local hosting for their Kopesha Cloud MFI (Monetary Financial Institutions) Core Banking and CRM applications. Under the arrangement, Flexus’s clients will benefit from a locally hosted application using the now emerging concept of Software-As-A-Service (SaaS). The partnership will provide hosted Applications (utilizing Quintica’s managed services facilities) for MFI’s across East Africa that that do not wish to invest in expensive software, servers and data centres for their core banking application. They will enjoy all the features and functionality in one package at a…

The Google Online Marketing Challenge was abbounced sometime last month in a blog post. We were still in the holiday mood so we procrastinated. But this is said to be a great hands-on exercise for undergraduate or graduate students in classes such as advertising, e-commerce, integrated marketing communication, management information systems, marketing and new media technologies. Good wants the students to come out of campus as pro-online marketers. In 2010 Google had such a competition and the response was impressive. 12,000 studnets from Kenya, Nigeria and Ghana participated. So, if you are a student: Your professor or lecturer can register now and…

2010 is gone and 2011 is here. Which technologies will we be looking for as Kenyan techies? They are varied and might not be the same but majority of these stuff just will be the same. Our pockets might not allow us to make long lines infront of shops during launches but we witnessed a near stampede last year during the launch of Nokia C3 sale. We did research and came out with a list of gadgets which will still make us go-gaga. Here is the list.

Kenya Police has had its fair share of tragedies and the bad omen seems to be following them online. The website has been hacked again with a message posted on it. The message reads; “Got in and all i could think about was zuckerberg!!! This’ for you Mark!” The hacker seems to have done it for Mark Zuckerberg. I doubt if this is serious hacking. I believe that this is simple defacing by the developer either to make a statement or just for the fun of it. Hackers most of the time have signatures. This signature makes it hard to…

Kenyan feature film and matte painter, Yvonne Muinde, is set to meet Kenyan techies on 10th according to a source at ICT Board. The 34 years old kenyan who is based in New Zealand and contributed to the highest grossing 3D movie directed by James Cameron, Avatar, will give talk and also get to engage bloggers and animation enthusiast at the event. Yvonne has many achievements to her cap including but not limited to AVATAR Pandora 2010 Visual Effects Society (VES), 2009 ‘Avatar’ Department lead matte painter Weta Digital , 2009 ‘The Lovely Bones’ Lead matte painter Weta Digital ,…

The South Korean and world are rejoicing over the Galaxy S smartphone reaching the 10 Million sold out handsets mark. For a start, I don’t give much of a damn about android. It is reactionary and not innovative. It’s UI is much worse than Chinese NQKIA’s interface. The whole hullabaloo doesn’t sell according to my script. Someone please stop Android. It is mediocrity taking over the world. Android-powered Galaxy S Smartphones launched in June 2010. Seven months later, the whole world is rejoicing. I have seen cooked figures and this might just be one of them. Samsung please prove me…

Samsung announced an apps contest sometime last year. The actual contest happened on 16th Dec 2010. The festive mood went with our concentration and so we have to apologise and for this late info. All-in-all, the results are out. The apps will be avaliable on Bada and Android smartphones by Samsung and will be sold or distributed through Samsung apps store. Mikul Shah – Eat Out Mobile Eat Out Mobile is Kenya’s first mobile restaurant guide, allowing users to search for restaurants using location, cuisine and budget. The application also benefits from having a popular website and Facebook page .

Kenya was in a crisis in 2007/2008. Kenyan techies led by Ory Okolloh thought of an idea to bring all the crisis reports of the same together in a tech manner. The main reporters were not so much techies and so they needed the most basic way to do it. The most common way then and now still is basic sms in a cheap cellphone. The Ory Okolloh and team thought that they will do with the basic sms, email and web reports and bring them all together in a map. That is how Ushahidi came to be. I got…