Author: Cyrus

Citizen TV has bowed to regional and political interests not to air an episode of XYZ Show which from the look of things, is ruffling feathers. The Video starts with a session in parliament with absent members of parliaments and ministers not responding to questions. The sad part of all this circus is that the President is laughing at all the unfolding events while carrying his Golf club. The show is a satire of the daily happenings in the country and is not exclusive to political happenings. Blockage of the episode shows how much influence politicians have in the daily…

HP announced an alliance with the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) that will provide structural and systemic improvements in testing and treating more than 120,000 infants exposed to HIV in Kenya each year. The partnership was facilitated at the Clinton Global Initiative’s 2010 annual meeting. With support from CHAI and the Kenya Ministry of Public Health & Sanitation, HP is providing technology that will capture, manage and return early infant diagnosis (EID) HIV test results in just one to two days after results are ready – a significant improvement from the previous paper-based system, which took two to three months.…

Word from Kenyan government spokesman, Dr Alfred Mutua has it that US Assistant Secretary of state in charge of Africa called the Prime Minister, Mr Raila Odinga, to apologise on the impending release by Wikileaks of over 1,821 cables from the US Embassy in Nairobi to Washington. The spokesman was not specific on the contents of the release but the leaked summary of over 226 documents out of the 251,287 documents say that “Almost every single sentence in the embassy reports speaks with disdain of the government of President Mwai Kibaki and Prime Minister Raila Odinga” according to Der Spiegel…

The AccessKenya Group has announced a partnership with insurance provider, AON Minet Insurance Limited. The partnership is expected by the data company to boost the uptake of its Access@Home packages. The partnership works in such a way that when you but a data package from AccessKenya, you get an insurance cover automatically. This is adding value to the products of Access Kenya which with the competition in the data market nheating up as all celullar operators are now major data resellers. For a fee of KSh 4,200, one will receive home internet as well as home insurance worth KSh 500,000. While…

Competition in the pay-TV field in the continent is heating up. Smart TV which is owned by Swedish firm Next Generation Broadcasting (NGB) launched locally. Smart TV will run on the digital broadcasting platform rolled out by the government sometime last year. NextGen Broadcasting Kenya CEO Dan Kagwe said yesterday that the SmartTv will push for more local programming and making the service affordable. He acknowledged that pay TV growth in Kenya has stagnated because off the unfair pricing by the sole player. Multichoice Kenya (DSTV) has continued to dominate the market with it’s unchallenged services. GTV gave Multichoice a…

CFC Stanbic Financial Services has launched the Kenyan first online share trading platform . If you are a local or foreign investors with shares at NSE, you will now be able to buy and sell shares online through CfC Stanbic Financial Services secure Online Share Trading’s (OST) . The online trading platform was launched by the PS  Dr Bitange Ndemo today morning in Nairobi. Dr Ndemo appreciated the move by CfC Stanbic Financial Service saying that the Online Share Trading system had taken Kenya’s equity market to the next level.

The Paynet Group is taking a leading role in AITEC’s baby which is on its fifth year. The annual Banking & Mobile Money conference will have the group as the Platinum sponsor according to a press release sent out yesterday. Paynet CEO Bernard Matthewman acknowledges that the conference has become the market-leading event for East Africa’s financial services sector and feels that it plays a valuable role in nurturing innovation and excellence in banking. 

Our ears are out and before we get to let it slip out, we are hearing that MTN Business is set to acquire a very good chunk of controlling stake at Essar Kenya (Yu). The rumours have been out for sometime and efforts to get comments from both sides have not been fruitful. A source at CCK says he has heard the rumour but the problem is that when these companies are talking informally, it is very hard to get much from them. They will only get to CCK when they are seeking the “no objection” letter. The letter will…

Orange has today been awarded the 3G license as promised by the CCK. The comppany says that it intends to adopt the pole position in the local data market with an intensive rollout of its 3G mobile telephony network. The service, according to Orange, will be live by June next year. That to me is a sign of a company which is not serious. Were they not contemplating this? Since the relaxation of rules why take that long. Who will need 3G next year? It wont even be that valuable. It will just be one of the data services but …

Orange seems to have things going on well for them on the data field now that CCK has sent out an invite to us to go and witness the handing over of 3G spectrum license to the company. Orange has been marketing their data products aggressively of late. They just don’t aggressively improve their customer care which is just whack. You will not get your case sorted in time and when they promise to call you, dont expect them to call. It will just be a promise. Orange already has a EVDO data service avalaible at differents bundled. EVDO (Evolution…

InMobi which is just the world’s fastest if not the largest growing mobile ad network, has announced some interesting findings from its landmark study “A Global Consumer View of Mobile Advertising”. The survey was done in partnership with digital marketing intelligence agency, ComScore. Over 2,500 consumers in South Africa, Kenya, and Nigeria and discussed overall comfort with mobile ads, perceived benefits, willingness to have ads, and interest in major brands across four categories of automotive, travel, consumer electronics and entertainment. James Lamberti, VP Global Research & Marketing at InMobi said, “Africans are among the most progressive in the world when…

We saw it coming and we have just been waiting to be told when it was going to happen. It came, we saw and now we can say what we think of it and forecast on the strategies which Zain might use in the market. It was not such a big event though they wanted to make it look big by whatever they had. But the brief of it is that Zain Africa has today formally launched itself as Airtel Africa.  Rene Meza, the CEO of Airtel Kenya, says that their strong entry points will be on affordability and focus…

Business Connexion (Pty) Limited has arrived in Kenya and is set to invest a reported Sh2 billion in setting up its operations in the local market. The South African ICT Company is partnering with a local firm, Africa Khusini Technologies to roll out its services.  Business Connexion is a leading integrator of business solutions based on information and communications technology (ICT), with a footprint in Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, Zambia, Tanzania and the United Kingdom. The company will engage predominantly in the establishment of infrastructure and data centre capabilities which will serve as the foundation for the delivery of managed ICT…

Zain is set to embark on a major re-branding exercise from Monday next week. The company will adopt the Airtel brand to as its new mother company, India’s Bharti Airtel. The re-branding will see also the other 14 countries in Africa adopt the Airtel brand. It might just be the most expensive re-branding exercise for the company considering that it has gone through 3 other major re-branding exercise in the last six years. In 2004 when Zain Kenya rebranded,  the exercise cost $30 million to rebrand from Kencell to Celtel , in 2008 $40 million was spent to rebrand from…

Equity bank is the largest bank in Kenya and I think the EA region. The bank handles more clients than you can ever think of. That is why it is very bad for the economy of this country when the bank has its systems down for the last two days and nobody cares to explain why. Clients cannot make transfers not check the actual account balance for the same period. The ATM network seems also to be down according to many clients of the bank. Trying to get to Alex Muhia who is the General Manager in charge of Communications…