Author: Cyrus

Orange Kenya, and Equity Bank have today launched an initiative that aims to avail One Million Computers to university students. The partnership Equity Bank was signed by the Orange CEO Mickael Ghossein and Dr. James Mwangi the Equity Bank CEO in Nairobi. The move will see Orange sell internet-enabled phones and computers within Equity Bank branches countrywide, and the bank will extend a credit facility to customers willing to spend on the same. Customers will identify the device to acquire, apply for a loan and once approved, will take possession of the device and then repay the bank in easy…

Business management software giant SAP, throughi its University Alliances program and the SAP® Education organization have teamed up with the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany to developed a program to extend an ancillary course in the enterprise resource planning application, SAP® ERP, to students in emerging market countries in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), allowing them to obtain an official SAP certification. The course, “Training ERP in 10 Days” (TERP10), will offer up to 300 participants the chance to acquire valuable SAP competencies during their time at university. This will enable students to enhance their career opportunities in…

Zain Kenya is set to start rebranding this month after being acquired by Bharti Airtel of India. This might be the most expensive rebranding innitiative by the firm considering that in 2004 the firm spent $30 Million to rebrand from Kencell to Celtel and four years later in 2008, the company spent $40 to rebrand from Celtel to Zain. The new owners, Bharti Airtel have been thinking and mapping the rebranding strategy since June.

Twitter is proving to be a pain in the ass with all these bugs. I just discovered that Twitter is showing that I have not followers nor those following me. The funny part is that I follow no one but my timeline is full of all these tweets What is happening @Twitter?

When Safaricom CEO, MJ, recently and in the past said that the company “will not engage in any war in the telecomms market”, we knew that he wasnt actually sure what was coming his way. You know he was coming out as aloof, arrogant and just not a friend of the consumer but literally a blood sucker. We have heard stories on how we were suppose to get cheap internet with the landing over the cables at the coast. The story immediately changed with Safaricom, Orange, UUNET, AccessKenya and other operators declaring that they must “return investment” before anyone can…

Sarova Hotels, Resorts & Game Lodges will now offer guests the option of settling or paying their bills through the M-PESA service after signing an agreement with Safaricom today which was preceeded by a month long pilot project. The M-PESA service will see clients settle their bills incurred through services and goods offered or to be offered. This is a very big development to the local developers who would like to see many establishments embrace m-commerce. Clients would be able to even book holiday packages and services in advance from any location as long as they will be having money…

Orange is upping the game and war in the telecomms sector in Kenya. It is offering its customers data rates lower than you have ever thought of. The average data rates have been around Ksh 7 per MB but now Orange has gone down to Ksh 1. Yaani one bob per MB. Thats a milestone. The intergrated services provider says thats the new mobile internet tariff targets the increasing number of people who are using their mobile phones to access the internet. CEO of Orange Mr Ghossein added, “Orange has used its unique advantage in the data market to effect…

All cell phones stolen or lost or even damaged in Tanzania will be blacklisted after the implementation of the Electronic and Postal Communication Act (EPOCA)  passed and assented-to this year by Jakaya Kikwete. “The Country is finalising the setting up of the regulations that will go with this law that will ensure that the phones are blacklisted by the mobile operators when reported”, the Tanzania Communications Regulatory Authority (Tcra), Director Information Society and Information Technologies, Mr James Kilaba said. The act, EPOCA as it is famously called, was passed by Tanzanians Parliament on January 29, 2010 and assented to by…

Google’s daily incorporation of Kenyans and also taking of the market seriously is just increasing. It has today launched Gmail-to-SMS service which they say is Kenya’s first PC chat to cell text service, which will allow Gmail users in the country to send and receive chat messages – for free – as text messages. The service is in partnership with Safaricom. Mhhhhhh!! With SMS-in-Chat, a Gmail user can send a text message from the desktop interface directly to phones via SMS. In return, these contacts may respond to these text messages and the response will appear in the original sender’s…

Regional Media houses have been tipped by KAS (Konrad Adenauer Stiftung) incorporate bloggers and new media practitioners  in newsrooms . The Director of the well known German Political Foundation- Konrad Adenauer Stiftung (KAS) Sub-Sahara Africa Media Programme, Mr Frank Windeck said this in Dar es Salaam on Monday. He noted that there was an increase in information channeled through community media aka blogs by the so called- ‘citizen journalists’. ”The question of whether these new media are a threat to traditional media or not is still discussable but their influence in information dissemination is enormous, it is becoming a more…

It has been long coming. We have been waiting for the time Google would make it easy for me to know which Android phone is out there. Every week you hear of a launch of an Android product. Now Google just made the gallery of the available phones live. You can now select many phones and get to compare them side by side. You can also sort the phones by features, country of availability and even by the provider. We still dont have Android Kenya market nor do we have Kenya or any other African country listed but we hope…

AccessKenya has deployed a number of CCTV cameras in Nairobi city to monitor traffic. I just dont know how ethical or legal this is in kenya but we know that Kenya police has anumber of CCTV Cameras in strategic locations to monitor crimes. KDN was the first to deploy such cameras and we have had many media houses using the feeds to send traffic updates. We just hope that the cameras will not be used in a wrong way.

RIM, the company behind the successful Blackberry phones just unveiled its much anticipated device, a tablet named Blackberry Playbook. RIM CEO Mike Lazaridis announced the BlackBerry Playbook at BlackBerry Developer Conference (DevCon). The PlayBook has a 7-inch high resolution widescreen display, 9.7 mm thick, supports Flash 10.1 with hardware accelerated video, HTML 5, 1080p video, has non-proprietary HDMI and USB connections, full-HD front and rear-facing camera, support for dual-displays (with use of HDMI cable), will be able to connect with BlackBerry Enterprise Servers out of the box via Bluetooth secure pairing to BlackBerry. The device will have a 1 GHz dual-core processor (with symmetrical multiprocessing capabilities) and 1…

The Top 10 CNN Heroes for this year were revealed on CNN.com on Thursday, September 23rd at 8pm East Africa Time. Selected by a Blue Ribbon Panel of humanitarians, profiles of the Top 10 Heroes are now available on www.CNNHeroes.com. The announcement also kicked off the online voting for the “CNN Hero of the Year” which opened immediately following the unveiling. Online voting will conclude at 6am ET on Thursday, November 18th. Now in its fourth year, CNN Heroes is a multiplatform campaign that shines a spotlight on everyday people changing the world; in 2010, the campaign received over 10,000 submissions from more than…

Daggers are drawn and even though Safaricom said they wont engage in price wars, all indications are that they are really not taking the challenges lying down. I think that for the first time, Safaricom is really scared of the competition. You should have seen that on Friday when the following two promotions were launched by the competitors. Zain Kenya on Friday launched a one Million shillings a week customer reward program.  Under the Angukia Milioni na Zain lottery, customers will earn points for using their Zain lines and be entered into a weekly draw in which they stand to…