Author: Cyrus

Faults in the SEACOM undersea cable is affecting many services based in the infrastracture in East Africa. Websites and ISPs in India and East Africa are reporting poor connection or unavailability as the maintanance of the SEACOM undersea cable which was expected to complete by 28th April is still ongoing and is now due for completion on 30th April. This process is being carried by a repair ship which has been deployed to the location of the fault where it will pick up the cable, cut it and bring it onboard to undergo the repair on the optic fibre before…

Orange Kenya has introduced a reward scheme for its loyal subscribers. The promotion dubbed ‘Orange Thursday,’ the programme seeks to reward its over 1 million mobile pre-paid customers. The reward scheme will be rolled out in partnership with all Fox Cinemas and Silverbird Cinemas in Nairobi and Kisumu and Nyali Cinemax Mombasa. Subscribers will be required to register in the scheme by sending the keyword “Movie” to 241. Once the customers usage reaches Kshs. 500/-, the automated system will send the an SMS, with a movie voucher to be presented at the partner cinemas that entitles the customer to a…

CISCO East Africa office has launched the cutting edge communication tool, telepresence. This has been possible by the laying of the fiber optic cable with three cables live. Video Conferencing was the in-thing but the latest craze in the market is Telepresence Virtual communication solution enabling you to hold meetings with clients wherever they are in the world.

Just got a media invite for an event which is going to be conducted by Business Software Alliance . The invite says that BSA will be releasing the International Data Corporation (IDC)  research report detailing software piracy statistics for this region(East Africa). Behind IDC seems to be the sponsor which is Microsoft as you can RSVP the even with Andrew Waititu who is Microsoft East and Southern Africa head of anti-piracy.

Facebook is introducing new changes making profiles abit more dynamic. Starting Today, Facebook is unveiling new ways of liking, enjoying or identifying with Community Pages or simply facebook pages. These changes are more like or related to the new “like” terminology Facebook introduced sometimes last month. We were fans of pages and we were limited to brands and organizations.

Kenyan mobile phone subscriber numbers increased its penetration to 49.7% according to Communications Commission of Kenya (CCK).  The actual number of subscribers is 19.4 million from 19.3 as of the end of 2009. Total revenues earned by the industry’s four players ( Safaricom, Orange, Yu and Zain) in 2009 grew by 16 percent to 84.2 billion shillings ($1.11 billion) against the previous year, but the average revenue per user fell approx 4.0%  to 362.20 shillings from 376.56 shillings.

Facebook yesterday announced that it had relaunched its Safety Center which is the section of the social media site devoted users’ security. Saying that it had multiplied times four the safety information available online while cleaning it and making it very easy to navigate.

Wananchi, known for its popular Zuku brand of cable, broadband and IP phone services, has secured three full transponders (162 megahertz) on SES WORLD SKIES’ new NSS-12 satellite to launch a powerful DTH lineup and VSAT-delivered, IP-based communications solutions.   Set to launch in September, Wananchi’s DTH platform is expected to offer as many as 80 channels over two transponders by year-end. The VSAT networks will enable everything from reliable high-speed internet access to Voice-Over-IP and videoconferencing.

The Apple Store has just gone live after a long period of being offline. Confirming the rumours and now features a new group of Macbook Pros, all ffitted with new Intel i5 and i7 processors. The 13-inch models still has Core2Duo technology. It, 13 inch model, will have faster Intel Core Duo processors, 4GB RAM, 10 hours of battery life and an NVIDIA G-Force 320M graphics card. The graphics now boast 48 processing cores, which makes them a worth adding to your office if you are a designer. Available in two flavours, the 2.4GHz model with 250GB storage will be…

Following the Microsoft launch of its KIN phones which are targeted at social media, Nokia today unveiled 3  handsets which will offer competition to the same. The Nokia C3, Nokia C6 and Nokia E5 are mid-range offerings, packing side-sliding QWERTY keyboard and great all-round connectivity. Nokia C6 This phone has a side-slider, runs on Symbian S60  and packs quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE support and quad band 3G with HSDPA. The C6 comes with a 3.2″ touchscreen of nHD resolution, capable of displaying up to 16M colors.

It is official, internet costs is not going down anytime soon in Kenya. That statement is derived from utterances of one Chris Wood who is the  CEO of West Indian Ocean Cable Company (WIOCC) which is the consortium behind EASSy.  Mr Chris Wood, the chief executive officer at West Indian Ocean Cable Company WIOCC, the single largest shareholder in Eassy, says it could take up to three years to have significant reduction in connection charges. Three F***ing years? Whaaat? You kidding me? Has he forgotten this? What about this?

It is the battle for the hearts of the youth and nobody is tops now in the battle for the soul like Kubamba Crew. They have set up a Ustream Channel and the feed is coming out right except for a few technical problems which they will come to overcome with time. They had the K-Krew channel which I dont know why they stopped using before setting up the current Rauka Channel. They have also set up a Facebook Group which has grown to close to 10,000 members within one month.

It is out for ya’. The Wordpress 3.0 still in Beta is out. Through a blog post by Jane Wells on Wordpress blog, she says; This is an early beta. This means there are a few things we’re still finishing. We wanted to get people testing it this weekend, so we’re releasing it now rather than waiting another week until everything is finalized and polished. There’s a ton of stuff going on in 3.0, so this time we’re giving you a list of things to check out, so that we can make sure people are testing all the things that…

After that long acquisition of Zain Africa operations, Bharti Airtel Limited will base its Africa headquarters in Kenya’s Nairobi, a company executive Mr Manoj Kohli was quoted on Dow Jones Newswires, Thursday. This is likely to be the current Zain Africa Headquarters based in Nairobi, as the Indian Telecoms giant moves to finalize regulatory approvals to the deal.

Google pulled it on us. It is April 1st and Google just announced in this blog post that it is changing its name to Topeka. It went ahead and explained that it changed it’s name because of the name changing act by Topeka City in USA to win the Google broadband. In Kenya, Nation carried out the story of Al-Shaabab attacking Kenya, Standard carried the story of Obama agreeing to visit Kenya while Nairobi Star carried the story of  Finger of God and Mungiki joining hands to win the leadership of Kenya.