Monthly Archive for May, 2009

Kenya’s Top 10 (Mobile) Web Sites and other Interesting Statistics.

Published on May 29, 2009 in random. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

Earlier today, I posted a link to story about the rise of Kenya’s mobile web usage as report in the Business Daily. The story prompted me to take a closer look at the mobile web usage trends in Kenya. The state of the mobile web report by Opera Software provided some interesting insights for Kenya:

  • Page-view growth since April 2008: 572.6%
  • Unique-user growth since April 2008: 146.4%
  • Page-views per user: 372 (*)

* – The report also points out that although Kenya is 4th in terms of mobile web usage in Africa, it has the highest number of page views per user, with each browsing 372 pages on average each month.

Basically, this means Kenyan’s are spending lots of time on the mobile web – the most in Africa in fact as of this writing, and its growing massively! I hope analogue and digital marketers in Kenya are reading this post! Its time for Kenyan brands and organizations to start building mobile web sites lest they lose out on this growing market! In fact, we just launched Dotsavvy’s mobile web site at www.dotsavvy.mobi

The other aspect of the Opera state of mobile web report is that it had an interesting ranking of the top 10 mobile web sites in Kenya. Some time last year, I posted a story on the 10 most popular web sites in Kenya. Its interesting to see as below just how different the ranking stands when it comes to the mobile web usage in Kenya:

Kenya Top 10 Mobile Web Sites (April 2009)

  1. facebook.com
  2. google.com
  3. yahoo.com
  4. wikipedia.org
  5. bbc.co.uk
  6. live.com
  7. waptrick.com
  8. hotmail.com
  9. gamejump.com
  10. eastandard.net

Google Kenya’s Deal Maker.

Published on May 29, 2009 in random. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

Seems that today’s edition of the Business Daily has some great stories on the ICT scene in Kenya. More specifically, they carried a story by Nick Wachira on Isis Nyong’o, Google Kenya’s businesss development manager. Isis is also friend and we have been working with her at Dotsavvy to push Google’s offerings in Kenya. Enjoy the story here >

Internet surfing on mobile phone thriving in Kenya.

Published on May 29, 2009 in random. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , .

According to an article by Mark Okuttah in today’s edition of the Business Daily, Internet surfing on mobile phones is booming Kenya. The article cites recent research by Opera, a cross-platform web browser company that has its software installed on a good number of internet-enabled phones globally. According to the article, Kenya is ranked 4th in Africa for mobile internet web browsing. Clearly, its time for kenyan brands and organizations to start getting mobile compatible web sites developed! Read the full article here >

Zuku announces half price broadband offer.

Published on May 24, 2009 in random. 11 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

This past week, Zuku, the broadband service from Wananchi Online announced a half price offer for new subscribers. This is a time-bound promotion that runs from the 22nd May 2009 to the 7th of June 2009.

The half price offer works  so that new subscribers pay the half the regular price for a period of 6 months from the month that they sign-up. The half price rates are impressively low as follows:

  • Prosurf (256 kbps): Kes. 1,499.00
  • Supersurf (512 kbps): Kes. 2,999.00
  • Megasurf (1 mbps): Kes. 4,999.00

Its possible to sign-up for the service online by visiting this page on the Zuku web site

Safaricom fairy tale gets reality check.

Published on May 22, 2009 in random. 3 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , .

The Safaricom fairy tale is clearly having a reality check. In almost one decade, Safaricom grew from being a low quality Kenyan mobile network with a few thousand subscribers to the most profitable company in East Africa with over 10 million subscribers. However, in the last couple of years, so much has changed in wonderland.

Safaricom (now) has three formidable competitors fighting them – Orange which is backed by France Telecom and Telkom Kenya, YU which is backed by India’s ESSAR Group and Zain Kenya which is backed by Kuwait’s Zain Group (formerly MTC). Over the past year or so, All the four mobile networks announced deep tariff cuts in order to win as much market share as possible.  In Safaricom’s case, this resulted in a price cuts as deep as 40% so as to remain competitive.

In retrospect, a major impact of the tariff cuts is that Safaricom yesterday announced a drop of 23.3% in its pre-tax profits from a 2007 high of Kes. 19.9 billion to 2008 low of Kes. 15.3 billion. Tariff cuts are not the only reason for the major drop in profitability at Safaricom – the politically fueled post-election violence, high taxes, the global recession, fluctuating currencies, and lower average revenue per user (ARPU) all played a key role.

Safaricom’s declining fortunes inform the significant effort that its putting into growing the uptake for its other services, beyond voice. The operator has had to push data and other value added services like M-Pesa aggressively to make up for its lowered margins in voice. It also paid a hefty bill for its 3G license that enables it to offer mobile broadband services – a bold initiative that it has to justify as all its competitors are still offering the slower EDGE/GPRS services.

Going forward, what remains to be seen for the rest of 2009/10 is how well Safaricom will perform in the face of an increasingly challenging marketplace. The “go live” of high speed undersea cables like SEACOM in June 2009 will reduce its international communications costs considerably. It’s also in the process of fully integrating Onecom (the Internet Service Provider it acquired last year) to start offering Safaricom branded business internet services. So, in the face of all these initiatives, maybe, just maybe, the fairy tale isn’t over – at least not just yet.

ICANN conference coming to Kenya in March 2010.

Published on May 22, 2009 in random. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , , , , .

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) was formed 1998 as a not-for-profit public-benefit corporation with participants from all over the world dedicated to keeping the Internet secure, stable and interoperable. ICANN promotes competition and develops policy on the Internet’s unique identifiers.

It has been confirmed this morning that after lengthly meetings last night, ICANN has awarded Kenya the 2010 slot for its Africa conference in March 2010. This is the second time that Kenya has been awarded the event but it lost its 2008 slot due to concerns at the time of the post-election political violence.

The ICANN conference in Kenya is being hosted by the Kenya Network Information Centre (KeNIC) in conjunction with private and public sector organizations. KeNIC is a Kenyan non-profit organization that is charged with managing and operating the .KE ccTLD (Country Code Top Level Domain). KeNIC is key in facilitating the growth of Kenya’s Internet sub-sect and fosters the uptake of ICT’s in the country through a public private partnership (PPP).

Economic survey shows Kenya’s internet and mobile usage grew in 2008.

Published on May 22, 2009 in random. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

According to a just released economic survey by Kenya’s Ministry of Finance, Kenya’s internet and mobile usage grew substantively in 2008 in spite of the negative effects post-election violence and the global economic meltdown.

The figures released by the Ministry of Finance indicate that internet usage grew from 2.9 million in 2007 to 3.4 million in 2008. At the same time, mobile usage grew from 9.3 million subscribers in 2007 to 12.9 million subscribers in 2008.

The survey results are somewhat impressive considering that Kenya’s economic growth has slowed down significantly over the last year. However, the impending “go live” of the SEACOM high speed undersea data cable starting in late June 2009 is expected to reduce international data and voice communication costs to and from Kenya starting this year.

Currently, Kenyan telcos, data network operators and internet service providers are upgrading and expanding their infrastructures country-wide in anticipation of all three high speed undersea data cables (i.e. SEACOM, EASSY and TEAMS) becoming operational by the end of 2010.

As budgets dry up online looks up

Published on May 22, 2009 in random. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , .

According to Marklives.com, despite the global financial slowdown – as nice a way of saying ‘global recession’ as anybody and CNN has been able to come up with – at least one marketing medium will expand its share of the revenue pie, even as others prepare to face cutbacks and closures.

After online ad revenue grew 24% in 2006, 27% in 2007 and 32% in 2008, World Wide Worx researcher Arthur Goldstuck predicts it will grow 32% in 2009. This will see revenue jump from R319 million in 2008 to R419 million this year. More>

Kumo: Already a step behind Google, Yahoo?

Published on May 22, 2009 in internet marketing. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

According to CNET, once again, Microsoft is finding itself beaten to the punch in the search game. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer may be ready to unveil search engine Kumo as early as next week.While it has been readying Kumo for its first public airing–probably at next week’s D: All Things Digital event–Yahoo and Google have already shown off their latest search enhancements. Worse still, their demos show that Redmond’s rivals are heading in some of the same directions as Microsoft itself. More >

Why Google’s recent service outages scare the hell out of me.

Published on May 17, 2009 in random. 5 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , .

I love Google. Their search and online advertising services are simply fantastic! Their Google Apps productivity suite is innovative, and especially their Gmail service has become one of most popular web-based email services. As a matter of fact, our firm has been configuring the same for a good number of our clients to use with their domain names. Thats why, for the first time, I am really worried about Google’s recent service outages.

Google is renown for having iron clad services. They have the world’s most popular search engine. Personally, I don’t know how I could run my business without Google Search – its simply indispensable. Last week, I had a real hard time accessing Google’s Kenya web site at http://www.google.co.ke. For some time there, it was impossible to access the home page. At the same time, the Google Uganda web site at http://www.google.co.ug was (apparently?) hacked this past week for a period of time (Google?! Hacked?! Amazing!). Then, on Thursday this past week, millions of Google Apps users we’re affected world wide making it impossible for them to work online.

In a nutshell, it doesn’t look good. It would seem that there are some very serious service delivery issues popping up at Google. Could these be a result of growing too fast and not putting in the right controls to ensure reliable service delivery? At the same time, as more and more businesses start to rely on Google’s services for mission-critical tasks, could this be the first indicator of the risks inherent in using “the cloud” exclusively? I get the impression that cloud computing, the emerging paradigm where applications run online, instead of using “in-house” client and server infrastructure, may not be ready for prime time.

Google’s recent problems are also worrying because a large number of organizations and individuals in Kenya are turning to “cloud” offerings for core operational functions. In light of the impending “go live” for the SEACOM and TEAMS high speed under sea data cables in Kenya, we can expect that faster and better internet access will result in more and more organizations signing up for cloud-based services as the cost-effective and highly efficient alternative.

Going forward, I see a very urgent need for organizations and individuals to take a long hard look at the pros and cons of using cloud-based services such as Google Apps. For sure, the services are great but one needs to have contingency measures for the inevitable when they fail. There are lots of free and open source softwares that businesses and individuals can use for their productivity needs without relying entirely on the cloud, for now at least.