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MobileMonday Kenya Meeting Summary: 16th August 2010

Published on August 16, 2010 in Uncategorized. 6 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

This evening was the the fifth meeting of the MobileMonday Kenya Chapter at the iHub. Below is a summary of the presentations made:

Jacaranda Health’s mobile maternal health solutions.

Jane of Jacaranda Health (JH) spoke about how they are using mobile technology to provide low cost and high quality maternal healthcare in Kenya. JH is targetting 4 million urban poor in East Africa with their offerings. Theirs is innovate maternal and neonatal healthcare for low income earners. JH is currently focussed on peri-urban Nairobi areas such as Umoja, Kasarani, etc. JH’s strategy is to use clinical innovation, systems innovation, and business innovation.

The JH Information System consists of EHR/EMR, mobile applications, forms, education/alerts and banking. It uses existing mobile technologies to deliver services such as SMS-based patient outreach, electronic medical/health records, data collection and mobile payments/banking as well as pre-payment cards. The focus of JH on android devices via tablets, netbooks or smartphones. More details can be found on their web site at www.jacarandahealth.org.

iChecki android app from the Xrystalgenius Team.

The team from Xrystalgenius who recent graduated from Starthmore University presented their “iChecki” matatu tracking android application. These students we’re impressive and had attended MIT’s AITI programme and also won US$ 3,000.00 in a Google sponsored competition. The idea behind iChecki is that there are over 45,000 matatus in Kenya and a 1/3 of of these are in Nairobi. However, no matatu schedules exist and as such passengers have to guess when they can expect transport to come their way.

The team from iChecki identified that Safaricom’s high speed 3G network is a key driver for mobile services, and high-end mobile phones are getting cheaper by the day. Since the Kenyan mobile market is varie, iChecki has been designed to serve high-end android mobiles, mid-level mobiles through mobile web and low-end mobiles using USSD/SMS. Therefore, iChecki is also multi-platform making it accessible to all.

In addition, since Safaricom has 16+ million mobile users, they hope to achieve 10% penetration within 3 years. iChecki integrates Google Maps, GPS and mobile telephony to power its functionalities. Users send requests which iChecki then processes using using GPS, LAI (Location Area Identity) and smart predictive algorithms. A reply is then send to give the approximate time that a designated matatu will arrive.

The goals are that year one will be to get people to use it (critical mass). Year two will be about familiarization and maturity. Year three will be for iCheck to become profitable. The plan is for iChecki to generate revenues from advertising, equipment sales and ultimately service charges. In the future, iChecki will use GSM to track, bus bookings, personal tracking solutions, and services for courier companies so that their customers can track their packages are.

Pay.Zunguka from Symbiotic Media.

Mbugua of Symbiotic Media talked about Pay.Zunguka, a micro-payments mobile platform. Pay.Zunguka is targeting markets that require micro-payments such as music downloads for instance. Its about also going to the bottom of the pyramid. The solution works by integrating with mobile networks. Case in point for micro-payments for instance in selling bite-sized news content instead of a full newspaper.

A concern of Mbugua’s is that mobile network operators take over 50% of revenue if content is billed for through them. Pay.Zunguka aims to fill a gap in this respect by leaving most of the revenues with the content producer. This could be hyper-local content that is contextually relevant for users and buyers, giving them a strong incentive to pay for it. Another opportunity is giving users the ability to pay for social gaming on social networks, without having to use a credit card.  Pay.Zunguka is also being tested for bank transactions as well as point of sale (POS) integration.

The Safaricom Innovation Forum.

Al Kags spoke about the Safaricom Innovation Board. More information on this initiative here>

GKenya from Google.

Chris Kiagiri, Technical Lead of of Google Kenya announced GKenya at Mobile Monday Kenya. More details on this event here>

Facebook Photo Album from the Meeting.

You can view photos from the 5th MobileMonday Kenya meeting here>

Next MobileMonday Kenya Meeting.

The next MobileMonday is the 13th of September 2010.

The “5C’s” for a successful web site.

Published on March 28, 2010 in Uncategorized. 12 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , .

I hear it all the time – people complaining that their web sites are not delivering the results they expected. Usually, this is after they have spent thousands or even millions of shillings and are not seeing an iota of the massive returns they had hoped for. So, what went wrong?! More often than not, its not what went wrong but rather their web sites we’re broken from the time they went live. By saying that these web sites are broken I mean that they do not conform to five key principles that are needed for a web site to succeed. I call these the “5C’s” for a successful web site.

The first C for a successful web site is content. Content is the very thing that keeps people coming back to a web site, time and again. It is not just the amount of content that matters but also how frequently it is updated and whether its relevant to the targeted audiences. In addition, content is not just limited to text but rather also includes video, audio and other forms of content for download. The funny thing is that most businesses do have lots of content but they don’t put it on their web sites, or they don’t have it online in the right quantity, or quality.

The second C is for commerce. A business web site has to have a commercial focus if it is to be successful. This can be by driving direct sales online through e-commerce or could be lead generation that eventually leads to offline sales via a sales force or call center. This means that a web site has to be built with this focus in mind so that users are explicitly or implicitly channeled to a sales oriented action. One of the emerging ways of doing this is having real-time live chat on your web site to help customers and prospects make a buying decision. Its also about ensuring you invest in internet marketing to increase the visibility of your web site.

The third C is for community. Today, its almost a no-brainer that your web site needs to be about more than your corporate profile and offerings. Successful web sites have features or extensions that encourage a sense of community. These features can be a blog, discussions forums, opinion polls and online surveys. They can also be links to social media such as Facebook fan pages, Twitter profiles, YouTube channels and LinkedIn groups. Ultimately, its about engaging customers and prospects in an interactive manner where they “belong” to your web site.

The fourth C is for context. Context is basis upon which your web site  is relevant or not to your target audiences. If your web site is not contextually relevant whether its for product information or media downloads then it will not succeed. The easiest way to ensure that context is achieved on a web site is to ask the users what they would like to see on the web site. From this point of view, email feedback forms and even social media can provide low-cost and effective user feedback channels.

The fifth and final C is for continuity. More often than not, web sites go live but are not maintained or managed for continuity. What I mean in this respect, for instance, has the very real prospect of a web site being hacked at any given time been considered? The consequence of such an action could be loss of business and trust, especially where services such as e-commerce are concerned. Yes, continuity is exceptionally important for a successful web site which means regular backups, up-to-date back-end applications, secure hosting and proactive monitoring need to be the order of the day.