This is an a random video chat that I had about a week ago with InMobi’s Ankit Rawal in Bangalore, India. I recently joined InMobi to head up sales in Africa and I was in Bangalore for a conference and training. Ankit has been at InMobi for over three years and therefore is one of the oldest employees at InMobi – from the days that they used to be known as mKhoj and were based in Mumbai (before relocating to Bangalore).
Ankit was largely responsible for getting InMobi into Africa albeit remotely from India and has key insights on what makes mobile marketing tick here. In addition, as one of the first team members at InMobi, he has seen what was a small bootstrapped start-up grow into the world’s second largest mobile ad network with over 500 employees globally which secured US$ 200 Million funding from SoftBank late last year. Enjoy the chat below where we talked Mobile Marketing In Africa, Bangalore as India’s technology hub and the rise of Inmobi.
This is an interview I had yesterday with Philip Nyamweya of iPay which is a mobile and internet payments service in Kenya. iPay goes a step further by also offering a payment solution that integrates with Kenswitch, the financial switching network that connects a good number of banks in Kenya. This means that users can use their debit cards to make online payments via iPay for as long their bank accounts are with banks that are connected to Kenswitch. Enjoy the interview as below:
Below is an interview I had with David Ngugi of NyeriOnline.com. I mentioned this web site in a list of Kenya’s top local web sites a few years ago and was quite surprised at the time as to how high it was ranked. NyeriOnline.com basically covers all sorts of content from Nyeri County which is one of the most vibrant commercial hubs in Central Kenya. In addition, David, who also happens to run an end-to-end ICT services business has managed to develop NyeriOnline.com into a fully fledged online portal that has professional writers on-board to generate content from the County – this is a demonstration of the increasing value of not just local content, but rather hyper-local content within the context of Kenya’s fast growing digital media space. I caught up with David during the Mocality Business Conference that was held in Nyeri at the Green Hills Hotel on the 30th of November 2011.
This is a video of a short but fun random chat that I had with Michael Pedersen of Uhasibu a couple of weeks ago at the inaugural WordCamp Kenya 2011 that was held at Crayfish Camp in Naivasha. In a nutshell, we talked about the pros and cons of WordPress in Kenya and the rest of Africa as a blogging and business web site platform, as well as why we had opted to attend WordCamp Kenya 2011. Initially, I did NOT plan to post this online but it just seemed to “work” really well when I watched it (and also got Michael’s consent) so here it is! Enjoy
This weekend I attended the first ever WordCamp Kenya at Crayfish Camp in Naivasha. The event which is focused on all things WordPress was well attended with over 100 participants, mostly from Nairobi. I had an opportunity to interview Kelvin Jayanoris who is one of the founders behind DukaPress.
DukaPress is an open source e-commerce plugin for WordPress that has been developed from scratch in Kenya. DukaPress was launched in August 2010 and since then has been downloaded more than 20,000 times from WordPress. It is NOT the most popular e-commerce plugin (yet) for WordPress but it is doing really well by being adopted by businesses globally, even though it was initially developed for businesses in Kenya to deploy e-commerce on their web sites.
DukaPress was built from the ground up by Kelvin and his team to offer Kenyan businesses a localized and no frills WordPress e-commerce plugin that could be used for all sorts of payment platforms including Safaricom’s M-Pesa as well as other International platforms such PayPal. In the interview, Kelvin told me that they make money from DukaPress when their mostly International customers engage them to do simple or extensive customizations to meet their unique e-commerce needs. You can find out more about Kelvin and DukaPress in the interview below. Enjoy!
Mocality, Kenya’s largest online and mobile business directory with over 130,000 businesses listed to-date is entering the online daily deals space by next week. Globally, online daily deals are dominated by the likes of Groupon, which has an impending IPO in the US and LivingSocial, which has recently launched in South Africa.
The most compelling aspect of Mocality expanding its offerings beyond its core online and mobile business directory listings is that it is able to leverage its reach in terms of businesses listed (all 130,000+ of them) as well as it’s over 10,000 active agents on the ground listing businesses nationwide.
This “mix” of Mocality agents and businesses means that it has two key factors that give it the ability to scale up in Kenya’s online daily deals space very quickly, and probably, very easily. 10,000 agents who can sign up daily deals from businesses all over Kenya whether they are a part of the Mocality business directory or not. Secondly, 130,000+ listed businesses in the Mocality directory means that it has an ever growing number of prospective customers ready to sign-up for daily deals. It’s a potent mix indeed!
On the flip side, Mocality is not the first business in the online daily deals business in Kenya. The nascent online daily deals space has to-date been dominated by Rupu and Zetu with varying degrees of success. Personally, I have only ever purchased one daily deal via Zetu and it was a relatively easy and pain-free process. Ironically, I forgot to remit my deal in time even though I had paid for it via mobile money a few weeks earlier – I wonder how many other people do the same forgetful thing!
Below is a video interview I had with Joshua Mwaniki who is the Country Manager for Mocality in Kenya on the impending launch of Mocality Deals. In addition to the deals, Mocality recently also launched mobile apps for both Apple’s iOS (i.e. iPhone, iPad and iPod devices) on the App Store and Google’s Android on the Google Market. Enjoy the interview!
This is a video interview I had with Johann Van Tonder yesterday at the iHub in Nairobi. Johann is the Internet Strategist at Naspers Labs and he has an interesting and long professional career in South Africa’s media and Internet space. Naspers Labs is sort of a skunkworks for Naspers in South Africa that works on various Internet business projects and initiatives, off the radar.
In the interview, Johann was unable to disclose much about why he was in Kenya and what plans they have for launching some of their initiatives here. However, one thing is certain, in a few months time Naspers Labs will launch at least one of their projects in Kenya, and even possibly in Nigeria. He did however note that Kenya is truly an exciting and fast growing market for technology services across the board.
For those of you who may not know, Naspers is one of world’s leading media groups with operations mostly in emerging markets. Naspers owns MIH Internet Holdings which in turn owns and operates Internet brands such as Dealfish which I happen to run in East Africa. Naspers is quite a large business with lots of diverse interests on a global scale. Therefore, the two-year old Naspers Labs is just one of their many initiatives that aims to build out Internet businesses in Africa and beyond. Enjoy the interview!
This has been a long time coming and I was really wondering when it was going to start happening in Kenya. It seems that (finally!) QR codes are catching on in Kenya. Well, maybe not really catching on but lets just say its starting to happen. I was recently in Europe and traveled through a bunch of countries in both Eastern and Western Europe and one thing that was common was the use QR codes on all sorts of advertising. More specifically, you would see QR codes on shop fronts, posters, newspaper ads, magazine ads, billboards, and even napkins at restaurants. Yes, QR codes have gone very mainstream in the rest of the world and as usual Africa tends to lack behind, until now that is, or at least NOT in Kenya?
But, what is a QR Code? In a nutshell (and according to Wikipedia), “A QR code (abbreviated from Quick Response code) is a specific matrix barcode (or two-dimensional code) that is readable by dedicated QR barcode readers and camera telephones. The code consists of black modules arranged in a square pattern on a white background. The information encoded may be text, URL, or other data.” In summation, a QR Code is normally accessed using a mobile phone and when “read” using your phone’s camera and a QR code reader software it takes you to a web site address. This web site address would normally be one that is marketing a service or product, as advertised. I first found out about QR codes around 2 years ago and even did a blog post here on this blog.
So, the reason behind this blog post is that for the very first time (in my knowledge?) I saw a brand marketing in Kenyan media using a QR code. The brand in question is the luxury range of Fairmont Hotels who had a print ad with a QR code in today’s edition of the Business Daily Newspaper as below:
On scanning the QR code, one is taken to the promotional Fairmont YouTube video as below:
Now, the whole promotional campaign by Fairmont using this QR code is indeed global so it’s not one that started in Kenya. However, that they opted to use the QR code in their advertising in Kenya shows that this market has clearly “arrived” from a digital marketing perspective. One of the major caveats (in the pre-broadband past) has been the lack of fast and affordable Internet access as well as (advanced) feature or smartphones that could support such a digital marketing campaign in Kenya – consider the fact that the “destination” at the end of the QR code is a YouTube video and you start to get the picture. So, as a call to action for more local and ambitious brands in Kenya, its time to try some print-to-digital marketing using QR codes, as Fairmont have just demonstrated.
This is the last of four interviews I had last week at Pivot25. This one was with Mikul Shah who is the Founder and CEO of Eat Out. Eat Out is a web site that provides comprehensive information on restaurants in Nairobi as well as reservation services and special discounts for customers. In a nutshell, Eat Out helps restaurants generate interest and eventually business. In addition, existing and prospective customers can find and explore the restaurant scene in Nairobi via Eat Out.
Eat Out was one of the finalists at Pivot25 although they did not win their highly competitive category. However, they have made already won several awards over the past year or so and have even become profitable in under a year with limited funding.
In the interview below, Mikul talks about their plans to launch Eat Out mobile which they expect to extend their reach in the Kenyan marketplace. In addition, he is currently in discussions with Nokia and Equity Bank and hopes to achieve strategic partnerships that will help Eat Out become an even bigger success in Kenya.
I had a video interview as below last week with John Waibochi of VirtualCity at Pivot25 in Nairobi, Kenya. John and VirtualCity are probably best known on a global basis for winning the Nokia Challenge last year where their mobile-based supply chain application won them US$ 1 Million from a field of numerous other global competitors. In the process, they put Kenya and Africa on the global stage for innovative mobile applications, once again, in the footsteps of Ushahidi.
John shared some perspectives on what he thinks about mobile apps and the mobile ecosystem in Kenya, as well as the broader East African region. He generally thinks that within the next couple of years, East Africa will see the arrival of mobile apps that could be as globally successful based on the presentations he saw at Pivot25.
He also felt that mobile app developers in the East African region need to focus on apps that can be commercialized but not through advertising revenue as this has not been successful to-date. Lastly, he also felt that there were good prospects for social apps focussed on development in Africa but the developers behind them need to really see how they can also benefit from them since they would need to be targetted at the public sector and non-profits.
