gmeltdown

In the last year or so Nairobi has been treated to a multiplicity of competitions and contest organised to promote local technology entrepreneurship. Depending on whether the chicken or the egg came first, one would argue that this has contributed to significant buzz and interest around East Africa’s growing tech start-up culture. That the region is experiencing growth in the tech start-up scene is difficult to dispute. Doubting people only need to consider the tech scene’s coverage from global media houses such as The Next Web ( Mnachi Mdema’s article and Francis Pisani’s artice ), the ReadWriteWeb ( Curt Hopkins article ), BBC ( Egon Cossou’s article ), Forbes.com and CNN ( Dayo Olopade’s article ) - to name a few. Some of the entrepreneur competitions in the last one year that I can barely recall are IPO48 , Garage48 , App Circus , Huawei developer challenge . Some of the contests take a more global scope such as Nokia’s Create for millions Contest , infoDev’s Top ...

Emerging battle fronts for Safaricom, Orange, Yu  and Airtel Kenya It has been correctly observed that for the Kenyan Mobile Network Operator (MNO) the voice market is only a cash cow in a wide array of business ventures and revenue streams.  Last week I wrote about the epic battle between Safaricom and Airtel in the voice and Short Message Service (SMS) market. I shall call these engagements battles as they appear to be quite a number along a couple of frontiers that our MNOs will need to fight it out over time. This is all in the bigger, long term war among the operators for favor with Kenyan consumers. In this post, I shall share some quick, simple thoughts on the various market frontiers The mobile money frontier Safaricom’s M-PESA service in Kenya has in the past two years become a globally acclaimed success . It has revolutionised lives in Kenya. The country has also become an attractive market for products building on innovations around mobile money. All the othe...

Tweet  triggered In the afternoon of 23rd October 2010 I posted this micro-post (tweet): “ Thinking telcos' price competition for voice market is contributing silently to Kenya's knowledge economy ” As usual I got a couple of reactions. The reactions set off my intentions to say more and justify my thoughts - as it were, in this article, outside twitter’s confinement of 140 characters. A knowledge based economy can be viewed from Peter Drucker’s work in the 90s as “ an economy based on intangible goods and intellectual capital as the economic driver ”. To also quote Vern McCorkle the late publisher of Alaska Business Monthly magazine, “ In our traditional capitalist economy, a knowledge-based economy stands in sharp contrast to long-established economic theory because it relies upon innovation and intellectual capital rather than hard goods to generate economic value. ” Perhaps in the tweet I should have used the phrase knowledge-based economy as opposed to knowledge ec...