gmeltdown

Social media giant, Facebook estimates that there are 4 to 4.5 million Kenyans who are its monthly active users. Facebook usage patterns in Kenya are arguably strong indicators of the country’s internet connectivity patterns. Over 60% of Kenyans (2.5 - 3 million) accessing facebook at least once a month are based in Nairobi.  This is very telling especially as Kenya's second internet exchange point in Mombasa struggles to make business sense due to having too few users. I used the Facebook audience insights tool to rank Kenyan cities and towns according to their monthly active users on Facebook. Below are the top 20 cities and towns in Kenya as at 9th June 2015. Rank City / Town Facebook Monthly Active People % of Kenya Facebook Monthly Active People 1 Nairobi 2.5m - 3m 60.0% 2 Mombasa 300K - 350K 8.0% 3 Eldoret 50K - 200K 4.0% 4 Kisumu 100K - 150K 3.0% 5 Nakuru 100K - 150K 3.0% 6 Thika 50K - 60K 1.0% 7 M...

This week there was much buzz about the Kenya 2009 census results, the on-going contest among our mobile networks, and other developments in the Kenyan online content space. What may have passed some of us in the midst of the noise is the announcement of one category of winners for the first round of Local Content and Software Applications Grant . As earlier mentioned on this blog, the initial processes of the grant had a number of useful insights if the ICT Board's post-application survey was to go by. Applicants for the grant in the government information portal / firms category were announced on 31st August 2010. In this category, seven proposals were chosen from a list of 166 proposals by firms according to the ICT Board's  press statement . The seven proposals were Octopus Solutions Limited -  HIV and AIDS in the workplace e-Learing Course - To assist implementation of the HIV and AIDS work place policy among civil servants Infotrack Strategic Solutions Ltd -...

Many Kenyan techies did not have a very normal weekend of 17th to 18th July 2010. For the simple reason that the deadline for submitting applications for the 'tandaa' grants was the Monday following (19th July). They had to do last minute write ups and touch ups on their local content grant proposals. Of course there had been a whole month or so to prepare and submit the proposals comfortably. Needless to say our last minute action culture did not excuse even some of the most organized amongt us. According to the ICT board,   of 1,800 applicants, 667 successfully completed the application process.   Indeed it is likely that many of the 1100 or so proposals that were not completed were merely time barred. Aside from our 'nice' culture, it may not be too early to give the Kenya ICT board a pat on the back for some noticeable milestones they have achieved with the first round of the local digital content grant financed by one of Kenya's many World Bank loa...

The arrival in 2009 of international submarine fibre optic data links to East Africa is anticipated to catalyse a digital revolution in the region. For a long time access to any international digital content has been expensively dependent on satellite solution providers. With the drastic fall of internet bandwith costs already implemented by some of the terrestrial digital infrastructure providers like KDN , Kenyans and East Africans in general are in for completely overhauled digital content industry. So significant was the anticipated change in content delivery that the Kenya ICT Board and individuals like Dr. Bitange Ndemo were aggressively evangelizing Kenyan youth and entrepreneurs to indulge en masse in the digital content generation industry.  The noble campaign to make Kenyans bridge their international content exchange deficit may also have had a side effect of forgetting to address some of the long standing content importation challenges.  A majority of Kenyans c...

Many of us Kenyans are yet to come to terms with our increasing addiction to online social networking (mostly facebook for now). It is even more interesting to see how many more local web pages within such social sites are popping up. More relevant events (online or otherwise), groups, blogs and community forums are being set up by the day for the most typical Kenyan contexts. Perhaps this is a little of what the Kenya ICT Board seems to be evangelizing - local content . With phenomena like Google Maps, FaceBook and a growing catalog of Kenyan blogs, we can certainly associate with the information age more closely than five years ago. Gone are the times when local content was limited to struggling web portals run by internet service providers (ISPs) - the likes of Kenyaweb, and African online, etc. Let us leave the fate of the traditional ISPs in the advent of Mobile phone operators, Undersea cables and the National Optical Fiber Backbone Infrastructure ( NOFBI )for another day. The st...