gmeltdown

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 -...

Today morning the Kenya ICT Board through its Tandaa Kenya newsletter  shared the results of a survey it administered on its grants application process. The survey was administered to applicants of the Local digital Content Grant a day after the proposal application deadline expired. Some highlights of the results were shared through the newsletter and also mentioned in Moses Kemibaro's blog including the following :- Barely 15% of lead contacts for applicants were female < Affirmative action needed?  77.9% of those who participated were satisfied with the grant application process (more than half of these were  very satisfied ) < Confirmation of sentiments in my earlier post 20% of those who participated had attended a  Tandaa Symposium   < More effort might be required to interest more professionals and entrepreneurs in the Kenya ICT Board activities 369 (55%) of the 667 completed applications were made on the last day. < Explan...

Many Kenyans still believe that 'their' Safaricom owns the patents to the M-PESA innovation. Some Kenyans even claim that Safaricom hijacked their idea and developed it into M-PESA - a court case was once reported on this. The reality being that the system  was 'developed' by Sagentia on behalf of Vodafone, it goes without saying that the corresponding intellectual property (IP) does not belong to Safaricom. That is also not to forget that Kenya has enough software development capacity to build such a system on a robust platform. Safaricom is paying patent fees to Vodafone just like any other network operator who will wish to use the money transfer platform. It might help for Michael Joseph to clarify if any benefits accrue to himself or others in Safaricom specifically for accepting to be the test platform for "Vodafone's innovation". Such a clarification should of course address the opportunity cost of a more direct contribution to Kenya's knowl...

It has been said, quite often that there is by far more talk about national paperwork on everything development than actual execution of development agenda in Kenya. Such paperwork will be called national strategy, national policy, national plan of operations, national assessment, national report and everything else national that can be put on paper. Of course developing the paperwork requires consensus building , which in turn requires government officers, bi lateral partners, UN bodies, solution vendors among other stakeholders to deliberate and dine in exotic hotels. The stakeholder meetings will be called workshops, seminars, conferences, trainings, and any other name that represents a group of privileged people who do not normally meet at their routine work places to say the same things over and over again. Needless to say, participants of such meetings also have to draw a handsome allowance to facilitate the temporary displacement from their normal work station. The stak...

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...