gmeltdown

Two week old context On the Saturday of December 4th 2010, I fought my way out of bed to make it on time for Mindspeak with Robert (Bob) William Collymore. Bob has been Safaricom’s Chief Executive Officer from October 2010 and many Kenyans were curious to hear ‘anything’ from him at the increasingly popular event.  Mindspeak is an event organized monthly on Saturday mornings by Mr. Aly Khan Satchu  (Chief Executive Officer of Rich.co.ke). The venue for the event is  usually at the Nu Metro cinema, Westgate Mall in Nairobi’s Westlands area. The MindSpeak happened only two months after another insightful event I wrote about on ‘ Reflections with Michael Joseph of Safaricom’ at the iHub Nairobi. A number of bloggers including James Murua , Tovuti Sanifu and UjenziBora have chronicled their observations at the MindSpeak event with Bob Collymore. A lot of the attendants were also tweeting the event live and their live feed was captured by afrinnovator using CoveritLive....

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...

With the anticipated landing of various undersea fiber optic cables at our coast, there is bound to be a radical transformation of the average corporate IT infrastructure. Many of the of larger regionally diversified organizations in Kenya have over the years invested heavily in Wide Area Network (WAN) equipment. The investments in hardware havealso gone along with expensive bandwidth provision contracts. This has largely been in pursuit of reliable data connectivity across their organization's branches. Government parastatals form a bulk of such organizations in addition to banks, and several of the larger local companies. Also included among the soon-to-be affected are multinational companies, international NGOs and intergovernmental agencies who have elaborate equipment setups and contracts based on the ageing premise that data connectivity in the country is slow, expensive and unreliable. Fortunately or unfortunately, the above organizations will very soon find themselves havin...