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....

Much has been written about Safaricom's success in Kenya. From voice, to sms revenues, to money transfer and data services, safaricom has clearly demonstrated the power of leveraging on traditional revenue streams to generate new value propositions. Michael Joseph and his troops are successfully integrating their business empire with the larger Kenyan economy. So far this has the obvious result of apparently sustained competitiveness for Safaricom. Safaricom's new partnership with Equity Bank whose EAZZY 24/7 service was at some point  pre-positioned as a serious competitor to the M-PESA service speaks volumes. Seemingly there is a limit to how far a large company in Kenya can pursue an aggressive product diversification strategy before having to 'sleep' with its other would-be serious competitors. Such a limit would then appear as the beginning of hope for companies competing with Safaricom in any of the sectors it has ventured into. Indeed, Safaricom's growth r...

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...