This is my first article in more than 6 months, it also happens to be a unique one for two other reasons: firstly, I am writing from a personal perspective, unlike the ordinary subject-matter content I write, and secondly, the issues I raise here are the two key challenges I have identified in my experience […]
The name ‘Edward Snowden’ has become familiar with many people. His revelations about the lengths to which government intelligence agencies in the US and UK have gone to in order to gather information about people’s actions online came as a shock to many. Some have since come to regard him as a hero, whereas others […]
I remember on university graduation, my father bought me a Nokia 9210i (Communicator) it was a timely upgrade from the Psion 3C I had bought from my friend in England which got me very fascinated with the future of mobile computing. At the time I was in the leading edge of mobile application development (I […]
A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of co-moderating two panels at the iHub during the monthly Nairobi Research Buzz event hosted by iHub Research and Microsoft. The theme was ‘Entrepreneurship 101′ based on research the iHub Research team is conducting on tech entrepreneurship in Kenya. There were two separate panels, the first consisting of […]
Written by Lauren Rosenberg (see below for her bio) Securing urban economic growth in new economy is less dependent on access to physical resources and increasingly dependent on attracting talent who can create economically useful new ideas. Urban theorist Richard Florida calls this type of talent the ‘Creative Class’ – knowledge workers who derive a […]
Kenya has come to be closely associated with technology innovation and entrepreneurship, particularly in the area of mobile technology, raising the country’s profile internationally as one of the up-coming tech hubs in Sub-Saharan Africa. The country has even been dubbed the ‘Silicon Savannah’, a term that embodies the aspirations of the country to dominate technology […]
On March 4th Kenyans went to the polls to elect a new government to steer the country over the next 5 years. One of the candidates, Mr. Uhuru Kenyatta, who subsequently won the election with his Jubilee Coalition, had made a daring campaign promise that many wondered if he would deliver on – to equip every […]
It is a well-documented fact that Africa is growing at a tremendous rate and there is no day that goes by without a story about the continent’s economic rise from all major news publishers. The stories are largely based around natural resources and large infrastructure projects. The stories have also involved a diverse group of […]
Creating a viable mobile money service is fundamentally a question of marketing (driving appropriate use cases tapping into clear customer pain points) and distribution (creating a sufficiently dense, liquid agent network). But success on both fronts requires getting to scale quickly: on the marketing side because payment solutions are only really useful if enough other people and businesses […]