Mocality.Co.Ke aims to become Africa’s largest business directory for the mobile phone. The venture by MIH Internet Africa, follows their other web projects Haiya and the recently launched Kalahari. Mocality has started operating in beta in Nairobi, Kenya earlier this year and will continue to expand before branching out to other countries. Nairobi being a great centre for business on the mobile, given the great success of mobile money transfer service M-Pesa from Safaricom, among other factors.

Mocality is a business directory designed specifically for the mobile phone. It is the result of an enormous amount of research into the activity and needs of Africa as a continent and Kenya specifically. Its aim is to generate a massive base of local content that is accessible from your mobile phone and easy to search. It’s designed to help you find whatever you need in Nairobi without having to look it up in a book or even use a computer. It’s a wealth of local information in your pocket, wherever you are, any time of the day.

Mocality offers business owners several incentives to get registered with the service:

• Ability to create a contact list of customers and suppliers
• SMS your contacts for free
• Send anyone your mobile business card
• Get a free mobile website
• Add extra info to market your business

At launch, they employed the use of Mocality ambassadors, who went out into small and medium sized businesses in Nairobi to evangelise the service and its features. This approach, and their other marketing efforts including their stand at the Nairobi International Trade Fair in October has seen them register over 4,000 businesses in Nairobi since their launch in April 2009. The main areas from which the businesses come from are in Nairobi’s Central Business District, which houses thousands of small businesses within it. Within all of Nairobi, there are hundreds of thousands of small and medium businesses and service providers who could benefit from this service. A look at the main categories according on Mocality reveals: Services, Shopping, Internet & Technology and Health and Beauty as some of the highest populated categories.

The functionality of Mocality is pretty impressive. Registered Business owners get 400 free SMSs to send every month and can send 2000 of their business cards via text message for free through Mocality. The powerful SMS functionality can be used to Add Customers and suppliers, register other businesses or add addresses. In addition, you can send invites to unregistered businesses from Mocality. There’s no limit to how many suppliers and customers you can store on Mocality.

Think of it as backing up your business address book in the cloud, and being given the ability to communicate with them for free. You can also perform searches for other businesses via SMS with the returning SMS providing the answer to your query. Considering that SMSs in this case are only charged on sending, not receiving, that isn’t too bad of a deal. You can’t currently have more than 400 SMSs, but if the market shows interest, they will consider letting people ‘top up’ with SMS credits.

Each business, once registered and validated, is given it’s very own mobile website page within Mocality where it can share its physical address, cellphone number and link to a website or other online presence. One of the other smart functionalities of Mocality is it’s mapping. Built on top of Google Maps, It shows the direction of each business based on the physical address given. Businesses are validated based on mobile number, and with new regulations in place to try and make it compulsory to register SIM cards with personal identification( It’s already happening in countries across Africa) this may be an added advantage for security in future. You can register multiple businesses on one mobile phone number.

Business owners are able to list their specific products and services and these are fully searchable within Mocality.It is also possible, if one  Mocality’s search engine is a strong part of  its offering helping connect customers and businesses. The only cost incurred so far within all of this is the network data charges for connecting to Mocality on a mobile phone, or internet charges on a PC.

Mocality is set to roll out a J2ME Mobile Application, which is now in beta testing phase, that will see the business tools and communication of Mocality become even cheaper and more available on handsets.

It’s safe to say the future looks bright for Mocality and with this kind of traction, they will reach their aim of being Africa’s largest mobile phone directory very soon.

Find Mocality on Twitter, Facebook and Their Official Blog.