At literally the beginning of this year, we covered Mocality, a startup based in Kenya that is aiming to create the largest business directory in Sub Saharan Africa. Mocality (@mocality) began it’s operations in Kenya with a vision of moving to other parts of the country and eventually other Sub Saharan Africa countries. In the months since we first featured Mocality, it would appear that they have been pretty busy.

Mocality is a Kenyan business directory designed for the mobile phone. It will expand into many other countries in Africa, becoming the largest business directory in Africa. Mocality offers business owners a whole range of exciting tools to promote and expand their businesses.

We managed to catch up briefly with Mocality’s CEO, Stefan (@smagdali), at their launch party/cocktail and had a quick chat on Mocality, what it is, where they are, what their future is and other general matters concerning small businesses on the web, spurring innovation culture and mobile price wars.

Currently the team has managed to list over 60,000 businesses in Nairobi on their service. The most interesting thing about this number is that a good percentage of the listings are small businesses. According to Stefan, the Mocality CEO, roughly two thirds of the listings are businesses that previously had absolutely no presence on the internet! Check out this cool visualization of how Mocality has grown the number of listings from 0 to 60000 plus:

The amazing thing about this is that you have the smallest businesses – local salons, barber shops, boutiques – now having some presence online and that means that web search engines can also index them and hence they automatically become web searchable! For example, we tried a Google search for ‘salon buru buru‘ and sure enough the first hit was a listing Mocality!

One can obviously see this as a potential game changer for Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs) in Nairobi as now they have some presence on the Internet, maybe the next thing is web advertising for these small businesses. As Stefan put it in our chat below, (paraphrasing) ‘The web changes the economics of creating a directory…’, now small are not shut out of listing because of not having a marketing team and budget sufficient for getting them on a print directory such as the yellow pages.

Mocality provides a pretty simple, neat and useful service. Erik (Whiteafrican) gave a good overview of Mocality on his blog.

It’s not often that you hear of a tech startup from South Africa who chooses to build and deploy their product to Kenya first. In fact, I’ve never heard of such a thing. However, that is just what is happening with Mocality, a mobile and web-based business listings and directory application built for Africa.

Memeburn also has a great piece on Mocality:

Their philosophy is that “we’ll make money when we can consistently generate more customers for our member businesses, and help consumers find what they want more efficiently.”