Digital and its benefits are not new to any of us. Looking back at the success of 2011 it is evident that in Africa internet accessibility is drastically increasing with mobile devices driving the majority of this growth. As this continues to take place, the importance of monitoring and measuring online performance grows as more people throughout Africa get connected.

On the continent, online reputation management (ORM) is advancing in Southern Africa; however there is a lot more room for growth in the rest of Africa. On the web it has emerged as a new frontier with some uncertainty but many stakeholders look at ORM as, at best, a form of risk management. However, ORM is equally a form of risk management as it should be a form of opportunity spotting and possibly even more.

By focusing on three key stakeholders namely, businesses; consumers and governments it is interesting to see how each of them have the potential to embrace online reputation management to maximise their impact.

African Business: From FMCGs to Start-ups

Focusing on the risk elements of a business can be very limiting. For instance, one of the main benefits of online conversation is the fact that it is user generated. People are constantly having conversations with their colleagues, peers and brands about various topics. Not only is this information unbiased but it is recorded beyond geographical boundaries helping provide deeper insights into the market and consumer behaviour and perception. Another added benefit is not only can this conversation be accessed week-by-week but it can also be used to identify trends one year within the market. A case in point would be to examine the sentiment of consumers of a big Pan African name brand like OMO detergent or another fast moving consumer good and see how that changed a year after they began social media.

Entrepreneurship in Africa is definitely one of the driving forces of any private sector in an African economy. Monitoring online conversation provides entrepreneurs with market insight at a much affordable price when compared to conducting fully-fledged surveys. It helps small businesses think smarter and use innovation they get from using technology that searches across the web for their consumers who are writing and speaking about them.

This provides an opportunity to outwit competition by making calculated decisions based on opportunities identified through online conversation. A case in point may be a pair of users discussing where to buy insurance from, though speaking about a larger healthcare provider, a salesperson can take the opportunity to share their perspective and gain a business lead in the real world through monitoring the virtual space.

The African Government

One of the problems in Africa is our leaders are not held accountable for their mistakes. This is changing thanks to initiatives such as Kenya’s Open Data Initiative and incentives are being put in place to take government data and put it in the hands of journalists and developers to make stories and services that citizens can use to keep their leaders more accountable.

As the African online community our level of awareness is increasing and our tolerance for incompetence is decreasing. Online networks have the potential to be used as a platform to bring together our community in one common space. By identifying these communities and monitoring what they are saying, a database of information and possible legislation can be drafted. A case may be when Kenyan Chief Justice Dr. Willy Mutunga took to joining the social network. This opened up a new avenue to discuss and deliberate what had been an archaic legacy judicial system. Twitter went as far as to profile his story here.

Secondly, there have been several campaigns recently geared towards driving awareness and driving change in the African people. In Nigeria, we had #OccupyNigeria recently and for both governments and interest groups or lobbyists there is a need to quantify the impact of these conversations.

Just after the Arab Spring, Afrinnovator covered an infographic of tweets and conversations online. View it here.

By being able to measure how many people have been touched by our message, we can further drive and push the democracy at a government level or even that of the concerned citizen.

Governments in Africa also need to take into account that worldwide online and digital spend is on the rise in the developed world. Mobile platforms have definitely revolutionized online penetration in Africa. Recent statistics state that mobile connectivity could increase national productivity by 15%. In order to propel this growth, governments need to start implementing policies and resources for monitoring and measuring.

The dawn of eGovernment means that they are now obligated to listen, if not participate in the conversation and relate with constituents through the web or mobile phone. Consequently ensuring Africa’s infrastructure and government service delivery grow in line with the developed world.

The African Consumer

Consumer experiences have the opportunity to be personalised through online monitoring. Companies will be able to identify loyal customers and build personal messages or customized products based on their conversation. Not only does this help develop a personal touch, but it provides a competitive advantage since very few African companies have embraced this mode of thinking and service.

The mass market approach is still very popular in Africa. And there is definitely a gap and need for more companies to embrace individuality. As our industries become more and more competitive, consumers will be looking for that personal touch and one-on-one interaction. Mobile network operators in particular are tapping into this by delivering customer service on social networks from Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa. Having information and profiles of each of the customers actively talking about a brand will help differentiate those that have loyal customers to those that don’t.

As a whole, there are plenty of opportunities for all stakeholders to maximise on. Users in Africa have access like never before and brands need to change their focus to listening to these voices. Many have taken to social networks with a reactive mindset and ORM brings in the opportunity to listen and act on the data as part of informing a proactive approach to web and mobile. At the end of the day, online monitoring can be used as more than just mere risk management but take it a step ahead to business intelligence. What will differentiate successful companies and entrepreneurs from their competitors are those that are one step ahead, listening to consumer needs and spotting the opportunities is that differentiating factor; or as trendwatching put it, brands that are “flawsome.”

Do you believe there’s a place for online reputation management in African business, government or with consumers? Let us know, share your thoughts in the comments.

Image via Wikipedia

Niti Bhan is Founder at the Emerging Futures Lab. Niti integrates her multidisciplinary background in business, design and engineering with a global perspective to offer immediately actionable insights and strategic directions for successfully entering the challenging markets of the developing world.

Much of the topic in today’s discussions on Africa especially here on Afrinnovator is the mobile phone. When it comes to M-Pesa and its socio-economic impact in Kenya, we find that some of the issues why it became a runaway success in Kenya have not yet been duplicated elsewhere. Beyond the obvious brought up in most articles of “…it’s the banking regulations (or lack thereof)” or “…it’s the distribution network.” I believe that if we can frame the problem (and thus the potential solution) correctly, we could make a big difference to the many ways we attempt to enable and support social and economic development projects.

For purposes of clarity, I’ll also refer to the mobile phone as the mobile platform, since the phone aspect is but a feature of this handheld device. It has played quite the role among what is popularly known as the BoP or Base/Bottom of the Pyramid, yet when I think about the very many pilot programs and attempts to spur development via the mobile platform or, as in the case of M-Pesa, to launch game-changing mobile money transfer systems elsewhere, what immediately comes to my mind is a reflection on the issues that plagued the analysis of the success of Asus’ eeePC when it was first launched back in late 2007.

We take affordable and portable netbooks for granted today but back then in time, the category did not exist until Asus launched their 7″ Linux-based, open source, rugged and durable beauty for around USD 400. It was referred to as a “subnotebook” back then and caused much head scratching among the developed world’s leading lights. Nevertheless, it spurred all manner of competitors to focus on the two most obvious elements of its perceived success criteria – “price” and “form factor”. Whereas I argued, that what made the Asus eeePC so successful was its fundamental premise – to be an easy to use affordable device squarely aimed at emerging markets and how it was this positioning that drove every other element, including its form factor and price. By focusing only on the obvious, without taking the holistic thinking and underlying value proposition into consideration, competitors were overlooking many of the details that supported its initial success.

Framing the Debate on M-Pesa
I see something similar happening with one of the most obvious success stories in the “Mobile as a platform for economic development of the BoP” bandwagon. M-Pesa shows up in most analyses of “Business models or mobile thingies that are helping the poor” reports churned out so faithfully by researchers everywhere, yet the question arises, should it be even considered in that sandbox of things that help the poor in the first place? And by doing so, are we overlooking some of the factors of what makes it work so well in Kenya as well as misinterpreting that it was meant to be used only by the poor?

When the first reports of M-Pesa’s hiccups in South Africa came to light, it was then that Wambura Kimunyu first tweeted to me about the lack of the banked that were critical to spur the unbanked and thus the overall uptake of the service. That is, if the M-Pesa ecosystem did not have enough banked people with money to circulate, then there wouldn’t be enough unbanked nor would there be enough money to circulate leading to the challenges that they are facing in South Africa now. You needed the banked to bank the unbanked. It sounded counterintuitive but over time as I observed many different facets of this activity across different strata in Kenya it came to me just how much sense this made. It also proved how relevant this aspect was for the success of anything that should be considered as a means to improve incomes among the BoP when using the mobile platform or otherwise.

Adding Systems Thinking to the Debate
That is, for any solution designed to enable the flow of wealth – mobile money transfer for example – or improve wealth creation at the BoP – it was not enough to simply target the poor alone. It would not work as a “Solution for the BoP” primarily because the BoP do not have any liquidity. Even if they do indeed have assets especially in rural areas, or they do not have the cash for it to flow through the system in the first place. Thus solutions aimed at improving economic activity for the poor needed ‘non poor’ actors in the ecosystem in order to inject cash into the system and thus make it flow and grow initially.

Taking this thought one step further, M-Pesa – assessed as a holistic ecosystem for financial transactions – has been so very obviously successful in the Kenyan context primarily because it is used by everyone, regardless of their economic standing or “bankedness.”

And thus, when ‘solutions on mobile to help the BoP’ are considered, they should be looked at in terms of the complete ecosystem including the critical question of where the money will come from in the first place? Without which, they will limp along as a cash-poor system with little wealth to circulate, achieving nothing for the BoP in question. Look at this article on M-Pesa repositioning itself in South Africa towards higher income brackets and away from the original target audience of poor rural women.

Solutions to Improve Economic Conditions For the BoP Cannot Be Focused Only On the BoP
Rather the focus needs to shift to complete ecosystems that fill a vacuum of need – usually in infrastructure or services – that include actors from differing socio-economic strata in order to make a viable difference to larger population involved. Not only is M-Pesa a clear example of this framing – it filled the vacuum of “how to securely and affordably send money” – but it did so for everyone and anyone who wanted to do so.

Similarly, when I consider my favourite example of the Mumias Sugar Company and their payroll management pilot program for their daily wage sugar cane cutters, I see the same potential for a greater impact on social and economic development for the lower income demographic involved in this system. The solution is one that is win-win for all stakeholders – from the company who don’t need to send armed guards with cash into the fields, to the workers who no longer need to carry sums of cash around with them on payday and even have savings accounts now.

I also hear that real-time inventory management and other enterprise level solutions for supply chain management are also moving onto the M-Pesa/mobile platform in Kenya – again involving the tiniest duka (small retail store) as well as the big name manufacturers or distributors. Again we can see the potential impact on inventory management and thus, cash flow, even at the bottom of the retail pyramid where it’s most critically needed. We can project the potential that it will improve the economic standing or at least smoothen the variability of income streams that these smallest players in the informal economy require.

Will all stakeholders benefit? Yes. And will the members of the ecosystem who happen to fall into the so called BoP category benefit? Most likely. And more likely than if only the lowest segment was involved in a system of this sort rather than participating in the larger ecosystem of buyers and sellers.

The Bottom Line
Bringing all this back to the framing of the solution and the analysis of the success factors, I believe that a simple shift away from seeing only the obvious – mobiles! money! Bottom of the Pyramid! – system level solutions that fill critical infrastructural and service gaps in locales where there are few or inadequate alternates and that serve many including the BoP can and will do far better to improve the economic wellbeing across the board of society that those that focus on one demographic alone.

Author’s note: With thanks to Wambura Kimunyu.

What do you think? Is M-Pesa’s value from the Bottom of the Pyramid overstated? Chime in below in the comments.

I got the chance to be one of the first speakers on the opening day of the conference and spoke on Silicon Savannah: Hope or Hype (more in my transcript post coming soon.) In the meantime, you can take in the coverage through our Storify  from day 1 and day 2 courtesy of Brenda Wambui who was reporting for Afrinnovator from the event. Below we’re proud to bring you a great infographic by Alex Muriu.

Thoughts? Let us know in the comments below. Meanwhile, you can follow Afrinnovator on Twitter, Join us on Facebook as well as sign up for our email updates in the signup box top right of the page.

Day 1

Storify of Day 1

Day 2

Storify Day 2

Anything catch your eye? Questions? Thoughts? Sound off in the comments below.

Two years ago, however, there was one discussion that much like a pendulum, swung into place a series of events that few have looked back to connect the dots to.

We frequently write about all amber and their conferences and it was in February of 2010 that they staged the inaugural Mobile Web East Africa conference in Nairobi. Afrinnovator’s Will Mutua was there in person to live-blog the two days with a series of curated tweets and tidbits on the proceedings. During this, however, at one segment in the first day’s program Mr. Peter Arina, then Chief Commercial Officer at Safaricom took to the stage to deliver an address on mobile internet usage in Kenya.

During his speech and the subsequent Q&A, he was challenged and Safaricom lambasted on their approach with developers, their openness to business ideas and the developer community and their pricing strategy for products for the Kenyan market. And unlike in today’s conferences where most of this happens in the “backchannel” on social networks, this happened in the ballroom at the Intercontinental in Nairobi and was preserved and documented through Twitter mostly.

This may have seemed like a mere afternoon spat with a few loud voices in the room, but it set forth what can only be seen as a shift in how the M-Pesa founding company communicates. Just over 3 weeks later and Safaricom formally took to social networks Twitter and Facebook and have since become somewhat of a beacon of what corporate social media looks like in the East Africa region. They then put it to the community to vote and nominate leader who would work with the telecommunications provider to mend their relationship in what has come to be known as the Safaricom Innovation Board (though not sure what the status on this is at present).

Since then their approach, availability and openness has dramatically improved and they are quick to acknowledge and listen if not respond to developers. Given not all of these initiatives have born fruit, the point is that they began to listen and participate; be it from senior leadership in the company to internal staff.

Mobile Web East Africa returns to Nairobi on the 22nd and 23rd of February with the aim of taking the mobile monetisation & content creation dialogue to the next level. Taking place at the Southern Sun in Westlands, the conference promises to trigger conversations and thought that could shape not only the country, but the rest of the region in the mobile space. Here are 5 reasons why Mobile Web East Africa is a “must-attend” this year:

1. PanAfrican Perspective
Speaking to top local blogger Bankelele recently about the event once this week, he mentioned what made the inaugural conference worthwhile for him was to see another African market and their progress in mobile juxtaposed with the Kenyan market. Be it advertising spend, successful campaigns and rich insights into what was happening in and around Kenya and South Africa.

The rich information and geographical spread made for a fine time in what Bankelele frequently refers to as “reading the tea leaves” for the Kenyan market. This year, a greater regional focus with a lens on Kenya but an eye on Tanzania, Rwanda and Uganda means the principles, pointers and practices shown at the conference will keep Africa and East Africa at center stage.

2. Audience and Ambience
I attend a range of conferences every year and one thing that gets my attention is the organiser’s approach towards audience interaction. Having spoken at previous all amber events, it’s no secret I appreciate their “roundtable” format. Sparking stimulating conversations with fellow participants and with the panel at the event is one of the reasons we had the Safaricom debate in the first place and always leads to rousing discussions.

3. Scintillating Speakers
The speaker list this year is impressive. A variety of local, regional and international names jetting in to speak. Multi-platinum record label Roc Nation will have their Head of Digital Briant Biggs speaking. Not to mention one of the world’s top 50 women in mobile entertainment, Emma Kaye of bozza.mobi. Regional speakers include Johan Nel of Umuntu Media and Emeka Okoye of Vinkantti Software while locally we can expect Karanja Macharia, CEO of Mobile Planet, Jessica Colaco of iHub Research and Taha Jiwaji of Bongo Live! among others.

Full disclosure: I will also speaking at the event.

4. Startups & App-Developer Subsidy
For app developers or those who are part of start-ups, there is a 50% subsidy for you to attend.  Conditions for eligibility are any of the options below:

• You represent a company that is under 2 years old and has less than 10 employees
• You are a Mobile Application or Games Developer

They are also happy to consider applications from individuals representing NGOs and Academia. To apply you can email info(@)allamber.co.uk. For a list of testimonials from people who have attended using the subsidy and more details you can go here.

There will also be an App Developer Competition at #MWEA2012 where your app gets voted on and the winner at the event stands to get $1,500 worth of advertising spend on the InMobi network, free entrance to the conference (a refund where applicable) and the pitch before the audience, not to mention their subsequent applause. More on that here.

5. The Future of Mobile
Afrinnovator’s been doing plenty of prospecting on what the future of mobile looks like on the continent in 2012. And Kenya or as most are beginning to christen it “Silicon Savannah” sets out to prove worthy of the title.With the convergence of some of the smartest minds in the industry and stakeholders from all across the value chain in mobile present in the room we can expect to do better than just read the tea leaves, but brew up a piping hot cup as well.

All things considered, this event ranks as a “Must-attend” and Afrinnovator intends on keepingyou posted on developments and proceedings in the buildup to Mobile Web East Africa 2012. Register here. 

Kenyan mobile tech startup MFarm, launched at the first IPO48 contest in Nairobi in October 2010 by the all-girl tech team of Jamila, Sue and Linda. The 48 hour “idea-to-business” contest pit them against more than a dozen other contenders and they came out top winning £10,000 from Kresten Buch and HumanIPO.
In 20122, MFarm was a finalist at Pivot25 (now PivotEast)

Their product? A mobile-based solution that gives farmers across Kenya daily commodity pricing, and getting access to market and suppliers through group buying and selling:

1. Daily Market price information
2. Group Buying by farmers
3. Group Selling by farmers through the SMS & web

They’ve now been selected as finalists for The Unreasonable Institute, and as Afrinnovator’s been witness to their success from their conception over a weekend to the milestones they’ve achieved in their incubation at the m:Lab East Africa we’re proud to share in their success.
The Unreasonable Institute is one of the world’s foremost impact accelerators, supporting high-impact entrepreneurs through a process of selection to pick 25 of them from across the globe for their remarkable program. MFarm are among these finalists. Their challenge like all other finalists of the program is to raise $10,000 within 50 days with the minimum amount that be sent in being $10!

To support them (and we encourage you to!) you can do it through The Unreasonable Institute Marketplace or Kenya’s revolutionary mobile money service, M-Pesa below:

• Marketplace: https://marketplace.unreasonableinstitute.org/project/m-farm/
• M-Pesa: Pay Bill Number 531300 Account Number MFARM or 0712502130

Share your comments and wishes to them by tweeting them or by giving your message below in the comments.

If you are anyway involved in mobile, technology or gadgets you will know that the focus of the vast majority of reports, articles and statistical data is around the growth of the smartphone handset segment globally. Some estimates during the middle of 2011 estimated that around 472 million smartphones would be sold worldwide by the end of the year.

The table below from research firm Gartner estimated that in quarter 3-2011, there were 115,1 million smartphones sold globally.

That is a significant number; however smartphones only represent one portion of the entire handset/device ecosystem. Using Gartner information again, we can see that total handset sales across all phone segments is massive and that smartphones make up approximately 26% of all handset sales in the third quarter of 2011.

That means that 74% of the remaining handset sales are made up of entry level and feature devices.

So what about the humble feature phone?

Defining a feature or smartphone phone is a minefield because the definitions change so rapidly due to the improvements in technology and cost efficiencies in manufacturing. I maintain that if you put 5 mobile executives into a room and ask them to define what a smartphone is you would get 5 different answers and opinions. So for purposes of this article, I would like to classify a feature phone as a device that supports WAP (GPRS/Edge) connectivity, has a colour screen, can send an MMS message, has low-resolution camera and lastly supports J2ME native applications.

The feature phone segment dominates mobile connected devices globally. There are numerous reasons for this,

• 10 years of device sales
• An established and installed base of users
• Cost of ownership and affordability

Globally the segment is dominated by Nokia Series 40 handsets (S40). Nokia estimated that nearly half of its 1.5 billion S40 handset shipments are in active use today, with 675 million active owners of S40 phones in the world.

This is a significant part of the market and it should not be discounted at all when looking at mobile services.

Below is a graphic from a mobile research firm called Vision Mobile which illustrates the size of the feature phone market in comparison to smartphones globally (collectively called the “connected device” market). Smartphones make up 27% of the graph below, leaving 73% that are feature phone devices.

Feature phones in Africa

Nokia is the dominant OEM (original equipment manufacturer) of mobile handsets in Africa. One estimate has positioned Nokia with a 65% market share across all Africa. The vast majority of the devices supplied by Nokia can be classified in my view into the following:

• Basic 2G handsets like the Nokia 1110. These devices are the bottom of the pyramid devices which allow for phone calls and SMS messaging
• Low-end feature phones (2.5G WAP) devices like the Nokia 5130 XpressMusic
• High-end smartphones devices (3G and up) like the N and E series Nokia phones

To see an indication of Nokia’s market share in the connected device market, two mobile platforms, namely InMobi and Opera Mini, provide great insights into Nokia usage across Africa.

InMobi is a mobile advertising platform serving mobile WAP banners across Africa. In Q3-2011 InMobi served over 15 Billion WAP banners to connected devices across the continent. This is a snap shot from InMobi Research, please take note of the Nokia information provided in the snapshot. 61.1% of available impressions where made from Nokia Devices on the InMobi Network.

Opera Mini is a third party mobile browser that has over 144 million monthly users globally. In June 2011 Opera Mini released their State of the Mobile Web and data for 10 African countries was provided - Opera looked at the top 100 handsets used in each of the top 10 African countries, of the 100 total handsets listed:

• Nokia: 89
• Samsung: 7
• Sony Ericsson: 1
• Alcatel: 1
• Apple: 1
• LG: 1

Incidentally the one iPhone was from Ethiopia.

What does this mean for Africa?

There is a huge installed base of feature phone devices across Africa which is made up largely of Nokia devices. There are many reasons for this market share including but not limited to the quality of the devices and superior battery life (an important consideration due to intermittent power supplies across Africa)

Smartphones are coming into Africa thick and fast with other OEM’s like Samsung and Huawei leading the charge with cost competitive Android based smartphone devices. However it takes time for these devices to find their way into the hands of subscribers. As is evident from the data, most of the handsets that subscribers currently use are feature phones and the status quo will remain as such for the next 2-3 years.

Any organization looking to provide mobile services in Africa needs to factor this into their plans especially when it comes to the ever-interesting debate between mobile web versus mobile app (a discussion for another time).

In South Africa, for example, probably the two most common feature phones in the market currently are the Nokia 5130 XpressMusic and the Samsung E250. It should be noted, if you are developing mobile web or even mobile applications for the mass South African mobile market and not designing for the E250, you are doing it wrong.

I would like to point out that mobile applications that have J2ME (Java) versions will still have the biggest potential audience reach in Africa. Any developer will tell you that developing for java is a nightmare and rightfully so BUT if you would like to see attract the biggest possible audience in Africa, that is the starting point for any developer.

Don’t forget about the humble feature phone, they make up a large part of the handset universe and are not going anywhere anytime soon.

Is this true, is there more to the feature phone than meets the eye or are we approaching the age of the smartphone from here on out. Sound off below in the comments.

In the American and European tech space there’s a growing problem. There’s so much funding available for early stage startups that everyone and their college dropout buddy is starting-up, leaving no one out there to hire.

It’s one of those first world problems: “We just raised 4 million dollars for our social network for redheads but we can’t find any developers…frowny face.” If Silicon Valley is having trouble hiring top tech talent, then it means that there’s also a drought in the NGO space. Even the biggest non-profits are suffering from the same lack of technical resources.

If you’re an African developer, this is a huge opportunity. Focus on acquiring (or maturing) some of the following skills. Talent in these areas is elusive even in the U.S. and Europe, being good at them will make you far more employable (or fundable if you want to start a company), globally as well as locally:

For Technical People

• Ruby on Rails A lot of web startups use RoR because it’s a great language and it also impresses investors. However, they quickly realize that it impresses because Rails developers regularly command high salaries due to such high demand.
• Python Django The Jan Brady to Ruby’s Macia. Actually, Python is probably more in demand these days simply because more developers are competent in it. It’s also great for mobile app development which makes it useful for all those SMS apps local firms are dying to build.
• iOS – the iPhone continues to dominate the smart phone arena. It’s less relevant if you’re targeting a local audience (there go with Android or stick with Java), but if you are building apps that you want to sell internationally then there’s no app store with a richer economy for developers than Apple’s.
• Data Visualization All that ‘open data’ out there is irrelevant. What’s relevant is data that can be used by anyone at any organization, with minimal fuss. Visualization makes it easy to relate complex datasets to those too busy (or too lazy) to analyze them. Data vis goes beyond any specific programing language, but it is a skill and it’s one that Africans can find a great deal of opportunity in.
• Math/Statistics Before one can visualize anything they need the components to visualize. If you’ve got a strong grasp of statistics and analysis, distilling information so that it’s actionable for others (who usually don’t share this skill) is a highly lucrative path to pursue.
• Semantic Analysis Despite what everyone thought, the semantic web is here to stay. It hasn’t become a ‘new web’ like some once thought it might, but semantic technologies (sentiment analysis, natural language processing, text parsing) have become the methods that are routinely used to power some of the web’s most popular applications. These skills are incredibly lucrative. The growth of the ‘Big Data’ industry is fueled by them.
• NoSQL & NewSQL Modern web apps require a great deal of backend engineering to deal with and keep track of all the byproducts of social, sharing, and content creation. There’s two schools of thoughts on this: one is that by doing more of the work on the application side (on request), applications can scale faster while handling more operations from more users. That’s the non-relational approach. The other school of thought is that there was nothing wrong with the old way of doing things, which stores data with the values the application uses for retrieving them later. The challenge was that this created a bottleneck at the database level which often lead to slow or stagnant apps. The new thinking around NewSQL is to keep the relational model and simply build better database software that allows for more throughput. Entire companies are being built of each type of database (see: Cloudera, Vertica, 10Gen), pick the one that makes sense for you. Also, this is the fuel for the Big Data/Open Data rocket ship.
• jQuery/Javascript/Ajax Modern web apps do most of their processing on the front-end. As I mention above, this often means the application side is where most of the logic for the web app lives, while the database becomes a place to store and retrieve. For these types of web apps, front end logic is critical. Given the rise of the Jquery framework this is probably obvious, yet solid front-end developers are few and far between.
• Hardware Engineering The ‘maker’ movement amplified by Afrigadget and Maker Faire Africa highlights another opportunity on the continent, the localization of manufacturing. Whether it’s bicycles or mobile devices, companies local to the continent that design and build things are scarce.

For Less Technical People

• Design Look at the majority of African websites. Most websites made by African developers still look like they were made in 1999 using the GeoCities default templates (translation: Fugly). Blegh. There is a bounty out for good African designers. The mistake a lot of programmers make is they assume design is about technical know-how. It’s not – it’s about a sense of aesthetic and attention to detail. If you are a lazy designer, you’re not a designer. If you are a programmer who thinks design is superfluous to your application, then you’re doing it wrong. There’s also a dearth of design talent in the U.S. and Europe and a good designer can command the salary of a top programmer. Where are the African designers?
• Writing You would be surprised at the number of people who can’t string together a well-written, cohesive, consistent thought in written form. Coupled with the rapid proliferation of social media (which, by the way, consists of mostly written messaging) the ability to write and write well has become incredibly important. I say this because you are not at a disadvantage if you are a non-native speaker. Example: Ariana Huffington is a non-native English speaker and she built a highly influential and powerful new media outlet that rivals old-school powerhouses like CNN and FOX on the web. It’s about being able to convey your thoughts cohesively and convincingly. It takes practice, so keep blogging!
• Project Management Being the person who can cultivate the best traits from your team of peers is a huge asset that has always been rare. Many people manage, few excel at it.
• Videography – We’ve all heard that there isn’t enough local content being produced for African audiences. One of the reasons is the lack of local producers. However, this is changing. More countries are becoming home to an African creative class who are producing film, television, and web shows locally. Can this be lucrative? I think so. As bandwidth falls in cost, eventually the demand for local content may not come from international viewers but the pan-African audience.
• Critical Thinking/Problem Solving Deductive reasoning. The ability to deduce conclusions and the reasons why they have occurred. To do this, you have to be able to consider all sides and all aspects of a problem…even the ones that you don’t like. You have to be able to challenge assumptions, this includes your own. It is a skill to be able to analyze the intricacies of why things happen or if someone’s argument isn’t grounded in reality, and to be able to explain your conclusions to others. This will make you a better anything.

There are companies all over the world looking to hire people with aptitude in these areas, but being in Africa puts you in a position of power because there will be as great a demand for you at home as there is abroad. Does this mean you’d have to relocate to another country? Not necessarily, many of these skills can be outsourced to you or your company.

In 2012 learn the things that are in demand so you can build firms (or offer services) that capitalize on these global trends.

Article originally published here.

What do you  think? Agree with Jon’s points or think he’s missed the mark? Sound off in the comments below.

Image by smagdali via Flickr

This is a guest post by futurist and technologist Soud Hyder.

I’ve been meaning to pen my thoughts on this over the better half of this year but time has nonetheless been very elusive. I happened to watch a video recording of a panel discussion about technology in Africa and naturally M-PESA seems to permeate through the discussion in one way or another.

Two points were raised that identified the non-agnostic closed wall nature of M-PESA and other payment platforms as an Achilles heel and the impact of M-PESA as well as its correlation to GDP.

In my opinion putting M-PESA into perspective would probably shed more light into the realities. M-PESA is a Vodafone product licensed to its subsidiaries the glory of which is Safaricom in Kenya. Now Vodafone is a PLC; Public Listed Company that operates in market economies. Meaning its intrinsic nature is to be a profit maximiser, it is not a charity. Hence it develops IP and seeks to monetise its IP through market dominance. If you look through all the successful financial and payment systems in the world, they are walled gardens of sorts and built on locking in critical mass and strategic partnerships. Secondly dismal scaling financial systems in Africa is not the fault of firms but rather the immaturity of economic policy within the regions. The lack of economic integration means that constituent states have different laws, regulations and systems and makes scaling financial systems a pipedream.

The buck lies with the regulator I would say. In the case of Kenya M-PESA’s success can be hugely attributed to the laissez faire approach in regulation that allowed M-PESA and mobile money in general to function under a tiered regulatory framework where M-PESA funds are linked to a series of trust accounts held by several commercial banks. The fact that the electronic (virtual) money is 100% backed by funds in trust accounts which are M1 (currency in circulation + deposits) means that M-PESA associated funds are regulated by the Central Bank of Kenya further implying that the electronic money is indirectly regulated on a tiered level.

But what happens when a little project grows far too big well too soon? When it affects millions of lives (directly affecting at least 33% of your population)? When it grows to turnover between 20% +and 30%+ plus of your GDP in 2010 and 2011 respectively? When the IP owner is a foreign based entity with significant portions of the service housed outside the operational country? Isn’t it a national security issue?

Worse still some serious systemic risks are emerging. It has been argued that the tiered regulatory framework for mobile money that CBK has employed plugs the inherent systemic risk of having a 100% directly unregulated mobile money payment system and Safaricom’s inherent world class internal self regulation as well as trust account modus operandi mitigates the operational risks.

Well for a small system operating within the economy that is acceptable. But when you have an indirectly regulated system growing in significance and amassing significant GDP throughput then there is an inherent systemic risk resulting from the laissez faire approach in regulation. The growth of M-PESA exposes Kenya’s banking system to liquidity shocks. Again it’s not really clear how the supervisory framework CBK has actually works, but logically a tiered scheme delays information flows, meaning that problems cannot be spotted on a real-time basis.

The bigger M-PESA grows, the more money in circulation (M1) it holds, though distributed across several commercial banks, it would take a bit of miscalculation by one of the banks and a significant system outage of M-PESA (which have been rampant of late) to trigger a liquidity deadlock, which could further lead to a shutdown of the banking system and a collapse of small and or risk inclined banks. Furthermore restricting the service to one operator and having no direct regulatory control on the M-PESA framework without any QoS restrictions places the banking/payment system in Kenya in a bit of limbo. The blame lies squarely on CBK for allowing the system to grow to such a scale without facilitating a secure and reliable operational environment.

On the other hand it can be argued that M-PESA has increased the efficiency of the Kenyan economy by catalysing the velocity of money. Which in turn has boosted and strengthened the internal economy. But then again quantity theory economists would argue that it can be linked to inflationary pressure because M.V = P.Q where M is money in circulation, V is velocity of money, P is price and Q is quantity, however this is not a universally agreed upon theory. Nonetheless I do believe that M-PESA has strengthened the dynamics of the local economy but also exposed it to other challenges and risks that do not seem to be addressed.

The lack of direct regulation makes it almost impossible to figure out what really is happening. There is information all over the web with figures and graphs of M-PESA but no centrally available validated information or reports on at least publically relevant information on the status of the system. M-PESA seems to be more of a black-box, it works really well, nobody really knows how it works and God forbid let it not break before all stakeholders realise the sheer magnitude of the monster they created.

Original post here.

Silicon Savannah: the new catchphrase describing the East African and Kenyan region, the innovation and dynamism taking root there and the temperature for creating disruptive companies and sparking growth in the region. Home to the iHub, iceAddis, Hive CoLab, the IDEOS phone and the epicenter of the global Mobile Money revolution. This is East Africa.

If we take a snapshot of each of the main countries there and their respective mobile populations:

Kenya has 26 Million Mobile Subscribers with 63% Mobile Penetration in the country. The corresponding mobile internet users for the East African region are spelt out in Erik Hersman’s slide above. According to the Communications Commission of Kenya (CCK) when they published the last quarter’s rise of 12% to 25M was the highest seen all year. This can be attributed to a number of factors including a hypercompetitive spell between market leader Safaricom and newcomer Bharti airtel. Within the handset manufacturers side, competitively priced handsets from manufacturers and subsidies/partnerships from Mobile Network Operators helped drive volumes.

Which brings us to the posterchild for the revolution so far, at least in Kenya. The ~$100 smartphone (now approx $70)

The Huawei IDEOS phone. Since the beginning of the year there are estimated +400,000 IDEOS in the market. Thanks to this, Android Marketplace and consumer education around apps and the app economy has grown.

Google Africa responded to this by including Kenya as one of localization nations for the Marketplace with local currency billing albeit no mobile money solution present yet.

The drive for local apps also led them to invest through Google’s Android Developer Challenge (ADC) where semi-finalists all get presence on the Android Marketplace and winners take home $25,000 for their local apps. Winners and more on that here.

“Kenya is an economic powerhouse in East Africa and its mobile telephone market is ranked as one of the most competitive in Africa.”

Eeva Nuutinen, FinPro Project Manager

But more importantly, let’s see how the countries weigh up in the East African community. For most, Kenya remains the epicenter of those looking to penetrate the African market. A great market to observe to put your finger on the pulse of what’s going on in East Africa.

Hard to look at this region without a reintroduction to mobile money. M-Pesa (M for Mobile and Pesa – “money” in Swahili) is the most popular mobile money transfer platform. According to Central Bank of Kenya it transferred $850M in 2010 with total volume of transactions processed exceeded $9 Billion and recently lauded for soaring past Western Union’s frequency of transactions.

As far as their partnerships with banks, one special mention is M-Kesho a partnership with Equity Bank where together they’ve pioneered the agency banking model with over 30,000 Registered Agents pioneering a new low-cost model of retail banking. One which CEO Dr. James Mwangi describes as “…banking through your shopkeeper.”

All this context is well and good, but in the scheme of how it applies to entertainment, more importantly value added services and the industry we needed to establish that context to dive in.

The Ecosystem.

Ideally what any mobile entertainment owner/operator aims to do is connect two things: Sources of money to uses of money.

Sources:

•Airtime

•MNO Wallets

•Banks

Uses:

•Information Services

•Media

A highly cited statistic by JBB Research in one of their Africa reports projected the Kenyan mobile entertainment market to be worth $165M by 2013. The Value Added Services estimates for the year from several industry voices remain slightly skeptical:

Current estimates of Digital Music in Kenya stand at $12M while for the Value added services (VAS) industry is closer to $40M.

Per capita income aside, if we look at mobile penetration and the masses behind M-Pesa, in this case the bottom of the pyramid, or the next billions (references to this and this) we find that one Kenyan nuance plays a role in the success of the mobile industry in Kenya.

Moving through peri-urban areas of Nairobi or most towns you will find even the smallest SKUs of fast moving consumer goods typically get divided and subdivided at a retail level for consumers who can afford a scoop of cooking fat or half a packet of milk (served and sold in a plastic bag) as opposed to the smaller unit found in a supermarket or main shop. This “nano-economy” of goods and services purchased and exchanged piecemeal speaks to a larger trend. In a country where Note: the highest denomination of mobile phone airtime in the country (on the Safaricom network at least) is Ksh. 10 ( $ 0.10)

Within the entertainment industry in Kenya, you have several products that have tapped into this phenomenon and achieved tremendous success as a result of creative micro-billing.

Malipo Pole Pole – Swahili for “Paying slowly” pioneered by Cellulant to allow people to make micro-payments for music downloads via their airtime. This

Okoa Jahazi – Swahili for “Save my ship” or “Save me” this is an airtime advance of between Ksh. 20, 50 or 100 where Safaricom, the mobile service provider takes 10% of the amount you ask for. The services’ success has seen it piloted in other emerging territories within the Vodafone footprint including South Africa.

Skiza Microbilling Options. Safaricom’s ringback tune service Skiza at their initial launch, charged Ksh. 20 a month for the service of having people who call you hear your favourite song. There wasn’t as much traction as anticipated. Upon changing this to a micro-billing model of Ksh. 5 a week traction was achieved and success followed.

Point: Microbilling for entertainment breaks it down to smaller manageable payments that appeal to the lower levels of the market who still want to consume content just need a more flexible structure to pay for it.

This is David Mathenge, known to many as Nameless.

As a successful Kenyan Afro-pop performing artist, he derives his value from strong hit singles and follow up appearances, endorsements and his own business ventures funded by his brand. He doesn’t need to release an album because the mechanics of the market don’t support artists through album sales. He released his debut album in 2004 and has survived with this smart tactic since, having delved into film production, music production and diversifying investments within the entertainment industry around his brand.

One commonly quoted statistics that surfaced speaking in online piracy and later piracy in general is that piracy accounts for 95% of music sales. The best an artist is going to do is 5%. The best.

Locally, there’s typically a 2 week window for pirates. This is because once a song’s discovered to be a “hit” it works its way through the system including a trip across the border where it is mass produced and copied to return and flood the grey and black music market across Kenya.

The Music Value Chain is messed up.

The Music Copyright Society of Kenya has lost the trust of the artists and the mandate to prosecute and act on their behalf thanks to wrangles and mismanagement. This leaves Premium Rate Service Providers (PRSPs) to connect directly to artists and/or record labels and make arrangements directly.

You can innovate around this dilemma or you can innovate to solve it.

To solve the dilemma one needs to look at the challenge for artists. The challenge for the artist is the capital to fund the hit single.

One company innovating the landscape of the industry is Cellulant. With their “Studio to Deck” program they’ve used their connections and partnership with financial institutions to connect artists to finance and capital to produce singles with a revenue split and digital music rights to Cellulant to deliver the content through their system.

Mobile Lotteries: Now you see them, now you don’t.

One of the popular stories of the past year involved a company known as Flint East Africa. They held two lotteries, the first began as “SMS 6868” charged at Ksh. 50 per SMS and later changed with no notice (but substantial branding) to “SMS 6969 charged at Ksh. 69 per SMS.

Their “reward” was over $12M in 3 Months after which the lottery was renewed and they generated large revenues once again in the second “reloaded” round.

Thanks to a lack of firm regulation and a gap in enforcement between the Betting Control and Licensing Board (BCLB) and the Communications Commission of Kenya, Flint East Africa changed the game mechanics from a simple single SMS entry mechanic to a questionnaire format (multiple SMS) that charged for each SMS answer into the game, multiplying revenues at the expense of the end user.

Sources and estimates have ranged from conservative to speculative ranging between Ksh. 30 000,000 to Ksh. 120,000,000 a day for Flint.

With over Ksh. 1.2Bn in 3 months the Kenya Anti Corruption Commission stepped in and began investigations that remain inconclusive into the ownership, structure, charity payment (every lottery must pay 25% of profits be donated to charity, of which this was never fulfilled)

One interesting end result of this was that everyone within Flint’s supply chain began some sort of play into the lottery space. The television station partners began their own SMS lottery games using their media coverage and audiences, notably KTN, NTV and currently Citizen Television.

Mobile network operators who had revenue share agreements with every mobile lottery also launched their own with very similar game mechanics, banking on the trust they have with their audiences. They’ve used similar entry mechanics albeit simpler on the “the more you SMS, the higher your chances of winning” and as to the ethics of this approach, given the circumstances the jury is still out.

And yet when it comes to the opportunities that mobile entertainment offers, where are the local innovators and those making the most of these gaps in the market? Further up, another bottleneck is lack of capital which we’ve looked at in a number of posts and articles before.

Nokia have really made headway recently with +30 apps have been reportedly been created by Kenyan developers, some exclusively for Nokia’s Ovi Store. Most are locally-focused, though some are promoted across the Ovi Store globally, hence bringing in revenue from markets with operator-billing in place (still no confirmed date for this in Kenya). Nokia is actively promoting these apps throughout traditional media including billboards, radio and below-the-line on behalf of the developers in an attempt to capture the market.

Conferences investing in this gap of success stories of apps and startups over the past few months have included:

Pivot25 Conference: $75,000

IPO48: €40,000

With IPO48’s investments all being in the media and entertainment space, the Estonian/Danish investors recognise the opportunity and are pushing these developers and startups to produce content and working with mobile operators to begin to deliver it to the Kenyan market.

One of the greatest challenges to mobile entertainment however, is delivery. At a MNO (Mobile Network Operator) level Safaricom is trying to address this. Last year they launched a partnership with Opera Mini, the popular mobile browser. Earlier in 2011 they piloted a white-labelled option of the popular browser “powered by Safaricom Live.” seen above.

This beta version pointed to Safaricom’s existing portfolio of value added services but a source at Safaricom pointed out that this could change to become more of a mix of Safaricom’s portfolio and what’s already popular on the Opera Mini service since this was a pilot phase.

According to Opera Mini’s State of the Mobile Web and their recent survey on Social Networks use on the Opera Mini platform, Facebook accounts for 67% of all pageviews in social media (and since Facebook is the #1 accessed site in Kenya it therefore accounts for 67% of all pageviews on the mobile web)

However, “social” is yet to be integrated as part of the fold in spreading and delivering mobile entertainment content especially popular content such as music.

Which leads to the big opportunity…

Delving into Music Discovery and giving better access to news and information services that can link up social and music discovery could prove to be “right on the money” for the future of content across the continent.

Your thoughts on Kenya, East Africa and the mobile entertainment scene? Music Discovery: hotbed or overrated for the African continent? Speak your mind in the comments below.