J » Technology

iHUB: Motivation

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 12:04:35 +0000

Skunkworks was conceived with the idea of bring together Nairobi (and Kenyan) techies together and really kicked off in early 2007. From the onset we had the idea of having a central location where guys could come in and utilize fast internet, access local servers to test out their applications while bouncing off ideas with each other. The goal was to create an environment where (hopefully) cool world class products could be developed and sustained. There are many great developers around but many complain about access to bandwidth and servers. In addition to this, many business people looking for software are sometimes at a loss when it comes to tracking down good developers. The iHUB will be the place to be for all these people.

iHUB is a realization of this, and I’m really excited about what will be happening after the March 3 launch. It is quite an experiment, and the iHUB advisors admittedly do not have all the answers to some of the questions being posed by many. However it is worth doing, and I guess learning shall be done as it evolves.

There is loads of widespread support coming in for this, meaning that the local tech community has been yearning for such a space as this. However the iHUB is just but a small cog in the wheel that will drive Nairobi (or will it be Malili?) towards being the Silicon Valley of Africa.

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Visit & mark this in your readers – http://www.ihub.co.ke and keep up to date with the latest on the iHUB.

There’s also a design contest on for the iHUB logo which has a $500 price tag so do not miss out on that!

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Skunkworks @ Strathmore

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 16:56:51 +0000

Strathmore University hosted an open session where a few interesting projects done by people around the skunkworks community got presented.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee (who by the way invented the WWW) was the chief guest.

Among the projects were:

pesapal done by Liko Agosta – Verviant
jahazi done by Mugambi – VST
iScribe + Afrinnovator by Wilfred Mworia – African Pixel
ushahidi by Emmanuel Kala
sembuse by Mbugua Njihia – Symbiotic
website.co.ke by Gichingiri – sokoletu

Sir Tim Berners-Lee gave us a brief background on how life was before the WWW. It is hard to imagine working without it in our times.

He also had some thoughts on where the web is going: web on the mobile, more web based apps using advances such as HTML5, geo-location etc.

A main concern for him and many others was how the WWW would be accessible for those living on less than a dollar. He mentioned the WWW Foundation which he had launched at the IGF in Egypt earlier in the week.

We hopefully will have more events like this next year.

Raising Startup Funds: Milestone Fundraising

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 22:06:43 +0000

Phillip M. Verges – Founder & CEO of New Market Technology Inc had some interesting thoughts on fund raising as well as the unique position that Kenya, and Africa at large has as an emerging market.

Investors are not investing in your success (I have never looked at startup funding from this point of view but it rings true). The Venture Capitalist (VC) just needs to take the startup to the Initial Public Offering (IPO) to make money.
Investors are only interested in financial milestones and not your long term success, so when pitching focus 10 minutes on your vision, and 20 minutes on how and when the investor will make his money.

Some fund raising myths:

Long Term Investments – Investors are only interested in financial milestones
Partner for Success – Investors can make money even when the start up is not enjoying success
Cash flow positive – investors can make money whether it is positive or red
Internal Rate of Return – investors are more interested in their rate of return

On Milestone Fund raising, from research:

Less than 40% of start ups are sustainable for more than three years
The fourth time is usually the attempt that tends to be successful for start ups
Milestones are needed along the way
Fund these milestones

He suggested that it is more prudent to raise funds for the next milestone – e.g. funds for a pilot of a product or service, as opposed to funds for the entire roll out at once.

He also mentioned that they are looking at local companies that they can work with. Interesting times indeed.

I didn’t get the last bit of the seminar as I had to leave.

Great times indeed for those with good ideas and are willing to give a shot at bringing them to fruition!

This seminar was facilitated by the ICT Board – Much appreciated

Skunkworks Meeting 3rd Nov: Kai Wulff on the Fiber & infrastructure

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 05:53:09 +0000

Kai’s definition of true broadband – being able to do what you want, when you want to online, and without bandwidth restriction. He is on a mission to (hopefully?) change the market’s perception of data operators as being out make money of the common mwananchi at all costs.

On local content he likened the submarine cables to ships bringing grain from abroad to Kenya (and the rest of East Africa). We should be worried though, as what will happen to the ‘grain’ farmer in Kenya.

For good ideas, reasonable partnerships are possible with KDN.

He also mentioned licensing models, and said that ideally there should broadly be infrastructure licenses and service licenses. Rolling out infrastructure is expensive thus these licenses would be pricey enough to discourage gold diggers. However service licences ought to be free. In Kenya, it is a unified license which is a bit tricky when it comes to empowering startups and encouraging local content.

Revamped macbook

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 12:05:19 +0000

It looks like Apple have revamped their macbooks.

www.apple.com/macbook/specs.html

They certainly look good now… @ $999

It cannot be a coincidence that this is just before Microsoft releases Windows 7…

Local Content: Online Classifieds

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 17:28:47 +0000

The last few months has seen activity with several notable entries into the online classifieds space:

N-SOKO – Done by the Nation Media Group (which unfortunately is rather graphics/flash heavy and thus mobile unfriendly). The fact that they already have a sizeable online audience makes many sellers flock there.
Kenyan Craiglist – It remains to be seen if the classifieds model that has worked so well in the west will work in Kenya (and developing Africa) where perceptions and mind sets are quite different.

There’s several other online classifieds. Try performing a random search on google for ‘Kenya Online Classifieds’.

One of the more recent entrants to the fray is MADUQA

MADUQA is a service that lets you to advertise your products and services; and also place buy requests online for FREE. Maduqa hopes to have surfers meet, sell, buy, chat, discuss and review products at maduqa.

It is generally a well done website though I have not tried it via a cell phone. With online classifieds however, the greatest challenge will be the generation of traffic to the website. This is where a site like N-SOKO has a sizeable advantage over maduqa.com.

Mobile & Classifieds

I think the eventual leaders in this space will achieve this by specifically developing a mobile version of their online classifieds – this is Africa and there’s more and more people going online with their cell phones than with computers.

Moses Kemibaro also did a post on n-soko & craigslist.

iWarrior

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 11:10:59 +0000

Hash has a new post on iWarrior, possibly one of the first games developed in Africa for the iPhone.

Dr Ndemo @ Skunkworks

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 19:21:00 +0000

The PS for Information and Communication did a talk at the 4th Aug meeting at Telposta towers 4th floor. There was also Joe Mucheru (Google Lead, EA) and Bret Bullington, a VC working in the Silicon Valley.

Quite an interesting talk and discussion thereafter, with lots of challenging and thought provoking remarks from Dr Ndemo.

Some highlights that stood out for me:

Digital Villages – data gathering at sub-location level (this could mean several hundreds, thousands of DVs) – such information would range from education levels, to types of soil, vegetation, population, sicknesses, and potential applications are numerous (would avoid such generalizations as ‘my constituency performs poorly because we are marginalized’ and would instead allow for facts to be presented). Solutions for social problems too, and entrepreneurial opportunities. Incidentally, the first Digital Village was at Kagundo and despite no training offered there, soon afterwards, there were people lining up to fill in PSC forms downloaded online.

Local Content – ‘We are through with (creating) infrastructure, we now need content’
The Freedom of Information Bill when passed into law, will allow a lot more Government information to be available (online)
Information on product pricing – how many times have you spent time looking for a particular product all over from shop to shop while you could conceivably do that from a single website.
Examination questions (KCPE, KCSE, CPA etc)
Bible in local languages
A kenyan ‘youtube’for local music, videos – lots of user generated content – can be used especially to preserve local languages, cultures, history, stories (e.g. Lwanda Magere).
There will be lots of opportunity for local music/video/movies/advertising especially when digital terrestrial television becomes mainstream (think a capacity of several hundred channels to choose from).

‘What is wrong with us’
This was quite challenging – Kenya is hosting AGOA. There are 6000 items which can be exported to USA duty free. How many of us can name 5 of these without reference.
Vietname despite being a smaller country than Kenya last year had more exports to the USA under a similar agreement to AGOA than the whole of Sub Saharan Africa.

‘Productivity’ and ‘Break even’ (and probably many other ideals) are not in our language. We need to measure our productivity, track our progress, use technology (ICT’s) to improve our productivity (as a nation).

Collect Data -> Information/Knowledge -> Analyze Information -> Intervention

The Government won’t make you rich.

There’s lots of opportunity in educational content

Every problem is an opportunity.

+++++++++++++++

Some more summary I missed out (thanks to S Ndungu )

We can add a few summaries
[pls pardon any misquotation, there was alot of info passed and im drawing this frm memory] :

-There was a promise by Alex Gakuru/ICT board for support of IT community through a 3 stage funding by the World Bank

1) training for a 1000 software managers – to be determined by a criteria
2) provision for 1,000,000 laptops to kenyans – to be determined by criteria
3) i cannot remember the third point – but it has to do with support of IT/ICT/Development projects [which I would assume includes the support for content generation for local use]

DR. Ndemo

-The digital villages did not take off as expected. The youth despite the urgency to create jobs did not respond to calls for training and taking up ownership/running of the digital villages

[the northern part of kenya (that claims to be marginalised) - only 8 participants showed up --- 8 participants !!]

-One of the reasons for digital villages was to make available “content” for kenyans through gathering of grassroots statistics like population, facts, economic dynamics – etc – In turn, due to support for electric self sufficiency of these digital villages [solar, wind, etc] – the owners can garner income thru:
mobile charging, photocopying, printing government documents [like P3s, job applications for government], hosting workshops,
folks can call thru Voip to distant relatives, cyber cafe services – and etc etc

(thru such services, the digital village provides justice, reduces corruption, collects information, makes business, creates youth employment)

-The current events for building infrastructure like the fibre is inline with the vision 2030 for Kenya. The government cannot help you set up an enterprise – it can only enable you to do so thru such projects as fibre, and creation of friendly policies that protect your intellectual property, enables your work [eg software] to have value, etc etc

-The vision 2030 covers 3 main pillars – aside from the popular ‘economic’ renaissance

->economic pillar
->social pillar – equity [not the 'members' bank] but equal opportunity for all
->political pillar-politics to be issue based, politicians to take risks and not fear lack of re-elections
-example – politics based on popularisms e.g passing the “maternity leave for men” bill make politicians popular but affect our economy…

CONTENT

-Dr Ndemo talked about preachers appearing on our own version of ‘youtube’ so that those of us in diaspora can catch up with home sermons. This also includes those who pretend to work in the office and love the gospel – they can catch up with more constructive episodes online.

-The provision of local and accurate videos online for example traditional dances that can be sold to those studying culture. This can be sold !
I know of a Kenyan studying in Japan a few months ago who was hired by a kindergarten school to show the kids an ‘african dance’. [pics on facebook]
He found a kikoi in a crafts shop that had maasai patterns. Then he and a friend performed an ‘isikuti’ dance in maasai attire.
But how could they ever know the difference ? The kids were quite happy to see an ‘African dance’.

-We can also throw Kamaru and Mike Rua, Sukuma Bin Ongwaro etc on our own version of youtube and charge subscription for those in ‘diaspora’ – think USD. 5 dollars for 1000 kenyans for a period = USD 5000 dollars.

-In summary the world needs our content – and we need our content

-Digitising of government information and putting it online for easy availability. This alone can create numerous jobs and revenue.

Dr. Ndemo talked of trying to do a research one day to find out the number of Internet users.
He was directed to a mountain of files [am sure you have a picture,,, the dust, the makonge strings, the musky odour] and he was told to look through those.
Now imagine if this was searchable through a computer database after categorising and serialising the documents [jobs].

-Registration of phone numbers – to identify a user to a number

-Product information online and pricing, aside from availability – eg for pharmacies, electronics etc.. this can save one alot of driving around.

-Exams, pass papers, research papers provision online, online assignments – you can charge per download [or per click ] thru deals with institutions like the university.
Students globally are always repeating the same things we did 15 years ago… why not charge for content provision.

-However, Dr Ndemo warned on pricing – charge cheaply and the masses can afford. ksh 2 X 1 million = 2 million.
-The problem with some content/services pricing is someone trying to pay their rent/car loan with a few big sales – this discourages buyers, and encourages piracy

-Digital TVs – provision of over 1000 channels . This provides a huge market for advertising. I was also thinking – what about building the database ?

-The AGOA issue is well covered by Josiah on his blog

http://blog.josiahmugambi.com/2009/08/dr-ndemo-skunkworks.html

-And yes its true – there is no native word for ‘enterpreneur’ or ‘breaking even’ or ‘positive productivity’ in our languages

-Example of some of our decisions : Policies such as land division are flawed. The farmers have subdivided their land so-o much that they are no longer viable to support food for the normal 1 year of crop production

-It took some of us 40 years to realize that coffee and tea are no longer profitable [think small scale farming] – we stick to various businesses that barely break – when in reality, their time has passed.

[google "the 5 stages of small business" - the last stage is not very good news for those of use with small businesses, but changes do happen and will happen - we need to change too]

Bret Bullington

Bret is from silicon valley and is on kenya for a while. Joe Mucheru called him a capital venturelist [who could actually fund/promote your ideas].

Bret’s short speech advised us not to re-invent the wheel because most of the opportunities we are looking at now have been tried and tested in the USA since the advent of computers in the 70s, the internet bubble in the 80s and now the age of the portability.

We should look at what is working else where and try it here. [This reminds me that Japan began as copiers, now they are the leaders.]

He advised to borrow ideas and sell them in our own country. For example, he quoted two German brothers whose keeness [is there such a word?] is to ‘borrow’ new ideas and adapt them in Germany.
They took ‘facebook’ and tried to introduce it in Germany. A television company bought ‘their’ idea – and they moved on to fetch and adapt another,, and another,,,

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

And from Alex Gakuru:

Adding my contribution to this ‘crowd-sourced’ blog entry:-)

> -There was a promise by Alex Gakuru/ICT board for support of IT community
> through a 3 stage funding by the World Bank
>
> 1) training for a 1000 software managers – to be determined by a criteria

see below

> 2) provision for 1,000,000 laptops to kenyans – to be determined by criteria

I am a member (representing FOSS and ICt consumers) in
multi-stakeholder steering committee appointed by the PS that is
jangling with the 1 million laptops implementation
parameters/framework. Included also are hardware vendors(Intel and
HP), Microsoft, banks, universities, University students, World Bank,
telecommunication companies, ICT Village, community ICT development
organisation, among others, led by the Kenya ICT Board.

Polished detailed will be publicly announced once the committee
thrashes out the many surrounding issues. This is a Ministry of
Information and Communications initiative, being implemented by the
ICT Board with participation of diverse ICT stakeholders. Paul Kukubo
Chairs this committee.

> 3) i cannot remember the third point – but it has to do with support of
> IT/ICT/Development projects [which I would assume includes the support for
> content generation for local use]
>

Thanks for making time for skunkworks meeting…
We were pleased PS Ndemo found time to speak to us.

Kenya now has a grant US$ 3 million (Kshs 240 million)
over next 2 years from the World Bank.

Funds to be used for ICT incubation partner institutions
support. The partners include universities and institutions
that will provide incubator facilities (e.g.land/premises)
The ministry of Information, through Kenya ICT Board,
will facilitate the incubators with industry linkages and
promotion of those facilities

The second component Software Projects Management
Certification. Targeting 1,000 local software developers,
this will support them have internationally recognised
Software Development Standards-will attract business.

The third component will involve assistance on software
Intellectual Property protection e.g. patenting games,
animation, and other local patentable digital innovations.

PS reiterated, there are more local content development.
funds available at the ICT Board.

I asked for the governments plans on O3Bnetwork.com?on the
To assure connectivity throughout Kenya/far flung areas.
(Someone please contribute the response..)

Appreciated Multi Media University’s continued support.
Venue was their courtesy donation to skunkworks.
ICT Board was thanked for sponsoring chai and mandazi.

Mr. Jotham Mwale represented MMU – gave vote of thanks.

I hope this illuminates further and that you can make
use of the opportunities presented.

Sincerely,

Alex Gakuru

Android part II

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 05:38:00 +0000

Looks like the next major release of the android platform is coming out soon with a few interesting features:

This are some of the user features I’m looking forward to..

Faster Camera start-up and image capture
Much faster acquisition of GPS location (powered by SUPL AGPS)
On-screen soft keyboard
SIM Application Toolkit 1.0 (think MPESA, ZAP)
Google applications
Batch actions such as archive, delete, and label on Gmail messages

Full feature list for both users and developers are here:

http://developer.android.com/sdk/preview/features.html

Nothing about battery life though. The best way it seems is to turn off data and GPS when not using them.

Android Review

Mon, 06 Apr 2009 11:50:00 +0000

I’ve got to play with the world’s first android based phone, and it’s been quite interesting.

The good:

Loads and loads of applications on the market, a good number of them for free. Among my favorites:

Astrid – task list that’s more than just that
APNDroid – Easy turn off/on your data connection stays on
Browser – the native browser is pretty cool to use
Bonsai Blast – this game should be on every phone
GMail for Android – very easy to use
Compare Everywhere – I like this one though it’s not too applicable outside of the US. Scan a bar code and get a price comparison online.
Tunewiki
Twidroid – Twitter

The Not So Good:

Issues with Bluetooth – sending files is a problem
SIM Applications (think MPESA, ZAP) have not worked for me – possibly since the sim application toolkit has not been implemented (as far as I know) yet in the current software release.
Battery Life – especially if you use the phone alot for GPS and data

Other than these it’s quite a phone.