Nairobi Barcamp 2008

Barcamp was held on Saturday at the Jacaranda Hotel: Hash has a list of links to various re-caps from other bloggers.

Here's mine from the ½ day there

ISP's: Riyaz (of Wananchi) gave a talk on the coming changes in the ISP sector, as he talked about the various offering in the market now;
- Safariom Michael Joseph is Mr. Kenya with 10 million ‘voters’ behind him has 700MB that costs 2,000 shillings ($31.25) (Not enough), and other bundles
- Celtel has EDGE for 3,000 not well marketed. Not as good not that it has many more users
- Access Kenya Access at Home has two rates one for day (high traffic costs more) and another for night (much fewer people online, cheaper)
Wananchi offers 512K at 3,000 shared (Not dedicated which costs about 100,000 shillings – and said any ISP who promises you dedicated service at a sub-par costs is lying to consumers). They have Wimax for offices cost about 15,000, are going into cable TV (100+ channels) and will roll out to houses via cable which has higher capacity (separately they got overseas funding for their expansion so no need for a local IPO now )
- KDN have laid out more more fibre than anyone in Kenya, serve a few hotspots but the butterfly does not fly
- Orange/Telkom Kenya. They pay very good salaries to engineers and other members and will roll out data service in a big way soon. They are on CDMA which means that they require fewer base stations (50 in Nairobi to 300 for Celtel and 400 for Safaricom, and will distribute the much awaited I-phone in Kenya and the region

Riyaz mentioned the need for Africa to not miss out on the ongoing technological revolution. He said companies like KDN and Wananchi have free hosting and are ready to partner with developers – he mentioned platforms like Jahazi (a hybrid application accessible from any computer – with chat, news reader and browser) and Zunguka – and challenged Kenyans to be ready to develop application and systems to take advantage of the expected submarine cable (TEAMS) once it lands.

Other platforms/applications I learnt about include Helule, Peupe (from multiplechoices), Campus Vybe, Stockskenya, and Haiya

- Hash gave a session on blogger tips that was very engaging

- Interesting talks were given on the Kenya Internet Exchange Point which exchanges net traffic between local ISP’s (and which can be up to 90% or 50 MEGS? in peak time), the Kipsigis Heritage Foundation, Computers for Schools Kenya and Kenyan Poet talked about a local book sale company that accepted M-Pesa payments and had free delivery of books in Nairobi

- Paul Kukubo of the Kenya ICT Board talked about the Kenya Transparency Communication Infrastructure Project (KTCIP?), a partnership with the World Bank that had a grant of $1.5 million to go toward creators of local portals, content and applications (such as commodity exchanges for agriculture). Awards will be in the range of $10,000 to $20,000 each and a formal announcement wile be made later

Safariom day 12
Deals 5,091 Turnover 438,560,608 ($6.85 million) Closing 7.70 High 7.80 Low 7.55 Last 7.70 Volume 56.9 million shares. Weaker tone. Buyers pulled back and Sellers chased down. 7.35/7.50 is support. We came down on much lower volume. Data and commentary from Rich.co.ke [Free real time prices] - authorized NSE data vendor.