#mea2014 is a cool annual
event that has since 2010, strived to showcase a lot of mobile phone
developments in Africa.
Some highlights of Day on February 12, in Nairobi
Host of the morning
session, Mark Kaigwa, started off with a comment that there's been a lot of hope, but
also a lot of hype around the whole silicon savannah story, and that the
event was about hearing some stories of actualization of developments
Veronica Ogeto-Tchoketch Head Of
Innovation at Safaricom spoke about recent innovations the company that aimed to transform lives and these included:
- iCow: A partnership with Green Dreams that offers dairy
and poultry farmers information by SMS to maximize their yields, and now has
12,800 farmers.
- Shupavu291: In partnership with Eneza education, is a study tool
for primary school students that now has
170,000 users on monthly or weekly subscriptions.
- JamiiSmart is a maternity app that aims to reduce mortality rates
of mothers and children from childbirth to 5 years by sending alerts on
immunization, medical visits, medication etc.
- Lindajamii aims to counter a low 3% insurance penetration
rate in Kenya - and so Safaricom partnered with
Changamka and BritAm to come up with a
basic in & out patient medical cover for families that also includes
funeral benefit and maternity cover with monthly m-pesa payments staggered.
- Refugees United: In partnership with Ericsson and UNHCR, they developed a tool that refugees
could use to track relatives they’ve lost track of through a platform that
provides confidentiality and security.
- M-Kopa: Is a solar panel solution that is able to light 3 rooms
in a home, and also charge mobile phones. 40,000 customers have signed up for this, and payments can be via m-pesa.
- Vuma online they equipped select matatus/PSV's (now 3,000)
with 3G modems - and now some youth ask if a matatu has vuma before boarding. They plan to extend the data penetration
services to restaurants, train stations, barbers etc.
- M-pesa has now been extended to M-Shwari (loans to
individuals) and M-Pesa online (pay for goods bought online via m-pesa)
The partnerships have been
developed with Safaricom's valued business partners including Huawei, BritAm, iLabAfrica, Commercial Bank of Africa, Seven Seas, among others.
In the Q&A session she
mentioned that they want to work in agriculture, health, fishing in 2014 and
people can send suggestions to innovation_at_safaricom.co.ke - but that app proposals were not enough to get one access to Safaricom
assets like USSD, API, and research. She also appealed to the government to open up spectrum to
mobile operators.
Dr. Bitange Ndemo, who’s the honorary chairperson, Alliance For
Affordable Internet said that Africa has the most inefficiencies of any
continent and said that the release of information by broadband / mobile as
one way of sorting these. He said African government make a mistake by auctioning
spectrums – and said the 700, 800, 2600 MHz spectrum ones should be given at
the lowest prices or even free as they will spur commerce that will generate more than enough taxes to pay these back.
Mark Redman the
CTIO of Smile Tanzania which launched 4G last year in Uganda and Tanzania that
uses 800mhz and offers excellent broadband to on the move mobile devices. He
said 4G has more possibility that 3G as one
can share many connections over Wi-Fi, can tether, stream HD, do FaceTime, Skype,
all with no buffering.
They are see seeing behavior change – and also some bill shock with their customers as 13MB/second download to a mobile service leads to an average consumption that is greater than 10 gigabytes per month
They now cover Arusha,
Dar es Salaam, Kampala, Entebbe and Ibadan and soon Lagos and also into the DRC
– giving them a presence in 4 large African markets.
in Tanzania they are using
national backbone, metro fiber in TZ - - and have to lease capacity which is
not great as they want to be a carrier. Google offer an interesting proposition
in Uganda so may work with them and talking with Google and IBM on other ways
of reducing costs including delivering internet without telcos. Smile is a service
provider, not an infrastructure company. they lease towers (from Airtel, Helios) but see that monopolization of towers is becoming a problem.
They are aiming for 5G next, and want to deliver all that was promised to
Africa on 3G and he predicted that by next year it will be hard to sell an
android smartphone that is not 4G capable.
Tomi Ahonen who Forbes magazine called one of the world's most influential expert in mobile gave a special address - The
Near Future Of Mobile: Where Is The Opportunity?. This was his 62nd
country to visit and 99th city to speak in about mobile stories.
Highlights
- The convergence of
mobile – many companies are now interested in mobile including PC giants who now think the future is mobile - such as HP (who regret abandoning mobile,
and are now coming back), Lenovo (buying Motorola from Google), Sony (sold
laptops biz to focus on mobile) and Microsoft spent $7b to buy Nokia
- Prevalence - There are
as many mobile phone subscriptions as there are people in the world. This is unprecedented, and even pen & paper, and wrist watches never got this reach
- Grand convergence - 15
global industries will fully migrate into mobile (if not completely) movies,
music, advertising, telecom, Internet, computer, credit, bank, insurance,
watch, camera, map, print, broadcast, and social media. Some are already on the
way there with camera already gone 90%
mobile, and music at 40% - but there is a lot of opportunity in the others to enable
this transformation. Also any of these industries, can cross over and capture
customers in another segment – as was seen with camera phones, introduced in
2001, but which have now wiped up traditional analog camera companies (today
Nokia is the most used camera brand, and Samsung is best selling camera
– while Kodak, Polaroid Minolta have all gone,. Also unfathomable in 2000 was that
computers would enter the music business, but today iTunes is the world biggest music store.
- Mobile is the 7th mass
media - 1st Print (1500) 2nd Records (1890s), then Cinema (1910) Radio (1920) TV (1950) Internet (1995) Mobile (2000s). Also mobile is different from the internet and
while it is difficult to make money on the internet, it is easier to make money
on mobile. …He said that 8th mass media will be augmented reality.
Mobile has 9 unique
abilities
- mobile is personal mass
medium
- Users are permanently connected
- Always carried
- Built in payment channel;
- Available at creative
impulse
- Has very accurate audience
info
- Captures social context of
consumption
- Enable augmented reality
- Offers a digital interface
to the real world
Ood
features like SMS are still very powerful as seen by corporates like Omo,
Carrefour, Finnair- who through various campaigns are able to generate paid
customer responses that range from 30% to 300%
- He cited Alan Moore by saying that said mobile
user data is the new black gold for the 21st century, and it's possible that by year 2030, the Fortune 500 companies will be topped by companies that drill for data, not for
oil.
- $10 iPhone Android is the future, but in future based on Moore law, in which the
processing power doubles and the costs halve every 18 months, there will be a
$10 iPhone (or an equivalent of that) by year 2019.
- What can Kenya learn from his Finland? Developers was not to be afraid to fail, but to learn and try again – noting
that Rovio (of Angry Birds) failed 51 times before they had the hit game.
Tim Legg CEO Ole! Media Group spoke of the
challenges of delivering media digitally in Africa. He said mobile is not
internet – and that since the advent of the internet, very few digital
publishers make money from digital media and that is not sustainable - whereas
mobile media is sustainable.
- - Independent mobile
media businesses need to be self funded
- Even next year
there will still be 1 smart phone for every 5,6 feature phone in south Africa - so forget about
the super apps. It is still a feature phone media world where USSD and SMS work perfectly
ok, and they see increase in unique growers on all digital platforms.
- Their growth is
predominantly through the mobile channels but
the durations have dropped, as have average number of visits have dropped.
-- Mobile can
compliment traditional media - allow interaction and enable payments -
something which internet has never done
- - Move away from the old newspapers model of charging readers a monthly
subscription paid by credit card to one pay per use billed to a mobile phone
-Publishers can't make enough
money from advertising to pay for content creation - and advertising in Africa has been driven down by Google and is heading to zero.
- Mobile growth is also
found in what are considered dying markets like the UK
- Start with feature phone
(SMS) move to smart phones, touch phones, then tablets to grow the media ad
network
Jonathan Endersby Head of Special Projects, at Praekelt
Praekelt works with Guinness
Smirnoff Johnny Walker and banks and insurance. They also have a Parekelft Foundation when realized some of tech work done for big brands was really cool and could also make
a difference in the world
He spoke of developing
universal tech that anyone can access and use it to make their lives better - and they do it on open source tools like
vumi
They have worked in 17
countries across Africa on initiatives that revolves around the base of the
pyramid – where 60% of people are
(earning less than $2.5 per day) and 50% of these have internet access, but 99%
have access to mobile phones
Some of these include
-
a text alert to remind people to go get doctor check-ups - people can now send
message back (2 weeks old)
- Guinness you’re the boss – a fantasy
football game that 5 people can play at the same time, al on USSD. It’s in 5
countries and got 200,000 users in 4 months.
- Wikipedia text
-100,000 users in 3 months, 400,000 searches. He pleads with Safaricom to make Wikipedia free (*515#)
Robert Lamptey, the CEO of Saya spoke about
preparing his company for international expansion. The company started as a way
for students who could not afford expensive SMS to send messages through
installing an app on their feature phones, access the phone books and mimic SMS messages
They wanted to experiment
with 2,000 people but instead got 400,000 downloads in 3 months – and 86,000
users (they realized they had an issued converting downloads to users) – and in
turn 86,000 people invited 9 million people to join in a few months and their
servers were crashing – and they got scared when they noticed some Arabic
messages flowing through their systems which turned out to be people in Syria
using their network to communicate early in the Syria uprising.
Early on they plugged some
analytics tools into their systems and were able to decipher trends and what as
happening e.g. that android devices are the next device people buy after
feature phones. And data tells you how to make money, and based on their
analytics, they are going o move into the dating platform space
One of their coolest
features street chat – which people in one location can use to start chatting –
and he said that they can see that Namibians talk about sex, Nigerians are always
trying to sell anything, Indians like to flirt, and Kenyans love politics.
as a founder, be on the
front-line and solve the problem that you have and not what other people have
e.g. telcos were blocking their systems that was eating away their revenue, but
they managed to find a way around that. There are many new opportunities e.g.
Google want to deliver the internet while offline, and without telcos.
He said there’s nothing
new in Africa, nothing we are investing has not been done elsewhere - so ask
people send email out, they will help you -as people who know stuff
are always willing to help.
Other quotes of the day
- Cory Wiegert Director Of Product Management, Software Group – Africa, IBM IBM has a $20 billion software business – and is trying to address the challenge of a 4 screen world (laptop desktop mobile and tablet) - how to sync that make that experience consistent, and secure in a bring your own device world - e.g. at IBM that has over 400,000 organization
John Waibochi CEO, Virtual City - Users have transformed e.g. in tea, coffee, alcohol sectors. Cooperatives in central Kenya want to do shocking things with mobile. Also distributors who are 65% cash less want to be 85% cash less and make these more demands from tech companies as they believe that the mobile is the way to go and tell their tech partners they are moving too slowly. Also no two groups want the same system/features. so his company has gone from having more developers, to having more business analysts
Laban Okune - Founder, Ma3Route - what holds people back? Money..SMS short codes are not cheap, and though people here are saying develop things around SMS, he also appealed to operators to make this cheaper
Taha Jiwaji Founder & CEO, Bongo Live spoke of bootstrapping with consultancy services to build your products and company
Jonathan Endersby even American developers are shocked that USSD exists
Jose Henriques Group VP Data, Airtel Africa - you don't pay to receive calls while roaming on Airtel in 17 African countries.
