ICTworks by Inveneo

Back in May Microsoft launched a new mobile device that struck somewhere in between a feature phone and a Smartphone. Yesterday, barely a month after the Kin launch, Microsoft pulled the plug on Kin saying it was integrating it's Kin and Windows Mobile development teams.

Microsoft said Wednesday it has stopped work on the Kin to focus "exclusively" on Windows Phone 7, the company's new smartphone operating system that's scheduled to ship later this year. The Kin was built and promoted to attract a younger, social networking-oriented audience.

The official press release from Microsoft states:

"We have made the decision to focus exclusively on Windows Phone 7 and we will not ship KIN in Europe this fall as planned. Additionally, we are integrating our KIN team with the Windows Phone 7 team, incorporating valuable ideas and technologies from KIN into future Windows Phone releases. We will continue to work with Verizon in the U.S. to sell current KIN phones."

Apparently Verizon, the provider for Kin in it's short lived life had already cut the price of the phone by 50% on both models, making it fairly affordable for your typical mobile phone user in Africa and other developing nations where mobile phone use has sky rocketed over the years:

The Kin One, the lower-end model, dropped from $50 to $30, while the Kin Two, went from $100 to $50.

Now, this is just interesting (not referring to Microsoft's pulling out a product from the market a few weeks after launch) - but even more interestingly is the fact that Ken Banks, the guy who started off the award winning FrontlineSMS, a while ago wrote a blog titled "The “emerging market” handset trap" about the need for low priced, higher featured phones than the typical Nokia 1100-type phones that are typical of developing markets. Ken's rationale follows:

Low-cost phones have certainly achieved one thing – low cost – and in price terms they’ve done exactly what they said on the tin.

Over the past five years or so, prices have indeed steadily dropped, as we can see if we pick an early "emerging market handset" winner from 2005 (the Motorola C113), a ZTE phone widely available in East Africa in 2008, and today’s Vodafone 150.

The prices may have changed, but functionality has largely stagnated. You couldn’t browse the web on the Motorola in 2005, nor the ZTE in 2008, and today you’d have the same problem on the Vodafone 150. You can’t download applications onto any of them, either. They all have monochrome screens and look pretty-much-the-same despite having a five year gap between them. Very little has changed other than price, it would seem. Voice and SMS remain king at the bottom of the pyramid, or so it would seem.

The real trick is to reduce the price of these phones whilst at the same time increasing (or at very least maintaining) functionality, a combination which no manufacturer has yet managed to crack. Nokia’s announcement last week of their cheapest 3G-enabled phone for the Indian market shows prices are shifting downward for data enabled phones, but at $90 it’s still some way off what most would consider affordable for the remaining 1.5 billion people in the world without a phone.

From today’s announcement, a sub-$40 smart phone – which really would change the game – looks to be as far off as ever.

Well... here's Microsoft with a fairly highly featured phone at just the right price (below $40 and just above $40)...

Straddling the fence somewhere between a dedicated smartphone and high-spec feature phone..

And they are pulling the plug on a potentially game changing device in developing markets! This may be speculative... but why not offer it to developing regions such as Africa, applying to it the same business models and service models such as no contracts - buy the phone up front, prepay models, opened up to whichever mobile service provider the consumer prefers....???

This was first published as Microsoft Discontinues Kin Phone - Why Not Offer it to Developing Countries?

Recently, Moses Kemibaro present the marketing plan for the .KE top-level country domain, managed by the Kenya Network Information Centre (KENIC). In his presentation, he asks an intriguing question: Are .KE domain names really expensive?

Now I wasn't at the presentation to hear his thoughts, but from the slide show, I will assume that he feels that .KE domain names are not that expensive. I respectfully disagree.

.KE domain names are way overpriced

The real question that Moses should be asking is, "Are .KE domain names relatively expensive?" See, its not that .KE registrars are making 75% profit, like .com registrars, its that new web entrants, which they're targeting with the me.ke marketing plan, are going to be price sensitive.

At $5 or less per year for the more widely known .com domain name, the $45 per year fee for a .KE domain is crazy expensive. Add to it that young Kenyans (the assumed me.ke target market) have less to spend on domain names, and I say that KENIC should be trying to price personal .KE domain names at $2 or $3 per year.

Give me.ke domain names away!

In fact, I say that KENIC should be giving away the first year of a me.ke domain name. Why? Because the owners of a me.ke domain will invest in it, to make it real and respectable - its thiername.ke after all - and when year 2 comes along, they'll pay $5-10 to keep their new address alive.

A great example of this marketing plan as a successful business strategy is 1&1.com, the giant German web host. They give away the first year of a domain name and add on many important features for free, because they know that once a person (or business) invests in a domain name, they'll want to keep it.

And I should know. I've owned wayan.com, wayan.org, wayan.net, and wayan.us for a decade now.

So I had the thought this morning that RadioMobile (the software we use for planning long-distance WiFi networks) could probably be pretty good for choosing sites to watch the fireworks in San Francisco - other than the tourist chaos right down by the piers. The terrain and satellite imagery data for the US is way higher than anything we ever get to use in the places we work, so this was kind of fun.

I asked RadioMobile for all the places a 2 meter tall person could stand to be able to see an object 15m above both Municipal Pier and Pier 39 (the two sites they launch from). I know fireworks are much higher than 15m, but to have a good view, you don't want to be staring at the side of a hill and just barely seeing the fireworks over the top.

Here's what it came up with (click on the image for a closer look):

The image shows the areas in red that Radio Mobile thinks would make good fireworks sites, and this Fireworks Viewing KML has Google Earth waypoints at three of those places that open in Google Earth to check out buildings and trees in the surrounding area.

This gives you a few interesting possibilities up in the Presidio, and some spots on the side of Russian Hill.

Happy July 4th!

Kevin Donovan and Jonathan Donner believe that prepaid ICT access models are more appropriate for poorer consumers and the availability of prepaid mobile data will be a key driver of inclusive mobile Internet usage. To prove their thesis, they've complied an amazing Ushahidi Map of the availability of prepaid mobile Internet in Africa.

But rather than just relying on their own observations, they've opened their map and their project to your input. You too can add to the knowledge of prepaid mobile data plans:

For the crowdsourcing, we’ve created an editable Google Map with entries for each country. Green indicates existing knowledge that prepaid data is offered by at least one provider. Yellow means we have been unable to determine the presence of prepaid mobile data. And Red suggests confidence that it is not available in that country (though if you know otherwise, please do correct us!).

If you know for certain that prepaid data is available for mobile phones from at least one network provider in one of the countries marked Yellow, you can either email us directly or submit a web formon the African Prepaid Mobile Data map - the more supporting evidence, including links or your name/affiliation, the better.

Now Kevin and Jonathan are not stopping at just a map - this is actually a subset of a much larger research paper on mobile data access and its impact on Africa. Hopefully they'll share the finished report with us as well.

I was in a workshop in the Upper West Region of Ghana recently. The goal was two-fold:

1. to train a small group of staff, ICT teachers and local partners on social media and new technologies for communications; and
2. to help them prepare for a project that will support 60 students to use arts and citizen media in youth-led advocacy around issues that youth identify.

Workshop participants in Ghana

I was planning to talk about how social media is different from traditional media, focusing on how it offers an opportunity to democratize information, and how we can support youth to use social media to reduce stereotypes about them and to bring their voices and priorities into global discussions.

But all those theories about social media being the great equalizer, the Internet allowing everyone’s voices to flourish and yadaya, don’t mean a lot unless barriers like language, electricity, gender, and financial resources are lowered and people can actually access the Internet regularly.

Mobile internet access is extremely good in this part of Ghana, but when we did a quick exercise to see what the experience levels of the group were, only half had used email or the Internet before. So I started there, rather than with my fluffy theories about democratization, voice, networks and many-to-many communications.

We got really good feedback from the participants on the workshop. Here’s how we did it:

Equipment

We used a projector, but small groups would have also been fine if there was no projector and a few computers were available. We generally use what we can pull together through our local offices, the small amount of equipment purchased with the project funds, and what the local school and partners have, and organize it however makes the most sense so that people can practice.

4-5 people per computer is fine for the workshop because people tend to teach each other and take turns. There will be some people who have more experience and who can show others how to do things, so that the facilitator can step out of the picture as soon as possible, just being available for any questions or trouble shooting.

What is Internet?

I asked the ICT teachers to explain what the Internet is, and to then try to put it into words that the youth or someone in a community who hadn’t used a computer before would be able to understand. We discussed ways in which radios, mobile phones, televisions are the same or different from the Internet.

How can you access Internet here?

We listed common ways to access Internet in the area: through a computer at an internet café or at home or work, through a mobile phone (“smart phone”), or via a mobile phone or flash-type modem connected to a computer (such as the ones that we were using at the workshop). We went through how to connect a modem to a computer to access internet via the mobile network.

Riffing off Google search

We jumped into Internet training by Googling the community’s name to see what popped up, then we followed the paths to where they led us. We found an article where the secondary school headmaster (who was participating in the workshop) had been interviewed about the needs of the school.

Everyone found it hilarious, as they didn’t know the headmaster was featured in an online article. This lead to a good discussion on consent, permission and the fact that information does go global, but it doesn’t stay global, because more and more people are able to access that same information locally too through the Internet, so you need to think carefully about what you say.

The article about the school had a comments stream. The first comment was directly related to the article, and said that the school deserved to get some help. But the comments quickly turned to politics, including accusations that a local politician was stealing tractors. Again this generated a big discussion, and again the local-global point hit home. The internet it not ‘over there’ but potentially ‘right here’. People really need to be aware of this when publishing something online or when being interviewed, photographed or filmed by someone who will publish something.

Other times when we’ve done this exercise, we haven’t found any information online about the community. In those cases, the lack of an online presence was a good catalyst to discuss why, and to motivate the community to get the skills and training to put up their own information. That is actually one of the goals of the project we are working on.

Linda, in the background

Social networks and privacy

When we Googled the name of the community, we also found a Facebook page for alums from the secondary school. That was a nice segue into social networks. I showed my Facebook page and a few others were familiar with Facebook. One colleague talked about how she had just signed up and was finding old school friends there who she hadn’t seen in years. People had a few questions such as ‘Is it free? How do you do it? Can you make it yourself? Who exactly can see it?’ So we had to enter the thorny world of privacy, hoping no one would be scared off from using Internet because of privacy issues.

One of the ICT teachers, for example, was concerned that someone could find his personal emails by Googling. I used to feel confident when I said ‘no they can’t’ but now it seems you can never be certain who can see what (thank you Facebook). I tried to explain privacy settings and that it’s important to understand how they work, suggesting they could try different things with low sensitivity information until they felt comfortable and test by Googling their own name to see if anything came up.

Online truth and safety

Another question that surfaced was ‘Is the internet true?’ This provoked a great discussion about how information comes from all sides, and that anyone can put information online. And anyone else can discuss it. It’s truth and opinions and you can’t believe everything you read, it’s not regulated, you need to find a few sources and make some judgment calls.

A participant brought up that children and youth could use Internet to find ‘bad’ things, that adults can prey on children and youth using the Internet. We discussed that teachers and parents really need to have some understanding of how Internet works. Children and youth need to know how to protect themselves on the Internet; for example, not posting personal information or information that can identify their exact location. We discussed online predators and how children and youth can stay secure, and how teachers and communities should learn more about Internet to support children and youth to stay safe.

We discussed the Internet as a place of both opportunities and risks, going back to our earlier discussions on Child Protection in this project and expanding on them. I also shared an idea I’d seen on ICT Works about how to set up the computers in a way that the teachers/instructor can see all the screens and know what kids are doing on them – this is more effective than putting filters and controls on the machines.

Speaking of controls: virus protection and flash drives

The negative impact of viruses on productivity in African countries has been covered by the media, and I enthusiastically concur. I’ve wasted many hours because someone has come in with a flash drive that infected all the computers we are using at a workshop. Our general rule is no flash drives allowed during the workshop period. I have no illusions, however, that the computers will remain flash drive free forever.

One good thing to do to reduce the risk of these autorun viruses is to disable autorun on your computer. This takes about 2 minutes. After you do that, you just have to manually access flash drives by opening My Computer from the start menu. A second trick is to create an autorun.inf file that redirects the virus and stops it from propagating on your machine. Avast is a free software that seems to catch most autorun viruses. Trend Micro doesn’t seem to do very well in West Africa.

Hands on, hands on, hands on

I cannot stress enough the importance of hands on. We try to make sure that there is a lot of free time at this kind of workshop for people to play around online. This usually means keeping the workshop space open for a couple hours after the official workshop day has ended and opening up early in the morning. People will skip lunch, come early, and stay late for an opportunity to get on-line. Those with more experience can use that time to help others. People often use this time to help each other open personal email accounts and share their favorite sites.

No getting too technical

People don’t want to listen to a bunch of theory or mechanical explanations on how things work. They don’t need to see the inside of a CPU, for example. They need to know how to make things work for them. And the only way they will figure it out is practice, trial and error, playing around. If a few people in the workshop are really curious to know the mechanics of something, they will start asking (if the facilitator is approachable and non-threatening), but most people for starters just want to know how to use the tools.

Jonathan Mativo in ICT4D action

No showing off

I’ll always remember my Kenyan colleague Mativo saying that in this kind of work, a facilitator’s main role is demystifying ICTs. So that means being patient and never making anyone feel stupid for asking a question, or showing any frustration with them. If someone makes a mistake or goes down a path and doesn’t know how to get back and the facilitator has to step in to do some ‘magic’ fixing, it’s good to talk people through some of the ‘fix’ steps in a clear way as they are being done.

My friend DK over at Media Snackers said that he noticed something when working with youth vs adults on Internet training: youth will click on everything to see what happens. Adults will ask what happens and ask for permission to click. Paying close attention to learning styles and tendencies of each individual when facilitating, including those related to experience, rural or urban backgrounds, age, gender, literacy, other abilities, personality, and adjusting methodologies helps everyone learn better.

Have fun!

Lightening up the environment and making it hands on lowers people’s inhibitions and helps them have the confidence to learn by doing.

Linda Raftree originally published Demystifying ICT on her very informative blog, "Wait… What?"

Just last week, it looked like Facebook would own the Internet relationship in a dozen African countries. Now, I'd say that Safaricom, a leader in innovation on the mobile phone, has just brought the ultimate killer app to any handset in Kenya: email.

Email is the killer app

No matter how many websites you visit, your entire web browsing experience pales in comparison with the amount of time and attention you give email. Its always been (and will most likely remain) the real killer app for any platform. And check out how Safaricom will own that relationship in Kenya.

Kipokezi from ForgetmeNot Africa

Kipokezi allows you to send and receive email and chat messages from ANY Safaricom mobile phone using SMS, regardless of the make and model of their mobile phone.

Kipokezi is a product from FrogetmeNot Africa, which uses their eTXT message to send and receive seamlessly as an SMS, an email or chat message on any carriers network via SMS. No need for downloads to the phone, internet, PC access or a change in user behaviour.

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This just in from the bandwidth testing company, Speedtest: Ghana has the fastest Internet download speeds in Africa! Speedtest clocks Ghana at a breathtaking 5.87 Mbps!

That puts Ghana at #44 in a worldwide ranking, beating out every other country in Africa - from Egypt to South Africa. In fact, they even beat Span, Italy and Israel!

This is based on millions of recent test results from Speedtest.net, with a comparison and ranking of consumer download speeds using a rolling average throughput in Mbps over the past 30 days where the mean distance between the client and the server is less than 300 miles.

Here's the full list: Household Download Index

When last did you visit a cyber cafe?

Eight years ago, my answer would have been “right now”. I would have been writing/reading this on a computer in a cyber cafe. Right now however, I am lying somewhere comfortable in my home, whilst punching the soft keys on my laptop.

A few years ago in Accra, one could count more than ten Internet cafes between Vodafone (then Ghana Telecom)’s Head Office around Kwame Nkrumah Circle and BusyInternet on Ring Road Central. There were: True Internet, WWWPlus Mega Cafe, Krofa Internet Cafe, Java Internet Cafe, and several others, whose names I do not remember at this time.

Sadly, most of them have closed shop. Whilst several reasons could be offered for the failure of these enterprises, one cannot overlook the solid impact of mobile phones and mobile internet technologies.

My facebook profile on a Nokia smartphone

Mobile Websites

A quick glance at the traffic metrics website Alexa.com reveals that the most visited websites in Ghana include: Facebook, Yahoo, Google, YouTube, Live.com, Wikipedia, MSN, GhanaWeb, BBC. Email used to be the most popular online activity in this part of the world but social networking websites seem to have taken the lead in recent times. News websites come third. Thus, the composition of the ten most popular websites is not much of a surprise.

What is more interesting is that ALL the most popular websites have mobile versions of their services. Typing facebook.com into a mobile web browser for example, automatically redirects one to a mobile version of the popular social networking website. The mobile websites are stripped-down versions but offer a lot of functionality, in a layout small enough to fit into tiny mobile phone screens. It is thus now common place to find people get busy with chatting, twittering, reading the news & more, from their mobile phones.

Smartphones

Smartphones are raising the stakes and pushing more possibilities into our hands, literally. They now have enough processing power to stream high-definition video and enough memory to download and store databases of music, photos and videos from the Internet. Some smartphones come with full QWERTY keyboards and thus making typing a pleasure. Emailing, blogging, chatting can now be done virtually anywhere.

Lower entry costs

Personal Computers are no longer the exclusive preserve of the rich and well-educated. 10 years ago, the pricing of an average laptop was about $2,000. Not any more. New, more powerful, full-featured laptops are available today for as low as $700. Their smaller cousins (netbooks) even come at lower prices; mwave.com currently prices an ASUS EPC900B-BLU01X Eee netbook PC at only $209.99

Used and probably refurbished PCs even drag the entry costs lower, for obvious reasons.

USB Modems

Those little devices have further democratised internet connectivity. Where mobile phones and smartphones are not enough, one could easily buy a USB Modem for as low as 60 Ghana Cedis (about $42) and connect it to a desktop, laptop or netbook for a full Internet experience. MTN Ghana is currently offering their USB modem at that price. Gone are the days when one needed to obtain a hard-to-comeby fixed phone line from the telecom monopoly or a fixed wireless antenna pointed at the Internet Service Provider’s radio mast, or a VSAT satellite dish + modem. None of these came cheap.

The more spectacular thing is that 3.5G USB modems offer real broadband speeds today.

Back to those cyber cafes. The rapid closure of cyber cafes is not limited to Ghana. 234Next.com, a leading Nigerian news source, today published a report titled: Cyber cafes are vanishing:

"In those days, around 2000 and 2001, I used to go to cyber cafe, pay money to check my yahoo email. You know the feeling that time was powerful. I was the only one who could browse amongst my friends then. We will go to a cyber cafe and crowd around one system, five of us, and then the systems were always very slow, so if we hear that one cyber cafe somewhere was fast we will go there," said Solomon Edema, a computer engineer. "Now, all of us browse with our phones. I also used my laptop. I have not gone to a cyber cafe for over a year now," Mr. Edema, adds.

Nowadays, the proliferation of computers and 3G mobile phones, including the famous China phones, has resulted in cheaper prices. As a result more people can afford internet-enabled phones. Similarly, the competition in the telecom industry has also led the telecom firms out-doing one another in offering cheap modems and internet access. Traders at Computer Village, Ikeja, now offer software that enable free internet access on laptops and mobile phones.

It is clear that mobile phones, are pushing cyber cafes out, the same way public phone booths and “communication centres” have become endangered species. What waits to be seen is how long the few cyber cafes that remain would last. Would they close shop or evolve their business model? Time would tell.

Recently the East African undersea cables SEACOM and TEAMS experienced a major Internet outage when the cable they connect to, the SEA-ME-WE 4 cable, was damaged on the Mediterranean sea bed.

As Moses Kemibaro explains, the outage was a shock to those now used to speedy Internet access and he calls for cloud computing redundancy:

The outage required Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and Telcos to re-route their bandwidth via expensive satellite connections so as to maintain some semblance of connectivity – this tended from very bad to quite slow depending on your choice of service provider. It is for this very reason why we urgently need to have local clouds that function even when international bandwidth and cloud are not available. This way, essential cloud-based services will continue to function locally.

I'd like to take his idea one step father - we need offline cloud computing redundancy, not just local-to-Kenya redundancy. While I can appreciate that Nairobi Internet users would want to still reach servers in Westlands if SEACOm or TEAMS were down, those in Kisumu or Eldoret want their cloud services if the link to Nairobi goes down. And as well Kakamega or Siaya if their links to larger cities go down.

So this means re-thinking cloud computing from a central server farm in the USA or even in Nairobi, to many smaller server gardens in many local locations. Redundancy that can ensure connectivity to your apps, no matter which link goes down. A redundancy kinda like the Internet itself.

That's why I say that with cloud computing, all weather is local.

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