ICTworks by Inveneo

Last year the microblogging service Twitter, pulled its outbound SMS service from Africa. While only a few technology elite bemoaned its loss, for me it was a great disappointment. Twitter didn't see that the SMS carrier fees Twitter had to pay ($1,000 per account per year on average) to send SMS to African subscribers were worth future value of these users.

Now ArabCrunch reports that Twitter is in talks with Zain to bring outbound SMS alerts back to Africa for its subscribers. And that's a big deal!

Why Twitter Matters to African ICT Businesses

Twitter is an amazingly convenient way for businesses to reach their best customers, quickly, with breaking news. In the USA, its mainly a web application. In Africa, with its small Internet user based but explosive mobile phone penetration (greater than light bulbs!), Twitter's SMS return can herald a whole new way to get and keep customer attention with targeted messages. For example:

1. Daily specials and sales
2. Location updates of technicians or sales reps
3. Quick feedback to customer questions
4. Service outage or downtime updates
5. Virus or hacking threats

That's just the internal use of Twitter. Add in the sales possibilities around training clients how to use Twitter or upgrading them to hosted SMS options like Frontline SMS or RapidSMS and the return of Twitter to Africa could become a real boost to ICT adoption. Just look at its Facebook in Africa, Twitter already become a must-have for the tech elite and leading companies, and its just getting started. Expect it to rival Facebook due to is amazing ease of use and immediate gratification for both sender and receiver of the tweet.

Africa-Focused Twitter Experimentation

At Inveneo, we're experimenting with Twitter and hosted SMS options to develop solutions for the African market. Just this past weekend, we ran a real-time SMS feedback demo at Maker Faire Africa, using Frontline SMS and Twitter. Of course, to keep up with our ideas, be sure to subscribe to:

• Inveneo on Twitter
• ICTworks on Twitter

And if you have suggestions for future Twitter and SMS experiments, please let us know. We're always interested in mixing SMS and web-based technologies to find African business opportunities.

Hat tip to Appfrica

Here at ICTworks, we are always thinking about new business opportunities for ICT companies in Africa. Our latest thought would bring the Craigslist online classified ads idea to Africa, with a multi-platform twist.

Automate & centralize this inefficiency

Business Opportunity

People all over Africa want to buy and sell things. Right now, this exchange is very inefficient - they gather at markets or post fliers along the roadside, hoping that the right person would happen to pass by at the moment of their interest.

This means that sellers wait for an offer, often accepting a lower one just to sell the good or service, and buyers may settle for a substitute to want they wanted just to fill the need. Either way, both buyer and seller are unhappy and price and product vary wildly from day to day.

Solution: Craigslist

Years ago, America brought a revolution in efficiency to this process though classified ads in the local newspaper. Then Craigslist made the process digital with a simple, community driven site where buyers and sellers could come together an exchange goods, services, and even ideas. The majority of posts on Craigslist are free - they only charge for job ads and apartment rentals in certain markets - and they keep bandwidth costs low by having a simple, clean design.

The time is right for African ICT companies to launch their own Craigslist variant. A simple site where people can buy and sell items directly with each other. With the right promotion, such a site would grow in traffic quite quickly, with many ways to monetize the interest and eyeballs it commands.

Existing Competition

Two companies are already deploying their own version of Craigslist in Africa: Nairaland has Nairalist in Nigeria and Google has SMS Trader in Uganda.

Nairalist is the most direct copy of Craigslist, as it is essentially the very same design and layout as Craigslist, but they've focused on dating, jobs, and apartments at first, to drive usage. Google's service is more innovative, as we've discussed before, but as its SMS based, it will be come expensive for heavy users.

Innovation Opportunity

I think there is a middle way that can blend both approaches. Take the Craigslist concept and add SMS to it, so users can read or post to the site using the web or SMS. This would give you amazing reach and let your users choose the medium they want to subscribe with.

Add RapidSMS, and users could even form their own groups - single guys subscribing to all the new dating posts by women, or all new job listings for accountants in Abuja - as a premium (ie: paid) service.

The site can be easily coded and integrated with RapidSMS, and once paired with an existing online community, like Nairland, it would have a quick adoption rate with the country's digital elite. From there, it would spread via Internet to those who has access, and via SMS to everyone else. SMS could even be a premium short code to offset costs.

This opportunity is real, and just waiting to be capitalized on in every African country.

Everyone knows how SMS works - you can send an email to one other person. And there are SMS aggreators like FrontlineSMS that allow you to send text messages to multiple people. But now we have RapidSMS, which promises to take SMS text messaging to a whole new level.

RapidSMS

RapidSMS is an open-source framework for dynamic SMS communication developed by Matt Berg, the UNICEF Innovation Team, and a core team of volunteer programmers (with a little help from Inveneo).

Developed over the past year, in the field and in code sprints, RapidSMS promises to be an innovative platform for SMS-based solutions using server-side logic.

RapidResponse

The first solution, RapidResponse, is a unified mHealth malnutrition monitoring platform that includes screening for malaria and diarrhea - major killers of children under 5 years old in Africa. Here is a great video on the RapidResponse benefits:

Jokko

Tostan has rolled out their own RapidSMS soltion, according to MobileActive. In a year-long pilot with UNICEF, several Senegalese communities are using "Jokko" as a low-cost system to encourage group decision-making in the villages.

Jokko utilizes the RapidSMS functionality dubbed 'SMSForum, as MobileActive explains:

Joining the Jokko community

SMSForum allows community members to access a server in the Tostan office by sending their text to a “magic number”. This number feeds directly into the server or computer which then forward the SMS to a group of community members phones.

The platform supports easy and dynamic creation of multiple groups of people. For example, one village  has created a discussion group exclusively for youth. The basics of this system work much like a group list for text-messaging, however, the sender is only charged for the cost of one local text message. The cost of text messages sent to the “magic number” are covered by the administrator, in this case Tostan.

Innovation Opportunity

Now let us take these examples and think of new applications for RapidSMS. Personally, I think the SMSForum functionality is quite empowering. I can see self-assigned groups starting up, much like a listerv or Yahoo Groups and Google Groups, but all SMS-based.

This would be great for both development projects as well as commercial enterprises. Make the inbound SMS a premium short code and add advertising to the outbound SMS and you could recover costs or even make a small profit on such a system for general community use.

But enough of my ideas. What are yours?