Samsung Launches the Galaxy Note in Style

It could have been set anywhere in the world, the Kampala Serena poolside and of course the Silk Events lighting always make any function one to relish.

We were there to launch the new Samsung Galaxy Note, Samsung’s answer to the iPhone, to Nokia’s N8, to Blackberry’s Storm. It is large, and I mean large with a really wide screen. It is super fast and of course with a clarity to match them all. That’s because of its HD super AMOLED HD display.

As we watched the minister for ICT Hon. Nyombi Thembo unveiled a work such as my years in tech-dom have not allowed me to encounter.

 

 This device came across as what you would get if your tablet fornicated with your cell phone and they had a baby. With the speed of the second latest android technology (yes, they used Gingerbread not IceCream Sandwich), and the sweet deliciousness that you find in next generation devices, one has to say that this device is quite the gadget on the block. Complete with a stylus, you can doodle, write, take notes, during phone calls which says something about the phone’s ability to multi task and not hang which is more than I can about some of our more prominent devices in our market these days.

Some have argued that this device is suspiciously similar to the Galaxy S II – and have been replied to that in fact both phones are made by Samsung and so indeed would carry the best features of the Galaxy S II. Able to support high speed internet, up to 16GB of inbuilt memory and of course the sleek 8 megapixel camera that makes all your photo and video experience a whole different shade of interesting.

 Anyway, they served us nice treats (as if the Serena can do any less), and then unleashed on us the finest surprise of the evening: Barbed Wire Thong. The boys in that band are on something extra rich. Rudeboy Devoh who used to sing for Afrigo and Samuel Nabwiiso as lead vocalists just took the night away and hit for 6!!

Hanging out with cool advertising girls

Samsung might not have done well to retail the Galaxy Note at UGX2.4 Million (about $USD1,000) especially since Orange was launching the iPhone 4S the same night at the same price but the band more than made up for that. But with expandable memory and its sleek bezel finishing, I think that the tide in the market might have changed. Finally Samsung has arrived to the party.

10 things/ apps/ ideas I think will redefine the future in Uganda as we know it

It’s that time of the year again when you have to take stock, to be thankful and most of all to be hopeful.  Has it been an amazing year? Yes!! Does it leave any doubt in my mind that the future is bright where we are going? NO. Not so much with all the things happening around us. I have however had the privilege to write about the people, ideas and projects I personally came into contact with this year that I think have what it takes to make this country and even the world a better place. Sometime we think that we know  what will make it through the next decade, and they don’t. But other times we actually don’t see them coming. I think these ideas point a new light to where the future of technology, the start-up industry and development will be headed; convergence, or at least, ideas that will make that destination a more desirable one.

  

        CU@SKOOL: Last year I wrote here about an OpenXdata solution that was being tested for trial in rural primary schools as part of a pilot to see if school absenteeism would reduce if school attendance was digitized. The pilot was in 100 schools in Kiboga and Mbale. The trials were completed the application was being prepared for national roll out to 16,000 schools. I think this app could reduce the numbers of absent teachers and students. First there are a few problems to solve: 

a) The $18 Million in aid which was pulled last week because of the level of corruption in government and the lip service that was being given to the Netherlands government. Another case involved the chairman of the board of the National Information Technology Authority NITA, Ken Lubega, acquiring an UGX 11 Billion contract to supply e-learning software for both private and government aided schools through his company, CyberSchool Technology solutions here. Some heads need to roll.

b) Rolling out the application in more than 50% of all schools at primary level. At that scale one can measure efficiency or the lack of it. 

c) At that scale the application can be channeled to query for more specific delivery, attendance and progress metrics. 

The application is built to run on low end devices and will allow the headmaster to send the District Education Officer a weekly report on attendance. It also automatically shares the results with members of the community and/or the PTA. If we can get the foundations of the education system right, then we can give the younger children a fighting chance against the monster that is USE.

Garage 48: Out of a town called Tanill in Estonia hails a group of 6 people who started something called Garage 48 where developers, coders, IT enthusiasts, and designers sit for 48 hours, are divided into teams and work to turn ideas into working prototypes. They have events that help foster startup communities across the world. Uganda had her first Garage48 event this September. One of the 11 complete apps that came out of there was Mafutago – an application that uses the GPS location of your phone to tell you the cheapest and nearest fuelling station near you. Would I like that? Yes!! Would a boda boda rider like that? Definitely! The truth still remains that with low access, and a price ceiling for internet accessible devices, the application will remain a preserve of the middle class. And yet, the stats show rising mobile internet usage and access every day. So there is reason to hope not just because of one app but because of what the spirit of start-ups represents; the "Silicon Valleyism" if you want. Code-a-thons, Techfests, Hackathons, its all just people who want to contribute and need to be given a chance. We’ll just have to start here.

3.   Crimex: Crimex: Speaking of geo-spatial mapping brings to mind a discussion I had with a friend of mine. @jkaizzi who escorted the Makerere University team to the regional Microsoft Imagine Challenge Cup (Microsoft’s own search for talent) where he himself has been going since 2008, when I first met him. Anyway, as a mentor he was taking his team to present an interesting application they called “Crimex”. Their argument was peace, stability, and rule of law were essential to the achievement of the MDGs. On a capricious, vastly volatile continent, they seemed to have found the link between keeping the peace, and making the piece. The application is built on a vast amount of data collected and inputted on maps which allows law enforcement to chart out trouble spots, plan resource distribution, map out recurrence, and anticipate future offenses. The challenges here lie in:

a) the massive amount of data collection

b) Resource training and analysis

c) Political will to see this through

d) With predictive intelligence as @JonGos said here, the positive disruptive potential is so huge that we would see a shift in the way crime fighting and approaches are done.

Will the face of crime fighting change? We don’t know, but what I know is that being able to map out where the prevalence of child molesters or domestic violence hot spots will give our mothers and sisters a better chance at justice.

Fundi Bots' Nigel-5

4.     Fundi Bots: When I first met him, he was the calm and collected half of the now famous blogger duo: Two weak dudes: a witty, slightly satirized look at society. When I got to know him, I found him to be a technology enthusiast, a lover of robots, an ethical businessman with the work ethic of a beaver. Solomon King Benge, is the Resident Fundi at Fundi Bots, a collective that is going around secondary schools in Uganda both rural and urban teaching young people about robots and robotics, starting robotics clubs, and generating interest in the topic. The fascinating thing about this story is that everything he knows, he self taught from tutorials on the internet. But what blows your mind and I guess every kid’s mind, is his story. He was told it was a dream he was never to pursue, never to chase, never to dream. He refused to stop. He pressed on. And when the time came, he dreamed again. Today, he is testament that those amongst us who continue to dream will be the ones we will choose to lead us.   I think that Fundi Bots deserves its spot here because of the spirited and inspirational stories behind the team who all volunteer their time to design, make, and speak on robots across the country. Gathering stories, teaching young minds, planting seeds of desire. For to get great technology, there must great inspiration.

Solomon King on a Fundi Bots tour at Kiira SS

5.     SatNav East Africa: Last week on BBC Click, they were talking about the trends that are emerging to take over the future and Tom said “ There are the devices that are going to shape the future are going to be Mobile. Location. Social.” SatNav, a company that is into location based devices is perhaps for me one of the closest places we have come to answering the question of where are you? The company that installs TomToms or location devices has just completed a mapping system where they have mapped out the whole of Kampala on a grid map and will be expanding out to the rest of the country over the next year, giving precise GPS addresses to places, locations and sites. For small fee, members of the public can get their own address which becomes their address where mail, deliveries, messages can be physically delivered. Now most people might ask what is strange about people delivering things to your address until you understand that you no longer have to have the conversation about “turn right at the mango tree, take a left, and keep going until you reach the trading centre and then stop at the Grey gate” Four years ago I wrote here that Uganda had leap frogged from the postal service to the mobile phone. Without the physical infrastructure of the landline of which the west had over 100 years, the idea of location and DSL internet connection at home as and still remains a largely unknown element. Skipping from the mailbox to the mobile phone was a coup for development and indeed the technocrats congratulate Africa and have called the Mobile the Panacea of all our evils. But the  universe must have balance. What would this mean you ask?

a) your mail would come to your place directly

b) in case of emergencies, police ambulances and rescue services would know exactly where to help you out from with improved rescue times

c)if you needed  health care, you’d know the nearest clinic/hospital/health centre

d) real estate brokerage would all go online as available house would simply just showed with pictures and viewing times 

SATNAV helping you find your way home

 e) sending loved one gifts parcels and love would be personal.

f) ordering pizza to your doorstep

g) the flourishing of a whole new service sector and attendant jobs as delivery companies start to set up shop

h) philandering will now have an address.

i) cabs will know exactly where to pick you up from

j) visiting your in-laws will be much easier.

k)”There was jam” and “I got lost” will no longer be a valid excuse for late coming. All in all, I think that by pioneering this service SatNav has a real shot at steering a future with real options for Uganda.

These solutions are not going to answer Uganda’s electricity or pothole problems (the answer to that is by adopting a pothole as the Urban legend guys suggest here) but represent the glimmer of hope of efforts and of people who are around us making a difference every day. These advancements possess the immense ability to prepare us to catapult to the next stage but also carry the grave warning that all technology does; one that can be abused to hurt a great many people. Either way, we have to make a choice and act now because the time to sit on the fence no longer exists.

cu@school: A school attendance tracking system for rural schools

 About a year ago I was working for the Faculty of Computing & IT [CIT] at Makerere University where I spent my days poring over tomes of data analyzing the University's fastest growing faculty. Almost a marvel in Engineering and administration. It had grown from an institute to a faculty in just two years; which was a university record on its own. I have since moved on from there but from time to time I go back to see what they are on about...


When I passed there last, I discovered a very interesting project they were working for rural primary schools that can't afford the heavy overheads of stationary for attendance rolls and teacher rosters. something called "cu@school"

"CIT launched its OpenXdata software to 50 schools in Mbale and 50 schools in Kiboga district on 28^th Jan 2010. The OpenXdata platform will be used by these schools in recording data on pupil attendance using mobile phones. The Netherlands Development Organization, SNV, in collaboration with Makerere University Faculty of Computing and IT (CIT) availed the schools with Nokia phones to kick start the process, under the ‘CU@school project’...."

Guided by the motto, "any data, any device, anywhere, anytime"  the software development team at the Department of Software and Innovations Development seeks to help head teachers to track down teachers who absentee themselves from schools. The technology is lightly engineered to carry on Nokia phones so it becomes an almost accessible and mass application tool. Mostly because Nokia phones are more accessible and also because of their almost ubiquitous availability.

In this article where they say the government loses up to UGX 12 Billion a year [USD $12 Million], I'm caused to wonder whether the government would lose any less money by actually investing a subsidized amount of money for every head teacher, through an agreement with Nokia or another handset maker and therefore improving the service delivery at the grassroots level and then working from there upwards to streamline the rot that is the education sector in Uganda.

The application which runs on an OpenXdata, an easy-to-use, easy-to-adapt platform is one of the many "legs" that technology enthusiasts keep talking about that Mobile phone technology has and can use to bring an improvement in service delivery and a new edge to the development discussion.

I also ask whether such incubation centre and software development labs are not supposed to be engines and drivers of trial technology and the front runners of the nation's advance towards a more tech-savvy populace. Why aren't they more funded? Why isn't there a conscious effort to have them as the number one reference point for all local software needs and solutions? Skeptics have often come back to this question with the assertion that foreign software developers are more accountable and their reputation is more reliable than local solution providers. I ask, if the local solution providers are not given a chance, how do they build credibility? 

In the final analysis, the fact is that these technologies and start ups need to be supported and given the local confidence necessary to build credible, dependable solutions for the market.

Google Developer Conference Coming to Uganda!

Nokia reaching out to developers in Uganda; Part 1 of a loaded story.

Yesterday, in a room packed full of journalists and the able members of the Kampala blogsphere, the able, beautiful Dorthy Ooko presented and unveiled Nokia's latest product; NOKIA OVI; for publishers.

Journalists being who they are sat quietly  through her talk but the bloggers and techies were clearly in a state. The guy from the Google Technology User Group Uganda [who looks like Matt Damon but is actually called Kyle] was wondering about licensing and technology compatibility while Revence was worried about control, content and how long a developer's application takes to go through the verification, certification and validation processes in order to star earning his developer's cash!

The journalists wondered whether this was not going to trigger another war in a market where Nokia is a dominant player and neither Apple nor Google have the set up structures to compete in User generated content management and application development. The latter two have made hundreds of developers worldwide wealthy by providing platforms on which they could develop applications for their different products and be remunerated by royalties paid from usage/purchase or downloads. 

This in many markets has meant that applications virtually for everything have been developed to assist users in their day to day lives; from the ovulation calendar to shazam; an app that will tell you the name, album, artiste, year  and number of any song  just by listening to the beats in that song. Obviously creating millionaires out of the truly brilliant designers. 

Another truth is that a lot of these products were either not designed for the African market [now often referred to as the Middle East and Africa market], therefore resulting in:

a) A lot of African designers not being able to design the apps they need to find  bags, shoes, cheap beer, and cheap affordable food  or housing for the communities in which they live.

b) They have inadvertently missed out on the billions  of shillings that are there to be made from worldwide consumption of their applications.

And in the new world of marketing  where you flex  your muscles where it hurts Nokia has flexed its biceps. Every day, more than 1.2 billion people connect to one another with a Nokia device – from mobile phones to advanced smartphones and high-performance mobile computers. you imagine that kind of power, usage subscription and loyalty and you tell me its not going to hurt. the naysayers will argue that people in Africa don't have the money to sustain the Apple and Google market sizes but these guys at Makerere will say different, or the guys at Appfrica, or the guys at Node Six.

Their argument is that if you continue to go where the money is, you miss the bigger "share of heart" that stands to be gained from the masses. this is mainly because these masses, eat, they work, they clothe, they dream and live; therefore they communicate; which is why new market analysis will tell you that the people are where you go, not the money.

Whether this is Nokia's objective or not is yet to be ascertained but one thing is for sure, the support that Nokia has now committed to offer developers is an almost unprecedented first; offering the OVI platform as a place for all consumers to be able to get their email, music,  share work, games, mapping and navigation capabilities. This will undoubtedly lead to an increase in the amount of local content online; the god of which i have discussed before in previous posts here. check it more out here.

And of course open up the possibility of having the first Ugandan billionaire software developer whose software will probably be published and sold online.

Download the statement/ news release here

Mobile Banking and the African Market

One year ago when I wrote a post on UBA and Mobile Banking, it was little regarded. MTN had just launched its own platform; MTN Mobile Money; all these of course behind Kenya's M-Pesa,-the system which revolutionized rural banking in Kenya. 

Today, almost a year later I read this in the New Vision. The question is whether it makes sense that a technology that was available two years ago and licenses were issued , and yet only one more company has managed to launch the Mobile money service. 

Zain's which is built on a regional platform is clearly the most competitive. MTN's Mobile still struggles with product consistency and pricing reactions. There are  also the overhead challenges of literacy and adoption, which have forced the market leaders to invest large amounts in public education and awareness campaigns. The danger I see in this for new entrants like Uganda Telecom is the lack of industry insights and the clear gap between the stalwarts and freshies.

But what does it say for the industry going forward?

My view is that until the phone companies can invest in a translated Sim card which speaks at least 2 local languages/dialects, they will continue to suffer. This is of course not easy because of the absence of a unifying local language. it also points to the unique market landscape that is Uganda. In many ways Uganda serves as microcosm of the greater African problem. The absence of significant language blocks has been a pitfall to a lot of communication executions.

Secondly, while a lot of market figures show Uganda's young population and project it to explode in the next few years due to an albeit interesting mix of prurient factors, the fact remains that westernization or whatever is causing this population to have this much sex is not about to stop, Work with stakeholders it address the population issue, then plan to maximize each individuals income per capita through empowerment, education and improvement of quality of life. Then you can milk them. 

But why all that hustle? Why invest all that money in order to get a small part of the market share? Because when it’s all said and done, the small segment you get will be a loyal, committed segment. Which is problem number 3: LOYALTY. The absence of brand loyalty in a lot of emerging markets can be attributed to a lot of factors (unstable political histories, illiteracy, cultural nuances, fear and superstitions, etc) and while its every business' big nightmare, it is not out of reach for a brand to nurture a loyal, committed customer base. No one just wants to pay for it.

And so my answer to UTL and the other Telecom companies out there reaping big in Uganda is this: there is a much bigger market called Africa, unbanked, uneducated, unlinked and in a lot of cases unbothered by you. If you must drink that juice, you must squeeze that fruit.

In order to reach Africa's most basic consumer, you need to come from above the line marketing to the line, and then take your communication through the line and below it. Reach the guy whose greatest problem is cattle dip vet solutions. Help him address his issues not just be a statistic in your marketing sheet. Then you will have made a real difference. It is my belief that only then will it all come together; because bottom up approaches never failed anywhere.

How Much Smarter? IBM’s Strategy for a Smarter Planet?

“What is the sound of the planet talking? A century ago, the answer was simple: people conversing in person or over wired networks. Today, it’s not just everyone, but also everything talking to every other thing, in constant motion.”

Last year, at the Digital Africa Summit, I sat down with the Chief Technical Officer at IBM Sub-Sahara, Clifford Forster and, in what would be an eye-opening conversation; he explained what IBM was thinking.


A smarter planet; something he called “the internet of things.” The idea behind what was thought to be the next stage in innovation and technological advancement. The idea that all the main areas of our lives were connected and that at no time in history than today were we able to allow all these things to “talk”. Energy, infrastructure, traffic, food, banking, telecommunications, intelligence, cities, etc; all these functions and elements today are connected and monitored and IBM is looking at ways of making a smart planet: enabling sustainable businesses and systems for a sustainable planet.


This year in his presentation, Walter Mhlongo, took this conversation to the next level with “Smarter Telecommunications”. Africa has only about 1% of its information online and so has to download about 99% of its information from the rest of the world. Challenged by language barriers despite inter-connectivity and facing similar problems, he explained that IBM’s commitment to a smarter planet had led it to develop “spokenweb” (IBM’s leading automated translation technologies) in areas like health care, trade and travel bringing to life real-time automated translation solutions all available on the internet.


It is estimated 2 billion people will be on the Web by 2011 – and they’ll be doing more than talking. Video on demand, IP television and internet TV will account for nearly 90% of consumer IP traffic by 2012. When people talk, it will be to many more people – via social networking sites, whose memberships will top 500 million in the next three years. Figures that are not only indicative of the future, but also of the countless opportunities that will arise for companies to innovate, collaborate and to feed into and re-define their world in order to continue delivering top notch services to their clients.


As I wandered across the conference corridors, I ran into Walter’s colleague, Dr. Shiyghan Narti, IBM’s Strategy and Marketing Executive. He reaffirmed IBM’s commitment to the continent, indicating that the company was investing over $100 million in expanding its presence in Sub-Saharan Africa. With this investment, IBM is better placed to enable its’ clients to take advantage of the opportunities presented by gaining new insights in ways previously not possible.


“Over the next few years, you will see IBM playing a critical role as an innovator, providing inspired solutions to local issues and creating high valued products that matter to the communities and clients it serves”, he confidently states. “We will continue to leverage industry leading forums like the Digital Africa Summit to engage in meaningful conversation with our clients and partners across Africa.”


In just three years, IP traffic is expected to total more than half a Zettabyte (a Zettabyte is a trillion gigabytes or – 1 followed by 21 zeros). The need for this information to reach the last half of Africa, triggering access to massive amounts of information and thus allowing informed decision making, better sustainable practices and an interconnected system of performance to deliver our planet to the next level has never been greater.