Thus Spaketh Idd Salim

As soon as my late grandma [mhsrip] told me ‘never bite more than you can chew’, she added, ‘mgema akisifiwa, pombe hulitia maji’.

I always blog about Safaricom because it is my hope that this big Kenyan company could up their game and style up to make sure their services and internal processes are upto scratch. But ohhhh, how disappointed I always am!

One of the biggest problems facing Safaricom is the glaring lack of capacity planning. At end of months and weekends when most mpesa transactions take place, there are always delays and outages. Obviously based on hardware constraints and total lack of responsible sysadminery.

The fact that Safaricom are just users of Mpesa and know absolutely zilch about the internal modus operandi, code  and garbage collection in Mpesa core system, could be used to excuse them form the blame. They dont own the Mpesa System like Zain owns Zap. But you would expect better from a company termed as the most profitable in Kenya.

It has become a common knowledge and a widely accepted fact that Safaricom are in business because Kenyans are always forgiving and ready to settle for mediocrity. Network congestion, Mpesa Outages etc are the order of the day.

The common phrase in town, ‘mpesa iko down’ [no pun intended] after mpesa servers go for lunch is generally acceptable. But watch out, Zap and yuCash are catching up.

Of late, Safcom have introduced a all you can eat Internet bundle for 7 days at Kshs 999. To the uneducated and freebies loving majority of Kenyans, this is an offer from heaven. But this could not be further from the truth.

Imagine the JAM that would be on our roads if for one week the government offered FREE fuel for everyone. That is what is happening to Safaricom Internet.

The once famed 2MBPS pipe I could get now crawls at a pathetic 6Kbps.

Poor capacity planning. Once again.

The 999 per week journeymen are now jamming the lines and slurping all the capacity for the ardent daily users. You would expect Safaricom to demilitarize the Unlimited Net from the mainstream net, but hey, they are Safaricom. They can do whatever they want.

The unlimited internet bundle is now SO LIMITED, it should be converted to a company. Maybe they can do another IPO on it.

Maybe sasa I will even be banned from wearing green shirts. Adios!

Last week, I got information and notification that I (Cdr Idd Salim – not related entities) was banned and blacklisted by Safaricom Kenya Limited and should not be seen physically or in a proposal as a service provider, cook, guard or even a potential husband to ANY Safaricom employees.

This was hugely because of my uncensored and non boot-licking blogs about the way a fictitious Kenyan company called Safaricon [dont know why Safaricom thinks they actually are Safaricon.] lures Kenyan developers into meetings and steals their ideas, implements them and commerializes them without even a rebate or a simple Sambaza to the inventor.

I spoke to Mwaniki and he told me : ‘Achana na Saf. They are just a jogoo la shamba with a measly 15M simcards sold and jut over 6M active subscribers. On the global scene, they are a micro-player. Think Global, my small brother. They cant match Zain’s 70M+ Subscribers.’. I smiled. But since I don’t like making enemies of any size, shape or color, I am here to apologize for the confusion.

Actually, I think Safaricom is the best company in Kenya and I have no beef with them. My fiction stories on Safcon will, however, continue.

The only beef I have with the mighty Safaricom that we all love and awe at, however, is this sad story:

In Dec last year, I remember, there was a certain Sally LM who was helping me solve a case where  my Safcom numbers was being tracked and all the SMSes I sent given to my S.O. and all my Voice calls sent to her as email attachments. Every day, after a tiring day hassling to pay rent and at least afford grocery, I would reach home for a FBI interrogation on who I was talking to and why I called a certain lady, ‘Darling’ in one of my SMSes. Sally LM was very cooperative until the 18th Dec. She stopped when we had finally cornered the Safaricom employee who was selling my call records to my S.O.

Safaricom, at first, categorically denied that they actually store ALL audio and text for all its subscribers. The reason, from Sally, was ‘technical’. Once I told her I knew what a mouse was and could at least double-click without stuttering, she explained that the volume of calls ‘was too big and the data storage capacity at Safaricom would not be enough’.

So I called my good old big brother at UTL and he told me that BY LAW, all Mobile Companies store data and this data is easily accessible. According to Vodafone, call data is stored for 6 months and all internet data for 3 years. The main reason is for crime revention. In normal modus operandi, Safaricom would  would want a Subpoena if records are requested for an account or telephone that you do not own [maybe requested by CID or police]. It is also a CRIMINAL and sue-able offence for someone to sell/buy data for a number they don’t own.

I did some maths and found that using the 13 kbps Full rate GSM pipe [Like Zain do for the clearest calls], a minute of a voice call would be 97.5 Kilobytes big. I stand corrected, but this means that if ALL the 15M Safcom sim cards were to be put in actual phones and all made calls there would be 7.5 Million dialogs using 697.37 Gigabytes of data per hour [A mere 16.736 TB per day]. With a Terastation Live 20 TB Sata harddisk of 10K rpm retailing at USD 200, It is hard to imagine a MSP would fail to build a data center to store this for 1 year+. But Who am I to argue.

Unfortunately, this being Kenya, all one needed to access my call records was just one disgruntled/under-paid/bored/corruptible Safaricom employee and all my records were public property. MTN Uganda did a better job when my calls were being tracked and an Employee called Emma Mudolla was fired in relation to this.

So, Working with Sally,  I made a prank call to one of my should-not-call-according-to-her numbers and when I was drilled on that after getting home that evening, I smiled. Safaricom system tracks who accesses client calls and at what time. So I emailed Sally and told her to check. Then the strangest thing happened. Until today, Sally no longer takes my calls or responds to my emails. Why Sally stopped helping me when we had cornered the snitch is still a mystery.

It would really mean alot if Safaricom could help me in eliminating this low-life pest. In Zain, A friend of mine had such issues and the snitches were flushed like the ectoplasm they were.

Back to code.

-Salim, Idd.

Our recruitment process went well. We interviewed over 30 bright and very talented young coders from all walks of life. Some came in suits, some came cycling. I was pleasantly suprises on how the education quality has improved at UoN and Strath. Kudos to the IT departments! So, after all was coded and debugged, we had to select like 4 to start with in our Q1 expansion plan.

SMC will now officially expand its programming docket. The following are the architectural changes we are undergoing and would like developers aspiring to join us in Q3 2010 (or just for sharing) to learn these skills because we pay well. Actually, any programmer who will join us with a working and ready-to sell product [or killer idea], will get life-time equity on that product and we will adopt it into our mainstream.

• Symbian Programming – We will be developing Symbian apps mainly using the Python programming language, but the good old, sexy, faithful and voluptuous Java ME will still be called upon from time to time. We will release a Symbian/J2ME game and a 2 positively social apps in Q1.
• Blackberry Programming – We will release a business tool for blackberry that will take EA by storm in Q1 2010. That is all I am allowed to say, so as not to get shot. SMC will be releasing information about availability on her (soon to be redesigned) main Website.
• Kohana - No… Daniels. Not Kahuna. Just simple Kohana. We are going to ditch the Procedural programming practice and ACTIVELY use our OOP PHP and Python resources to redevelop all out websites using Kohana as the PHP  Framework of choice. Sorry CakePHP, Symfony and all the other pretenders. Kohana had bigger balls. We will redesign all our client’s website ala Zunguka version 4, CititizenTV, Hot96 FM etc on Kohana…

I wish I had more time to blog about the 3 other things we are working on, but Mbugua is giving me that ‘Go back to code!’ eye…

Laters!

In 2006

As hackers in Kenya, we have/are always been taken as fact-less doomsayers and merchants of fear about an IT apocalypse.

I remember in 2006, From a 32Kbps line in my bedroom in Kampala, I Hacked into a top Nairobi Stock brokerage firm registered with the CMA/NSE and downloaded their Entire Database of Investing clients. The database, obviously included some juicy details e.g. Names, Cell #s, Address, ID No, Trading History, Usernames and Password.

Being the Naive and PURELY technical hacker I was those days [No Business Sense or mentorship], I sent the MD and IT manager an email with the Database as a Zipped attachment and advised them on how to secure their enterprise and lock-out people. Maybe it is the Concortion of Matoke, Lumonde, Kallo and oBushere I had taken for lunch, But this was a very dumb move.

“You have just burned an opportunity to have these guys pay you through their noses!!”, Said an Irate and totally annoyed Mwaniki. “Next time, talk to me or get a BUSINESS PERSON to handle the BUSINESS for you. You are just a hacker”. Hmmn, Kumbe things I do for fun could rake big scrilla.

2 days later, ‘I received an Email ridden with threats and gloating on how they can send cops to my house before I could Spell the name ‘DjembaDjemba’ and have me locked out for good.

So, What makes Kenya a FAT Juicy Bulls-Eye for hackers?

A lot of  things make Kenya a big fat juicy and warm err.. target.

1. This is Kenya – Name me the country where Systems like Mpesa/Zap pioneered? Yeah, Kenya. Ushahidi? Kenya. This makes Software development houses a major target for Industrial IP espionage.
2. No IT Criminal Law – Well, breaking into a place requires physical presence. so, technically, hacking isnt breaking in. In some states in the US, for you to be convicted of Hacking, you must be caught LIVE actually logged on tho the victims machine. The server/route logs from their ends are totally inadmissible. For all they know, states the rule, the machine could just be hacking another, and not the user. Logs can also be manipulated to show anything the SysAdmin wants them to show.
3. Kenyans are too stressed, to remember complex passwords – During all the times  I have had to Prank-Call or Social Engineer an ISP Support desk or every time I have gone to a Dormans or a Java, I have concluded that Kenyans use the Following password for Cisco Routers, Wireless Networks etc [1234124, 12345678901, p@ssw0rd, jesussaves, welovejesus, railatosha, hague]. or if the username is kamau, the password is normally kamau123 or KamauMnoma or personal/Work/neighbours car Number Plate or Date of birth..
4. Kenyans Trust the padlocks – Alot of times I have visited organizations [Not all ofcourse] and have been given an IT tour. the conversations normally goes like this:

IT – “And this is our server room. You can see all the servers are securely locked in there with that huge padlock.”

Salim : “What firewall do you use?”

IT : “We have Fire Extinguishers and also motion detectors.”

Salim : “No, No. I meant, FIREWALL. To really secure the servers from intrusion. Internally and externally.”

IT : “Hiyo padlock no Solex original mzee”

Salim : “OK. good.”

It is also a culture that most people use the same password for their PC, FB Account, Gmail, Chat etc. Usual Excuse : “Sitaki Stress ya kukumbuka password kama 30 mzee!”

Who can/will be Hacked in 2010?

This is no indication at all that the cogs are already oiled and raring to go. Just plain fact-less prediction based on Obvious situations. If you are a pool player, you know that if a black ball is set, it will eventually be pocketed. What is in the plate, will eventually be eaten.

The following are my personal top 5:

1. The Stock Market – I will not be surprised to wake up one day and find The price of Safaricm Shares is 15 bob. Definitely, the regulations protect the Market against such differentials, but what about the confidence of oblivious investor? One of the Arms of the Trio [NSE, CMA, CDSC] has a very insecure setup that could be the achilles heel for a skilled/semi-skilled hacker.
2. The Banking Sector – Alot of banks are jumping to the SMS and Online banking bandwagon. I must agree I accept the software models and security architecture of some of the players, but MOSt banks seem happy to just fire up an IIS with default settings box, throw in some insecure code and walla! They have an online banking system!
3. Social / eCommerce Sites – The advent of fibre brings with itself a surge of websites and me-too replicas of social networks and eCommerce and payment platforms. Quite a number are designed with a very strict methodology taking care of performance and security concerns, but there are still alot of vulnerable apps in terms of data sanitation and business logic.
4. Government Websites – A great percentage of Government are done Gungho by just setting up a quick installation od Joomla or Drupal. There is no differentiation between CMS implementors and actual web developers worth their salt. I have a bad feeling The reliance of security features of the CMSes and the reliance on the un-educated CMS guru on security will have bad ramifications. Let me not even list the government websites that have been recently hacked.
5. Individuals/SMEs – Corporates and SMEs normally need a one-time secure setup by a seasoned pro and then everything runs smoothly. Behaviorally, to save cost, new devices and configurations are added to the LAN without consulting the pro, later on. The adding of new items and possibly the need to change [read adulterate] the secure settings leads to an insecure environment. Alot of reasons e.g. espionage [delete all their data because they are my competition], Disgruntled employees, Ex-staff with access etc make the SMES a risk factor. again, since most ISPs have same/default password for their equipment [for ease of remembrance for the techies], a hacker can hop from Zimmerman to Hurlingham Zombifying home computers without even the owner smelling the trap.

Habari ndio hiyo!

Back to code..

In a previous Post, I talked about how Google could use GoogleCheckOut to monetize Africa and do a 2-fold win-win move:

• Help Millions if Africans access e-Commerce and sell to the world, as opposed to locally.
• Enable Google take a big chuck of the millions of USDs sent from US/Europe back home to Africa.

I also talked about the blacklistic that payPal does for African IPs. So bubbling with Ideas and possibilities, I approached CK [of Google Kenya and not DjCk]. Google is your friend, right? Ohh how wrong I was!

CK Made it clear to me that [Quoting the chat]:

• unfortunately we [google] are not ready for monetization in Africa
• even if we were to monetize the entire existing online population in sub-saharan africa, it would not be a significant amount.

So, apparently, Africa is too small for Google. I thought not. So I googled (sic!) some facts about Africa Remittances and what I foind blew my mind. According to this report, :

Kenyans in the diaspora are contributing an equivalent of 3.8 per cent of national income through remittances.

In the year 2004, for instance, Kenyans living and working abroad remitted about Ksh35 billion ($464 million), which overshadows the net foreign direct investment (FDI) of Ksh3.6 billion ($50.4 million), which accounted for 0.41 per cent of the country’s gross domestic product.

More recently,  [According to this]:

Despite the global recession, remittances by Kenyans abroad, a key source of hard currency, grew 6.6 per cent to $611 million (Sh49 billion) last year, Central Bank has said.

However, the growth was much slower than the 41 per cent rise the previous year [2007] when the remittances stood at $573.6 million (Sh46 billion).

The figure above oscillates between .6B and 1B USD depending on the source.

So, WHERE IS THE OPPORTUNITY FOR PAYPAL?

I believe that internet has reached sign-up saturation… people no longer jump to a bandwagon and register with no clear benefits. They now need a REASON. Free email sevices like yahoo and lycos had a boom because they had that UNIQUE offering.. FREE. Sadly, FREE is no longer a selling point nowadays.. people need to feed the fundamental human urge.. the urge to trade.

If a big player [PayPal] could use TRADE as a reason to get people online, this would be a winner. You know africans. We NEED a valid and convincing REASON to do anything constructive.

Trust me… Wangechi will not get online to poke Otieno… but tell her that Otieno will pay… she will log on to your site faster than you can say Paypal. Think of all the possible implementations of MicroPayment and MicroLending for social and business reasons in a typical African/Kenyan setup.

I will seek audiences with Menekse and the like and see if this cross-continent trade with Paypal Linking to Zap and Mpesa using our hand-made KuKanja Payment gateway can be made a reality.

More later…

My 5 year old daughter, Nuria, came to my coderoom, on the morning of Jan 1, as I was debugging the jQuery bits of the Hot96 Fm Website that Mbugua decided I should do personally. She said, ‘Happy New Year Daddy!’…. Hmmn, I look at her suggestive smile deciphered the stenography on it.

I remembered, ‘Ohh, it is Baby Shazma’s 1st Birthday!!’.  Shazma has now made 1 year and even though she has Flu, it has not stopped her from walking with support and saying ‘Baba’, ‘Mama’, ‘Java’ and ocassionally, ‘Gog’ when the Dogs outside Bark. Nuria wanted a big cake bought ‘for the baby’.

So I asked myself, ‘Salim. New year. Same stuff?’. Nooot! And I came up with a few resolutions. The resolutions are nothing as drastic as ‘I will start using IE’ or ‘I will code in VB’. They are now as sacrilegious as ‘I will start Support Man Urinals’ or ‘I will Insult a server by Installing Windows on it.’. No! They are well calculated steps and decisions based on advice and lectures from well-wishers that I am sure will make me a better Coder, Daddy, Gunner, Haxor, Business man and person.

• Do What PO told me. Stop Selling technology. Sell Solutions. Adapt the ‘you tell me what you want and i will build it’ approach. Ditch the ‘We have these solution that you might need’ approach.
• Do What PO told me 2. Wake up every morning hungry for more! Don’t celebrate Jana’s success today. That is the past. Break new grounds every day. Day! Not Week.
• Do What PO told me 3. Stop learning! I already know enough to develop any web/desktop/mobile solution. learning and meeting investors kills my time. Focus on the solutions and fine-tune them. Make them user friendly.
• Do What PO told me 4. Stop working from home! Kids, TV, Pool, Neighbours. Too much distractions. Until my Kitisuru home is complete, I will go work from office everyday. wake up daily at 4am and sleep not ater than 12am.

• Do What Daniels told me 1. Business Acumen. I am good in technical stuff, but I sometimes leave clients more confused when I throw some terms like MiTMA or NMAP in an explanation. I need to find a business writer for alot of my paperwork.

• Do What Rashid told me 1. Salat! I missed alot of prayers last year and even my Fasting was flawed. I need to become more religious this time round. Allah’s blessings come to those who seek them.
• Take my pool professional. Will actively participate on all pool tournaments in East Africa. Will enable me travel more and also meet new people on a social setup.
• Do what Jude/Rashid Told me. Get married. make everything official.
• Do what Kelly Told me. My hacking skills are good and natural. We need to setup an organization to legally and ethically offer serious security consultancy to willing banks, corporates, ISPs and individuals.

That’s  all folks.

This poem is about the unending trials and tribulations of a Kenyan Coder.

Monday: Wake up at 5am all psyched up and ready to start this new lucrative project,

Turn on the PC and fire up netbeans and start apache, glassfish and googletalk,

A mail pops up and a client is calling me for a quick 10k job in westlands,

Because my pocket is empty, i run to westlands for the all-day 10k job and the lucrative project stalls.

And so, today, yet again, I will postpone my success…

Tuesday: wake up all fired up. Today I will debug that piece of Java code,

I disconnect the net and shut down all other distractions, even my phone.

BUT, the electricity company decide to also disconnect the power, ohh my god!

I should be all panicky and angry, but I decide to remain hopeful and bold,

Power comes back at noon, and by then it is hot, and no longer cold-code time,

And so, today, yet again, I will postpone my success…

Wednesday: I pick up my call at 5, there are some investors in town who want to see us,

Sometimes it is Safaricon who want a demo of my system and cant stop calling us,

We spend on cabs and lunches and waste coding time hosting the same old vibe,

Our success Project delays because of useless meetings and countless proposals for other solutions,

And so, today, yet again, I will postpone my success…

Going Forward: In the midst of all the hassle and bustle, I decide to watch news,

Mr Politician lectures the clapping crowds on how they bring them development,

And how the government is there to help the vijana kupata kazi,

I laugh and go to bed, thanking God for knowing better,

And so, tomorrow, never again, will I postpone my success…

The time is now.

I candidly remember when we were kids at campus in UoN. We used to always talk about people with money. Not small pocket change like 10 or 20 Million Kenya Shillings, but real cold scrilla. Everytime someone started talking about how rich s/he or someone else was, we asked, ‘Kwani yeye ni Cris Kirubi?’

That was the most common phrase in Campus, relating to a real definition of someone who has made it all by himself.

Typically, a good majority of Kenyans become ‘rich’ (By Kenyan definition of rich) by either stealing from the public, taking heavy bribes or doing drugs.

There are quite a few who have become real self-made billionaires through hard work, smart work, sheer passion and a never say die attitude.

Today, gentlemen, the few ladies in Kenya, my haters and my friends, I had the honor of meeting such a true success story. The one and only, DjCK.

As an entrepreneur, when such a figure avails 5 minutes to meet you, you are always advised to have all your selling points at your tongue-tips. You may never get the chance again. CK gave us 3 hours top pitch, and ohhh, pitch we did!

I was astonished and pleasantly surprised at how switched-on about technology DjCK was. Everything we said was well received and understood and he never shied to ask when he did not understand what the technology did, or where the money was.

We have met quite a number of people who think they are rich, other who are getting rich and some who are actually rich. I must confess that Humbleness, care-to-listen and  the love and passion for technology was not a virtue any of them had. DjCK had these.

Mbugua and I were impressed and encouraged by the prospects of teamwork and collaboration and now, only the proverbial sky is the limit.

Like I said in previous posts and on various Zunguka and Facebook notes:

• It is only those who are awake that shall smell the coffee.
• There are millions of dollars to be made in East Africa and Kenya in Particular with the coming of the fiber.
• The ultimate synergy is the collaboration of old money and new ready-to-sell ideas/products.
• A million put on a development house in Kenya today, will be an easy million in a year (Kenya shillings input; USD output.)
• Doomed and the developers that develop for corporates and individual clients till now. The winner solutions are solutions for the masses.
• Doomed are the Kenya Millionaires who will FEAR to invest in technology for they shall soon be surpassed by time and their comrades.

Habari ndio hiyo.

Back to code.

My daughter’s 5^th Birthday was on December 4^th, 2009 and my SO’s was on December 5^th . Also, due to possibly 72 reasons, my SO’s sister decided to get married on December 5, and So I had to travel to Mbale, being the good father and mpenzi I am.

On my last trip to Uganda, My 3 boys flossed about how they could now to talk to their 16 campus girlfriends all day and all night for just Ugx 1000 (KSHS 40), thanks to the new Warid talk plan dubbed, ‘pakalast’ or ‘pakarasiti’ in luganda. It is said that Warid has all the other players in the Ugandan Market Worried, no pun intended. So I decided to test her and see if she is as versatile, portable, satisfying and hot as the guys claim.

Being a heavy mobile Internet user, I needed to access my Gmail, Sembuse, FaceBook, Zunguka and LinkeIn accounts, lest I become as old as VB6.

December 5^th 9am. I buy a Warid phone line. I get about 13 SMSes in a space of 2 minutes. Some welcoming me to warid, some promising to make me Ugx 25M winner and some promising me a ‘Kikompola’!! Whatever that means. For a moment, ‘Kikompola’ sounded like a homosexual invitation.

So I read the pamphlet and it stated ‘Call 100 for Internet Settings’. I call 100 and the IVR nearly bored me to death. ‘To change language, press 1. To Do x press 2.. blah… blah… to topup press 132… to topup another number press 133.. to speak to a customer care rep, press 0.’!! Damn!! Why didn’t that ZERO option come first. So I press 0 and speak to Rena. She asks the normal stuff about the phone make and all then promises to send the settings in 2 seconds.

3 Minutes later, the phone beeps and alas!! Warid Web Settings! I click on Open, but the settings had a PASSWORD!! ‘Please enter the PIN for the Internet settings’. My Hacker mind started buzzing. ‘Try 1234’, ‘Try 0000’, Try ‘6666’ since Warid is a Muslim company. I decided to act a fool and called 100 again. This time, before the IVR voice could reach 2, I pressed 0 and presto, I am number 125 on the queue. After 2 minutes of waiting a Patrick comes on line and tells me to enter the code 1234. groan!!!

Warid charges Ugx 2.00 per KB of data. Sounds nice and fair, BUT when you consider it is an EDGE connection and convert the per MB rate to KSHS, you realize the deal is not as good as it sounds. Extrapolate that to Per MBs and then to Kenya Shillings and it makes Safaricon look like an angel.

Safaricon charges a maximum of KSHS 8 per MB of data. That is Ugx 196 per MB. For 1 MB of data on Warid, you pay Ugx 2, 048. Warid is 10.4 times MORE EXPENSIVE than our local leech, Safaricon. With Ugx 500 bob on my phone, I cant even poke 100 people on Facebook, leave alone send 2 Kgs of e-Miraa on Sembuse.

The uptake on Internet in Uganda is 4.5%. You wonder why? Even a retarded kid with the IQ of a dung beetle can see it is because EVEN the BEST rates for Internet, make it look and feel as a thing for the rich! Simple AS!

Sadly, even MTN and UTL are on the same 2/= per MB madness.

And here I am complaining about Kenya Data Rates. This was a good lesson on Humility. It still does not mean I am suddenly going to jump to bed with Safcons offer or Zains 250 bob per day unlimited internet rate. Still Bloody Expensive.

Even as we approach 2010, Mobile Service Providers are fighting the voice and SMS battle. This, ofcourse wins over some promiscuous customers who hold more than one line at a time, but in the long run, the primary sim card war is WON by the holistic provider. In Uganda, there is NONE!

Data and Content infrastructure is set and ready to go [Warids EDGE feels like 3G, SuperFast! Possibly because it is too expensive for the average user to log in and clog the small pipe] but lethargic and 2002ish thinking make people do this new thing the OLD tired way.

I believe the clear winner for the Primary SIM war, especially with the advent of Mobile Social Networks like Zunguka.com, Sembuse, CM, CN and CC plus mobile web social networks like FaceBook etc will be someone who will charge the user KSHS 10-40 per day for data. Come on MSP, you have NOTHING to lose!!

Back to code!

-Salim, Idd.

Alot of times, I have been stopped on the streets [on my way to Laico for lunch] by many a coders with the same question. ‘Salim, I want to make money using SMS shortcodes and tun my own campaign ya kulipua mabilioni kama ile ya Safaricon. Nidosike kama Sebi na ninunue Kompressor sita za pink.’

So, being the big brother I am to a few, I always cancel my lunch and take the person to Savanna Loita, and explain it all.

• How it works
• How much money once can make
• What different types of billings are available
• What are the best people to partner with to get value
• How to promote your service

Now, After the Arsenal Loss, I woke up refreshed and sober. I can share this with the public. So here we go.

Premium rate SMS services are a value-add SMS revenue model for Mobile Service Providers (MSP) customers, that is run by Premium Rate Service Providers (PRSP) and Content Providers (CP) to drive revenue via SMS and SMS-related services.

By Law, MSPs (Safaricon, Zain, YU, ME, Orange and PineApple) are not allowed to run ANY shortcode business directly or indirectly, as this would kill the small players (But we all know SafCom does it anyway, huh?)

To become a PRSP, you will need to pay KSHS 210, 000 to CCK for a license, and renew it anually for KSHS 100, 000. This allows you to book Shortcodes with the MSPs. If you dont have 210, 000, you can become a content provider and book a shortcode from a PRSP.

There are two types of shortcodes in Kenya.

• Golden Shortcodes : (e.g.) 5050, 8008, 4441. Easy to remember, cute on the eye and cost KSHS 200, 000 application and a monthly of KSHS 10, 000 per month, per Network + VAT.
• Normal Shortcodes : (e.g.) 4034, 2346, 4659 etc. Kawaida shortcodes for KSHS 10, 000 per month, per Network + VAT.

So if you want to run a normal shortcode on 2 networks (e.g. SafariCon and Zain), you need KSHS 20, 000 + VAT per month and you FULLY own the shortcode and can run your own services on it and rake in cash, as long as you can advertise them and make them popular.

So, Where is the money?

When you book a short-code, you need to decide the following:

• What Billing band should it be? – Bands start from KSHS 3.5 per SMS where you make 0 (Read Zero) Shillings to one that the client gets charged around 100 bob per SMS. Most people settle for KSHS 10 to KSHS 60.
• Should it be MO-billed, MT-billed or MO-MT billed? MO-Billed means user MUST have the money e.g. the 10 bob, on their phone before engaging you. MT means user gets billed once SMS lands on their phones. MO-MT is obvious. Means user gets billed half on send and half on receive.
• How much money you want to make. Obvious huh?

So, How much money Do I Keep?

Well, I was hoping we dont fika here. This is the saddest part of the entire business. Normally, based on whether you are a PRSP or a CP, the moneymatics are as follows:

• Unless you have received 1, 000, 000 SMSes on your shortcode, the MSP takes 50% revenue, PRSP takes between 10-30% of the remaining 50%. So, if you are charging 20 bob per SMS, you take home between 7-9 bob per SMS, PRSP takes between 1 to 3 bob and Safaricon takes 10 bob; bila adabu.
• Zain have a better deal at 30% if your volumes are high.

Errrr, yeah. I will answer the rest personally.

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