How Mxit and Safaricom can increase RoI by leveraging local platforms

Jul 15, 2010 4 Comments by

Mxit - Sleeping giant. So far...

Well, After receiving a few phone-calls and some random emails, I have decided to be positive and share a unique insight on the Immense power of the Collabo between Our beloved Safaricom and Mxit. They might not be doing so well, as we bloggers and alot of arm-chair IT consultants might have analyzed.

Straight to the point, The first step is to address the current hurdles, then to look at the revenue engines.

Locus Standi

Mxit support the Moola system but is  not being used heavily, if at all, in Kenya because very few people have credit cards. So revenue from  Moola is Zilch. Mxit needs to contact the servers in SA for the XMPP requests and semi-HTTP requests and thus costs users more than normal browsing.

Safaricom has about 1.5 M people on data [unverified].  A great majority of these can  be converted to Mxit users if :

  • Mxit would develop a lighter app with less data guzzle. Implementation of compression and better and more-spaced session re-tries. Every byte counts.
  • Safaricom would come up with a Mxit Bundle (SupaMxitta) and allow people to subscribe to a buffet model of e.g. 10 bob per day like they are doing on Facebook.
  • Mxit would center itself on content and other value-additions like an mMall system by partnering with establishments like Maduqa.com for data and Mocality for business information.
  • Mxit Moola system would ride off a fully working and tested MicroPayment Aggregator like pay.zunguka.com. This employs a pay-once-spend-may-times model for people’s money and would move Mpesa traffic and also data traffic as MXit becomes the de’facto mobileMall for Kenya. One deposits money via Mpesa, it gets converted to Moolas and then they can spend it on Virtual and real goods, in the Mxit community.

My work is done.

Back to code!

Personal, Symbiotic

About the author

Coder, hacker, inventor, pool guru.

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