Thus Spaketh Idd Salim

March 18, 2010.

It is the Tandaa Local Content Conference today in Nairobi. Thanks to ICT Board again.

I am at iHub Kenya and just heard Wanyama [@kenyafreelancer], say “What more do we Kenyans want? We have Fibre now”

I am at iHub Kenya and just heard Cynthia Muyoti of FabGuru , say “Facebook has made my business better? 1391 fans todate and I am soon expanding my Shoes Business”

Seated next to me is Agosta Liko, Mbugua Njihia and John Karanja. I hear talk after talk. Aly Khan Satchu talks about how anyone can be rich and gives examples.

So I brainstorm with fellow coders and the question becomes; ‘How can Kenyan Coders be rich?’. Not the “i can afford to go out and i own a toyota” rich. Or the “I pay all my bills and my rent is always paid on time” rich. How about the “I look at the food names on the menu, not the price before I order rich”, or the “I am undecided whether to drive my Range or my Mustang today rich”.

50 Cent said ‘get rich or die trying’ [GRODT], but I tell you, try ‘get rich or get rich’ [GRoGR]. We are in a position never experienced before. So, for free as usual, I will list the top 10 opportunities that are there open-legged and wet and just waiting for Kenyan coders to smell the coffee and dive in and start making the old-Money conglomerate wish they could impregnate their daughters.Only coders?? Naaah! ANYONE can jump into the eChapaa bandwagon. It is free and there for everyone.

My Top 10

1. Local Digital Content – Yes. Content is the buzzword. Enough Said. Anything you know [Yes, am speaking to Pamela, Wangechi and Anyanche] is sellable. Just grab word-press and google-checkout and walla!
2. Content Discovery Tools – Coders. The challenge is yours. Java Applications, Desktop Applications. There is over KSHS 100M not made per month by PRSPs because of lack of content discovery tools. That is why the guys down South are inviting  likes of Symbiotic to go down there and consult on HOW to convert content and knowledge into wallet-content.
3. Mobile Apps – Think of anything useful as a mobile phone app and there are 100, 000 people who NEED it and will PAY 20 bob each for it.
4. Mobile Games – Here we go again. the limit is only your imagination. grab a keyboard and write some code!! Stop these silly excuses that ‘programming is hard’. I got a miserable B in KCSE and can code, sembuse wewe!! But whatever you do, please don’t use VB.
5. Hacking and Security – The silence is deafening, but the hackers are on their way. Be equipped to defend Kenya. Your hacking knowledge will be invaluable in 3-6 months time. Tick.. tock…
6. Animation and Design – Some foreign jamaaz came here, partnered with HomeBoyz Studions and now are making millions of dollars per month. What are Kenyans doing? Facebook all day and complaining about how hard life is, how much of a a parent-hater Esther Arunga is and how much money Ruto is stealing. Kaeni papo hapo.
7. Kenyan Social Networks – YES. I said it. You can start your own Facebook tomorrow and become rich like crazy. There are 4M Kenyans with an Internet Connections. This number grows by the day. there are only 580, 000 kenyans on facebook. This is 14.5% percent of Kenyans with Internet. So what are the other 85.5% doing? Waiting for you to give them something better. Something Kenyan. Something more contextual. Lala tu.
8. Adult Sites – Ati Eish? We all know Kenyan is the mdinyano capital of East Africa. An average slut makes KSHS 2, 500 per night. And those are the cheap ones. Connect the clients and the vendors. Simple as! I wont say anything more.
9. eParty – Bring clubbing to the mobile phone. Hook people up to YOU on thursdays, fridays and sato. Just charge each user 10 bob per week. Kenyans will pay.
10. Your own WebTV Show – If you are that Kibera guy who can dance like MJ or that Kileleshwa bathroom singer, get heard online! Make some money. Sell yourself!

So maswali ni, what do KENYANS want! Are you going to waste all day thinking up cocky status updates for facebook and poking strangers who you mean NOTHING to, or are you going to monetize your time? Are you going to waste your life away in the digital world, or are you going to focus on what will really make your momma smile in public pointing at you and say, “yeah! that’s my baby!”. Are you going to complain all day about the government, corruption, the kaanjo and these bloody foreigners, or are you going to take control of your life?

Amua mwenyewe!

Ehh, back to code! Pole timo.

Kenyan coders are all smiles. The real die-hards like Kasomo and Salim cant stand up OK because the erection that the new Mpesa move generates has taken all the blood from the legs. We have been waiting for this. Now it is Here! With one blow of the keyboard, The Mighty Safaricom (not to be confused with the satanic Safaricon), have finally made our wishes come true.

We, at Symbiotic, can now finalize our ZungukaPay payment gateway and overtake all the wannabes in the market.

“What has Safaricom done, Salim?!!”, You ask

Well, something they should have done even before Semenya started growing hard Female nipples. Safaricom, of late, have decided to attach the Number of the Money Sender and Money receiver in the M-Pesa mReceipt. How simple is that, to the un-educated eye!! How cool is that to payment gateways developers!!

Maybe, even the guys at Safaricom did it accidentally, but let me not spoil this post.

Now I will have to re-do the payment modules I had done for TumaSMS, Sembuse, Sovaya and Zunguka… But I aint complaining.

Now I have a clear and valid reason to apply for a Safaricom Mpesa Business Account.

I will blog once the payment gateway is done.

Kudos Safaricom!

Tick… tock… Tick… tock… Goes my HackOmeter. “Have they been hit yet?”, I ask myself. I switch on the TV to see if a Kenyan Bank has yet been hit. “Not yet”, I conclude. “I see voluptuous women flaunting naked in the streets an on bill boards. Soon the rapists are coming.”, I tell my friends. And Ohh, what a sad day it will be.

The Topic for today is SMS Banking.

What it is MEANT to do:

SMS banking is a remote banking service via mobile phones. Upon each money withdrawal operation with a card account (purchase using a card, cash withdrawal in an ATM), the client connected to the SMS Bank system receives an SMS message with information on the transaction. Such SMS message usually includes the charged amount, part of the credit card number, date, time, and place of the transaction (shop or ATM location). Full stop! That is what SMS Banking was meant to be, should Be and Must remain as.

What is has been ABUSED to be:

But hang on, there. What about these services all over the news that allow a user to check balances, transfer money, stop checks etc, all from SMS (or USSD as the case of Equity and Barclays) ? Isn’t that what SMS banking really is?

Well, this is classic example Security Through Obscurity.  Like walking at Tom Mboya at 2am waving a KSHS 1000 Note and reaching home safe. You won’t do that for long.

Shamelessly stolen from The RSA Website, :

We have all read about the iPhone and Blackberry SMS attacks and vulnerabilities. There is current commercially available (let alone black market) software that allows eaves dropping and spoofing of SMS. The lack of SMS confidentiality has been established by congressional members, city mayors, and international government officials in dozens of cases where their text messages were intercepted and made public. Like landline communication, cell phone communications including SMS should be considered to have no confidentiality.

An SMS can be:

• Intercepted on its way from your phone to Zain/Safaricon/Safaricom.
• Changed and edited [The content, the destination Numbers, The Source Number etc].
• Delayed.
• Deflected and even deleted before it ever gets there.

This can be done with equipment that cost less than USD 10, 000 and also with techniques that anyone who knows the difference between Hellon and Arunga can master in a week.

How Can this be done?

There are 3 Knows ways to Intercept communication between 2 sources that are sent via SMS:

• Phone cloning – The best. Totally bamboozles the MSP Cell Towers [Saf/Zain]. They see two phones with same phone number, MIN and ESN. Very effective on CDMA networks but not as effective on GSM – More Info -
• SIM Copying – VERY Illegal because it is 100% efficient. Clones the SIM and yours becomes active whereas the clone is dormant but receives copies of all your SMS and calls.
• Patched Firmware  – A very easy and common method is for a hacker to upload a super-firmware to their phone. This upgrade turns their phone into a super-phone radio transmitter and they can receive SMSes that are addressed to THEM and people AROUND them. You can really have fun with this at a club, a mall or a bus-stop.

Ever been robbed or attacked then the assailants returned your phone / SIM? Chances are you got cloned and All your phone-calls [as long as you are on the same Cell Area] and ALL your SMSES [irrespective], get delivered to YOU real phone and its clone.

Where is the problem?

Ok. Enough phone hacking lessons. For those dumb enough not to grasp where the problem is, so far, please, allow me to reiterate:

• Your SMSes are neither CONFIDENTIAL nor PERSONAL. Get over it! In a recent article about how guys from SafCon sell data call and SMS records shows the first level of breach. Your data can be bought!
• Your SMSes can be intercepted by hackers. SafCon can fire all those name-spoilers they hire, but your information is only secure from humans. It is NOT digitally secure. SMS and USSD traffic is rarely encrypted, if ever.

What is MY problem?

Just your money, my reader. You dont want all your hard-eraned cash to end up in Nigeria, do you?

Why doesnt Safcon [Not to be confused with Safaricom] etc do something?

Honestly, not their problem. You send SMSes, they make money. And it is not their mandate to SECURE these systems. they offer the ROAD. If you get an accident on it, hard luck!

Is All Lost in the Mobile Banking Sector?

Not by a long shot. But that is a topic for another day, or you can skype/gmail/yahoo me @iddsalim so tell you HOW Symbiotic is Countering this menace. Power through serious code..

Adios!

Back to code!

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!

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.

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.

Back to code.

<< Part 1 Here

Along came Safaricon

Those guys from henga (Wahenga) once said ‘Mtegemea Nundu Haachi kunona’. That is normally the truth because as we see it all over, then BIG companies are always helping out the small ones, even if via mergers and acquisitions, for the good of everyone. Google just bought AdMob last week for USD 750M [KSHS 54.7 B].

However, In Kenya, the saying was officially changed to ‘mtegemea nundu, haachi kusota’.

The 2003 experience

I vividly remember in 2003. I was co-habiting at UoN with some of my Starehe Old Boys. Like most Kenyan Coders, I was all-brains and bubbling with Ideas, but NO Money. So, Me and my Friend Wasena Angira went to Safaricon with our very brilliant Idea. We called it 2GeS [2^nd Generation Email Service]. This solution would help one aggregate all his emails using a simple web Interface we had created and would get an SMS when new mail checked into any of his/her email accounts. Via USSD, the user would then quickly peruse his emails and decide whether it is necessary to rush back to the office or cyber to read the mails. User could set parameters and priority levels based on sender, subject or message body.

Assuming Safaricon was there to help the innovators be able to finally afford some groceries, we did the demo, shared the documentation and the entire concept. Talk of a cute gal walking with a shirt with the words ‘Take me, I am single and desperate’ in Westlands.

‘Very nice concept, we will get back to you in 2 days’, was the response. And so we walked back to westlands stage smiling at each other everytime we saw a nice car because we knew, ‘we will own 2 of those each, soon’.

OHHH!! How wrong we were!!

We got a regret email stating that Safaricon was not immediately looking at email over SMS and that they will get back to us.

Needless to mention some time after that, Safaricon and Google did a replica of that system. Thanks to God, it flopped. Amazingly, [possibly just coincidence].

I do not have enough facts to intelligently comment on the origins of mPesa, OkoaJahazi or Sambaza concepts, but I know some people that talk about coders who went to Safcon, were told off via email or call, only to see their product on a billboard and all over news. Powered and Owned by Safaricon, ofcourse.

The 2009 experience

So, fast-forward 2009. We are more equipped and stronger. More technically adept and mentally sanguine. We develop and test Sembuse version 3. A mobile Social Network that comes with Real-time Cheap Messaging, Operator Agnostic payment, SIM-Independent Revenue model and a ground-breaking Advertising Engine [ManenoAds].

So we go to Safaricon with after a request for a meeting from JM, we send an NDA and they send an email saying that all but MJ have signed the NDA, but we can proceed with the meeting. We go to Safcon House and meet with a group of 3 marketing department staff and 2 VAS Staff. All names available. We take them through the system and all its workings, discuss revenue models etc.

‘Very good product. So, what do you want from Safcon’, The VAS lady asks. ‘One-off Licensing cost and a revenue share’, Says TM. ‘Hmmn, Revenue Share? How does 90% Safcon and you 10% sound’, She Asks.

Ohh dear! 2003 all coming back to me.

We found a way to get off the meeting amicably and they were to ‘get back to us’. Till today, we have not yet received the NDA. MJ bado hajasign.

Amazingly, [possibly just coincidence] Safaricon started a CLASSIFIED service on Safcon Live, aiming to cannibalize on our ManenoAds ad engine. Needless to say, it was a kindergarten implementation of our concept.

The advice

I have shared this idea with a lot of people and the following was the collective advice I have got on how to deal with Kenyan Corporates:

1. The NDA is just a piece of paper. Go to ALL meetings with a lawyer. No phone calls. Insist on Emails and always CC your lawyer.
2. Don’t deal with middle or low-level staff. They will steal your Idea, package It as theirs and sell it to senior management. They are mostly under-achievers who will do anything to get noticed. They are kawa people like you who HATE to see you walk in with an Idea and walk out with a check right before their very eyes. Above all, they will just waste your time.
3. If you can’t deal with SENIORS or OWNERS, then it is not worth your time. God has given you that Idea and he will open other doors for you.
4. Don’t be intimidated by company size. Remember, Companies like Safaricon are just ‘Jogoos was shamba’. With their 12M subscribers they are non-entities in the global scene [read: Mjini]. Using LinkedIN and simple google searches, you can find bigger fish who can take up your idea in a more professional level and manner.
5. Look for a VC or a non-kenyan investor to put money in your idea and LAUNCH BIG. A small launch is like a small erection. It impresses no one and just exposes your Ideas to the hunters and gatherers.
6. Offshore is better. Why Non-Kenyans? Because there are no real investors in Kenya. We have not met someone who can put USD 100k in faith and equity on an IT startup. Kenyans have no faith. All we have met are people who want to put KSHS 1M for 80% ownership of your solution and your life. Remember it is Software. Not Bread.
7. Never give up. Like Jose Chameleone said, ‘Chako ni Chako’.

More Soon…

Part 2 Here >>

It is 3am, and am yet to sleep because code has to be done. My coffee is getting cold and so is the night. Then comes the Email from Timo.

“The CDSC want a software very similar to Esplanade. The tender was in the newspaper so this seems a fair thing to propose for”. [Esplanade is our revolutionary system that allows people to monitor, watch and trade shares in the stock market from home via web, sms or email]. “Nice!!”, I remark. At last a Kenyan company will but software from a Kenyan developer because the advantages of dealing with local talent are clear.

• We understand the local market needs than any punjabi coder could ever hope to.
• We have local support and dont need to be hosted at Hilton for USD 400 per night as we debug.
• We make better software than the Indians/Sri Lankans anyway. Better Interfaces. Better Backends.
• We come unbelievably cheap. Pay us a mere KSHS 2M and we will do an entire system for you.
• The government has the ‘Kazi Kwa Vijana’ initiative underway.

Ohh how wrong I was! CDSC called us for about 3 meetings :

• Meeting 1 – We meet and take them through our concept. We could see how awed and disbelieving they were. “Hii kitu imetengenezewa Kenya kweli?”, One fella asked, “Ama nyinyi ni partners na some Indian Firm. Nyinyi ni resellers sio?”. Well, we malizad the concept and we were slotted for an actual demo in 3-4 days time. We were informed that we have been shortlisted as one of the 3 companies to do the job. YES!!
• Meeting 2 – We suggested they book the shortcode CDSC [2372]. And we took them through a demo on how an investor would detect fraud, set stock price threshold alerts, make statement and valuation inquiries via SMS etc. About 13 unique features. We discuss financials and do a quote for KSHS 1.2M.
• Meeting 3 – We get a regret email that the job has been given to another Company and that the meeting was not necessary.

Ok. Ok. Ok. No problem. We can take it on the chin like hardcore coders do and we keep soldiering on. Ama vipi? Maybe the best proposal won.

So, a month later, the CDSC launch this innovative System.

Developed by a firm rumoured to be from Sri Lanka for an amount rumoured to be bordering KSHS 50 M, the system launches. It has only 2 features and pathetically build. [Call it sour grapes, but my 6 year old daughter knows enough Visual Basic to do that system while watching Tom n Jerry.] My beef was:

• The system used our proposal, WORD for WORD, even up-to the shortcode and modus operandi we proposed.

Why is it, to a Kenyan, so EASY to engage a Kenyan group of hard working and smart programmers to spec and brain storm, but paying them is VERY hard. Where is the pain?

Why is it so hard to financially empower a Kenyan [a mere KSHS 1.2M] but so easy to pay out overseas [KSHS 50m+] for a baby-class implementation of the same system?

Part 2 Coming up n Wed. This time round, Safaricom does it…