Thus Spaketh Idd Salim

On Tuesday, I had the pleasure of being in the same room with some very influential development oriented people. Meeting was held at ICT board, hosted by PK. Invited were Symbiotic, MobileMonday, Safaricom, Top PRSPS and Developers in then Kenyan Mobile Arena

It was a good meeting of minds and well worth the time and effort. For Once, I was in a room with some guys from Safaricom who had their brains bigger than their Egos.

Present

Paul Kukubo – Head of ICT, Lewela and Kaburo

2 Peters from Safaricom, Sylvia Mulinge,

Salim, Timo from SMC, Wesley from Letti Games, Cellulant, Adtel and IMS teams.

Absent

All other Jokers in the country.

Agenda

• Why Safaricom is seen as a monster by Kenyan Software developers. Perception being that most ideas sent to Safaricom disappear at the Marketing department and and get ’stolen’ to make Safcom all this BILLIONS, while the real inventors languish in poverty.
• How do we as inventors and developers work together with Safaricom and make a living out of code.
• What are the key failure factors met by developers while dealing with Safaricom.

Mangumi na Mateke

The top 2 issues and responses are as listed below.

ISSUE: The current locus standi is grim and really pathetic. Wesley argued that Apple Automatically gives the developer 70% shares and keeps only 30%. This encourages the developers to innovate and pays them immediately. Safaricom and the PRSPs take over 75% leaving the developer with a measly and satanic 25%. As if that is not enough torture and an abuse of human rights, the developer WILL NOT get paid until after 4 months. A Kenyan Mobile developer CANNOT live on code, unless they decide to follow the path of the weak and prostitute themselves and get employed

RESPONSE: Safaricom expressed willingness to shift the revenue shares to the favor of the developer. Developers will get as high as 90% of the money they bring. Systems that bring DATA traffic and thus bring residual income to Safaricom, e.g. Sembuse from Symbiotic, will also attract special treatment and revenue share models from Safaricom.

ISSUE: There are SO MANY requirements from Safaricom before a developer can get to the platform where their services reach the market. CCK Licence, PRSP Licence etc.

RESPONSE: This challenge fell to the PRSPs. It is, obviously out of the Safaricom domain. Adtel and IMS expressed willingness to incubate developers and their systems [Apps, Games, Ideas] at a very sexy revenue share.

There is a positive vibe from Safaricom at last which might indicate the following:

• The actual problem and cause of the ‘Safaricom ni Madogi’ movement in Kenya by coders is due to the red-tape between the entry-level marketing department and the upper tier. I remember going with a proposal to SafCom and Evah from VAS asking if we were read to accept 5% revenue share while SafCom kept 95%. I felt like crying. Maybe she was Joking. Meeting people higher up makes you realize that SafCom aint all that bad.
• Safaricom have started to realize that Voice and SMS are dead! The next frontier for MSP Mkwanjalization is DATA and DATA driving solutions. Step in Java Developers!
• Safaricom have started to smell the coffee. Which is good. Of late, they have just been inhaling the AC!

Lemmi go back to code. Mbugua is giving me that ‘you have not coded for 12 minutes straight’ eye! And No, Deno, Safaricom have not ‘onad me kando’ to do a positive blog about them. Good stuff is happening.

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.

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.