Thus Spaketh Idd Salim

Well, on march 11, I had the privilege and the pleasure of meeting the creme-de-la-creme of Kenya’s Mobile Industry. The MoMo Kenyan chapter if official BABY! SHe is alive and kicking in Kenya.

The list is endless, but top of my mind was Paul Kukubo, Mark Kaigwa, Pratik, Forrest, Aly Khan Satchu, Kaburo, Lewela, Ronald Meru, Timo, Leon Asoyo Oywero, Kemibaro, Erik Hersman, Caroline Juma, Norman Gombe, Oscar from Zain… Just to mention whose who smiled at me, shook my hand and spent some seconds to talk to me with either advice or questions.

Slowly, Idd Salim is becoming a celeb. Hehehehehehaters. Relaxini bana. Cant a brother get some recognition?

Hersmann stated that the world is waiting for the Kenya’s version of FacebookMobile, but with focus on Local content and trends. I told him about our Zunguka Mobile site and he was pleasantly surprised. I smiled thinking, “A black Facebook on steroids. If only Symbiotic had 1/6473868 of the development investment/budget of Facebook. But no one believes in Kenya. We have to fend for ourselves!! Innovative Geniuses doing hand-to-mouth programming with emphasis on code-for-food-and-rent.”

Mark as always was happy and enthusiastic about our products like Sembuse and TumaSMS and hoped that GotIssuez could do a collabo with Symbiotic. I asked only one Question? ‘Why not?’. There is alot of content repetition in Kenya. What we need is content aggregation. Nipe nikupe. As in, Symbiotic.

Moses Kemibaro, the man whose mind is not narrow and got words like the mighty sparrow was next. “Salim, congrats bana. Your website was ‘Kenyas Blog of the week’ in the Business Daily”. I had no idea! Thanks BDA. BDA march 11, page 17. Moses then Introduced me to the great Aly. Well, the Kenyan Version.

I was most likely speaking from a whole meter below the Tall Aly. I think he was standing on his Wallet. Nevertheless,  I am sure he got me verbatim when I Explained how he could use the Sembuse platform to monetize his NSE Stocks Data on rich.co.ke and rake millions. Make the data go to the people, not make people come to your website for data. He was all smiles. Watch this space.

Ronald of Adtel and Norman of IMS told me sweet things I like hearing about some things we call USSD, MONEY and CHAPAA.

And then came a God-sent moment. No, not me finally speaking to a Female. I was doing dudes all night jana. I met this guy whose jobbo is to get poor and orphaned kids from slums and teach them photo-shop, web design etc, and then empower them to be self-reliant with web jobs. I told him about Symbiotic being a Company formed by Old Boys from Starehe, understand sponsorship and charity to the letter.

We are pamojaz with him and we got no Issuez with helping. I also suggested he talks to MobilePlanet. What I hear is that Safaricom has given ONLY mobile planet access to USSD and locked out all the other developers and PRSPS and these kids could really benefit from knowledge of USSD coding. maybe at last in Kenya, we can see more innovative solutions on USSD rather than wait for a Semeni every 3 years. [Btw, i have no beef with Semeni and I believe it is a great solution. It is actually named after Semenya, a real champion of the people. But come on, this is Kenya. We have the best coders and thinkers on earth. Am sure we can do better if these APIs are opened.]. Or maybe my Informer meant Safaricon, and I heard Safaricom. I stand corrected.

Speaking of our Beloved Saf, I did not meet anyone from Safaricom at MoMo. Either they were not there, ama maybe tu ni network haikuwa.

Oscar, Bi Juma and the rest of the esteemed Salim-meeters were all positive and I am sure all this will come to a good end. Or is it a start?

Only time will tell.

Err, Code time it is.

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.

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!

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.

Well, we all know that Mpesa is

One Gateway to rule them all

widely used in Kenya, Tanzania and Afghanistan. Zap is available to the 22+ Zain One-Network Countries.

We also know that Paypal hates Africa.

Lastly, We know that Symbiotic Media Consortium has developed a working Payment Gateway that already links PayPal, Mpesa and Zap. Needless to say, there was no help or support at all from Safaricom, because safaricom knows as much about Mpesa as Wangechi.

So this presents a very clear advantage for players like Google to come into the Africa playing field. Africa has millions of people who have NO WAY doing e-commerce, unless they have credit-cards and can cheat Paypal to not be seen as originating from Africa, the Dark Continent full of thieves.

Using The Symbiotic Payment Platform, Google can rule the African Market and Leverage the un-tapped m/e-commerce. We know Google Loves Africa. She has Offices in Kenya.

This being a man-eat-man society where people just sleep and wait for others to think then steal the ideas, I will share no more, but will email it as a PDF to Google, detailing each and every step, hoping they will adopt it. They will. I know.

-Salim, Idd