Thus Spaketh Idd Salim

Bend Over, daggering

Raila once quoted me and said, “Wameona Simba amenyeshewa na ametulia, wakadhani ni paka mkubwa”.

The sad Google swahili translator processes this as: “The see lion in rain. He has relax. They think big pussy”

Well, thanks to Mblayo, I got this disturbing video of the Zain truck:

BendOver jibe at Safaricom HQ

The Zain Marketers (who safcom’s has ruthlessly out-performed, out-thought, out-conned us and out-sold  for over 8 years now), came up with what they thought is a daggering blow at SafCom.

They hired PA System and went to blast the ‘Bend Over’ song at Safcom HQ.

Dunno if the traffic police, Nema, the ZainWanaringasasa crew and the ThisWeekSijaona conglomerate will take this lightly. I, for one, know Mwai is devastated by this.

But wait! For the life in me, I would assume for a moment Zain would show some class and focus on the areas where SafCon makes them bend-over, daggering style, e.g:

• Social Networking
• 3G or 4G Data
• Zap vs Mpesa
• International Call rates
• Data Rates

Just a thought.

Now, lemmi make some windows servers bend over.

Have a bendy night, wont you?

Wazi.

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Cry baby? Again?

Please let me put in 7 laughs Kwanza for Safcom. – Ha… Ha… Ha… Ha… Ha… Ha… Ha…!

Michael Joseph was ranting on KTN as 2 PM today about this deal.

Thanks to the new Zain Tarrif. You can now call for3 bob per minute to ANY network in Kenya.

Safaricom has BLOCKED all calls to Zain as at 1PM Kenya time. Most of the Safcom calls were calls from jamaaz telling jamaaz tu SHIFT to Zain. Talk of viral migration.

This morning, Safcom had 15M+ Subscribers. I predict they will have only Mwai and 4M others by close of day.

The only reason I had kept my Safaricom line was because of Mpesa. Now I have Zap. Now, Zain just needs to stream-line Zap and work with local developers and Zain will rule this Market.

More later.

Back to code!

Wazi.

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It is sad. Honestly, really sad.

I sat with Buju the other day and he asked me : “Salim. Wewe huwezi unda your own Facebook na venye code unaimesea?”. My response is the same respose I once gave DjCK, Okech and Sebi. “Put me in a position that I won’t have to worry about rent for 6 months, and I will give you the world.”

So, the discussion went on. I pointed out that ANYTHING Safaricom touches, turns to a pile of shiite. Mxit has MILLIONS of people all over the world. Safaricom brought it to Kenya, did over 100 pages of color ads, and it died, as expected. Meanwhile, 2Go is keeping Kenyans teens awake till 3am.

Next up, Facebook. In this encouraging post about the opportunities for Kenyan Coders, I did on March 9 2010, Facebook had 580, 000 Kenyans. On its own. No advertising, just viral value additions. Then Safaricom started doing their Ads and USSD codes + TV ads using that smigo-faced ugly rasta jamaa. 5 Months later today, the site has 776, 920 users. Pathetic, if you ask me. Facebook has Stagnated, As soon as SafCom stepped in.

They say EVERYONE IS ON FACEBOOK… Well, we must be the smallest country in the world.

Facebook has STAGNATED since Safaricom touched her

“So”, Buju continued. “Now that ONLY 19.43% of the Kenyans with the Internet are on FB, and the growth is stagnating., what can developers do to harness the massive 81% that is NOT on Facebook?”. I smiled.

“And what is this other system you are saying that is being tested now and will come to really shock Mpesa?”, He asked. I smiled more.

Back to code!

Wazi.

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One API to rule them all...

Great day today for Kenyan coders. Ok, let us say, EastAfrican Community coders, for political correctness. I don’t even know how to break this news, so I will just do it my plain no-beating-around-her-bushes method. No, the Octopus has not predicted that Safaricom, MTN and Zain will start supporting local innovations. No. The octopus would rather die than err. To err is to human; not to octopus.So, the hustle continues.

As a CSR, being  head of a team of very gifted coders at Symbiotic, I had committed to head the Pay.Zunguka Gateway and API development team and see to it that the Pay.Zunguka API was out before Mid May 2010. But one thing did not lead to another, and we had to inevitable delay the launch.

Well, here it is now. The API. The EuberAPI. One API to rule them all.

Download the API NOW!!

So first things first. What is an API, you would ask? Huh? You are having a larf if you expect me to answer that!! The API has been developed in PHP, jQuery and MySQL and the documentation provided with it makes it totally idiot-proof. Anyone and everyone can use the API and start earning from their hustle, Immediately! All transactions from Mpesa/Zap/yuCash will hit your system, via the API in 5 seconds. Anyone who can copy-paste, can use the API.

Safaricom have indirectly played ball this time round, so flawless end-to-end mPesa support is the first feature of the API. I hope this will not make them Mad. My QA team is still testing the ZAP and yuCash modules, but jump to it. Play with the fully working mPesa support and share your thought on the approach, the model, the logic and the illogic.

If you are a ‘BIG’ fish (read a big corporate with a lot of sensitive transactions) and don’t want to use our API as a payment aggregator, we can license the actual product. This would apply to guys like DSTV and KPLC. So instead of waiting for 48 hours for the transactions to hit their backend system, we can guarantee KPLC customers that their bills paid via Mpesa/Zap/yuCash will be reflected in their account within 5-7 seconds. Cute huh!

Like all my friends will tell you (real friends, not facebook jokers), I believe in seeing, showing and action. Si mdomo mob. So dive right into it! Visit http://pay.zunguka.com/ NOW and have a blast !!

Wazi.

-Salim, Idd

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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!

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