Comments on: Mxit is Imported into Kenya

By: Athman Mohamed

Athman Mohamed — Sat, 19 Mar 2011 11:37:55 +0000

nothing new… nothing unexpected from safaricom. they started this kind of nonsense waaaaaay back… just ask Paul Kukubo about “Life in Green”… and yes, the same Kukubo who is current ICT Board CEO and founder of 3mice…

all i can say is NKT! And bwahaha on Idd’s comment… serves them right this time 😀

By: 5 Reasons Why Local Developers are Poor and would Remain So

5 Reasons Why Local Developers are Poor and would Remain So — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 05:32:32 +0000

[…] Whiteafrican take: Mxit is Imported into Kenya here […]

By: Vince Mabuza

Vince Mabuza — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 20:14:08 +0000

Dont we Africans love to whine….In Kenya you guys whine about lack of funding and the Big Players from South African…In South Africa we whine about lack of funding and Big Players from the US. The common denominator above is wait for it-Whining. We seriously need to cut that crap and make things happen .Africa is so open for anyone to play in its not even funny.
Im sitting here thinking wtf were yall doing before Mxit came along.Im Thinking maybe the creators of Sembuse created the product and experted it to blow up with out effort.At the end of the Day in Africa you still have to promote an online product offiline if you want it to catch fire and you have to be contravesial.
and like the poster above said…Bootstraping is the way forward and also learning from Asian counterparts because its basically the same type of market as us but we 6-7 years behind.

Ps
Stop Whinin!!!!
The next time i will be on this blog will be for an interview

By: Blurring Borders » Blog Archive » With Facebook Zero, Two Reasons For Worry and One For Hope

Tue, 29 Jun 2010 14:36:16 +0000

[…] they are working with MXit to bring the South African service to Kenya. Erik Hersman sees this as a missed opportunity for local entrepreneurs. The real problem, though, is that the operators in Africa can choose winners and losers on their […]

By: John Karanja

John Karanja — Fri, 28 May 2010 09:37:06 +0000

I finally wrote my take on this issue here http://bit.ly/9jrk2c Why Zain could be the one that finally builds the APP store.

By: Mwangi

Mwangi — Fri, 28 May 2010 06:01:47 +0000

And now Safcom has Kipokezi, IM Messaging by http://www.forgetmenotafrica.com. The funny thing is that this Forget Me Not Africa is actually based in Hong Kong. Its basically chat & email on SMS, Mxit on SMS.

By: Amol

Amol — Wed, 26 May 2010 20:56:31 +0000

forgot to add my email address if anyone would like to discuss "off line"amol.jadhav@gmail.com

By: Amol

Amol — Wed, 26 May 2010 20:54:26 +0000

I’ve sincerely enjoyed this article and following discussions and thought I’d share my thoughts and echo Afrowave’s comment that bootstrapping is the key. VC funding (although limited) is out there for the right African tech start-up, I feel the bottleneck is the quality of innovative business plans/models and the lack of “mature” or experienced entrepreneurs. After spending the better part of 2 months trying to work with Makerere ICT students on mobile start-ups (sorry, was not able to make it Nairobi), I found many showing the traits of an amature entrepreneur, key of which is not investing a sizable amount of your own time, effort or limited funds in bootstrapping the venture.

If you can bootstrap your venture and show some succcesses (prototype, active users, compelling partnerships, reasonable revenue projects – along with some justification of assumptions), I do not think you should have too much trouble finding equity financiers.

Another great resource on bootstrapping is Guy Kowasaki’s blog post: http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2006/01/the_art_of_boot.html#axzz0p4KkPnLP

By: Christiano kwena

Christiano kwena — Sun, 23 May 2010 06:28:08 +0000

My bad, on an earlier comment. I meant to say:

december 2009.
Sorry.

By: Christiano kwena

Christiano kwena — Sun, 23 May 2010 06:23:41 +0000

Well discussed. Thank you all.
My apologies to all who find my language foul.

According to Seth Godin, building a following or tribe around the product i.e. Sembuse will help making it something to wanna get. Shumpeter has written that only innovation will upset the market and create a new dominant player, however it’s for a moment before other players imitate, unless entry costs are prohibitive.
I was unable to use sembuse on my nokia 6288 because of an “out of memory error”, haven’t thought about it again. The reason is:
there were no known friends who had ever had of the app in december 2005, therefore no motivation to keep trying. I got to sembuse by curiously following an email footer link that said nothing about a j2me app, i just stumbled upon it. I wonder how many potential users visit tech forums where they’ll stumble upon it like me.
I have been to remove high schools like in iten, and young people know mygamma, ebuddy and nimbuzz. Thats What they use and mostly mig33 which has virtual currency and has been quietly getting sale agents all over kenya. Please get your product where its visible e.g. Getjar, bwap, safaricom.com, and on breakfast and 8pm radio. If you haven’t reached me a heavy chat user, how you getting the newbe.