You’ll find me on Facebook
Peterson (in yellow) has just begun setting up the beachfront corner he and his colleagues maintain during the high season at Kilifi, next door to the Baobab beach resort. A few curio shacks, some local art, a massage and salon comprise their services to the expected influx of tourists taking a break from the winter […]
Inserting tones into your iPod
Inserting tones i.e. Ipod – just the choice of words used to describe the service offered, that of downloading from iTunes seems to imply the order and popularity of the technologies introduced in this market i.e. contextual knowledge of the customer base. I’m not articulating this as well as I’d like but we’re going back […]
VoIP centers in Old Mombasa
We saw this shopfront while following our friend Ahmed through the narrow gallis of Old Town. Wouldn’t you think it might be a cybercafe offering you a chance to go online? We did so too, but no, its a small room with a table top full of boxes and switches. He offers only VoIP based […]
Socially networked mystery shopfront
We spotted this closed shopfront just before entering Mtwapa – a midsize town about 10km from Mombasa, when returning from a day trip north to Kilifi today. There was no signage to tell us whether it was a cyber cafe or internet center of some sort. But we’re sure they are extremely networked socially.
21st century Kenyan
Beyond.internet
From the fact that mtandao is a newly minted word in Kiswahili that means network – from the verb tanda which means to spread – to the signboard’s assertion that its no longer simply a matter of getting access to the internet but instead a consideration of what’s next – our early survey of cyber […]
Lies, damned lies and statistics: how mythinformation can go viral for mobile data
Mark Kaigwa‘s comment on my previous post exploring the future of cyber cafes in Kenya made me take a deeper look at the data around mobile phones, internet access and of course, extremely affordable Android based smartphones. Perhaps it was not just in the urban areas that cyber cafes were facing a challenge to their […]
Exploring the market forces acting on the cyber cafe industry in Kenya
This post continues on the challenges of estimating size and value of an untapped market in the developing world – in our current case, it is the cyber cafe industry in Kenya. A critical aspect of this exercise will include assessing the impact of a variety of market forces acting on the industry in the […]
The challenge of assessing the size of an emerging market opportunity
Untapped opportunities in the developing world bring with them their own challenges for businesses seeking to invest in them. An interesting one is that of assessing the market size and value, particularly for the lower income demographic that operates primarily in the informal economy (often called the BoP or bottom of the pyramid). This snippet […]
