Launched in August 2011 in Ghana, Saya Mobile is set to launch its dating version to fill in the gap they feel exists among its online community. The dating version will be based on its street chats to allow users know others who are interested in dating.
Robert Lamptey, CEO Saya Mobile told TechMoran during the Mobile East Africa conference in Nairobi said users want to date or find cool new people online. This is also according to data available on their system.
“People want to meet hot girls and dudes online and we want to make this available for them and not just have chatting capabilities. Our street chat feature allows a user to identify other users who want to date and this makes it easy to for them to connect.”
Lamptey also added that the firm is also introducing an enterprise version to allow users join meetings even when they are still held up in traffic or away in a remote location.
Saya Mobile was founded to help feature phone users send SMS minus costs, minus data. The SMS killer app gives smart-phone-like messaging to billions of low-end devices in emerging markets. Saya Mobile says it wants to cut the cost of SMS by up to 1000 times as it works on low-end phones and also has added functionality for Facebook chat, group discussions, location-based chat, and users can also exchange of multi-media content.
Lamptey was today presenting at Mobile East Africa on the journey from their campus days to where they are now. He said they had no mentors and networks but because they were on the frontline and had no money they build their own servers when they could not afford for international servers.
Data is important, and clients did go to them to know more about the offline market. After building their own servers and collecting so much data and traffic, Google visited them about how to put internet offline, to allow people to use YouTube, Search and other services be shared offline. Lamptey tells entrepreneurs to ask out for help, but most entrepreneurs shy away from asking but there is nothing knew being innovated, someone somewhere has build that system already. Robert added that entrepreneurs ought to take analytics serious from day one as clients will need them for any commercial campaigns.
