Cisco has shown plans to connect East Africa to Cisco Connect Kenya 2013 so as to drive the regional businesses in the region forward.

Cisco’s Vice President , David Meads, said that the focus will be the continued investment in East Africa, Heighten focus on ICT skills training  and the technology capabilities, richer experiences and unprecedented economic opportunities for business and individuals in the regions.

Meads added that the company’s operations in East Africa have continued to grow annually representing a product and services business that is significant within Cisco’s Emerging Theater in Europe, Middle East Africa and Russia (EMEAR).

The company has shown interest in engaging the governments of  East Africa into creating collaborations to help support plans for further accelerated development. Next year, the company wants to embark on the journey of improving the ICT situation critical for national infrastructure, education, healthcare, defense & national security and the services provider market.

“Our goals is to drive customer and partner success by making it easier to do business with Cisco in East Africa. As we align with country agendas we will continue to focus on creating job opportunities for the growing youth population who are entering the workforce today and in the future,” said David Meads.

Present in the event was Kenya’s Cabinet Secretary Ministry of ICT, Dr. Matiang’i said that the government has its position on ICT in the government’s manifesto and is critically looking into its success.

He highlighted four areas that the government has its focus on. First the government is looking to implement the national broadband strategy, which is intended in making the internet in the country fast.

The second thing is bridging this gap between innovation and technology. He said that the government is looking onto offering resources that will aid in realizing the talents and innovation that the youth want to pose in order to make the technology situation in the country workable.

Dr. Matiang’i said the government is looking into, how to deploy ICT effectively in the government as most of the sectors are analogue and also to make ICT a core thing in the countyr to help in capacity building.

The event branded ‘your vision made possible, held in Nairobi, provided a platform for Cisco to discuss and showcase current ICT trends such as the Internet of Everything (IoE) and how organisations and governments throughout East Africa can leverage these trends to drive success and make their visions possible.

The Communications Commissions of Kenya (CCK) together, together with the East African country’s Ministry of Information, Communication and Technology, have again repeated that there is the need for mobile service providers and their agents to comply with SIM registration regulation.

“Anyone who contravenes these regulations commits an offence and shall be liable on conviction to a fine not exceeding three hundred thousand shillings, or to imprisonment for a term not exceeding three years, or to both,”  said CCK’s Director General, Francis Wangusi.

The commission also made it known that Kenya’s process of SIM Card registration regulation has emerged after the CCK reportedly discovered that mobile operators or agents are continuing to sell SIM cards and activating these without registering subscribers.

Wangusi has issued another warning to both the public and all mobile phone subscribers that using unregistered SIM cards could result in arrest and prosecution.

Its about time we go beyond this, everyone knows the importance of registering their SIM cards and should be reminded, this cat and mouse game should stop its really hard to understand the harm in just showing up and registering unless the person has  bad intentions.

Between 2011 and 2012, the African Development Bank (AfDB) increased its investment in clean energy in Africa by a staggering 92 percent putting its clean energy projects in Africa at $4.3 billion.

The new report by Bloomberg New Energy Finance, which looks at the clean energy transactions of 26 national and multilateral development banks from 2007 to 2012, between 2011 and 2012, AfDB increased by a staggering 92% its investment in clean energy in Africa, the largest source of financing for the Africa region so far.

AfDB was the first with $4.3 billion of the total $14.7 billion invested into clean energy projects followed by the World Bank Group at $2.9 billion since 2007.

The funds totaling $1.2 billion are used to accelerate risky and costly clean energy projects such as the Moroccan Integrated Solar and Wind Energy Programs and Kenya’s Geothermal Development Project in Kenya.  Investments worldwide increased three-fold from 2007 to 2012, from $36.8 billion to $108.9 billion. Clean energy financing from development banks broke the $100 billion mark in 2012 for the first time in history.

Microsoft East Africa, HP, Safaricom, Google, Samsung and OLX are some of the companies that will showcase technologies of the future in a Digital Fair to be held in Nairobi next month.

The firms will also illustrate their technological capabilities and showcase the latest digital trends to the public at the three-day event to be held at the Sarit Centre. Present at the event will be IT researchers, critics, the business network and the public to exchange experiences and reflect on challenges and the expected impact of digital network technologies.

The event’s organizers, Eyeballs Marketing, say the Fair will offer complete digital experience to visitors interested in the latest digital trends, lifestyle gadgets and other technologies designed to simplify and enrich their lifestyles.

Eyeballs Marketing CEO, Mr. Martin Muli, says the Fair is a response to growth in digital technologies that has transformed how business is done in the country in the last several years.

“It is high time we bring different organizations and experts to a platform where they can meet with the public to debate ideas on digital trends and what the future holds for the country,” says Mr. Muli.

The economy has witnessed massive technological investments in areas like the financial services and telecommunications sectors where firms compete to take advantage of the benefits enabled by technology-driven innovation.

Exhibitors at the Fair will be drawn from all sectors of the economy including telecommunication, media and advertisings firms, lifestyle and products, government agencies, learning institutions and Techie companies.

“The Digital Fair will  have to levels of exhibitions, the Business Digital Fair and the Digital Future Fair, which will offer the public opportunity to interact with different exhibitors, listen to their presentations, experience technology and buy some of the products on offer,” says Mr. Muli.

The Business Digital Fair will be for businesses to display and show case unique and superior technologies that are in use to enhance the customer experience.

“The Business Digital Fair booths will strictly comprise of businesses, both corporate and SME, and will offer them a chance to provide a full digital experience to the public as well as generate business leads,” explains Mr. Muli.

The target exhibitors under the first level will include hotels, media houses, PR and advertising firms, learning institutions, government bodies, telecommunication companies, foreign companies, technology firms and businesses in lifestyle products.

At the Digital Fair Future, different techies and organizations will present solutions that can positively improve the lives of Kenyans. These solutions will be presented to key decision makers in Government and corporate sectors who have the capacity to engage techies and adopt the digital solutions.

The experts will be expected to tackle ideas on the future of digital technology in areas like disaster management, healthcare, agriculture, management and governance, security and public transport.

Eyeballs Marketing has been involved in planning and management of various successful events like the recent Kenya Social Media Awards, Grand Wedding Anniversary and several county editions of the ongoing Miss Tourism Kenya.

“Completion of secondary school is vital to helping youth find jobs, start businesses, and bring about change in their communities,” explains Reeta Roy, President and CEO of The MasterCard Foundation. “Our partnerships with Camfed, FAWE, and BRAC prioritize secondary education for young girls. Data from the World Bank show that for girls, one extra year of secondary education increases their earning potential by 15-25 percent. Additionally, staying in school also delays early marriages, and over the long-term, promotes healthier and more economically secure families.”

A UNESCO report says that in Sub-Saharan Africa, the rate at which secondary school enrollment is very low and stands at 43 percent and more than 21.6 million children of lower secondary school age may never spend a single day in school.

Apart from Scholarship Program, MasterCard is also looking for students who have shown leadership potential and a desire to give back to their communities. Through mentoring, leadership development, and service-learning, students gain the skills and competencies needed to become change-makers and ethical leaders and to succeed in the global economy.

BRAC, Camfed, and FAWE will work in partnership with families, communities, educators, and government officials to identify and demonstrate best practices for strong, high quality secondary education institutions.

The youth in Africa now have more opportunities than they used to have a years before as there are many programs that have been formed to support them in the major aspects of their lives. Hopefully it will help in curing the unemployment situation in the continent.

There is a level of apprehension when it comes to the adoption of Cloud services in Africa and publicised data leak issues like the US’ National Security Agency (NSA) Prism program have not helped. However, the situation calls for perspective say experts and Cloud computing simply has to go through the natural progression of adoption as defined by Gartner’s maturity cycle.

Albie Bester, General Manager at Pamoja, the Cloud business unit of Pan-African ICT enabler SEACOM and a wholesale provider of Cloud services, refers to Gartner’s hype cycle and specifically the point raised that Cloud computing is now in the “Trough of Disillusionment” or a situation when interest wanes as experiments and implementations fail to deliver.

However, he is quick to point out that the technology still has to enter and pass through other significant stages of development, in line with this cycle, including the ‘Slope of Enlightenment’ and ‘Plateau of Productivity’, that will happen in the next two-to-five years and will be characterised by broader market applicability and relevance.

But where is Cloud computing making the most impact? For public Cloud services the target market is primarily small to medium enterprises.

Pamoja is witness to an increase in Cloud adoption at the bottom end of the market where these organisations trust their IT suppliers to make their technology decisions for them. Where the IT provider is leading with a Cloud service it will be accepted by the customer in most instances.

Medium to large organisations have their own IT departments who make decisions on the best technology route for the company and will, in most cases, push on-premise solutions.

Into Africa

In Africa the biggest challenge still remains reliable and affordable connectivity. If an organisation cannot connect to its business services then all business processes dependent on that service will suffer and possibly halt. The Africa continent is connected to the rest of the world by an abundance of submarine links and it is in the last mile of connectivity where the bottle neck lays.

“Traditionally Africa lags the rest of the world in the adoption of new technology. In the case of Cloud computing it is not much different, but we expect Africa to catch up much quicker than is the case with other technologies,” says Bester.

“The reason for this is that Cloud computing is a perfect solution for Africa where there is, firstly, not much legacy IT to deal with and secondly an acute shortage of skilled and experienced system implementers and operations staff. Cloud offers “pre-configured” IT to organisations and thereby reduce the need for skilled IT resources with every customer activation,” he adds.

According to Bester the issue of control over infrastructure is central. Cloud computing is introducing a paradigm shift in the way that organisations will access IT and business services he says. If any of the basic building blocks, including computing and storage infrastructure, software, connectivity and end-user devices, are missing, it will impact negatively on user experience.

“Moving away from an on-premise based IT model reminds us of the early days of computing where services were offered through bureaus. Not many people remember those days and the current generation are used to seeing and touching their IT. That means they could decide exactly what to deploy and how to look after it. They thus had full control over the technology, the implementation and the operations. With Cloud computing they lose that. The fact that they gain on several levels still does not balance it out as most of the value of Cloud computing are at a business, cost and productivity level,” he says.

Leadership at Pamoja is adamant that perception will change to realisation when facts are corroborated by the success stories of the early adopters.

“An interesting question we always ask customers is whether they use and trust online banking. If they feel secure to conduct banking transactions over the internet then they can rest assured that they can get their IT delivered securely, that way too,” Bester adds.

Airtel Kenya has said it will be giving its prepaid customers free internet access every morning from 6am to 8am.

The offer dubbed ‘ Good Morning’ is expected to give customers the freedom to enjoy free internet access on their phones.

According to Mr. Shivan Bhargava, Airtel Kenya Managing Director, “This initiative is in response to insights from our customer surveys  and we have responded by offering them greater freedom and access to superior quality communication and service on our network. We will make it easier and faster for our customers to access the internet everyday.’’

Bhargava added that the company will continue to offer customers with value based offers to communicate conveniently with their friends loved ones. After the free period customers can subscribe for data bundle, Club 20 or Smart bundles by dialling *544#.

Abel Masai, a computer science graduate from a local university has launched NewsDrift,  an Android news aggregator from major news sources in Kenya.

Speaking to TechMoran, Masai said, “I first launched in April. At that time, I began by aggregating Kenyan newspapers. Then in July I did a major update that now inludes international news sites. My initial target market was Kenya, and eventually Africa.”

He told TechMoran that he chose Android because it’s the mostly used smart-phone platform in Kenya and because Android phones are cheap and easy to use.  He believes building for Android is like building for the critical mass. Other platforms like Windows Phone 8  and iOS will follow.

He is not breaking law yet. He is using publicly available RSS feeds to get news to his app and he has also written to news sites requesting for permission to use their content in line with their terms and conditions. His competition include apps like Habari App, majorly for East Africa news and News Kenya focused on local news. Internationally Pulse, Flipboard, Google Currents among others. One big competitor, albeit still on web is AllAfrica, which aggregates all African news, with permission.

Asking about Habari News App, which has both Android and iOS apps, Masai says he has used the Android version and has not plans of coppying them.”Actually I began working on NewsDrift late last year. I came to learn of Habari long after I had launched news drift, he told TechMoran. He wants to get as many users as possible onto the NewsDrift platform, have the critical mass then start earning revenue either through adverts or by partnering with news houses.

He was inspired by his first smart phone, a Huawei Ideos, which he was very impressed by. It had quality apps done by global tech giants.  “One such application was Pulse. You could clearly see someone put some thought into application, took his time to perfect. Yet locally the apps weren’t as good. I thought If these guys can do it so can we.”In five years, he wants NewsDrift to be the no.1 news aggregator in Africa and globally. he is also working hard to acquire a big chunk of the local market before the international players launch here.

Working on his own with no investors to back him or revenue, he has manged to push  the word out about Newsdrift  and has been featured on Techloy, Savvykenya, Techweez  and Androidtapp and AppZoom both top review sites for Android apps.Masai, a software engineer from Kenya, currently working at Cellulant did computer technology at JKUAT. After graduating last year. He spent most of his free time experimenting on new technologies and ideas.

He denies that Kenyans are not just building mobile apps as their counterparts build massive solutions for enterprises.
He says,” That’s not completely true. Guys are actually doing some really stuff. On the face value, a mobile application might see very simple. But that application could be feeding off a complex server backend. As such, the app only acts as an access channel to a complex system.  So while we might have very many M-apps, we also have some very good mobile-based solutions that only need the right amount of exposure.”

School children from the remote Wonchi area in Ethiopia are showing drastic improvement in literacy skills with the help new technology involving laptops and tablets, a report of a two year research project by scientist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Tufts University USA, launched in February 2012 indicates.

In the study, the researchers supplied laptops to over 40 pupils in the area, in a bid to find out what happens when children are given early literacy apps and games without receiving any operating instructions or tuition in their use. They found that children between the ages of 4 and 10 quickly learned not only how to turn the solar-powered tablets on and off but also what the function of the installed early learning apps was.

In the study, most of the children learned to understand the English alphabet and read and write words. Yet, the Wonchi area has been known to have a literacy rate of virtually zero with the other half from a small village not far from the town of Wolenchite. None of the children had ever attended school before receiving their tablets.

While literacy levels in other countries like neighbouring Kenya is over 90 percent among youth, literacy in Ethiopia lies at 42.7 per cent for the total population, with the figures expected to rise especially as the trend of switching to new technology involving laptops and tablets continues in rural areas, as it is in Addis Ababa.

Nevertheless, in the survey, instructors found that the children from the Wonchi area involved in the programme were keen to continue learning despite the nearest primary school being a two-hour drive away. However, while the project is set to end this year, it is remains unclear on how the tuition would be conducted in the remote area.

South Africa’s Conduct Telecommunications has launched its fibre-ready area in Cape Town after launching in Claremont.

The open-access fibre will be supplied to businesses in Cape Town  and then Stellenbosch, Westlake, Muizenburg, Tygerberg, Bellville and Milnerton.

South Africa’s Ellis Park Stadium is the first Wi-Fi enabled in the country after a partnership deal by WirelessG (G-Connect), an internet provider and the South African Golden Lions Rugby Union in preparation for this weekend’s rugby contest between the South African Springboks and New Zealand’s All Blacks.

Manie Booysen, Golden Lions Rugby Union CEO, thrilled said: “We thank WirelessG for their efforts and for setting up this partnership with us. We sincerely hope the spectators, media and staff will enjoy this unique service.”

Spectators only will need to enable Wi-Fi on their devices, connect to the Wi-Fi network named “G-Connect” and open their internet browsers. A landing page interface will then be introduced from which the free G-Connect Wi-Fi service can be accessed.

The G-Connect will sponsor free Wi-Fi connectivity to all main-stand spectators for this coming Saturday’s rugby Test. WirelessG promises to expand this new initiative to other stadiums throughout South Africa. The connection will have a 10 Gigabits per second network capacity. It is also expected to ease network congestion during matches.

“This new G-Connect Wi-Fi innovation will not only provide connectivity relief in high congestion sport stadiums that have become unbearable for South African mobile and broadband users, but will change the way real time sport entertainment is offered in this country,”comments Carel van der Merwe, Wi-Fi entrepreneur and CEO of WirelessG.

WirelessG launched G-Connect In-Flight Wi-Fi  less than 17 months ago, the deployment of the Wi-Fi hotspot at Ellis Park Stadium can be regarded as WirelessG`s  second first for South Africa. This clearly distinguishes WirelessG as the leading Wi-Fi specialist in South Africa.

Sudan and Ethiopia have been highlighted as some of the countries without internet freedoms in Africa, while Kenya and South Africa seem to be enjoying these rights.

According to a new survey, Nigeria, Angola, Uganda, Tunisia, Malawi, Morocco, Libya, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, and Egypt have decreasing online freedoms respectively.

The survey carried out by Freedom House show that most African countries, have a long way to go in terms of internet freedom of speech.

The recent happenings in Gambia, where the government issued a ban notice on VoIP service including Skype, Viber and even online dating sites shows the extent of control some governments have over the internet.

Recently Zimbabwe government published a law that will enable it to spy on citizen’s mobile calls. In Angola there are unconfirmed reports that the state is planning to introduce an electronic monitoring system for all communications with assistance from Germany.

Although the survey included only 14 countries for its study, the trend seem to show that even advanced countries such as Egypt are still struggling with online freedom.