Feeds

13636 items (0 unread) in 79 feeds

Afromusing

• October 26, 2009
• 16:35

  Shop online using mobile money: PesaPal is Live!

   » ‎ Afromusing

  Tags:  AfriPreneur  

  

  PesaPal is a service that enables anyone with an MPESA or ZAP mobile money account to buy goods and services from approved merchants. Why should people with credit cards and paypal accounts have all the fun? For the 6.5 million users of MPESA in Kenya, PesaPal will be a welcome service, particularly to those without credit cards, but do have MPESA accounts. Granted the number of merchants available right now is limited, as merchants sign up there will be lots of choices for buyers as to the services and goods they can order with their mobile phone and the web.

  

  PesaPal is a product from Verviant Consulting, a company that has made inroads in the IT consulting business, providing end to end IT support. This new product ushers in a new form of commerce. The CEO Agosta Liko recently spoke to Capital FM in Nairobi regarding the advent of fiber optic cable in Kenya, and the new way to do trade online…

  “I call it ‘new commerce’ because e-commerce was the era of credit cards and all. We will own this era where I should be able to pay for mangoes from Mombasa and pick them in Nairobi. I see it becoming the way by which we buy,” he projected.
  Mr Liko said this development would most likely be driven by increased competition, the need to ease the cost of doing business and remain competitive.
  “From this point going forward, people are going to see how they can make money from the internet, how you can save operational costs and how customers will be willing to pay on time,” he said.

  I see this a tighter coupling of the mobile phone and the cloud. Something I have alluded to in the past . Its gratifying to see homegrown solutions to the problem of trading online in a seamless way, we need not wait for Paypal to get its act together and include sub-saharan countries, we can just get on with business.

  Online merchants, click here to register your business to accept PesaPal, and friends in .ke, sign up here for the service. Developers, do not fret, here is the info you seek, on how to use the PesaPal API.

  Disclosure: Liko Agosta is a close friend of ours, and I bum off of the Verviant offices bandwidth whenever I am in Nairobi. I was a pre-beta tester of PesaPal

  [is.gd] title="Post to Twitter">

• October 09, 2009
• 21:28

  Its 2009, mobile costs should be lower. Yes, its a bit of a rant.

   » ‎ Afromusing

  Tags:  Tech  

  *Yes, its a bit of a rant.
  Let me just admit upfront that my mobile bill this month shocked me. So much so I was looking at every charge with a fine toothed comb, all the while wondering, how the heck did it get this way?! Yes, I made some calls to Kenya and sent text messages, roamed at times… Well, that was not surprising, done all that and more (I am not going to talk about the time a friend and I got lost in Helsinki, had to use the iphone maps to navigate – that bill was epic). Well, here is my beef. It used to cost .15 cents to SMS to Kenya, now it costs .20. This can add up really quickly, and is partly responsible for the increase in my mobile phone bill. Last I checked, the US touted itself as a free-market economics-competition will lead to lower prices for the consumer-so called western nation. Why then did the major wireless carriers all bump their SMS rates when all the gen x’rs Ys, Digital natives caught up with their world peers and increased their use of the SMS service?

  The FCC (Federal Communications Commission) is compiling a report on competitiveness in the mobile market. Excuse me while I laugh up a storm. It is glaringly clear to many consumers in the US that there isn’t much competition to speak of. AT&T Bought Cingular, Sprint is supposedly to be acquired by T-mobile. Sad really, I used to work at Sprint when it was THE company to beat. A story for another day. Its 2009 for gosh sakes, our mobile costs should not be increasing! Besides, there are no SMS bundles for texting overseas, I am willing to pay 9.99 usd a month for an international texting bundle, just like I pay 4.99 for 300 domestic SMS. Do it T-mobile. Just do it already. We know the real cost to the Telco’s for SMS is darn near zero, so why rip us off?! Yes I know its for the money, but come-on…

  

  CC licensed image by Cayusa on flickr. I wish he was chewing on a mobile, but hey, this works!

  I started using Google Voice. This is helping me deal with SMS costs (pretty much free right now, even to Kenya. *Shh, don’t tell everyone*) though I am reluctant to make the full switch to that number because so many of family and friends have the T-mobile number. I still might, because the google number forwards calls to all your phones, allows you to screen calls, and transcribed voicemails. I hate leaving messages, and checking them too is rather tedious, so I absolutely love the transcription service. Think of it as Jott for your mobile phone (Whatever happened to Jott anyway?). Be warned, SMS to some countries is blocked, your mileage may vary.

  Hey FCC, you can probe Google Voices’ practices all you want, but do listen to consumers like me who are sorely disappointed with wireless providers. Here’s an idea, force the wireless companies like AT&T, T-mobile etc to allow for number portability to Google voice. That would really irk them into behaving as they should. Treat Google as a player in the Telecoms market and usher in some real competition. How long do we have to wait? As it is, it will probably take awhile before the FCC concludes, ‘yeah, these guys are totally overcharging customers, tsk tsk tsk lets punish them’. We all receive letters in the mail telling us of some class action suit or credit from our wireless providers, to the the tune of a couple of bucks…all the while the big wigs at AT&T congregate in a dark club house, hold flashlights underneath their chins and go ‘Muahahahaha – got you suckas!’.

  Let me stop here…before the rant on Wimax bubbles to the surface.

  [is.gd] title="Post to Twitter">