sadq70's posterous

This is the reason why CCK's lets-grab-some-users-from-safaricom MNP failed; the implementers ignored User Experience. Kamau Macharia's piece in the Sunday Standard quoted it well, that with regards to regulation it was a success, but its the users who port their numbers. And they didn't( Plus it's lame to re-define success after a failed attempt).

1. No worthy destination
Number portability was mainly implemented to de-monopolize Safaricom in the name of user freedom. But which other network should mobile phone users have all ported our 072X numbers to? The other telcos that were to benefit from MNP were(and still are) not doing much out-the-safaricom-box thinking. Any value-added-service introduced by Safaricom has been cloned as it is by the other networks.
Take the popular Okoa Jahazi advance airtime service pioneered by Safaricom. They introduced it with enough clever measures to ensure it isn't abused or exploited. Airtel introduced the same service but without bothering to find out what would be a better Okoa Jahazi for users. If any of the 'others' provided the same service at zero charge, they might have grabbed some of more users. But considering how much revenue Safaricom allegedly makes from it, none of the rest could have the guts to go the other way. I want to believe someone at Airtel suggested an interest-free Kopa kredo but management declined.

2. Prefix attachment culture
Mobile user generally prefer to make on-net calls for the sole reason that they are cheaper. People with multiple lines on dual-sim phones have them so that they can make as little off-net calls as possible. And how does one know that a number is off-net or not? By looking at the prefix, 072X is Safaricom, 073X is Airtel and such. If MNP had been a success, that culture would have been disrupted.
Culture-disruption is risky business, a business has either to fit itself in its users culture or have slowly and organically change it. Like how having more telcos and cheaper calling rates is slowly killing this piece of culture. we're no longer care so much about knowing what new prefixes belong to which telco.

2. Bad Process Design
It should be obvious to consumer-facing businesses by now that if a service it's not simple, it's not for the masses. And when it comes to MNP, the whole world is doing it wrong. Switching providers should be as simple as manually selecting the network from the Network Settings option that is a feature in ALL cellphones. So why not use this user-friendly process? One word; Simware. Applications like Mpesa that reside in the sim card are not network ubiquitous, each telco with its suite of VAS 'apps'. In a perfect world, switching your network should hide applications not related to that network.
The sim card should be distributed by the relevant regulatory body and be a tad more smarter. No filling out forms each time and paying for the bureaucracies of bad business processes. But it seems the world is headed in a sim-less direction where the telco is served by your device’s OS Provider(Are we?)  

What Now?
Apart from lessons that startups can learn from this failure, no other good has come from this. I doubt there will be a better number porting solution in Kenya anytime soon. All of this going on while the guys throw Steve Job's (Yes, including this blogger)name around as if they even begin to understand what he is all about. We Don't, yet I hope.

They innovated a super useful application and started a revolution. But entropy is creeping in yet there is so much they are yet to deliver from a user perspective. So what should mobile money do? The field is getting crowdier and each provider is solving a problem created by the other,cross-carrier service, pricing, mainstream finance integration. Mpesa, the pioneering and largest of them all is falling behind. Safaricom needs to do to Mpesa now what was done to Mpesa in the beginning: Innovate.

Uncuff The Innovators
Many pundits in the business and mobile sectors hoped and wanted Michael Joseph to let Mpesa loose and have it running as a separate company. That would have helped innovation: less layers of bureaucracy means more chances to try out new ideas. Mpesa has spent the last few years too busy with itself to be innovative. It needs a strong R&D department. Each new player brings on a 'new' twist and it ends there. Innovation without iteration is counter-productive; It makes a company dellusional and leaves it open to disruption. Sadly, the ones trying to outdo Mpesa are not doing good, but other players seem promising.

Think long term

Mpesa's strategy should be to maintain user relevance in the next five or so years. Mpesa should want to be, in retrospect, the company that made a huge difference to how we handle money on a day to day basis. Right now its just a money transfer service, with a bill payment feature on the side. 

Fix current problems

Mpesa has, as is with many 'solutions', created problems too. It has lowered the bar for fraud(work-from-home con artists) and created a high-risk low-pay workforce(one-person nano-banks mostly without security guards, money-counters nor safes). They have to reduce instances of erronous transactions and create a customer care system. And that most user PINS probably start with 19XX. Providing long-term solutions to problems that users are having seems idealistic, but if they realise that these problems are what the competition leverages on, they might do something about it. Mpesa should want to be a robust and reliable finance ecosystem.

Micro > Nano

If what they're doing is micro-transfer, they should leverage it to provide nano-payments. Let's say I walk into a restaurant and spend Ksh 200. I have a Ksh 500 note and an equal amount in my Mpesa account, I won't even think about it, i'll just pay with cash. It's not worth 30bob to reach into my pocket and pull out a note, wait for cashier to confirm thats it not fake, count up my change and dump some notes and more coins onto my hands. Currently the only thing worth buying with Mpesa is Safaricom airtime, and that has no transaction fee. Almost everything else is just too expensive, because the transaction fees are modelled for money transfer and not small payments like, say bus fare. A percentage based transaction fee(come on, paypal visa) would definitely lead to more purchases being paid for by Mpesa. And that's a good thing.For users. And Mpesa too.

Think Hardware

 A technology like NFC is perfect for mpesa. You walk into an mpesa agency, navigate to the withdraw menu and when it asks for agent number, its automagically entered, correctly! You're in a mall, and you know you want to pay your electricity bill or buy a prepay token, you see a Kenya Power poster and when you tap on it, it asks, via your mobile phone and with your permission, if you want to buy a token. NFC will significantly reduce Mpesa's user error problem, no more wrong agent or paybill number. And since Safaricom is a mobile service provider, they can start pushing for NFC phones while building the necessary infrastructure. 

Be Platform Agnostic

Safaricom customers have the freedom to port their numbers to whatever voice, sms and data services they prefer but won't because they want to keep their Mpesa accounts. Mpesa suffers at the expense of Safaricom's dear and crappy service. It shouldn't be that way. Of course the reverse worked out great for them. Safaricom got more customers because of Mpesa, so to them its impossible to lose them the same way. Mpesa's one-platform-ness will majorly affect its future, positively or not.

Integrate

Mpesa needed an API since last decade and why they haven't made a developer interface is not clear. This boat may have already passed them with startups like Zege Technologies and the unofficial API PesaPi. Not much can be said about mobile money integration that hasn't made its way round the blogs.

Signs of an Endgame

I doubt Mpesa will disrupt my wallet, but if they are headed to the point where the number of players is reducing and Mpesa is running steadily, they will have proved it.When we have less agents and the Mpesa logo is right alongside the Visa one(and places where Visa can't reach). When I can pick my (insert network name here) phone and tap it on a supermaket till and get what will then be a familiar ding sound confirming a purchase. But its not just Mpesa who are in a position to take this to the next level, question is: Who's got the guts to? 

Your thoughts? Put 'em down or shoot to @sadq70.

Hash already wrote about Kenya's Web Design Problem 10 months ago. It's bad enough that we are allowing ourselves to publish badly designed websites, but when people start to win awards for it, it becomes an absolute disaster. When we publicly claim to be making "world-class websites" and what is actually there is a stack of crappy  color-dead websites with little (buzzword alert!) "web 2.0" functionality, we are in a web design disaster and I don't think it's going away soon. I'm talking about the work done by Elimu Holdings.

To give credit where its(Mgalla muue..), they had a good initiative, and i'm hoping that that's why they won the IDG award and why Larry(pause) Madowo featured them on Money Matters a few weeks ago(i didn't watch but I guess Larry did not actually look at the actual work). Not Because of the 215 websites they claimed to have made. The sites are actually running but they are outright crap. They use the same layout on ALL the sites and they only changed the colors to more eye-killing combinations(have they even heard of the color-wheel?).

"Towards the above goals Elimu has already developed world-class websites for over 184 schools ar..."

Do these look "world-class"?:

(download)

Click here to download:

kenya-s-web-design-disaster-aaguhhbfAmJEcgjbdgbk.zip (709 KB)

"Elimu pursues activities and processes that ensure the websites built for the schools

have a high output to input ratio. For every effort, shilling or minute put in developing or

maintaining the website the school gets maximum use of the website by its people..."

-Elimu profile on chukua.com

My Joozi account has been blocked(my fault ) so I'll just dump it here:

Topic Title: Feature Request: Joozi News

Category: General Discussion

Content:

WHAT: A HN for africa(yes, small a,)
AGAIN, WHAT: An aggregator for coder-relevant stuff(okay fine, content). The whole works, comments, karma(gamification if you prefer), a bookmarklet and whatnot. Like muti but for coders.
WHY:I want to spend less time on HN And more on Joozi. I think it might turn joozi into a "facebook for african coders" without ads.
I STILL DON'T BUY IT: You want(this I know) a place where you can get links to interesting blogposts, articles, in one place and have all that stuff be relevant to you, african coder.
NOTE: Is there such a place on the web, if so let know. If you like the idea, say Yes. If it sucks, say why.

Tags: FeatureRequest

Reasons to Blog:

i have had to convince me to blog for the last one year. Better late than never and below are my self-pitchings.

1. This guy gives a compelling(and long) reason. This guy too.

2. I write a lot of junk in my notebook. all lateral and geeky. in incomplete sentences. I want to learn how to write the normal way.

3. So I can brag about it to friends and family. Not really, I intend to let them stumble into this.

4. I may have some pointlessness I want to share with you.

5. This guy also inspires (yes i'm a ruby programmer, sort of).He was the guy who said this:

 "when you don't create things, you become defined by your tastes

rather than ability.your tastes only narrow & exclude people. so create."

6. There is no sixth.

If you are thinking of blogging, don't procrastinate on deciding so. Just do it.

If you follow this link from my twitter, I hope I will have posted something here.

If you just stumbled here, Welcome.