FortySouth

At the back of our minds we’ve known for a while, and it has been variously predicted, that mobile telephony subscribers will quickly outpace growth in fixed service, and that more and more users are getting connected online as internet access becomes more ubiquitous.

But to what extent do the numbers actually back up these claims? I dug through the Communication Commission of Kenya’s (CCK) Q2 08/09 Quarterly Report [pdf] and made some interesting finds that not only affirm these predictions, but also depict a positive outlook on Kenya’s technology future.

Here are some quick hits. Continue reading

Lately, I’ve been mulling over this thought: what does it take to create a technology hub?

I’m almost certain Paul Kukubo has been onto this too for longer than I have, since the ICT Board‘s vision is that Kenya becomes a top 10 global technology hub. Nairobi being Kenya’s, and arguably the region’s, technology epicenter, does it have what it takes? Continue reading

About two years ago I had a crisis of thought. As some most at the pinnacle of their undergraduate electrical engineering education, I wondered what I had gotten myself into. Don’t get me wrong – I wasn’t considering a change in major to anything else, not just because I was too far in already, but I actually did enjoy most of what I was learning.

I asked myself this often because I found that I seemed to quickly forget material learnt from previous semesters. Once the semester was done, I let out a sigh of relief and promptly sold some of my books.

I sold fewer, though, as I progressed through my program for a couple of reasons. The first, and more compelling reason, was that the books became invaluable references in subsequent classes. The other was that the geniuses at the school bookstore would usually buy them back for the almost criminal rate of 50% of my purchase price! Now, just so you understand, I bought all my books out of pocket which stung, and each hardly cost under $100 so offering $49.99 was tantamount to a very classy No Deal. What sort of investment will, with predictable consistency and without fault, depreciate to half its value in a 16-week time span? The same book is then unassumingly decked on the shelf the following semester retailing at, predictably, 7/8ths of the price of a new book. Clearly, I’m in the wrong business. Then I found the Amazon seller account, somewhat more reliable than eBay, where on a good day I could almost recoup my investment.

But I digress. Continue reading