Interesting Kenyan Sites #11

Stoundi – I had the good fortune to learn of this website from the developers themselves! It looks like it can be something amazing – for one thing, the technology behind it is very advanced (they use artificial intelligence technologies). Basically, this is an “answer engine” and the creators of the site say that they are building it to be able to give you answers to any question you could ever have (to do with local stuff). So, for example, if you wanted to know the Governor of Kiambu county, you would just ask Stoundi and it would return the answer. Nice eh? Good Kenyan technology!

Simple Motion – if you look at it closely, this site will simple blow you away! It is a news aggregation site built by Kenyans for Kenya. And they use some of the most uniquely amazing technology. For instance, they are the first (and maybe only) company in the world to have videos embedded on maps! (The site is, however, not fully done yet.)

50-50
PesaPal – Have a look at this page. It seems that PesaPal has done little SEO, going by the fact that the site’s description in the search results is not optimized. I’m not bashing PesaPal, but why wouldn’t they do this? It takes a minute or so only…

Flops
The Office of the Prime Minister – You’d think the site would look as good as the PM’s spanking new offices, eh? Not so. While the design is okay, many links on the site seem not to work. And what are those squares on the home page? I’d expect better from a website of such a ‘large’ office.

K24 – I do not know what the K24 site even looks like….because they’ve been hacked and cracked. Invest in security, people.

K24 hacked

K24 hacked (click to view larger)

Additional Resources

Comments

  1. Alex Riungu says:

    Hate to burst the bubble here but simple motion’s website is simply a deployment of Managing news by Development seed http://managingnews.com/. there is quite a lot you can do with managing news including embedding videos on maps, so this is not a first in the world.

    • Are you sure man? I was talking to the developer (@kahenya on twitter.com) and he was pretty upbeat and said it was built (by him) on a custom platform…

  2. Alex Riungu says:

    @Kelvin just head to the website download a package set it up in your WAMP environment play around with it and report back in a few days. Managing news is a Drupal Installation profile. What simple motion has is a deployment of Managing News. We did almost 20 deployments of MN when i was an intern at KenyanLogic. Take a look the following websites which are also using MN
    http://drupal6-managingnews.module-demos.org/feeds (the official demo for MN)
    http://planetdrupal.org/feeds
    http://news.drupalservers.net/
    http://catholicnewslive.com/
    As a quick guide, do you notice the similar share buttons and the login module at the bottom right on all the websites!

    Anyway, MN is a powerful system, some of the stuff we did with it doesnt even come close to simple motion! A good PHP coder working with MN can produce some amazing stuff, like:
    http://afghanistanelectiondata.org/election/2009/data/

  3. Whatever happened to stoundi? Who were the guys behind it? What are they upto now? The site seems truly dead and buried

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