pesaDroid

January 26, 2012 By 2 Comments

pesaDroidI came across a very interesting Android application for your mobile phone – pesaDroid.

As much as I loathe Safaricom sometimes, I cannot live without my MPESA. Problem is, MPESA text messages are deleted (by me) as soon as I get them …. which unfortunately means I often cannot keep a record of who paid me or what payments I made. Don’t even mention that I then have to spend Kshs 1/- to find out my MPESA balance. This is where pesaDroid comes in, it helps you to monitor your MPESA transactions. specifically, it offers the following features:

  1. Ability to scan your SMS inbox and retrieve MPESA transactions
  2. Ability to store the transaction data in an internal database so that evidence of a transaction persists even after the SMS is deleted.
  3. Ability to generate regular statements from these transactions
  4. Ability to send the statements to your email address.
  5. Ability to send us feedback for improvement of the service.

This nifty little app is available for sale on the Android market at Kshs 256.84

More information: pesaDroid

What do you think of pesaDroid?

Filed Under: Tips Hacking and Reviews Tagged With:

Education Reform in Kenya

January 4, 2012 By Leave a Comment

I came across an article titled “The Golden Age of Education” which is really about the problems with education in the developed world. I read it and felt it was talking about the exact problems facing education in Kenya. Here’s a few paragraphs:

“10 years ago, if you did well in high school you’d get into college. If you went to college and finished your degree, with fairly high likelihood you could get a job with a respectable salary. Nothing in the world is ever truly a given, but I think it’s fair to say that what arose in colleges were certain tracks that you could follow to the end where there was a job waiting for you. If you studied Finance, Engineering, or Business, you were competing for the best jobs but you always had a fallback. Most other majors were in a similar albeit slightly less comfortable position. The occasional philosophy major aside, the career outlook was looking fairly bright. It’s in the news every day now though, the demand for jobs is not being met – winter’s coming or is already here.

There are a lot of theories floating around on what is the fundamental cause of the prevalent high unemployment rate, and with any complex problem the answer is probably some mixture of everything. A bad economy, jobs being displaced by software, and a generation not trained for the demands of modern society all likely factor into our current predicament.

It’s that last one that keeps me up at night. We spend 20 years educating our youth for a job that they will spend an average of four and a half years at, going through roughly 11 different jobs between the ages of 18 and 44 . The curricula taught at universities are completely out of date and out of sync with industries, and for most people you get a total of four years of professional education for the next 50 years of your life despite the fact that industries are created and destroyed in the span of a decade today.” [Read More]

Does this not just speak “Kenya” to you? In fact, I’d wager that in Kenya things are much, much worse. How many students who sat for their KCSE last year will even get the opportunity to go to University/College? Worse, how many university graduates will get good, well-paying jobs? Things do not look good at all in Kenya, do they?

In stark contrast, here’s an article about the remarkable success of the Finnish education system. Please read that article, it speaks of a drastically different approach to education that was taken by the Finnish government in an effort to reform its education system.

This is the kind of reform we need in Kenya. We do not need to make slight adjustment to the KCPE or to reduce the number of examinable subjects, we need to take a hard long look at our education system as a whole and pursue a wide far-reaching goal of reforming it as a whole (not just parts of it).

In university, I was in a class of about 50+ people. To this day, I know of only a handful who have found good, well-paying jobs or have started businesses. This has to stop. We need to commit ourselves to wholesome educational reform. Now.

Filed Under: Miscellaneous

The Power of Understanding and Solving Problems

December 3, 2011 By Leave a Comment

This is a follow-up to yesterday’s post: Find A Small Problem, Provide A Simple Solution.

Many have made money and built reputations by solving problems. Doctors cure the suffering of illness, psychiatrists help heal the troubled mind, lawyers protect names from being tarnished, consultants offer marketing advice and a dazzling array of products help to remove any inconvenience you might possibly encounter in your daily life.

Many people are solving problems. They’re all offering solutions to people who need them. Some are giving them away for free. Others are selling them for a price. When problem and solution is a perfect fit, a relationship of trust is built between two parties. If this helps me now, it might help me again. If this solves my problem, it might solve my friend’s problem too.

There’s a connection. The problem solver becomes more popular as more problems are solved for more people. Every time you solve a problem in a way that’s better than others, you add undeniable value to the person in need. After performing a search engine query on a topic, what pages do you bookmark? The ones that offer you the best possible solution.

As a business or website owner, you have to face the challenge of getting people to consume what you’re offering, be it free content on your blog, a piece of merchandise or premium service. You’ll have compete with other problem solvers in the market. Other blogs, other companies in the same field, other service providers. All offering different solutions.

For instance, there are many different products to solve the problem of dirty dishes. A plethora of different washing fluids, sponges, machines and racks. In most scenarios, there are more solutions than there are problems. Solutions themselves become problems to be solved.

Most of the time problem-solvers are already engaging your target audience but that doesn’t mean you should stay away. There’s always room for another solution, especially when its one that addresses the problem with more elegance, more force, more precision or more style.

First, identify the problems facing your target audience. Go deep into the user-generated recesses of the web: monitor forums, social networking websites, blogs and places where people interact and talk online. Understand the problem more deeply than your competitor. Go after nuance. Absorb feedback on current solutions. Know what they want but isn’t available.

Then, create a solution that builds on the flaws of other solutions. Or one that completely circumvents the existing paradigm by addressing the problem from a different angle, using different methodology or a combination of existing solutions. Be daring and creative.

Try going wider for broader appeal or swim in narrower channels to reach hardcore fans in order to gain a support base. The same applies to online publications like blogs on specific topics. What problems do your readers have? How are you solving them with your content? If solutions already exist elsewhere, how can you do better so you’ll be the go-to site?

Nobody is able to constantly solve problems in the best possible way to please every single person. All solutions have flaws because consumers evolve. People are also going to look elsewhere because of boredom. But understanding exactly what problems and solutions are out there, allows you to better score points or gain favor with any audience.

Source: DoshDosh.

Filed Under: Small Business

Find A Small Problem, Provide A Simple Solution

December 2, 2011 By 1 Comment

Here’s the story of a young guy in Mexico who started his own small business immediately after college and has now moved from his bedroom to his own office, bought furniture, computers and has a substantial amount saved up.

He studied mechanical engineering in uni and after graduating, he decided to start a small business since he had some experience building websites. He noticed that small business owners wanted to do online marketing but they had little idea of how to do it. So he started offering a very simple service of charging companies to handle their Google Adsense (Google’s advertising product). In as little as 4 months, he had achieved impressive sales.

Sounds nice and simple, eh? That’s the moral of the story. Sometimes we try to think up these elegant and complex business ideas when all we need to do is find a small problem and provide a simple solution.

Come on, this is something you can do, right now. What are you waiting for?

Filed Under: Internet Culture, Make Money

If you want to get rich, stop joking around

November 17, 2011 By 1 Comment

This is an article adapted from If you want to get rich, stop being a fucking joker.

99% of people you interact with in life are jokers. You’re used to joker behavior.

We’re all middle class. That sucks. We should be wealthy. But to be wealthy, we need to NOT BE JOKERS.

What’s a joker? A joker is someone who says they’re going to do something, and then doesn’t. A joker always has excuses. “Oh well, I tried…” -> No, I don’t care that you tried. Did you do it or not?

DID YOU DO WHAT YOU SAID YOU’D DO OR NOT?

If not, you’re a joker.

“We will find a way. Or make one.” – Hannibal Barca, 247 BC – 182 BC

That’s my favorite quote. Hannibal is one of my greatest heroes.

He almost conquered Rome. He could have, actually, if he’d been willing to have all his men die to do so, but he loved his men too much so he didn’t do it. Think about that! The man almost conquered Rome!

There’s so many stories of him doing the impossible. Breaking out of ambushes, setting crazy fires, marching elephants through the Alps to invade the Italian Peninsula… dude, he took ELEPHANTS from Africa and MARCHED THEM THROUGH THE MOUNTAINS INTO ROME.

The Romans thought Hannibal had the FORCES OF HELL ON HIS SIDE. Why? Because of that quote: “We will find a way. Or make one.”

Look. When something doesn’t get done, there’s always a good reason. Yeah, you’ve got your job. Or you’ve got to go some class. Or the server crashed. Or whatever!

I don’t care. No one does. You need to get your part done. FIND A WAY. OR MAKE ONE.

Filed Under: Make Money

An Experiment in Kenyan Movies Part 2 – SEO

October 6, 2011 By Leave a Comment

You guys remember our very recent project in Kenyan movies? We thought we’d share everything that we’re doing for the site – it will be more fun that away, ama? Also, hopefully one of our Like Chapaa readers can learn something. What follows, therefore, is a discussion on how we’re trying to market the site through search engine optimization.

Now, one of the best ways to get visitors to your website is to ensure that when people search on Google, they find you. For us, we want people to find us when they google “Kenyan movies”.

The SEO Strategy
Step one was to estimate the expected traffic using the Google Adwords Keyword tool. This tool gives an estimate of how many people search for a particular word/phrase on Google every month. It can be used to estimate how many people you can expect to be searching for your website. The tool also gives you ideas on other key words and phrases that are related and which you should/could also target.

We found that about 8,100 people search for “Kenyan movies” on Google every month. Now, this is an extremely small number. This could mean that very few people are interested in Kenyan movies (which is probably true). This is just sad for our movies industry. Sigh.

However, this can be viewed more positively a such: it is probably going to be quite easy (relatively) to dominate this keyword on Google and get to the number one spot in the search results pages.

Also, there are other related keywords/phrases such as free kenyan movies online, kenyan movie stars, kenyan movies online, kenya tv, kenya video and so on. Collectively these push the number of monthly searches to well over 50,000. A good figure – yes?

So the strategy for us would be to dominate search results for “Kenyan Movies” and then target the other keywords one by one.

What happens when you are at number one in the search results pages? It is important to be number one because the site listed at number on in Google search results usually gets upwards of 90% of the people who search. For example, if we rise to number one for “Kenyan Movies” we should expect 16,200 visitors (90% of 18,000) to our website every month. If we rise to number one in the search results pages for multiple keywords/phrases then our site’s visitors increase dramatically. For free. This is, indeed, the power of SEO (search engine optimization) for your website. You can get tens of thousands of targeted, relevant visitors to your website for free.

The Situation So Far
We launched the website www.spaceyangu.com on October 2, 2011. Today is October 5, 2011. Before October 2, if you searched for “Kenyan Movies” you would have no hope to find SpaceYangu because, well, we did not exist.

We’re happy to announce that if you search for “Kenyan Movies” today, you will find us on page 8 of the search results. This puts our website at Number 76 out of 5,310,000 others. Of course our strategy is to get to number one but getting to 76 out of 5 million is pretty good for three days’ work, I think. Here’s a screenshot for proof:

Kenyan movies - Google Search

Kenyan movies - Google Search (click for larger)

Along the way, we found a competitor! Sinema.co.ke is a website that is also about Kenyan movies as well as other forms of Kenyan entertainment. It is always good to find competitors as it validates what you are trying to do. We’re confident that through SEO alone, we can outdo sinema.co.ke. :) Actually, in fact, at Number 76 in the search results, we’re already better than this site. (I say this full of respect for them, of course).

Some of you may be wondering how we improved our SEO so fast. We’re honestly not quite sure ourselves. I think it is because this is not a very competitive search term. What we did, though, is fully documented here. Please read that. You will learn that SEO is all about relevance and authority. So, for us, the strategy is 1)to make sure that our websites is as relevant to “Kenyan Movies” as possible and 2) to get as many other websites to link to SpaceYangu.com as possible. It is going well so far. Let us see how long it will take to get to Number 1. Wish us luck!!

We intend to document everything we can about how we’re building up SpaceYangu. If there is anything specific that you want to know, please leave a comment below.

PS: You can Hire Us if you want us to do SEO for your own website.

Filed Under: Case Study, Internet Culture, Small Business

An Experiment in Kenyan Movies

October 4, 2011 By 5 Comments

Ok, let’s start from the beginning: do you even like Kenyan movies?

Up until yesterday, I did not like them. This was mostly because I knew next to nothing about them. Then my good friend came over and we watched some… they were pretty good!! Much much much better than I would have thought. In fact, I think they may be better than Nigerian movies. Who agrees? Have a look at the following trailer to get a taste of what I mean:

YouTube Preview Image

So anyway, after my friend had left and I was all alone at home, I felt like watching some more so I quickly thought I’d google and find where I can buy Kenyan movies online. Guess what? Not only could I not find a place to buy Kenyan movies online but I could actually not find any one site which focused on Kenyan movies. This is just sad, ama?

So, I decided to do something about it. I gave my friend (mentioned earlier) reigns over SpaceYangu to turn it into a Kenyan movies hub. Perhaps in the future we can actually also sell movies on there. What do you think of the site?

www.spaceyangu.com

This is an experiment in what we can do with such a site. We’ll keep you posted on how it goes. Sawa?

For now, you can like us on Facebook: www.facebook.com/spaceyangu

Cheers!

Filed Under: Miscellaneous