Virtual City is participating in this year’s 7th African Dairy Conference & Exhibition in Dar es Salaam, an event organized by The Eastern and Southern Africa Dairy Association (ESADA). The conference & exhibition will be held from Wednesday 25th May 2011 to Friday 27th May 2011 at The Movenpick Hotel .
Virtual City will be exhibiting its Agrimanagr solution, an innovative solution that has been successfully rolled out in the tea and dairy industry here in Kenya.
Eyes on Africa: Developers Africa (video)
Eyes on Africa is a series of four films, focusing on the work being done by Nokia in the continent.
Mobiles have leapfrogged conventional communications in many developing countries. People are getting access to mobiles before landlines and certainly before computers. This is creating an enormous potential market for new applications that put locally relevant needs first. Our last video looks at the ways African developers are starting to take advantage of this opportunity.
Post Extracted From http://conversations.nokia.com/2011/02/03/eyes-on-africa-videos-22/ (Visit link for full article)
The dynamics of Africa are totally different from those in North America and Europe. This calls for a radically different approach when it comes to technology and business in an African context.
This is one of the realizations of Liko Agosta, founder of Verviant Consulting services and PesaPal, a payment gateway that has been running successfully over the past few years.
Liko drew attention to the fact that very few people have credit cards, and indeed a straw poll of the crowd bore that out. Fewer still use those credit cards for online purchases.
However a much larger percentage of people have mobile phones, and a good number of those transact using one of the available mobile payment gateways by the local providers – MPesa (Safaricom), YuCash (Yu), Zap (Airtel) and Orange Money (Orange)
This creates an opportunity for developers and businesses that wish to monetize their applications, by implementing online payments for goods and services.
It is this niche that PesaPal wishes to exploit.
Their product, launched almost a year ago has been slowly but surely covering ground.
The current strategy is to go after a large untapped market – school fees. PesaPal is currently working with schools to enable parents to remit school fees using mobile payment platforms. This is a safe and convenient method, as opposed to the traditional methods of bank transfers and cheques.
Read More on PesaPal at http://mobilemonday.co.ke/2011/pesapal-presentation-at-mobile-monday/
When Virtual City – John Waibochi’s tech start-up – developed a solution that would boost the profitability of small businesses, it was to many just that, another information technology solution. But phone giant Nokia thought otherwise, picking the application as the winner of its global Growth Economy Venture Challenge.
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Tunza Children’s home is a project that Virtual City adapted earlier last year as part of its Corporate Social Responsibility Initiative. Tunza children’s home was established in 1998 by Dimina khasiala, popularly known as ‘Mama Tunza’. Tunza is a swahili word which means taking care of.