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• Kenyan telecom giant Safaricom opts to stop selling feature phones

  One of Kenya's biggest mobile network operators has announced that it will soon start pushing smartphone adoption in a big way: by phasing out the sale of feature phones.Speaking at the Mobile Web East Africa conference in Nairobi, Nzioka Waita, Director or Corporate Affairs at Safaricom, said that “Safaricom is soon going to stop selling the cheap feature phones in all our retail outlets, as we try to skew the Kenyan market towards smartphones”.He added that as much as the ...

• Kenyan government plans to almost double the country’s bandwidth

  Kenya’s government has announced plans to lay a fifth fibre-optic cable in the region, which is expected to practically double the country’s bandwidth capacity from the current 8.6Tb per second to more than than 15Tb per second. According to the country's Ministry of Information and Communications' permanent secretary Dr Bitange Ndemo, improved uptake of the current cable capacity will only be possible once the country adopts 4G. Although he did not specify the timeline, Ndemo said that a firm in ...

• Swapping paper for pixels: Kenya aims to digitize school curriculum by 2015

  Kenya’s education minister has announced that his ministry is planning to digitize the entire school curriculum by 2015, a move that will see the government reduce expenditure on education resources.Minister Mutula Kilonzo said that the government spends a lot of money on educational material, while there was a better option to minimize this through digitization and to allow students to get exposed to ICT skills at an early stage.“My dream is to see our learning institutions churning out highly skilled ...

• MasterCard launches next gen touch screen bank card in Singapore

  As part of a partnership with Singapore’s Standard Chartered Bank, MasterCard has launched its next generation interactive card, which features an embedded display and touch-sensitive buttons, in the country.Currently, banks and other financial institutions require the use of a separate authentication token or device (usually the customer’s mobile phone) for online transactions. This innovative two-in-one device by MasterCard, which combines the functionality of a standard payment card with a state-of-the-art security token, simply reflects the customer’s one time password(OTP). ...

• Google-backed project rolls out Wi-Fi hotspots in major Kenyan cities

  Internet users in Nairobi and Mombasa in Kenya can now connect to cheap Wi-Fi on the go following a continuing roll out by search engine giant Google. Google communications manager for East Africa, Dorothy Ooko, said its Wazi Wifi initiative will make the net accessible without limitations -- hence encouraging more consumption. The project is aimed at increasing internet penetration and bandwidth utilization in Kenya, and is a collaboration between local businesses, Google and the Wananchi Group, which is investigating ...

• Phone tech to enable rural Nigerians to surf the web in local languages

  A phone technology called InternetSpeech could allow more than 100 000 illiterate farmers and traders residing in Nigeria’s rural areas to browse the web in local languages... using their voice and their cellphones. Nigeria-based IT consultancy firm Adamu Consulting, alongside the ICT University of Louisiana, are offering the technology which will enable users to transact business over the internet in their home language or with people of other languages via an inbuilt translator.At the media presentation of the new technology ...

• Music service rara.com launches new apps, enters 7 new countries

  UK-based music streaming service rara.com has announced that it has expanded to reach 27 countries worldwide -- including South Africa, Brazil, Mexico, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia and Portugal. It also launched Windows 8 and iOS apps to add to its existing web, PC and Android lineup, which all come ad-free and allow users to access millions of songs wherever they are.Its pricing is competitive enough to challenge other recent entrants into the market, like Simfy Africa, the music service ...