As part of our focus on reaching the community more effectively we are on the look out for passionate people who can join our website team and help us push out relevant articles to the community. If you have an existing blog and would like to have your article cross posted please feel free to hit us up on email at talk@mobilemonday.co.ke or on twitter @mobilemondayke, for those of you who just want to post articles and join the team also ping us.

The m:Lab’s training on mobile applications development and related technologies is delivered through a short course program. The training program is designed to offer individuals who already have a software development background an opportunity to hone their skills with a mobile technologies focus. It is a program targeted at the thousands of graduates of ICT related degree programs from East African universities.

The training is undertaken at m:lab East Africa’s new facilities located at Bishop Magua Centre on Ngong road – one floor beneath iHub. The training facility has capacity for 25 students equipped with computers and high speed Internet connections. The Lab’s testing facility equipped with a wide range of mobile devices from various manufacturers is also accessible to the students.

Technologies covered in the training include USSD, android, J2me, php, mysql, LWUIT, Mobile Web , IVR, User Experience Design, SMS, Systems Design. Students also get to cover training on business for mobile. This is meant to improve their entrepreneurial skills and is complemented by short business incubation period before they graduate. The Lab expects that although some students may complete the course and go into relevant employment positions others will go into entrepreneurship with mobile innovations.

The current program is a full time daily course on all week days. The students get to interact with other developers and domain experts from different development sectors through events organized by m:lab East Africa and the iHub community.

Eligibility criteria

1. Must have completed a degree program (evidence = final year transcript or degree certificate)
2. Must be available on a full time basis from 9.30am to 3.30pm for 4 months (between September 5th 2011 and December 31st 2011 for second wave of students)

Number of Students

A new lot of 25 students is expected to join the training in September 2011.

Evaluation and Selection Criteria
The selection panel for submitted applications will consider the following criteria

1. Familiarity with technology, platforms and programming languages
2. Accomplishments
3. Demonstrated interest and motivation
4. Academic background and performance

This post is from Mobile Monday .Original article/post can be found here  http://goo.gl/3t7Ke

The annual Innovation Africa Digital Summit, held in Kenya March 22 – 24th, gathered c-level industry leaders for 3-full days of panel discussions, networking and business opportunities, see agenda here. We were honored to participate again this year along with other supporting organizations, industry leaders, policy regulators and government representative agencies who presented case studies, conducted workshops and provided related materials supporting senior executive delegates with insight and valuable connections for building ICT in Africa.

Organized by Extensia, this platform continues to serve as a perfect opportunity for MobileMonday to learn – first hand – about the important developments across this region and make key contacts in order to assess how our global community can best serve the interests of this unique marketplace. Several MoMo founders were on the panel sessions and we released the 2011 version of our popularMobile Africa Research Report. Many thanks to all for a fantastic visit at the Leisure Lodge Resort!

 

also see 2010.pdf and 2009.pdf

One of the biggest challenges of starting and running a community event is building the right team, most people believe that building the community is the hardest but in most cases the passionate people always know how to come together for a common cause. Over the last 6 to 9 months I’ve spent a good amount of time trying to build the team that will take Mobile Monday-Kenya community to the next level, it’s not been easy and believe me finding the right people who are committed to something that has no monetary benefits is hard,  but as I mentioned earlier “passionate people always come together..”. So i’m very excited to announce the addition of Kennedy Kachwanya as part of our team, he joins the likes of James Muendo @mmuendo, Nelly Ndonye and I in working together to build the community. Kachwanya as he is popularly known on twitter is an avid blogger, tech enthusiast, developer and entrepreneur- have a look at Maduqa.com to see what I mean, he brings to the team insightful blog posts which will edify the community as a whole.

We at the Mobile Monday team are looking forward to working with Kachwanya, and getting all the support we need from the community.

A new book has just been launched, covering the growth and impacts of the Internet in India: NetChakra (http://netChakra.net). It is a compilation of 30+ essays by Internet pioneers, entrepreneurs and analysts in India covering key developments after commercial Internet access was launched in countries around the world in 1995. The book’s Web site has a novel feature: a chronology of Internet developments and launches in India, collectively compiled by the Internet community! India is one of the largest Internet markets in the world but also has a huge digital divide.This book covers a wide range of Internet business and digital inclusion issues, and the lessons and structure of the book can be picked up by practitioners in other countries as well.

About the Editors

Dr. Madanmohan Rao, Consultant/Author; BANGALORE
Founder, Indian Proverbs project http://twitter.com/IndianProverbs http://IndianProverbs.in
Co-founder, Bangalore KM Community (www.kcommunity.org)
Research Projects Director, Mobile Monday (www.mobilemonday.net)
Research Director, Indian Music Experience Museum http://bit.ly/gL8ZEc
Official blogger, BaliSpirit Festival 2010 http://bit.ly/ec8utW

Catch Madanmohan Rao on the following social platforms:

Tweets: http://twitter.com/MadanRao
Blogs: Mobile: http://mobile.techsparks.com/

Osama Manzar

Director, Digital Empowerment Foundation http://www.defindia.net
Founder, Manthan Awards (www.manthanaward.org) and mBillionth awards
(http://mbillionth.in)
Authored, “e-Content: Voices from the Ground”
(http://www.econtentworldwide.org)
Grand Jury Member, World Summit Awards(http://www.wsis-award.org)
Twitter: @OsamaManzar

About Samsung Apps Developer’s Contest.

Samsung is having a developers’ challenge as a way of showcasing Kenya’s talent and developing applications into the market place. This will involve inviting talented developers to develop and submit applications.

Registration

Interested developers can design mobile applications and submit into any of the 7 categories.

Categories
There would be 5 categories for entries:

• Education/Reference
• Games: Arcade/Action/ Casual/Puzzle
• Social Networking + Lifestyle
• Entertainment + Media
• Miscellaneous

Mechanics

Developers can submit their applications for any one of the 5 categories at the beginning of the contest. Not more than one application should be submitted for each category by a contestant.

1st Stage

There will be a first round selection stage, to identify applications built to specifications and standards suitable for mobile device rendition and functionality. In this round, the top 2 applications per category will be selected by a team at Samsung. There will also be a second round of selection by judges made up of professions in the fields of mobile software development and marketing. In this round the top application in each category will be selected. These applications will then move to the second and final stage of the contest.

Each of the developers picked after Stage 1 will receive handsets from Samsung.

2nd Stage

At this stage, the top five (5) applications across all categories will be developed and deployed on Samsung Servers. There will be an app launch session @ ihub and alls developers whose applications as launched will win KShs 200,000 (approx $USD 2500).

Eligibility
The Samsung Apps Developer’s Contest is open only to applications that have not been made publicly available to the market prior to the beginning of the contest. Additionally, applications that have been entered in similar contests are ineligible for the Samsung Apps Developer’s Contest, regardless whether they were winning apps. Similarly, updated versions of applications that have been entered for in a similar contest are also ineligible.

All applications submitted for the Samsung Apps Developer’s Contest will be made available to all contest judges for free, exclusively for the purposes of judging. If contestants intend to sell their application after the conclusion of the contest, they may submit a “trial” version of the application for judging. We recommend that the trial version include full functionality, but with a timed expiration, rather than including limited functionality with no expiration. Judges will evaluate the applications based on only the functionality accessible to them.

All submitted applications must run on the following mobile operating systems as listed below and must be in English language:

• Bada

Reward
Prizes will be awarded in each of the following categories:
1 stage selection (Per Category)

• Samsung Device

Overall (Per App)

• Kshs 200,000

Timeline

October 25th 2010

Contest Starts.

December 6th 2010

• Announce 5 Local developers who will develop their apps further and deploy on Samsung Apps.
• Each of the 5 Developers get handsets
• Each of the developers start working to deploy the apps via Samsung apps

January 31^st 2011

• Samsung Launch for the 5 Apps
• Each of the developers earn 200k each
• Rev Share Kicks in (for paid apps)

We at MoMo Kenya are proud to announce that Virtual City, winners of the $1M Nokia Grand Venture Challenge, have agreed to sponsor Mobile Monday-Kenya for the next 6 months. Virtual City is a perfect match for MoMoK , with a focus on innovation and entrepreneurship MoMoK and Virtual City see value in reaching out to developers, enthusiasts and businesses in Kenya. The MoMok team is looking forward to working with Virtual City to build a strong community and spur the next generation of mobile developers.

DeviceAnywhere, the industry leading provider of technological solutions to streamline mobile content creation, certification and customer satisfaction, and Mobile Monday, the open community of mobile industry visionaries, developers and influencers, are partnering on a new initiative to offer developers 20 hours of free access to the award-winning DeviceAnywhere Test Center™ product.

MoMo members will be able to remotely access and interact with over two thousand devices, such as the Apple iPad and Android Motorola Droid X, on over 28 different carrier networks worldwide. These devices are accessible remotely over the Internet, allowing users to interact in real time to ensure all development, porting, testing, and monitoring needs are met. The DeviceAnywhere service uses actual, physical handsets to provide developers with the same experiences as having the devices in hand. (more…)

Follow on Twitter using #momoke, the live stream is here – http://www.ustream.tv/channel/mobile-monday-kenya-meet-up

The team at Nokia is really committed at promoting local talent. At a previous event when they were announcing the results from the Nokia Innovation Competition, they were challenged to at least mention the some of the Kenyan developers who made it to the top 20. This they did and went a step further.

After looking through the top 20 list, they selected two young developers with whom they worked with to refine their service and even offered marketing support. AfroHot or Not and Wazzup were taken to market with good results. AfroHot has a user-base of 6,000 across East and Central Africa.

Word is…more cool stuff is coming from the various collaborations Nokia is spearheading with local developers. Watch this space.

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