Did you miss the mobile mega trends 2010 report? Well here it is courtesy of http://www.visionmobile.com. The report
explores the many facets of change in the mobile industry. It’s our third and biggest Megatrends research we‘ve published to date featuring 64 juicy slides with detailed analysis on the future of mobile.

This year we’ve covered 8 core themes:
- Vertical integration: a one-way street or a quick detour?
- The evolution of revenue models
- App Stores: the long-tail future
- Web platforms: why the future of software development is still elusive.
- Open is the new closed; how companies are using open source to further their own agendas
- Recommendations everywhere: raising the bar for mobile services
- OEM monetisation: products, services or distribution?
- Operator futures: bit-pipes or supermarkets?

Researched, authored and published by VisionMobile

Read the report here

This is an article from Audience Escapes written by Dinfin Mulupi about how m-pesa is being used to provide insurance to farmers in Kenya.

An innovative insurance program is coaxing Kenya’s farmers to invest in quality seeds and fertilizer. Relying on the popular mobile money transfer service, Mpesa, it promises to process any claims due to crop loss quickly and safely.

In the coming months, Kenya is bracing for a spate of severely dry weather caused by the La Nina effect. While the government prepares for the resulting food shortage, Kenyan farmers are facing the possibility of financial loss as their crops wither on the vine.
For some farmers, a new insurance program is coming to the rescue and encouraging higher-yielding farming practices in the process. Kilimo Salama (Swahili for “safe agriculture”) guarantees farmers a return on their investments in the event of harsh weather conditions that may affect the production of their crop. With its reliance on automated weather data to support farmers’ claims and the use of a mobile money transfer service to make payments, Kilimo Salama is overcoming farmers’ resistance to purchasing crop insurance.

Kenya’s food insecurity is sometimes blamed in part on the reluctance of farmers to use high-yield farm inputs (such as seed and fertilizer). According to statistics, only half of Kenyan farmers invest in improved seeds and nutrition for their crops because they fear losing money in the event of harsh weather conditions. Such weather is not uncommon, as with the drought that occurred in the last quarter of 2009. Yet the result of farmers’ failure to invest in higher-quality inputs is that they use old seeds which produce lower yields.

Gaining Farmers’ Trust

Kilimo Salama is changing perceptions about insurance by eliminating what used to be a lengthy and subjective claims process. To determine who gets payments, the program uses data from automated solar-powered weather stations positioned across the country. No longer must farmers file claims and argue with an agent about whether or not their crop failed because of the weather. Instead, once these weather stations record low or excess rainfalls, claim payments are automatically triggered.

The program distributes insurance payments to farmers using MPesa, a mobile money transfer service operated by Safaricom. As most farmers have access to mobile phones on which to receive the payments, this is an attractive feature. Instead of having to open a bank account or travel to a bank branch to cash a check, the payment is instantly transferred.

Kilimo Salama is considered “microinsurance” and is available to farmers who plant on as little as one acre. It was developed by the Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture in partnership with UAP Insurance and Safaricom. The insurance is made affordable for farmers, according to the Syngenta Foundation’s website, because “Kilimo Salama’s agribusiness partners pay the other half of the premium.”

How it works

To purchase the insurance, farmers pay a 5 percent premium on top of the price of seeds, fertilizer and other farm inputs. A group of 40 registered and trained rural retailers, known as agro-dealers, now sell the insurance. They each have a camera phone to scan a special bar code on the product at the time of purchase. This registers the insurance policy with UAP Insurance through Safaricom’s mobile data network. Immediately afterward, an SMS is sent to the farmer’s mobile phone confirming the insurance policy.

In September, a group of more than 100 farmers in Embu became the first group to receive insurance payouts through the program. Low levels of rain at the Siakago Rural Technology School had triggered the payments. The largest payout was of 2,500 shillings (equal to approximately US$30). This is equivalent to the cost of 12 kilos of high-yielding maize seed that can be used to plant one acre.

One of the beneficiaries, Jennifer Mbiro, was satisfied with the insurance program. She said: “I am happy that I have received a payout. But since I did not really trust insurance, I only insured my fertilizer and not the seed. Therefore my payout is small this time. This season I’ve insured my seeds, fertilizers as well as some chemicals that I’m trying for the first time. I now know that it is worth insuring all my inputs.”

The payments were not made to all policyholders in the town. They were made only to those who cultivated in the area where the weather station documented below-average rain totals. According to Syngenta’s Executive Director Marco Ferroni, the program is designed to have enough weather stations so that variations in rainfall patterns can be noted over small areas.

“The fact that not all farmers received payments shows that the system can distinguish who suffered damage and who did not,” said Ferroni. “This is how the system is supposed to work, to compensate farmers for any harvests that fall below what they would expect. In this case, the projected losses, and thus the payouts, were fairly small. In seasons with less rain, the payout could be far greater.”

According to James Wambugu, Executive Director of UAP Insurance Kenya, the product was designed to meet the farmers’ needs. Discussions with farmers are currently ongoing to help in the development of products and services that will shield farmers and their harvests from risk.

“We believe Kilimo Salama can revolutionize insurance and make it accessible to farmers,” he said.
Kilimo Salama was rolled out early this year after the success of a pilot project conducted in Laikipia County in 2009. It is now being offered in Bungoma, Busia, Eldoret, Embu, Nanyuki, Oyugis, and Homa Bay. Next year, the program will be extended to other parts of the country with the target of reaching 50,000 farmers by 2012.

Official Kilimo Salama website: http://kilimosalama.wordpress.com/about/

It’s that time again!!

Mobile Monday Meet up will be happening at the iHub on November 15th starting at 6pm-7:30pm. Our hosts will be Nokia who will be talking about “Being part of a sustainable and scalable developers ecosystem with Nokia”

Other presenters will be:

• Akira Chix- winners of the recently concluded IPO48 competition.
• Nzioka Waita, Head of Strategic Business Development- Safaricom

Excellent opportunity to network with other mobile developers,entrepreneurs and enthusiasts.

If you’ve registered before for other events please go ahead and register again http://momoke.eventbrite.com/

Sponsors

Paul Scott gives his views on the MXit API that was launched last week in South Africa. The original article is here:

The MXit API

So today I attended the launch of the MXit API. I was pretty excited about this one from the hype surrounding it mainly because there was a lot of talk of MXit finally “opening up” and creating an open API for anyone to use. Turns out that this is not really the case at all.

Firstly, as the launch event started, the audience was asked not to tweet anything without running it by the MXit folks first (you know in case they have to deal with more bad press), at which point I should have left, but didn’t.

The “API” as it turns out, is really an SDK. A Microsoft .Net C# SDK at that. There is no API (well not counting the standard XMPP “API” which we have been using for years anyway) at all, but a Windows DLL that contains an interface to the MXit currency functions (they call it Moola) and some basic messaging options. They have also introduced a simple markup language that allows some simple graphical elements to be cached client side for performance. The markup would be really useful IMO, but that seems to be secondary to MXit themselves.

Essentially the DLL is only useful to Microsoft Visual Studio coders as it uses the Net.TCP function to do the bidirectional API calls. That basically means that you cannot even hack this thing onto Mono and still use a Free Software stack to run your apps. There is a WCF service that runs on top of the API to handle the requests to handle the HTTP requests from client apps.

This could all have been achieved in a much easier way by sticking to pure old XMPP plus a basic API to handle some non-standard XMPP stanzas for the transactions etc. I do not know why they approached it in this way at all.

Basically the MXit API is Yet Another Walled Garden (YAWG) that I do not need to think about again.

For those that are interested in doing something with the “API” the approach would be:

1. They are very interested in games, so make a simple text based multiplayer game.
2. Get in real early. I suspect that the apps will quickly become saturated and lose novelty fast, so start coding immediately if you think that you may want to make money from this thing
3. Be aware that your revenue stream is based on MXit Moola, which means a Premium Rated SMS service via MXit. That means that for every Rand you charge your clients, you will get 50c

One vector that I can think of for one person to make an absolute fortune from this would be to buy the infrastructure and software and create an Open API around it for 3rd party devs to use. You will essentially become the middle middleman and create value for everyone in the world that does NOT want to fiddle with Windows DLL’s and such. You could then charge a small transaction fee on that service.

Overall, I was underwhelmed, but lunch was good, so thanks to MXit for that! We also got a goody bag(let) full of stickers and a cap, so I am sure my kids will have fun with those.

Paul Scott can be reached through his blog at http://www.paulscott.za.net or through twitter @paulscott56.

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)

Last evening we had by far our largest Mobile Monday meet up at the ihub. The meet up was facilitated by Samsung who came in strong and showed us why they are a force to reckon with in the mobile industry. As always the meet up was characterised with a lot of excitement and very good participation and turnout from the mobile community. MoMoK had earlier promised on our twitter stream @mobilemondayke that we would have “goodies” for application developers, believe me we didn’t disappoint!!

We were privileged when Samsung chose Mobile Monday to launch their app developer competition and show case their platform Bada. Developers have the opportunity to win up to Kshs200,000 ($USD 2500) in prize money plus get their apps pushed on to the Samsung Bada apps store where they can continue to make money from the revenues the app generates- “With a Samsung, it’s not that hard to imagine”. Update: More information about the competition can be found here.

Verviant, a kenyan technology company was also represented at the meet up, with Mark Mwongela MD doing his best to show case some of the work that Verviant has done in developing applications on the Samsung Bada platform.

Also present was someone from Mxit.

MoMo-Kenya is growing fast, and this works to the benefit of the developer community. We want to make it bigger and better during each event.

A big thank you goes to our partners- iHub Nairobi who always manage to give us a superb venue plus team to help us arrange things, Virtual City- our premium sponsor, Pete the Barista- the coffee,beverages and food go a long way and of course the MoMo-Kenya team.

During the 10th Anniversary of Mobile Monday held in Finland, Xrystalgenius led by Alex Nyika were crowned champions in the Peer Awards. Xrystalgenius beat competitors from Uganda,Kenya (Akirachix),Brazil and Pakistan. Below are some of the pictures from the Peer Awards ceremony.

Photos from the 10th Anniversary Mobile Monday meet up in Helsinki,Finland, Sept 27-29th

During the 10th Anniversary of Mobile Monday held in Helsinki,Finland, Jari Taamisto CEO/Founder of Mobile Monday officially signed up the Kenya chapter of Mobile Monday. As one of the youngest MoMo Chapters, we are now part of the 150,000+ members in over 32 countries. The signing ceremony was done by John Wesonga (pictured here with Jari Taamisto) the lead of Mobile Monday-Kenya. The official MoMo founders pin was handed over to John Wesonga.

Show me the money!!..you’ve heard it many times, so this your chance to know how to monetize all those apps your fingers are itching to build and put in the Android market store. Join us at our next MoMoK meet up where we will be having Samsung talk about “Developers and Monetization Opportunities”. Expect a major announcement for developers during this meet up!!..you can’t afford to miss out on this..

Date: Monday, 18 Oct. 2010

Open Hours: 18:00 – 20:00
Venue: iHub
Admission: Free
Expecting Food & Drinks and Great People!

Register here mobilemondaykenya.eventbrite.com