December | 2010

Now Accepting Applications for Red Membership

The Red Card membership grants you a semi-permanent desk, a locker and priority on the meeting room space. Currently, we have 10 spaces available at any one time, and these Red Card seats will go for about Ksh.10, 000 per month.

The red members space

These Red Card seats are “semi-permanent” spaces as we want these Red Cards to be open and usable by more than the first dozen who get to them. Our plan is to set a time limit on them of 6-12 month intervals, thereby giving others access to a more permanent space at the iHub.

Anyone with a green card can apply for a Red Card, but know that preferential treatment is given to people/teams who can prove concrete progress towards a specific project or product’s goals.

Deadline: Wednesday 5th January 2011 at 11.59 p.m. (GMT+3)

By: Jessica Colaco

21-12-2010

Community Events iHub Members

Samsung Apps Contest – Stage I Winners

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.

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 at the iHub and winning developers applications will be launched and will win KShs 200,000 (approx $USD 2500).

The Winners of Stage 1 and their winning apps

From left to right: Mikul, Nelly, Robert Ngeru from Samsung, Paul and Bernard

Mikul Shah – Eat Out Mobile

Eat Out Mobile is Kenya’s first mobile restaurant guide, allowing users to search for restaurants using location, cuisine and budget. The application also benefits from having a popular website www.eatout.co.ke and facebook.com/eatoutkenya presence.

Paul Mungai– Tweet Drill Down

Using the phone’s current geographic location as a reference point, the application will retrieve geo-located tweets within a given geographic radius and provide the capability to filter the data based on certain criteria e.g. crime, food, sports, politics & people.

Sam Kariu – Geuza

Geuza is a Swahili-English translator game app that test’s your knowledge in Swahili vocabulary and helps you improve your fluency.

Nelly Ndonye – Nelly Data

Mobile application for providing real time data from the Nairobi Stock Exchange (NSE)

Bernard Owuor – Zynde Money Manager

This application plugs into Zynde.com – A Kenyan money management (budget, expenses, income, tax etc) web site. The Bada application allows individuals, employees and SMEs to Track their finances through their Bada phones on the move.

By: Tosh

17-12-2010

Community Entrepreneurship iHub Members

GREEN MEMBERSHIP APPLICATIONS REOPEN!

It has been a fruitful two months since we launched the first bunch of green members and as we had promised earlier, we have reopened the application process afresh. All White members are eligible to apply for Green Membership. Once you signed up, you received an email to activate your account. If you haven’t activated then please do so to be able to apply. The second round of successful green members will be announced on the first week of January 2011.

Please note that:

You must complete your applications with details at each stage. Please avoid One liners.
You must upload a true picture of yourself.
Make sure your application is as detailed as possible

There are limited spaces available. This application process will continue until the 31st of December 2010.

Click here to apply

More about the *iHub_ Membership

Membership is open to those who are in the tech field – programming, design or research. Upon acceptance, one is given a special ID card that permits one entrance to the *iHub_ for free. There are three levels of membership:

White
These are people who wish to be part of the *iHub_ community virtually as they cannot be physically present. They will be part of the online community and members within the *iHub_ will be able to interact with them via our Membership Site. White members can apply for green membership.

Green
It is for anyone who meets the basic pre-requisites with additional information on projects. It is free and gives you the ability to hang out, have meetings, surf the web and work on projects with others in a great environment.

Red
The Red Card membership grants you a semi-permanent desk, a locker and priority on the meeting room space. Currently, we have 10 spaces available at any one time, and these Red Card seats will go for about Ksh.10, 000 per month.

These Red Card seats are “semi-permanent” spaces as we want these Red Cards to be open and usable by more than the first dozen who get to them. Our plan is to set a time limit on them of 3-6 month intervals, thereby giving others access to a more permanent space at the iHub.

Anyone with a green card can apply for a Red Card, but know that preferential treatment is given to people/teams who can prove concrete progress towards a specific project or product’s goals.

By: marie

16-12-2010

Community Events Mentorship

Rhok #2 Update

Its time for a lunch break for the hackers and the food looks appetizing,

well and the hackers brought their appetite too

earlier guys had defined problems and here are some of the problems going to be solved:

1.Sms based emergency Assistance routing:The idea here is for a Disaster Assistance Response system that would help disaster victims. In these situations regular communications are down due to the disaster, but SMS should be functioning. Such a system would allow someone to call a number in an SMS Center, report their status (whether they are OK), submit information/recommendations. The Center could also follow up. The final product would be a semi-structured list for first responders within the first 48 hours of a disaster.

2.Disaster Resource allocators:In times of disaster, there is need to allocate resources fairly to the least/needy areas.

In areas where there are many schools and health centers, there is more chances that the area is more developed than other areas where there is low concentration of schools and health centers.

Government and NGO’s need to allocate resources to areas that are more vulnerable than others.

3.NGO collobaration Space:The Tech Camp idea here is to generate cooperation and communication among NGOs, sharing both resources and information in a variety of sectors such as disaster response, or election monitoring, for instance. Currently these organizations lack incentives to make information available online. They all have excellent projects, but few are online.

4.virtual Assembly point:Virtual Assembly Point is Crisis Management System that will help the Emergency Response Department to know and evaluate a tragedy before they reach the location of the tragedy.from the Virtual Assembly Point, the rescue team will be able to get manifesto, sort people according to their needs, set priorities according to the ground data, pull individual records for accountability purpose and plan for and manage the available resources properly.
People will be able to report their status at anytime and anywhere, and the information will be used by the Emergency Response Department to locate them and rescue them as soon as possible with minimal resources utilized.
from the system also, family and friends will be able to view ones status and how they are coping up especially after the rescue

5.Data chart:Tweak the Tweet has shown some of the potential for exchanging structured information over a public network like Twitter, using the existing practice of #hashtag markup to add crisis-related message annotations, and recommending new conventional use to encode some data types near certain tags.

Aleem Walji from the world bank also took the time earlier to talk about the apps for development challenged and encouraged the perticipants to apply theres upto 45000 dollars up for grabs.

Aleem Walji

view more photos on Flickr

By: marie

14-12-2010

Community iHub

Rhok #2 Finale

The 2nd RHOK finally came to an end, after 2 days of extensive coding for the participants. The applications presented for judging were innovative.

Participants Waiting for the deliberation

Here is a breakdown of the winners:

Individual Category went to Bahati Schyns with his Virtual assembly Point Crisis management point app. Bahati will get an opportunity to intern with the World Bank for a period of three months all costs paid

Bahati on the left all smiles

The next prize for Best group category went to iCollab with their NGO Collaboration space app and best group effort Went to Rhackers with their Disaster resource Allocator.

Mr Francis Muraya a representative from the World Bank congratulated Bahati and also gave a word of encouragement to all the participants. He encouraged the Kenyan devs to think of long term solutions and not just solutions for one or two day competitions.

Francis Muraya from the World Bank

By: Joshua Musau

06-12-2010

Community Events iHub Members

Rupu – an online social marketing platform is launched at the iHub

The world of digital social marketing has rapidly evolved over the last few years. So fast that organisations are tapping into this tool to help market their products and services. Today marks the launch of rupu.co.ke, a revolutionary digital social marketing platform that benefits both businesses and consumers. rupu is a digital collective buying and social marketing tool that leverages the influence of social applications such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MSN and Yahoo Chat. Rupu works in three easy steps:

Our subscribers receive daily alerts via SMS, email, Facebook or Twitter feeds on daily deals to great local businesses;
They then share these deals with their friend across social networks;
Once the deal is activated, our subscribers then present their voucher (print or mobile device) at the business to get their deal.

Rupu aggregates the power of collective buying and negotiates large discounts with great local businesses to offer one deal each day at an incredibly low price. Deals are only up on the site for 24hrs. The deals are activated only when a minimum number of people agree to buy” said Mr. Benson Maina, rupu Head of Marketing, during the launch. Mr. Maina added that, “By requiring a minimum number of buyers, rupuguarantees its businesses a tonne of customers therefore ensuring subscribers get maximum discounts. This is called Collective Buying. In addition, consumers are able to get rupu deals via their mobile devices, plus extend rupu gifts to their friends, family and colleagues”.

Benefits to businesses marketing via rupu is that since it is a platform that facilitates online discussions, consumers are able to express their views, opinions, recommendations and complaints about certain products. rupu enables businesses to engage in conversations with their customers and listen to their feedback on what improvements their product can use as well as give an opportunity to address their views. Engaging rupu not only guarantees businesses foot traffic through their doors, but more importantly, repeat customers.

The Internet has arguably become an indispensable part of everyday life. It is for this reason that social marketing can be naturally integrated in people’s daily lives in a form that is non-intrusive and thereby acceptable to many. Here is a short video of rupu:

By: marie

04-12-2010

Community Events Members

Rhok #2 Kicks Off

iHub Nairobi, is this weekend hosting the Kenyan round of the 2nd edition of Random Hacks of Kindness. Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK) is all about using technology to make the world a better place by building a community of innovation. RHoK brings software engineers together with disaster risk management experts to identify critical global challenges, and develop software to respond to them. A RHoK Hackathon event brings together the best and the brightest hackers from around the world, who volunteer their time to solve real-world problems.

The 1st edition of RHoK held in June this year also at the iHub was a huge success. It was eventually won by a team called Res-Q who developed a solution to the Person Finder problem. They created a Person finder technology that includes a database schema to synchronize multiple databases. The team came up with a mobile and also a web app. The mobile app was in j2me and with this the registration process would take place. The web app was named Virtual Assembly Point since it emulated a fire assembly point.

RHoK is a hackathon with indviduals or teams working through the whole of Saturday, through the night to have their submissions ready by the deadline of 13.30 on Sunday E.A.T.

The iHub is slowly filling up as hackers get used to the idea of rising before noon (although a free breakfast was a fitting reward for those who managed to wake up early.)

Photos on Flickr

Check out what’s happening at RHoK around the world on Twitter

via mentalacrobatic

By: Erik Hersman

03-12-2010

Community

International Open Data Hack Day: What Are You Looking For?

[A guest post by Aleem Walji, Innovation Practice Manager At the World Bank Institute, about tomorrow's Random Hacks of Kindness hackathon at the iHub.]

As December 4th approaches, I’m getting excited for the International Open Data Hackathon and even more excited to see World Bank challenges and data featured in an event that will span 50 cities (and counting ) over 6 continents. It’s thrilling to consider what hackers and users working together might mash-up and what role we (as data providers) can play in giving people access to clean and interoperable data sets for their using. Let a thousand flowers bloom.

Having recently traveled in India and after meeting development folks of various stripes from economists in Delhi to social entrepreneurs in Hyderabad to geeks in Bangalore , I’m struck again by how important local data remains. It’s one thing to talk about global economic trends and macro indicators but quite another to understand what’s happening in one Indian state, say Andra Pradesh, compared to its neighbors. Imagine a citizen group comparing rainfall data between states, at the district level, compared to crop yields over two decades. That’s when things get interesting and potentially useful to users.

Much of the data we’ve “liberated” at the World Bank will be helpful to policy wonks, researchers, and perhaps students of global development but for most media organizations, civil society groups, and citizens, what matters most remains local or even hyper-local. So where’s that data and how do make it more widely available? Where’s the micro-data upon which national statistics are built and global indicators published? Why is it so seldom available? When will governments (rather than just international organizations) embrace Open Data and all the possibilities it affords?

Let’s start by acknowledging that data is political. To make information available on differential rates of development within a country is bound to create tension. Why are parts of countries developing faster than others? How are rates of “development” correlated to ethnic groups or faith communities? The truth is seldom clear but people regularly make claims based on anecdotal data or false information. Making information available to more people more regularly means more opportunities to cross check facts and allows a system of checks and balances to emerge.

It takes an ecosystem to build a well functioning democratic order. That ecosystem needs to provide reliable and clean fuel to many actors necessary to govern effectively. Data is fuel and reliable data in usable formats is refined fuel. I’m hoping the Bank’s Apps for Development Global Competition surfaces many national and local data sets that can be combined with global indicators to understand how things at the local level compare with global trends. I hope we also pinpoint where important gaps in data exist and where we need to work harder to find reliable information to solve important problems. In a world of data deluge, there is no shortage of information collected but parsing it, sorting it, and making it relevant locally is the real challenge. We want to hear from you, see your ideas, and work with you to make available the raw material to power the next economic or scientific revolution.

By: Judith

02-12-2010

Community Members

Intellectual Property Law Talk by John Syekei

Today there was the much anticipated session on Intellectual Property led by John Syekei, Head of Intellectual Property at Coulson Harney Advocates. Here are a few points that came out during the talk.

John Syekei - Head of Intellectual Property at Coulson Harney Advocates

There are two types IPs:

Industrial property- This is acquired through registration

Copyright- This is acquired through the fixation and expression of ideas and in certain jurisdictions deals with software. It’s almost automatic you do not need to register.

Trademarks denote origin and distinguish you from your competitor.

Patents need to be new, non-obvious and something that can be utilized for example formulas, new machines. Patents in Kenya give twenty year protection.

There are two ways you can get copyright:

If you want to get a copyright you need to express it first: write it, document it. Create copyright before you look for funding or share the idea. Write the source code, mail it to your mail address and you get the postal slip that shows the date when you came up with the copyright.

Alternatively you can deposit the documentation with the Kenya Copyright board. They will give you a slip that shows the date you came up with the copyright. But yet again copyright is all about dates, who came first; if someone has evidence that they came up with the new product before you and they can prove it, they can get the copyright.

See a lawyer who will also stamp an affidavit confirming your copyright over your asset.

Non Disclosure agreements-they create an obligation of confidence between yourself and the person you are sharing the idea with. Make sure that the NDA does not end even when the discussions are terminated and make sure it is in writing.

Tips:

Document and create dates as soon as possible.

Don’t rush when signing contracts or NDAs.

Consult a lawyer before signing.

He who asserts proves. If you say I own this copyright then you need to prove it.

For more information on IP law *PLEASE* consult a lawyer.

If you missed this, take heart there will be other sessions like this.

By: Tosh

01-12-2010

Uncategorized

EREVUKA KUWA SONKO-ICT VILLAGE

According to the latest research by UNDP, 75% of Kenya’s population is below 30 years of age and only 50% of Kenya’s youth are expected to find gainful employment in their lifetime.

With this regard the Erevuka Kuwa Sonko youth empowerment forum was created to rally the youth in all sectors, one being IT, gain access to entrepreneurial and financial information to develop not only themselves but their nation. IT developers and programmers are needed within each pillar of Kenya’s Vision 2030 because each pillar needs modern technology to be efficient, productive and improve livelihood.

Visit the ICT Village at the Erevuka Kuwa Sonko Forum in Dec 8-10 and meet successful BPO’s, grantees, Capital Ventures, Start ups who are thriving in the IT sector. Youth also have a chance to display their innovations and demonstrate their skills & knowledge in IT.

Microsoft East and Southern Africa are willing to sponsor student developers and techies interested in exhibiting at the event if they utilize Microsoft as a platform for their web developments and software! This could also be your chance to be recruited in the Imagine Cup Competition- The world’s premier student technology competition hosted by Microsoft! http://www.imaginecup.com/

For more information Contact Michelle on: michelle@squaregold.co.ke

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