DOORS OF OPPORTUNITY OPEN FOR SME'S ON THE STOCK MARKET.
‘The SME market is intended to offer issuers benefits by permitting for listing by introduction, without a public capital-raising component. It is aimed at seeing enterprises broaden their shareholder base and gain access to open market valuation through market price discovery,” said the Capital Markets Authority (CMA) chief executive, Stella Kilonzo. This follows approval of rules governing the listing of SMEs by the capital markets regulator. Small and medium enterprises (SME) with a capital base of at least Sh10 million can list at the Nairobi Securities Exchange (NSE) without necessarily selling shares to the public from June 2012.
The budding enterprises will be listed under a new segment called Growth and Enterprise Market Segment (GEMS). The listing is expected to make it easier and cheaper for medium-sized enterprises to raise funds through rights issues or corporate bonds, while easing the process of trading shares for the shareholders.

Listing at a regulated exchange builds the confidence of potential investors in a company. Ms Kilonzo said the regulator developed the policy and regulatory framework jointly with the NSE and the Central Depository and Settlement Corporation (CDSC), the custodian of electronic investor share accounts. CMA said the introduction of the small companies at the NSE is part of the government policy to promote micro, small and medium enterprises as one of the key drivers of Vision 2030.

She also cited a report titled Impact Investing Challenges and Opportunities in the East Africa’s ICT sector written by the Authority in conjunction with the Rockefeller Foundation as having identified viable SMEs with investment opportunities.



Mrs. Stella Kilonzo.

 “In the long term, the SME market will gain from access to long-term capital by introducing modalities for the public offer of securities by SMEs thus enabling SMEs to raise capital through share offers,” said Ms Kilonzo.

She said the approved policy and regulatory framework necessitates companies aspiring to list in the GEMS at the NSE to have minimum capitalisation of Sh10 million, with no trading record or profit history required.

The SMEs will also be required to appoint a duly vetted and approved nominated advisor who will be responsible for overseeing the company’s compliance with the listing and regulations.

The advisor is also expected to ensure that at least one third of the company’s directors undergo a corporate governance director’s induction programme.

The creation of nominated advisors is aimed at reducing the costs associated with building up internal capacity for listing prior to a company coming into the market, thereby reducing the operation costs and encouraging wider participation by SMEs.

THE CHURCH HAS GONE DIGITAL. HAVE YOU?

The world of technology is moving fast and it has long found its way into the church, or let me say into religion. Today you can have a church service at the touch of a button. As a Kenyan youth  I can say am privileged to have gone digital. The religious music industry has also taken a new twist with fresh young musicians. I don’t know what you’ll say about this but this newage music is really entertaining for the generation. We are slowly drifting away from the classical choir systems of music.

If you listen to Daddy Owen “king of kapungalla” sing you’ll want to listen to listen him sing again. Music played by Mary Mary is very very spiritually inspirational. Kenyan hip-hop fans can bear me witness that Juliani is one great musician. On the othe hand Ekodida is making people to fully praise in the ghetto way.

Back to my story, it is now evident that we can digitally have fellowship with fellow Christians from anywhere on earth. Joel Osteen can preach to the whole world through internet tv and change many lives. Back here in Kenya local TV stations are taking a step to broadcast church sermons during specific hours of the Sunday. As I write this, new shows have poped up and are proving to be quite refreshing. Check this out, you can watch Tukuza Fresh Start on KTN, get the word of God from the bible via internet (Oh! Talk of version, that’s your choice), interact with friends and family about the word via Social media like facebook, twitter, google+, 2go…pick one, request  your praise of choice and have it played it on TV.

So, are you going digital this Sunday or perhaps this Christmas?

JOURNEY TO THE PAPERLESS SOCIETY.

Samsung's chromebokk.

Everywhere you look, where paper once thrived it now doesn’t. Cash is increasingly a number on a screen, airlines push online check-ins, people send e-cards, and companies manage hard drives in lieu of filing cabinets. If you open up your eyes you will see E-readers like the Kindle, tablets like the iPad, and other devices are reshaping all corners of the publishing industry. Consumers are fueling a meteoric rise in e-books and other content accessed via digital subscriptions. Meanwhile, eHealth is pushing medical records to computers, vastly cutting out paper waste. 

It won’t stop there. Everyday, we learn about new e-paper technologies that mix the qualities of paper with the interactivity and durability of touchscreens. For traditional paper, this is the final nail in the coffin. Like a stealthy ninja, technology that displaces paper-based communications are now diffusing throughout society, largely unnoticed. One day we’ll look around and ask, “Hey, where did all the paper go?”

Can this realy come to an end?

A paperless society? Really?

This is Africa, print media are struggling, but they should have been dead years ago. Despite the ubiquity of the iPad, the evolution of the smartphone, and the emergence of a $199 tablet designed specifically around buying and consuming digital, rather than paper, content, we're dismally far from being paperless. Newspapers abound, magazines that should long ago have moved online line the shelves at bookstores, and my kids still come home with paper notices from school.

No, we haven't gone paperless yet. And, quite frankly, on the eve of 2012, this is an utterly unacceptable state of affairs.

THE ULTRABOOK

‘ULTRABOOK’-THE NEXT GENERATION OF LAPTOPS.

While the Kenyan and most of the African Tec-toy consumers still struggling to acquire and use the tablet, giants in the industry have gone ahead and produced the ‘ULTRABOOK’. To me it appears as if in the year 2012 we will be having a new technological jargon to use in our tech speeches, the ultrabook .

What is an Ultrabook?

According to Intel, who trademarked the term, the Ultrabook is a laptop that:

• is less than 20mm (0.8 inches) thick
• has no optical drive
• uses a solid-state drive (SSD) for all storage
• uses a Core i5, i7 processor
• weighs less than 1.4 kg (3.1 lbs.)
• yields 5 - 8+ hours of battery life
• priced around $1,000

The first Ultrabooks have started to appear from top laptop makers, including Lenovo, Acer, ASUS, and HP. While these initial models have been able to meet the hardware criteria laid out by Intel, the “around $1,000″ has been a sticking point. To be fair, models of the MacBook Air with decent configurations sell at prices higher than the $999 entry-level configuration.

It is good that so many companies are looking to produce Ultrabooks, as that will drive prices down. While Ultrabook makers may have a hard time competing with Apple currently, if prices drop enough next year that will surely change. Intel is predicting 40 percent of all laptops sold will be Ultrabooks by the end of 2012.

PC laptop makers realize they must do something to kickstart the Ultrabook category, and it is reported that at least 50 different models will debut at the Consumer Electronic Show (CES) in January. It sounds like the Ultrabook will be the big thing at the CES in 2012, compared to netbooks and tablets in recent years.

While netbooks were essentially a flash in the pan, quickly getting big sales numbers and fading just as fast, Ultrabooks are here to stay. Netbooks went the underpowered route to acheive cost effectiveness, and many owners quickly tired of the corner-cutting. Ultrabooks are full laptops, with good performance packed in a highly portable form. In spite of the fancy new marketing term, they are the natural evolution of the bigger laptops, and they’ll be around for a good while, post-PC era or not.

Ultrabooks prove that Steve Jobs was right with the introduction of the MacBook Air. Given the choice between a boxy laptop and a thin ultraportable, many will choose the thin and light Air. As prices continue to drop, as they usually do over time, the Ultrabook will be in a position to give the Air a run for the money. Laptop makers will be chasing the MacBook Air, just as tablet makers are chasing the iPad.

Ultrabooks will go into one area that Apple hasn’t tread with the MacBook Air– integrated 3G/4G. As prices drop, carriers are going to be willing to offer Ultrabooks that tap into their networks. These will be popular in the enterprise sector, too. We may start seeing Ultrabooks pop up everywhere we go. That’s what the sector is hoping for, anyway.

If next year I can get an Ultrabook like the Lenovo U300s I recently reviewed for less than $1,000, I can see buying one. I likely wouldn’t be the only one, as many need a Windows laptop, or have a bias against Apple. Next year may very well be the year of the Ultrabook.

THE BEGINNING OF GOOGROLA.

THINGS ARE LOOKING UP FOR GOOLE AS MOTOROLA MOBILITY SHAREHOLDERS APROVE MERGER.

Motorola Mobility has been given the green light to merge with Google by its shareholders during a special meeting on Thursday. 99 percent of the shares voting at the meeting of stockholders voted in favour of the adoption of the merger agreement, representing nearly three-quarters of Motorola Mobility’s total outstanding shares. The two companies are now a step closer to making the merger happen, with Google currently expecting the $12.5 billion acquisition to go ahead by early 2012.

Sanjay Jha, chairman and chief executive of Motorola Mobility said, “We look forward to working with Google to realize the significant value this combination will bring to our stockholders and all the new opportunities it will provide our dedicated employees, customers, and partners”. By bringing Google and Motorola Mobility together, it will allow the smartphone maker to team up with the mobile operating system creator and search giant to create an ecosystem for Android, which currently holds the first-place spot as the most popular mobile device operating system in the U.S. and the UK.

The move will also enable Google to acquire a number of key patents from Motorola, which will bolster the company’s position as it continues to fight legal disputes over alleged patent infringement. But Google recently stated that the Motorola Mobility arm would be instead of being made a subsidiary of the larger search giant’s company, it would instead be treated as a third-party smartphone maker instead. Google also said that it would not favour its acquisition over any other Android partner. So far, it has been quiet on the anti-competitive, antitrust front, with no company publicly denouncing the merger. But the U.S. Justice Dept. will still need to approve the merger, but looks so far at this stage the deal will go ahead.

Orange Money wins award for best mobile money launch

Orange Money wins award for best mobile money launch

Nokia to back local app development in Senegal

Nokia to back local app development in Senegal

THE DIGITAL MIGRATION IN EAST AFRICA.

A recent meeting held in Tanzania by some East African Community (E.A.C) revealed that they are proposing to for governments to limit the number of signal distributors to roll out digital television. The ministers responsible for  Transport, Communications and Meteorology in the E.A.C said this sitting that this will aid the region to migrate from analogue to digital before the international deadline. They also said that they will give the market segment to full competition when the government is unable to fund one public signal distributor.

This comes while Kenya is about to award the third license. The first one was given to Signet, which is a subsidiary of the Kenya Broadcasting Corporation (K.B.C). the second license was awarded to a Chinese firm Pan African Network Group, which brought out a lot of opposition from the local private media players in the market. the government gave a bid for a local media consortium, but as per last week the Communications Commission of Kenya (C.C.K) reported they hadn't formed the consortium yet. C.C.K says they are contemplating on inviting bids for any potential investors within the region interested in the third digital distribution license. will the local media bring more opposition after this?

wazolako: BING SHOWS THE IMPORTANCE OF SOCIAL IN SEARCH.<...

wazolako: BING SHOWS THE IMPORTANCE OF SOCIAL IN SEARCH.

<...: BING SHOWS THE IMPORTANCE OF SOCIAL IN SEARCH. The year 2011 has really been a year of elevation yet full of challenges for Search giant...

 BING SHOWS THE IMPORTANCE OF SOCIAL IN SEARCH.

The year 2011 has really been a year of elevation yet full of challenges for Search giants like Google and Bing. I will give credit to where it deserves and truth be told, Google has been and will be the truimph of technology. Copy that? As Jason Hiner put it, "It was the capstone that completed the initial structure of the internet." Talking about the internet, it is now in the midst of a dramatic remodel and it’s unclear whether Google search will get the refresh it needs to make it more appealing than ever or if it will be one of the things that gets painted over. http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/hiner/can-google-survive-its-blind-faith-in-the-algorithm/9654?tag=content;siu-container

To many of us who like, love and use the internet will admit that web search is near our universal homepage. But, increasingly, it fails to deliver results that were as useful as they once were, for two reasons:

1.      The shear volume of web data continues to rise at a brutally quick pace

2.      SEO is being used to manipulate search results with subpar content to turn a quick buck

Director Stefan Weitz

 As for the data volume issue, Bing director Stefan Weitz insists that there’s one big answer for solving it: tapping social.

“The infusion of the social signals into search is the next generation of search,” said Weitz.

That won’t surprise anyone. In fact, Google finally recognized this in 2011 with the launch of Google+ and its tight integration into Google search. However, while Google views social as a layer that adds value on top of its search, Weitz and Bing view it as an central element of the future of search. And, what most people don’t realize is that Bing already has more and better social data than Google because of Bing’s strategic partnerships with Facebook and Twitter.

Weitz cited the oft-quoted statistic that throughout all of human history up until 2003 we created 5 exabytes of data (five billion gigabytes). We now create that much every day. In 2011, we’ll create 1.8 zettabytes of data (a zettabyte is a 1000 exabytes). That’s up from 1.2 zettabytes in 2010, and we’ll be creating over 20 times that by 2020.

“The infusion of social data is not a gimmick,” Weitz said. “Literally, without it, search is not going to scale.” 

“The Facebook integration is pretty cool. It brings in your friends to every query,” said Weitz. ”We built Bing as this ‘decision engine’ thing.” Right now, the endgame for social on Bing involves taking Twitter and Facebook and “embedding those people into the decision flow,” Weitz noted. This is becoming more important as people turn to social networks more often for asking questions, as illustrated in the chart below, which is based on a Bing survey.

In trying to scale to meet this data explosion, “our search engines themselves as getting creaky” said Weitz. ”We rely on people to do things every day. Today’s search simply doesn’t take that into account. It’s completely mathematical… It’s been in the current stagnation for the past 12 years.”

Weitz didn’t hesitate in stating that Bing is ahead of Google in terms of powering search with social. He said that Bing has better social data and is more deliberate about integrating it. He also said that Bing has a lot more social integration coming soon. Inside Microsoft, the Bing division now has a new headquarters at the company’s Bellevue campus, has an international team working on refining search, and has a special team working on social integration right in Google’s backyard in Mountain View, California. 

Check this out, while Google has been busy working on building Google+ as its social tool,

---

Microsoft has quietly gone out and cut partnership deals with Facebook and Twitter and started integrating their social data into Bing search results. For example, if you do a search on Bing and you’re logged into Facebook in the same browser then the search results will show which of your friends have liked a certain page. 

Sanity check

Bing may have a leg up on Google in social today because of the Microsoft deals with Facebook and Twitter, but you also have to keep in mind that Google is going to have more control over its social-search destiny by building its own product. It won’t have to worry about partnership deals going bad or having to ask its social partners for additional API access. Google can just make it happen.

On the other hand, social is all about the people. And while Google+ is off to a great start, Facebook and Twitter still own the social graph today and will for years to come. That gives Bing a strategic advantage for the next stage of web search, for now.

Sidebar: Bing’s Twitter and Facebook deals

Here’s the timeline of Microsoft’s Twitter and Facebook deals involving Bing, based on information from Microsoft:

Oct. 21, 2009: At Web 2.0, Qi Lu, president of Microsoft’s Online Services Division, announces a new beta feature that enables people to easily search Twitter’s real-time information feed within Bing. The feature helps customers to more fully understand the conversations taking place in Twitter by showing the most popular links people are sharing via Twitter and revealing the comments from the most authoritative users about those links. The feature refines the real-time feed by removing duplicates, links to adult content and tweets containing spam.

Feb. 5, 2010: Bing announces an expansion of its global search alliance with Facebook. As part of the new global agreement, Facebook customers searching for Web content on the site are presented with a fully integrated Bing experience, allowing them to more easily search the Web and make better decisions. Microsoft also no longer represents Facebook display advertising sales in the U.S. as part of its ad network offering.

April 13, 2010: Bing announces the limited release of Twitter integration into Bing search results. More specifically, Bing pulls in social content generated on Twitter to surface the most relevant updates quickly following a breaking news event. Bing analyzes what topics are generating the most interest on Twitter and surfaces the latest and most interesting content. It also utilizes Twitter data to bring customers the most popular shared links for navigational queries.

Oct. 13, 2010: Bing announces a deeper alliance with Facebook, offering a more a personalized search experience for people who use Facebook and Bing. The new features are available when an individual is logged into Facebook while searching on Bing and include Facebook profile search and “Like” results. Bing is the only major search engine that can search public “Like” information and surface it to friends, providing a personalized search experience for each customer.  We intend to build upon this alliance to provide a more personalized and improved search experience in the future.

May 17, 2011: Bing announces an expansion of the integration of “Like” results to include not only pages and links liked by a person’s Facebook friends, but also results related to trending topics, articles and Facebook fan pages. Facebook Profile Search capabilities are enhanced to return more detailed information when searching for a specific person on Bing. Additionally, social results are integrated into Bing travel and Bing shopping, allowing people to get help from their trusted friends when making decisions online.

Sept. 6, 2011: Bing and Twitter announce they will extend their alliance, allowing Twitter’s fire-hose to feed into the Bing real-time search feature.

AFRICA, A FAST GROWING MARKET FOR MOBILE OPPORTUNITIES

Africa is the fastest growing mobile market in the world, suggesting companies like RIM and Nokia may have an opportunity to serve the continent's growing base of customers. Groupe Speciale Mobile Association's research indicates Africa is now the second-largest mobile market after Asia. The continent topped 649 million connections in the fourth quarter this year and is set to claim 735 million connections by the end of 2012. "That is equivalent to a 65 percent penetration rate. Out of every 100 people, 65 have some form of mobile connectivity," said Peter Lyons, a GSMA director. 

Africans also increased their cell phone use by twenty percent per year during the last five years, with Nigeria boasting 93 million network users to date.

Tax cuts on handsets have helped Kenyans purchase 200 percent more phones, which 8.5 million citizens use for increasingly popular mobile money transfers. South Africa has the strongest broadband connection, which supports music, videos, e-books and other online services.

This progress is not ubiquitous, however, as one-third of Africans in functioning mobile markets do not yet have network connections. That gap leaves space for companies like RIM, Nokia and other lower-end handset makers to claim more customers in these emerging markets.

RIM's investment in Africa has returned 50 percent more sales than last year, thanks to the "continued popularity" of its BlackBerry Messenger service. The Canadian company struggles elsewhere in the world, where it grapples with profits, products and leadership issues, but RIM may have a chance to entice more African subscribers to its fold.

Nokia, too, may have an opportunity to grow in Africa, if the company can overcome several obstacles. The Finnish company said it will undercut Android pricing with its new Windows Phones, suggesting it may manufacture cheaper handsets for developing countries in Africa. 

RIM may face troubles, however, as South Africa wants the keys to its encrypted BBM service and the company's recent outages have not endeared it to frustrated consumers worldwide. 

But after failing to compete with Apple and Android, ditching its Symbian platform andlaying off thousands of workers, Nokia has decided to embrace smartphones over feature phones. This tactic may work in western markets but Africa's networks are not always capable of handling smartphone speeds, suggesting Nokia may not want to ditch feature phones just yet if it hopes to gain traction in emerging markets.

Both RIM and Nokia may be able to capitalize on Africa's growing mobile market if they plan carefully and target their audience appropriately. Should they do so, Africa's handset and network adoption may soon grow to surpass even Asia's.