Kenya’s biggest mobile operator, Safaricom, has said it will stop selling feature phones in its own retail stores in an effort to increase smartphone penetration and bolster the East African country’s digital content market. Corporate affairs director Nzioka Waita made the surprising announcement at the Mobile Web East Africa conference
The Bank of Tanzania says mobile financial services regulations aimed at improving the oversight of mobile payments and the service providers that facilitate them are expected in June. The central bank drafted the regulations last year in what it says is a bid to enhance the sector’s stability and
Founded in 1998, Canada’s Communitech is the sort of start-up incubator and new business creator any country would dream of. What started as a small group of entrepreneurs looking to support one another and other new businesses, the Communitech network now includes more than
Sales of digital set-top boxes, which went on sale last month in Kenya, have been sluggish. The boxes are required to convert digital terrestrial broadcasting signals so that that the East African country can switch off analogue broadcasts before the International Telecommunication
Kenyan capital Nairobi has emerged as a “serious tech hub” and may become Africa’s technology leader, Google chairman Eric Schmidt said this week. Schmidt visited Kenya’s iHub innovation hub last week during a whirlwind visit to Africa that also included stops in South Sudan, Chad, Nigeria and Rwanda
Shares in Apple plunged by almost 10% in after-hours trading on Wednesday in New York after the consumer electronics company published first-quarter financial results that fell short of analysts’ expectations. Investors appear to have taken fright, in particular, at the
Kenyan president Mwai Kibaki will preside over a ceremony next week to break ground on a new US$14,5bn technology town called Konza City. Konza City will consist of facilities meant to attract business process outsourcing ventures. The Kenyan government wants to attract international technology companies
Uganda is to get a fourth-generation (4G) mobile network using long-term evolution (LTE) technology. MTN’s subsidiary in the East African country will deploy the network in the coming months. MTN claims it will be the first to offer 4G in East Africa, although it appears the company has overlooked Smile Telecoms
Despite a warning by the Communications Commission of Kenya that it would not extend the 31 December 2012 deadline for operators to disconnect mobile subscribers who haven’t registered their Sim cards, unregistered users continued to enjoy access to services on Thursday, three days after the deadline
Ghana’s National Communications Authority has ordered MTN, that country’s largest mobile operator, to stop adding new subscribers to its network because network quality “continues to deteriorate”. MTN Ghana has 11m subscribers in a country of 25m people, according
