100 Free texts to Kenya
The first year of business as a company has been an exciting one for Whive.com. We recently hit the 100,000 mark in user subscriptions and we continue to experience modest growth.
We have also grown our contact base to around 500,000 contacts all whom will be the beneficiaries of our exciting offers in the year 2012.
Earlier this year we launched our Whive SMS and Whive Classifieds Nokia applications at Pivot25 the mobile competition for East Africa. We were also winners at the same competition in the Utilities, Entertainment and Gaming category.
Currently in partnership with Nokia East Africa we are providing a Free SMS service that will reach millions of SMS users in East Africa. This service will introduce many Africans to the Internet as a useful tool for communication and business.
We have grown our Small Medium Enterprise base to over 600 customers who use our services to send bulk messages as well as receive 2 way sms communications.
Through our classifieds applications we have provided 2,000 plus job listings and generated 60,000 views through using our social media services such as SMS, Twitter and Facebook. These efforts enabled us to win the Vision 2030 ICT award for innovation in the Youth and Gender sector in Kenya and we are very proud to be serving our community. See how we linked this application to open data here.
Our Facebook application is still number 1 in Kenya and we will continue to ensure we offer robust social media services.
All these applications have allowed us to build an SMS API Platform for developers to build and test their applications. This will enhance future growth for many upstarts that leverage on SMS particularly here in Kenya.
We have incubated two upcoming startups that are leveraging on the WhiveSMS API namely:
CrowdPesa.com: A mobile money mappings solution built on the Ushahidi platform that is being used to map the 25,000 Mpesa Agents in Kenya. This application will be used by Kenyans to locate mobile money services using their phones.
PesaPay.com: A mobile payments solutions that will allow for IN-APP purchases locally in Kenya.
We also opened a hi-tech Support Centre in January which has been housing all of the above efforts. Plans are underway to triple our capacity in 2012.
In conclusion we at Whive would like to assure you of our commitment to delivering the very best in social media services for the next billion of users and we will be there to offer them the support they need in this digital age.
Signing off for the year,
Founder and C.E.O Whive.com
