whive.org

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

King Bee — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 11:32:40 +0000

Merry Christmas Bees

Have a Merry Christmas and a Happy 2012

CrowdPesa Launches: The first 3rd Party Application built on Whive SMS

King Bee — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 06:05:57 +0000

P.S. Dr Bitange Ndemo Launches CrowdPesa

Crowdpesa an application built on top of Whive SMS API has launched in Nairobi on 14th December 2011 at the iHub. Crowdpesa is a location-based service aimed at providing the average consumer with the convenience of finding the nearest mobile payment service, financial institution, financial intermediary and retail outlet around the World.

The Whive team has been involved in the development of the Crowdpesa platform as both organizations share common facilitators i.e. Space Kenya Networks an Seed Incubator located in Nairobi, Kenya. Crowdpesa is also incubated at The Mlab East Africa.

Crowdpesa is a brand/trademark of Pesapay is headed by Mr. Patrick Maina, Legal Advisor to Whive.

This is a major milestone for Whive as it is the first 3rd party application to be built on Whive.

In his remarks to the guests who included Permanent Secretary to the Ministry of Information Dr. Bitange Ndemo, Whive Founder and C.E.O John Karanja said;

Through our work at Whive we have discovered that there is no bigger social enabler in Kenya like SMS. SMS has powered mobile money solutions like Mpesa and through Whive SMS it is powering Crowdpesa SMS and Notification services. This will continue to ensure that Crowdpesa empowers Kenyans at the grassroots through technologies they understand and are already available to them.

We at Whive would like to wish the Crowdpesa team best of luck as they pursue the noble goal of providing financial informational services to Kenyans and the World.

See photos of the launch here.

You can learn more about Whive SMS here.

You can learn more about CrowdPesa here.

SMS for Millions, why Whive is a great platform for reaching “the African mobile phone user”.

King Bee — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 07:58:43 +0000

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,

John S. Karanja

Founder and C.E.O Whive.com

Space Kenya Networks Ltd

WordCamp Kenya is here bee there or bee square :-)

King Bee — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 08:32:15 +0000

Camping Like Bees (Pic Google Images)

WordCamp Kenya (@WordCampKe) 2011 is finally here from Nov 12th-13th at Cray Fish Camp Naivasha. Organized by a good friend of Whive David Mugo (@Raidarmax) this will be a great opportunity for bloggers, readers, publishers and advertisers to connect with each other and understand each others social media needs.

WordCamp is a fun gathering organized by local WordPress chapters around the world. The intention is to enhance blogging as a social tool for development particularly in emerging countries like Kenya.

This will also enhance the development of the Social Pillar under the Vision2030 goal that the people of Kenya have committed themselves to.

In this regard we at Whive will facilitate the Social Media Needs of all attendees for FREE over the weekend. Particularly 100 Daily FREE SMS for social texting on both days. The same will be available on the following social platforms:

FACEBOOK: facebook.whive.com

TWITTER: twitter.whive.com

MOBILE: whive.mobi

WEB: whive.com

DOWNLOAD APPS: whiv.eu/n

Important times to remember for leaving for Naivasha are: [FULL SCHEDULE]

8:30am
Assembly outside Alliance Francaise on Monrovia Street, opp View Park Towers. Please keep time, be there at 8:30am sharp so we can get you into your seat on the buses.

9:15am
Departure from Nairobi for Naivasha.

You can follow the twitter stream #WordCampKe and Whive @whive

Remember to have Fun and Share the Buzz…

Emerging Mobile Opportunities :: Internet Governance Forum Panel

King Bee — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 07:11:15 +0000

Vint Cerf Creator TCP/IP at the iHub (Pic by Unknown)

Last week Kenya hosted the Internet Governance Forum Summit at the United Nations Gigiri, Nairobi.

Whive Founder and C.E.O John Karanja was a panelist at the Emerging Mobile Opportunities workshop. He made a presentation on the mobile applications being developed in Kenya that are addressing the market opportunities in Africa.

The Internet Governance Forum (IGF) is a multi-stakeholder forum for policy dialogue on issues of Internet governance. It brings together all stakeholders in the internet governance debate, whether they represent governments, the private sector or civil society, including the technical and academic community, on an equal basis and through an open and inclusive process. [1] The establishment of the IGF was formally announced by the United Nations Secretary-General in July 2006 and it was first convened in October / November 2006. Ref: WikiPedia

Emerging Opportunities Internet Governance ForumView more presentations from Jon Son.

Introductory slide

Thank you very much George, it is a great priviledge to be here at this very exciting time for Kenya and Africa discussing some of this critical internet governance issues at this gathering with my eminent colleagues, as you have heard I am John Karanja the Founder of Whive.com which is a Social Media Platform built for Africa and other emerging markets.

What we have done at Whive is integrated exisiting platforms already being used in Africa such as SMS, facebook, twitter, Nokia: Symbian ecosystem, and offcourse the web and mobile .

First Slide AFRICA = OPPORTUNITY

Africa equals opportunity. To provide some context. There are over 300+ million mobile phone subscribers on the continent today.

In Kenya a quarter billion SMS are sent everyday. SMS has become the platform to engage the African User and as a first step to rolling out Internet services. So what we have been able to do at Whive is integrate the Internet to SMS services. As such we are beginning to more entrepreneurs emerge with applications that are leveraging on SMS and data. Governments such as the Kenyan one have set policies that have lowered SMS termination rates keeping the cost of SMS as well as voice as low as possible. This has a net effect of spurring growth across the ICT sector. Keep in mind this sector contributes 2.3% of the country’s gross domestic product.

Second Slide MOBILE MONEY ECOSYSTEM

Progessive regulation from the governor of the Central bank in Kenya 5-6 years ago. Duplicate these kind of policies in the Internet Space in Kenya (See CrowdPesa.com). Mpesa reaches remote areas transfering about $2 billion every year. Allows for transfer of money from one end of Kenya to the next instantly. Emergence of new applications in the mobile money space such as CrowdPesa.

That leverage on this mobile money ecosystem.

Third Slide EMERGING APPLICATIONS

Applications in m-commerce are likely to emerge very soon within Kenya and there are some like #PesaPay which is a mobile payment gateway that is serving numerous and newly funded start-ups including Whive.com. Agriculture space has a huge potential considering the Economic center of gravity is shifting East to Asia . Indeed 50% of Worlds GDP will be generated in Asia. Asia will have the money and will need FOOD. Africa has lots of arable land just waiting to be utilized. We expect to see applications such as M-FARM from Kenya become increasingly relevant. Already it is connecting 2,600 farmers at just 1 year od existence. There is also a lot of interest in the Health sector such as applications like MEDKENYA that are integrating to Kenyan Open data another example of how Openness Policy can spur innovation and fill gaps. The CRUCIAL Education sector remains largely unexplored and i am waiting to see what sort of applications will emerge from this platforms. Indeed at Whive we are providing the SMS driven Social Media Tools that are absolutely crucial to the success of the start-ups I have mentioned today and the maturation of this emerging applications and i look forward to joining you in Connecting Africa to the world.

Whive integrates Kenyan Open Data

King Bee — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 12:59:28 +0000

Prime Minister Hon Raila Odinga & Whive

The government through the Ministry of Information and Communication Technology recently released a treasure trove of Open Data to Kenyan developers about 3 weeks ago at an event officiated by the President Mwai Kibaki at KICC.

This was in response to the challenge posed to the Kenya ICT Board and Ministry of ICT by Kenyan developers to make this data available. We are glad that they have responded in a timely fashion.

Eager to make use of this Data and come up with useful tools we at Whive set out to discover how we could best use this data to enhance our platforms.

We decided that the information would be most useful in providing situational context for our content. In particular we at Whive crowd-source daily Jobs at Whive.com for our readers and we wanted to immediately create locational context for this information .

Say for example you view a job listing called Administrator Jobs in Mombasa. The Whive platform should be able to detect that Mombasa is a County in Kenya and give you more information about it! Well this is what we have done and you can have a look at Open Data working on our platform on this screen shots below.

Visit Whive.mobi

Browse Classifieds

Select county listing

Open Data is Embedded

Open Data is currently available on Classifieds on our mobile platforms at www.whive.mobi and on our classifeds apps at apps.whive.com. We will be rolling out a fully fledged implementation over the next few months as we learn how from our users experience with this newly integrated applications.

World’s First Kikuyu Mobile Application is launched by Whive.com

King Bee — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 08:47:55 +0000

Kikuyu Application

Whive.com launched the world’s first Kikuyu Mobile Application on 20th July 2011 at @KamemeFm radio station between 7PM-8PM.

The Application dubbed Aterere has been in development for the last one year and is the first in a series of localized and colloquial applications developed for Africa.

Whive recently won Kenya Vision2030 Award for innovation in ICT for Youth,Gender and Vulnerable groups. It is in our agenda to developed applications for vulnerable/marginalized groups which sometimes can be ethnic groups. We believe that mobile applications in local languages will help create local markets and increase opportunities for Kenyans as envisioned in the new Kenyan constitution which respects our cultural heritage.

The application also allows the user to switch to English and Swahili languages which will also allow individuals to learn this languages by word association.

We are grateful to all the users who participated in the crowd-sourcing of translations for this application.

Already the application has received 659 downloads within a space of 12 hours which is very encouraging for developers looking to monetize the vernacular space.

You can download the application at http://apps.whive.com

We still need help in translating to more languages so please do contact us through the contacts on this website.

WhiveSMS Interview and Mobile Monday Presentation

King Bee — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 08:25:48 +0000

John Karanja @MobileMondayKe

Whive were @ihubnairobi to make their Mobile Monday presentation to developers and geeks. This presentation focused on monetizing of Applications.

Whive C.E.O John Karanja spoke [See Pics] about the progress of mobile applications made by Whive see reports and video below produced for Kachwanya TV.

You need to a flashplayer enabled browser to view this YouTube video

Whive launched their public SMS API that allows users and businesses to integrate SMS to their applications.

Whive also introduced an affiliated product from another SpaceKenya.com Partner using the WhiveSMS API lead by Patrick Maina (@crowdpesa) called PesaPay.

Here is a link to the presentation and the twitter live feed is below.

ksparta Spartan Cat typo #pesapay > @MobileMondayKE: RT @ksparta #pesapal and the networks it works on j.mp/iX99Vo pretty nifty, me likey #MoMoKe

27 Jun Favorite Retweet Reply kimka207 Karanja Kimani Love the idea behind Pesa Pay #momoke (live at http://ustre.am/AljB)

27 Jun MurayaKamau Muraya Kamau So how much has @whive made so far? #momoke

27 Jun mbuguanjihia Mbugua Njihia RT @AgostaL: @mbuguanjihia @MobileMondayKE @iddsalim Everyone wants to be Linus Torvalds when you can be Bill Gates. #momoke

27 Jun Amamacho Amamacho Pesa pay serves wonderful platform for those who mean BUSINESS. That’s an enlightening presentation. #momoke

27 Jun LouiV Louis Openda Alert! Alert! a china phone spotted at #momoke @mobilemondayke guards guards…..pete someone help O___O

27 Jun MurayaKamau Muraya Kamau #Whive really need a designer. That stand looks shabby #Momoke

27 Jun MobileMondayKE Mobile Monday-Kenya RT @MMuendo @crowdpesa is an open innovation & a crowd mapping software.And they used @ushahidi as part of their crowdmapping tool #Momoke

27 Jun mlabeastafrica m:lab EAST AFRICA Interesting crowd sourcing model called @crowdpesa that #PesaPay are building on #momoke

27 Jun savvykenya Savvy Kenya PesaPay: an open source integrated mobile payment solution. That’s the presentation going on right now #MoMoKe

27 Jun LouiV Louis Openda Mpesa, Airtel, Yucash etc. Payout each other and receive payments from each other. so is defined as pesapay. #momoke

27 Jun Mwirigi Bobby RT @mbuguanjihia: The TumaSMS messaging API available here – http://bit.ly/ky0WVt #momoke @MobileMondayKE

27 Jun MobileMondayKE Mobile Monday-Kenya Pesa pay is open source and its crowd-sourced. #momoke

27 Jun Rosejackson3 Rose Jackson Study break for a little #momoke! #pesapay on now. Mobile aps in the #SiliconSavannah

27 Jun allay_ allan allay PesaPay on stage #momoke

27 Jun mbuguanjihia Mbugua Njihia @agostal unasikia hii pesa pay maneno? #momoke @MobileMondayKE @iddsalim

27 Jun iddsalim Idd Salim Mzungu Hmmmn.. AirtelMoney? #momoke

27 Jun Mwirigi Bobby RT @mbuguanjihia: #Moca will power #micropayments on @tuvitumobile #momoke

27 Jun mlabeastafrica m:lab EAST AFRICA Now hearing about PesaPay – www.pesapay.com #momoke

27 Jun LouiV Louis Openda Whive launch their SMS Gateway. #momoke

27 Jun mbuguanjihia Mbugua Njihia @robert_mwangi the strength lies in the aggregation of local content that aint available the android app market @tuvitumobile #momoke

27 Jun LouiV Louis Openda Their seems to be many substitute payment gateways. never heard of pesapay #momoke

27 Jun allay_ allan allay whive.com on stage #momoke

27 Jun savvykenya Savvy Kenya John Karanja of apps.whive.com next up #MobileMonday. What’s the tag again, #MoMoKe?

27 Jun MurayaKamau Muraya Kamau @mbuguanjihia on #tuvitu #momoke

27 Jun mbuguanjihia Mbugua Njihia just presented @tuvitumobile @ #momoke

27 Jun gmeltdown John Kieti Up next John of #Whive #Momoke

Whive launches apps.whive.com @Pivot25

King Bee — Sat, 18 Jun 2011 12:15:13 +0000

Whive wins @Pivot25 Photo by @mentalacrobatic

Whive.com launches apps.whive.com @Pivot25 on 14th June 2011. Pivot25 was the premier Mobile Apps competition for East Africa held at Ole Sereni Hotel in Nairobi on 14th/15th June 2011.

John Karanja Founder and C.E.O of Whive.com/Whive.mobi made our pitch and also took the opportunity to launch apps.whive.com at the event.

This platform allows Africans to download our J2ME SMS Application for Symbian40/60 and Send SMS for Free anywhere in Africa.

Whive also emerged as the winners in the Mobile Gaming, Entertainment and Utilities sector. The photo above shows the Whive team receiving the award from Nokia Lead Dorothy Ooko and iHub/Ushahidi Founder Erik Hersman.

The organization of the event was superb and the Whive team was impressed by the quality of the start-ups it was pitching against this year. This event showed that East Africa has Indeed come of age as an ICT hub in Africa.

You can also read more coverage on Pivot25 here:

We at Whive look forward to next years event and we will be back to showcase more innovation

Whive.com acquires SMS254.com

King Bee — Sun, 05 Jun 2011 12:44:30 +0000

Whive + SMS254 = Synergy

Social media aggregator Whive.com (@whive) has now acquired SMS254.com (@sms254) which according to Google page rank is the number one Bulk SMS provider for Kenya. Whive now supports bulk SMS services for individual, business and corporate use. SMS254.com will continue to be a gateway SMSC for Kenya but will not provide direct SMS services which will now be provided by Whive.

This means that:

Whive now has a capacity of at least 5 million SMS to all Kenyan Mobile Operator Networks per month.
SMS254.com clients now have access can now send single, group and bulk branded SMS on Web, Mobile, Facebook, Twitter and Smartphone platforms.