I noticed multitudes of GOtv Africa banners and balloons in the ancient city of Ibadan Nigeria in the last quarter of 2011. The similarity with the name/logo of DStv was clear. Promotional drives were ongoing at different vantage points in Ibadan. GOtv is a new digital terrestrial TV (DTT) service by Multichoice Africa, operators of [...]

Too many people in Africa happen to fall within the low-income bracket. Thus, one would expect budget airlines to be commonplace on this continent, catering for the masses. This is not so. Budget airlines are rather common in high-income countries of Western Europe, North America, India and many Asian countries. The relatively few airlines that [...]

Jerry Rawlings, the African Union envoy to Somalia, makes a plea to international governments to put aside their prejudices and help the horn of Africa.

Mobile Number Portability (MNP) launched in Ghana on 7th July 2011, enabling mobile subscribers to move from one mobile network to another, whilst still retaining their full mobile number. It has generated some buzz in the Ghana’s mobile communications sector with all the mobile providers offering mouth-watering incentives to woo subscribers from other networks whilst [...]

I got the following message from a reader of this blog: Good day Mr. Ajao. I am a post graduate student at the university of Northampton, United kingdom, studying MA International Marketing Strategy. I am really proud as I see a Nigerian like you writing good articles on current issues on the internet. I have [...]

Esoko is an agricultural market information platform. It takes advantage of the explosive growth of mobile communication services in Africa. Managed on the web and delivered via mobile, individuals, agri-business, government and projects use Esoko to collect and send out market data using simple text messaging.

Following the launch of Mobile Number Portability (MNP) in Ghana on 7th July 2011, the mobile networks all launched campaigns geared towards enticing mobile subscribers to port to their network. Newspaper ads, radio jingles and TV ads have taken the lead but since the internet is slowing going mainstream in Ghana, the leading mobile networks [...]

Infinity TV, a direct-to-home satellite TV service on Astra 2B has gone premium. Most of the channels they offer which have hitherto been free since early 2010 are now encrypted. This is not much of a surprise since Infinity TV had always set-out to be a premium service.

Esoko was founded in 2005 as TradeNet by Mark Davies, who also founded BusyInternet years ago. TradeNet was rebranded as Esoko in April 2009 and its investors are: Jim Forster, the International Finance Corporation, and the Soros Economic Development Fund.

It appears MTN failed to sufficiently communicate the new packages to its mobile broadband subscribers, early enough. Users have lost their airtime because they simply loaded airtime and continued browsing as usual, without actually subscribing to any data packages. Thus they were billed at the very high tariffs that MTN now charges outside the packages.

I was invited to cover the Tech Showcase of Esoko’s 3rd Annual Partner Conference. The Tech Showcase was a segment of the larger partners’ gathering. Esoko Partners are their international clients who have paid to use Esoko software in their respective countries. I was able to gather information that I would be sharing in the [...]

In case you missed the memo, Africa is rising. Having been largely ignored in the development of the Internet, things have been changing rapidly in the past decade with telecommunication companies forming alliances with financial institutions to bring serious data connectivity into Africa, and with it, lots of potential for prosperity. You can thus understand [...]

I granted the following video interview to ICTWorks.org in January 2011, and spoke about ICT for development, mobile communications, e-commerce, web hosting in Africa. Enjoy.

DStv is offering a major boost to residents of Ghana, Nigeria, Tanzania and Kenya who might be interested in their DStv Mobile service. Before now, the DStv Mobile had been restricted to a few mobile phones – these phones have in-built circuitry that enable them to receive and decode DVB-H signals. DStv is now offering [...]

I was a bit amused by a bold promise from MTN Ghana’s Facebook update recently: Dear All Thank you for your commendations .We are working hard to even give you much more better coverage for both voice and data services Indeed, MTN’s USD 90 million West African Cable System (WACS), the biggest in Africa, has [...]