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.

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.

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 [...]

Vodafone launched its Blackberry services a few weeks ago, targetted at individuals, small businesses and large enterprises in Ghana. The telco announced BlackBerry service packages that were different from that of its main competitors – MTN and Zain. Currently, both MTN and Zain offer very similar BlackBerry services. They both offer a flat monthly fee. [...]

I picked-up an MTN Nigeria mobile broadband kit recently and have used it heavily, since then. Find below my review of the service. The entire kit cost N18,650: HSDPA USB stick: N8,500 MTN SIM: N150 Airtime: N10,000 (24/7 monthly plan) The MTN agent asked for an ID and passport photo. As I had no prior [...]

With over 7.4 million subscribers as of September 2009, MTN is easily Ghana’s leading telecommunications network, offering mobile telephony services, Internet connectivity and more. I recently picked up an MTN “Exclusive 3G Pack” for 100 Ghana Cedis (about $69) and have used it extensively for about 14 days mainly in Accra. The information below is [...]

MTN Ghana is annoying a lot of their subscribers with the persistent text messages from 2010, yours truly included. All a subscriber has to do is text “Go” to the number 2010 and he/she is then burdened with the misfortune of being bombarded with text messages morning, afternoon and evening entreating him/her to keep texting [...]

Each time I had a tough time travelling within Nigeria, I always wished there was an electronic Nigerian travel information service that met the needs of the business traveller. A service that offered flight, hotel, car rental information via SMS, mobile web or a full-fledged website. Though there are several websites that offer air travel [...]

The Internet is a very powerful medium of communication. IP protocol (the backbone technology of the Internet) allows just about any data to be encoded and transmitted from node to the other. Riding on this power and ubiquity, many means of communication in today’s world are now increasingly relying on the Internet. Projections are that [...]

The shrieking SMS ringtone from a phone woke me up at 12:39am. I could not sleep thereafter. After tossing from one end of the bed to the other for another 10 minutes and still being awake, I resorted to doing the only thing natural for a geek like me; powering my laptop computer to get [...]

The jury is out on who is the media leader in our contemporary world. On one side of the divide is the mainstream media, represented by CNN a leading international TV broadcaster and on the other side is social media, represented by Ashton Kutcher an American actor and former fashion model. I first got wind [...]

I am saying Short Messaging Service (SMS) via cellular networks has become mainstream in Ghana, because corporate and government institutions are now embracing it as an effective medium of communicating to the populace. Before now, I have been receiving text messages from time to time, from my bank (UBA Ghana), and other few companies. I [...]

There is no denying the fact that the Western world is far ahead with technology, nonetheless, web technologies. So many web tools/applications are out there that are irrelevant to African countries. Services like Paypal, Ebay, Yahoo! Music Unlimited, Free SMS websites, readily comes to mind. It is important therefore that Africans can themselves build such [...]

Skype has released an updated version of its popular Skype software, for PCs running Windows XP. The new version (still in beta), features more value added services and allows subscribers to send SMS, globally, at a fee. Calling phone lines has also been made easier since country codes are now built into the software and [...]