The Age of Streaming is Here

The age of streaming is here! In the second week of January, Netflix announced that it had gone, mostly, global. Here in Kenya, the internet, by which I mean Twitter, immediately went wild with people making jokes (Netflix and chill anyone?) and giving opinions on whether it’ll work or not. iAfrikan itself had a post […]

Equitel Increases Transfer Fees to M-Pesa by more than 100%!!!

So I recently came across this InfoTaKe. Users transferring money from Equity Bank’s Equitel Mobile Money platform have been hit by a more than 100% increase in the cost of transferring money from the platform to Safaricom’s M-Pesa. The new charges appear to have been implemented at the start of August, just as Equitel officially […]

Is Data Safaricom’s Future?

Once again, I’m back writing something about Safaricom. While most of the country, and the world, concentrates on M-PESA, I’d like to focus on something else, data. From the figures below, we not only see that data revenues have not only exploded, but according to my back of the envelope calculations, they are set to […]

Zuku vs. theBIGbox

Recently, there’s been a lot of talk about Safaricom’s 4G efforts. Well, not exactly their 4G efforts, but their set top box, ‘creatively’ called theBIGbox (in case it wasn’t clear, that’s sarcasm). In this post, I want to compare their offering to one of their competitors that always comes up every time anyone talks about […]

The Box is Coming

Safaricom is launching their digital set-top box this Friday, 8th May, dubbed ‘The Box’. When they first announced it I was ultra excited for what it might mean for the current media landscape in Kenya. But before I get into that let’s see what features ‘The Box’ will have: powered by Android, in addition to […]

M-PESA’s Homecoming

This weekend, Safaricom is moving their servers, which were in Germany, to Kenya. They’ve been harping this on their social channels as #mpesacomeshome. From their press release: Early last year, we announced plans to migrate the M-PESA platform to Kenya. We can now confirm that faster transactions, improved stability and added functionality on M-PESA is […]