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 on the matter authored by Arthur Mwai, and it also discussed the topic at length on African Tech Roundup the companion podcast to the site, and an awesome listen, which was hosted by Andile, Tefo and their guest Emeka Okoye.

Some time late last year, I’m going to say in November but I’m not certain, the Communications Authority of Kenya (CA) released 6 documents that would amend the Kenya Information and Communications Act, for public comment. You can find the notice for public comment and the drafts here. These documents were zero drafts, which means they are the first versions of these documents and are not yet even on the path to becoming laws as they are not even in parliament. The amendments would touch on the following issues:

Sometimes I write about my interpretation of the law, bills and policy documents that come from the government and various other stakeholders. I’m not a lawyer and I’ve never studied law but as a citizen of this country I’m allowed to comment on these things. It’s my constitutional right. Consider that the disclaimer.

[caption id=“attachment_307” align=“aligncenter” width=“718”] Image from http://www.michalsons.co.za[/caption]

One of the bills that I’m particularly excited to see passed is the Access to Information Bill(referred to henceforth as A2I which is so much cooler) which just went through it’s 2nd reading in parliament. This bill codifies our constitutional right to access of information found in Article 35 of the Kenyan Constitution. Which states:

Tech blogs in Kenya suck! It’s something I’ve said before in other platforms and fora. I knew it empirically but didn’t have the hard data to back me up. I do now.

Let’s get into why I’m the right person to be talking about this:

• I’ve been reading tech news on an almost daily basis for more than 8 years now
• I’ve been following the local tech scene almost as long.
• I have a degree in Computer Science.
• I’m a part of the ecosystem.
• I have the skills to do this analysis
• I’ve been thinking about this for a while now, almost a year

While it’s entirely possible to analyse more than one blog I decided to do only one as a sample. The blog I choose for this is Kachwanya because:

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 announced it’s transition from a pilot phase. No official communication on the new charges was relayed to Equitel users.

Some interesting news lately from the Business Daily:

Airtel Kenya is operating under the licence previously held by Essar, which it bought out last year, as its permit which expired in February is yet to be renewed.

The Communications Authority of Kenya (CA) yesterday said it was still considering “a number of issues” before renewing Airtel’s licence.

Why would Airtel not renew their license? I wonder what the CA means by issues? Perhaps they’re considering the imminent sale of Airtel Kenya to Tigo as posited by NairobiTech:

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 approach those of M-PESA by the year 2020, and combined, will dwarf voice revenue by almost 100%; that’s less than 5 years from now. 

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 Internet in Kenya, Zuku.

More often than not, when the two are compared, the better offering seems to be Zuku. But what everyone forgets in these comparisons is that Safaricom doesn’t have to compete with Zuku; at least not yet.

 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 being a television set top box, it’ll offer video on demand to also provide internet access to users through a 4G SIM and wireless hotspot capabilities and other services like gaming.

A lot of musicians in the the country have been complaining about their inability to make money from their art. The reason they give for this, well the one that comes out loudest, is piracy.

I have a different view from that but this is not the time for it.

Recently stakeholders from the music industry released the final version of the music policy document that they hope may become law or inform it in some way or form.