Capital Currents

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  • Payment is Not Consent: Privacy-Preserving Digital Marketing Is the Path Forward for Kenyan SMEs

    Recent enforcement actions by the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner (ODPC) against businesses sending unsolicited marketing messages have sparked animated debate across Kenya’s SME ecosystem.

    On one side are those who argue that the regulator is simply upholding the law. On the other, businesses argue they are being misunderstood, asserting that consent is implicitly granted during routine mobile money transactions.

    This tension is understandable. But it risks obscuring the more important reality: compliance is the gateway to a more sustainable, trusted, and effective digital marketing ecosystem.

    The Myth of Implicit Consent

    I agree with the regulator’s position that payment interactions do not constitute “express, unequivocal, free, specific and informed” consent. This is supported by how people actually behave.

    When a consumer is settling a bill, buying airtime, or completing a transaction, their cognitive focus is on the fulfillment, not future marketing engagement. Treating this moment as implicit permission for promotional messaging is wrong.

    Global privacy norms have drawn a clear boundary between the two, and Kenya is aligning with that direction. Importantly, this clarity benefits businesses. Ambiguous consent creates legal risk and customer resentment; clear standards create predictability.

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  • Rich Communication Services: Second Wind for Telecommunication Networks

    For decades, telcos were the unchallenged custodians of communication. SMS was their golden goose, universal, reliable, and wildly profitable. Then came the over-the-top (OTT) revolution: WhatsApp, Messenger, Telegram. Riding the same data rails telcos built, these apps ate the messaging pie whole, turning operators into mere connective tissue.

    Rich Communication Services (RCS) has re-emerged as the telco comeback strategy, a modern, media-rich evolution of SMS. It is the long-promised upgrade that lets users exchange images, videos, and even payments directly from their phone’s native messaging app.

    The Promise and Fragility of RCS

    Having onboarded and built two media use cases across news and entertainment, I can confidently say that RCS is the “killer channel.”

    Its ubiquity and seamless handshakes on the network side, with no installation required, make it uniquely powerful. Unfortunately, the revival has not been entirely organic.

    Recently, Google rolled back access to its directly provisioned RCS service, resulting in outages for subscribers across various markets. Interpreted as arm-twisting or not, the move has jolted the industry awake.

    RCS remains the foundation of Google’s vision for an open messaging ecosystem that can finally rival iMessage and WhatsApp.

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  • Public Key Infrastructure critical to pushing Intra-Africa trade

    Kenyans are a scared lot when it comes to government projects that portend to personal tracking and the sensitive issue of user privacy, fueled by the very public citizen lash back in America and Europe following  allegations of NSA snooping and project PRISM.

    I have on a number of occasions opined that the issue of privacy is overrated and any times misunderstood and taken out of context. At a recent workshop organized by the ICT Authority to update on the progress of the public key infrastructure project, consumer concerns on privacy came to the fore at the mention of the push toward one digital and unique identifier.

    PKI as simplified by Wikipedia is “a system for the creation, storage, and distribution of digital certificates which are used to verify that a particular public key belongs to a certain entity. The PKI creates digital certificates which map public keys to entities, securely stores these certificates in a central repository and revokes them if needed.”

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  • Drone tours anyone?

  • The change I want to see in Africa’s tech scene in 2014

    It has been a slow year in my minds eye of what would have happened in Africa’s technology scene. And instead taking the angle of what to watch out for on matters technology, I want to focus on the change that I would like to see across the ecosystem that is more inclined to the supporting issues that often get lost in the hype only to become apparent once the uptake of innovation does not go as expected. (more…)

  • Strengthen IP institutions across Africa for growth

    I have been digesting the Mo Ibrahim Governance Index and a host of other data-sets that look at Africa’s current position and I feel validated in many ways on my call for the support and reinforcement of intellectual property institutions across Africa. As Kenya and many other African nations gun for a knowledge based economy, the inherent economic value can only be fully and truly realized once we protect the intellectual property in what is a sharing economy.

    While we have runaway success by way of  multinational brands, Africa doesn’t have – in my opinion,  what we can boast of  as truly global brands. With a burgeoning  and very creative youthful population, the  key to growing entrepreneurs who will deploy the next innovative technologies and create jobs at an international scale is to give our institutions both a bark and a bite. The global village equals global competition, which means it is not only the guy next door who could  monetize entire concepts or “borrow” certain elements but a whole army of international idea trolls, scouting for the next big orphaned idea. (more…)

  • Sun Tzu, The Art of War

    “Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.”

  • Technology as part of any product or service mix

    Conversations with many business managers and individual entrepreneurs cut from varied sectors reveals that the perception on the value of technology remains low, owing to the fact that its delivery is often times intangible. As many businesses conclude work on strategies for the coming year, it is important to highlight and take cognizance of the fact that technology must form part of any product or service mix if but for the following reasons. (more…)

  • Government — investor, risk-taker, innovator

     

    Why doesn’t the government just get out of the way and let the private sector — the “real revolutionaries” — innovate? It’s rhetoric you hear everywhere, and Mariana Mazzucato wants to dispel it. In an energetic talk, she shows how the state — which many see as a slow, hunkering behemoth — is really one of our most exciting risk-takers and market-shapers.

  • Silicon Savannah ecosystem maturity on the horizon

    It has been an eventful six months in the Silicon Savannah, with many initiatives that show clearly we are on the right track toward ecosystem maturity, having learnt slowly but surely what  is our unique blend , as opposed to outright copy pasting of models from other regions. Establishing the Silicon Savannah, can be viewed through startup stained glass, with time to product taking longer than scheduled, capital requirements far exceeding estimates, matters talent and culture throwing us off  balance and a real threat of getting stuck in a perpetual hype cycle which would in the long term lead implode. (more…)