This evening was the the fifth meeting of the MobileMonday Kenya Chapter at the iHub. Below is a summary of the presentations made:

Jacaranda Health’s mobile maternal health solutions.

Jane of Jacaranda Health (JH) spoke about how they are using mobile technology to provide low cost and high quality maternal healthcare in Kenya. JH is targetting 4 million urban poor in East Africa with their offerings. Theirs is innovate maternal and neonatal healthcare for low income earners. JH is currently focussed on peri-urban Nairobi areas such as Umoja, Kasarani, etc. JH’s strategy is to use clinical innovation, systems innovation, and business innovation.

The JH Information System consists of EHR/EMR, mobile applications, forms, education/alerts and banking. It uses existing mobile technologies to deliver services such as SMS-based patient outreach, electronic medical/health records, data collection and mobile payments/banking as well as pre-payment cards. The focus of JH on android devices via tablets, netbooks or smartphones. More details can be found on their web site at www.jacarandahealth.org.

iChecki android app from the Xrystalgenius Team.

The team from Xrystalgenius who recent graduated from Starthmore University presented their “iChecki” matatu tracking android application. These students we’re impressive and had attended MIT’s AITI programme and also won US$ 3,000.00 in a Google sponsored competition. The idea behind iChecki is that there are over 45,000 matatus in Kenya and a 1/3 of of these are in Nairobi. However, no matatu schedules exist and as such passengers have to guess when they can expect transport to come their way.

The team from iChecki identified that Safaricom’s high speed 3G network is a key driver for mobile services, and high-end mobile phones are getting cheaper by the day. Since the Kenyan mobile market is varie, iChecki has been designed to serve high-end android mobiles, mid-level mobiles through mobile web and low-end mobiles using USSD/SMS. Therefore, iChecki is also multi-platform making it accessible to all.

In addition, since Safaricom has 16+ million mobile users, they hope to achieve 10% penetration within 3 years. iChecki integrates Google Maps, GPS and mobile telephony to power its functionalities. Users send requests which iChecki then processes using using GPS, LAI (Location Area Identity) and smart predictive algorithms. A reply is then send to give the approximate time that a designated matatu will arrive.

The goals are that year one will be to get people to use it (critical mass). Year two will be about familiarization and maturity. Year three will be for iCheck to become profitable. The plan is for iChecki to generate revenues from advertising, equipment sales and ultimately service charges. In the future, iChecki will use GSM to track, bus bookings, personal tracking solutions, and services for courier companies so that their customers can track their packages are.

Pay.Zunguka from Symbiotic Media.

Mbugua of Symbiotic Media talked about Pay.Zunguka, a micro-payments mobile platform. Pay.Zunguka is targeting markets that require micro-payments such as music downloads for instance. Its about also going to the bottom of the pyramid. The solution works by integrating with mobile networks. Case in point for micro-payments for instance in selling bite-sized news content instead of a full newspaper.

A concern of Mbugua’s is that mobile network operators take over 50% of revenue if content is billed for through them. Pay.Zunguka aims to fill a gap in this respect by leaving most of the revenues with the content producer. This could be hyper-local content that is contextually relevant for users and buyers, giving them a strong incentive to pay for it. Another opportunity is giving users the ability to pay for social gaming on social networks, without having to use a credit card.  Pay.Zunguka is also being tested for bank transactions as well as point of sale (POS) integration.

The Safaricom Innovation Forum.

Al Kags spoke about the Safaricom Innovation Board. More information on this initiative here>

GKenya from Google.

Chris Kiagiri, Technical Lead of of Google Kenya announced GKenya at Mobile Monday Kenya. More details on this event here>

Facebook Photo Album from the Meeting.

You can view photos from the 5th MobileMonday Kenya meeting here>

Next MobileMonday Kenya Meeting.

The next MobileMonday is the 13th of September 2010.