Tag: africa mobile commerce

Mobile app development initiative by Intel will support African startups

| March 11, 2014

The massive corporation hopes to intensify its engagement within the continent.

Intel Corporation has recently revealed its intentions to enhance its African engagement by making strategic investments in local startup businesses in order to help to promote software and mobile app development within the region.

The growth of the internet economy in this continent has been considerable and is handing the company an opportunity.

According to the vice president and general manager, EMEA at Intel, Christian Morales, the primary reason behind Intel’s choice to plant its feet more deeply in the local mobile app development is the growth that the online economy is seeing there. He explained that the company is making highly strategic investments of its capital into startup businesses that have been growing their experience over the last three or four years and that now require a “world-wide footprint”.

Investments into these mobile app development businesses will be of a minority nature.

The goal is to allow the startups to have the capital that they require to expand, without actually taking them over. According to Morales, Intel is making this move because “we see the potential in local applications and software in Kenya and other countries in Africa.” This announcement was made alongside the company’s unveiling of its two new microprocessors.Mobile App Development - Africa

Those new microprocessors are a quad-core mobile Atom and a duo-core 64 it Atom. They have been launched with the promise to help to boost the experience for mobile users in terms of performance, speed, and energy consumption. Intel has placed high hopes in this tech in order to give it the power it needs for a more significant share of the mobile market space. The company, said Morales, was encouraged in this arena by the success of its Yolo smartphone, which was released in Nairobi in 2013.

Beyond its intention to invest in African startups, Intel has also shown interest in working with local mobile app development companies through its Developer Zone Program. That program provides local software and application developers with free support and tools by way of training to create their apps based on Intel’s own architecture.

Mobile marketing has massive potential in Africa

| June 24, 2013

M&C Saatchi Mobile has just released a whitepaper to present this concept in greater detail.

A white paper has just been presented by M&C Saatchi Mobile that detailed the tremendous promise that mobile marketing holds in Africa.

The report indicated that the smartphone channel is central to advertising in the continent.

The report showed that Africa is proving to be a very promising emerging region for mobile marketing, driven by affordable smartphones and strong economic growth. This report is only the first in a series that the company intends to release regarding various global regions and the part that smartphones play in the relevance of the advertising there. Many businesses and brands are now functioning under the impression that the best way to reach consumers in Africa is by way of this channel.

This whitepaper has also shown that mobile marketing will play a vital role in the continued development of the region.

Mobile marketing shows promise in AfricaIt illustrated the way the continent was able to leapfrog over the fixed line telecommunications stage that was traditionally used as a stepping stone upward toward the latest, which is the mobile marketing world of today. Africa has moved straight to the cellular services domain instead of stopping and waiting at telecommunications, first.

According to M&C Saatchi Mobile, the new primary means by way African consumers access the internet is over their smartphones. At the moment, there are 84 million internet enabled devices that are already owned and are being used. This makes the channel a very promising one for mobile marketing and reaching consumers very quickly and directly.

According to the company’s global CEO, James Hilton, “Contrary to popular thinking, Africa is not an under-developed region – it’s the second largest and fastest-growing mobile phone market in the world after China.” He went on to say in the statement that he gave about the mobile marketing report, that “The large numbers of African mobile consumers with web-connected smartphones using their device to surf the internet or download apps shows that the assumption that mobile services in Africa are only about SMS and low-end handsets is seriously out of date.”