Innovation@Skunkworks

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Innovation@Skunkworks

By kayliz ⋅ October 4, 2008 ⋅ Post a comment

So I had some free time and attended the innovation@skunkworks event held today at the Panafric hotel in Nairobi. I have heard a lot of good things about Skunkworks Kenya so I went in with massive expectations. I was not disappointed in any way.

Folks, I am proud to be Kenyan. The event was exhibition-style and a good number of 100% Kenyan startups as well as more established companies had the opportunity to strut their stuff. And strut they did. You should have been there, friend.

Just to show you the kind of quality on show, have a look at my favorite startup, Zunguka. “Zunguka is the web and mobile portal of choice for East Africa. We aim to revolutionize the way you work and lead your day-to-day activities. Zunguka is aimed at enhancing your social and professional lives by enabling you discover new ways to improve your efficiency and interaction. All the 6 Zunguka Products are aimed and enhancing a certain aspect of your modern life.”

Check them out. I particularly like their product, TumaSMS. “Je unafanya nini? Natuma SMS” Basically, through tumasms you can send sms at Ksh 1.50 to any network. Nice, huh? Unfortunately, you have to be on a computer to use it but once their develop a mobile version of this product, the sms game changes. They shall be in direct competition with Safaricom, Zain, Orange etc. What would I do? In Paul Graham’s famous words on How to start a Startup,”never to let anyone fly under them, meaning never to let any other company offer a cheaper, easier solution” Why not make the SMS 100% free? Free is the new pink!

The Kenya ICT board was also in attendance and made some impressive promises:

There shall be a CEO - Skunkworks forum in the next 6 months where developers will pitch their products to people who can more easily do something with them. Today, the audience was mostly developers and tech nuts so it would be nice to have an audience that can more readily buy the applications being exhibited.

Co-operation. Instead of working alone, why not work together? The reasoning is simple. We definitely have some truly gifted developers each working independently for the most part. What if they teamed up and made one absolutely killer app? To this end, the ICT Board is offering Ksh 100,000 as an incentive for developer cooperation.

A very poignant point made revolved around intellectual property. it’s not clear to me how strong our local Intellectual property Laws are but judging from the event today, they have to b strengthened. The ICT board spoke at length on this, and hopefully something will be done.

WhiteAfrican has a nicer review of innovation@skunkworks where he looks at more Kenyan startups.

What do you think of this innovation@skunkworks event?

Discussion

3 comments for “Innovation@Skunkworks”

I was at panafric saw some of the presentations ..i think it was a good idea to have this demo.
great idea ..about having a developers join together to form a group - brilliant idea.
I am a multimedia developer tell me how i can get to meet you and get something going

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Posted by andrew mwaura | October 6, 2008, 12:04 pm
Andrew, do you care to share your experience at this event?

Go here if you do: http://kikulacho.com/submit-an-article/

Kikulacho is a platform for Open Publishing. That means anyone can contribute and it’ll be published. That means that you may get some exposure if you put some of your work here.

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Posted by mosh | October 6, 2008, 3:23 pm
Andrew, I missed a good part of this event. What was the coolest exhibition?

I didn’t know that we had such a vibrant developer’s community before Saturday. So I agree that the demo was a super idea.

Well, to be honest, I am not a developer - just a geek. Maybe you can do as mosh says?

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Posted by Kayliz | October 6, 2008, 3:30 pm