Author: Hubtel

Kokomlemle, Accra — One of Africa’s leading mobile and internet value-added service (VAS) providers, Ghana’s SMSGH is preparing to outdoor even more applications as it moves into its newly-built US$1.25 million state-of-the-art offices by the end of October 2014.

This fast-growing indigenous start-up has for nine years run on the back of its three major platforms; MYtxtBOX, Jumpfon, and MPower Payments which have grown its customers to over 25 million across four African countries – Ghana, Nigeria, Cameroon, and Kenya – with millions of mobile VAS transaction volumes on a daily basis.

The ever-growing company achieved all this by working from a relatively small space at Kokomlemle, where its offices sit about 40 employees comprising engineers/developers, platform managers, business solution experts, call center executives, and country operation directors among other staff categories.

General Manager of the company, Alex Adjei Bram reveals: “We will move into our new offices by the end of October. It’s an exciting time for the company, and even more, having this coincide with the launch of our Unity Aggregation Platform. This will mark the beginning of something entirely different in our space as it is a global first. This platform will host a plethora of innovative mobile and online-based applications to serve our teaming clients across Africa and elsewhere.”

The new SMSGH three-story building is nicely segmented into various areas, and a tour of the interior showed a bigger sales area, platform monitoring center, app development area, call center, an administrative area, a boardroom, and an anti-boardroom (a more relaxed and casual area for meetings and discussions).

Alex Adjei Bram said when the company moves into its new state-of-the-art offices, located on the same premises as the old one, “there is going to be a flood of applications and services that we will release into the market to further deepen Ghana’s position as a leading VAS community in Africa.”

SMSGH is close to finishing about 10 new tailor-made applications for specific corporate clients for promotions and other services those organizations are about to run in the country soon.

Alex Adjei Bram said “The team here at SMSGH is a very entrepreneurial one, so we measure our success by the result we give our customers. I would not say business has not been good but the financial reward is not our yardstick at SMSGH – to the extent that our customers are getting results or value, and our products are helping businesses to grow we can say we are successful.”

Regulator

He believes the regulatory environment in Ghana has been pretty responsive to the industry but things could be better if the regulations properly encompass every aspect of the VAS space with an orientation towards helping the main players, who are mainly young but skillful Ghanaian entrepreneurs, to grow.

Particularly in the area of stemming abuse of VAS services, Bram said the regulator has been largely responsive and some industry players now need to sanitize their operations to meet regulatory standards.

But he still believes “the regulator has some catching up to do with the VAS industry – we need a regulator that is not too speculative or restrictive because that could also stifle innovation,” he said.

He said “at SMSGH we have effective systems of preventing and checking abuse on our applications and have also signed on to the Code of Ethics of WASPAG (Wireless Application Service Providers Association of Ghana) for the purposes of ensuring sanity in our industry,” he said.

The government has announced that soon it would issue a license for a one-stop-shop clearinghouse for the telecom and VAS industry, and Bram thinks the clearing house is a great idea because “it will bring organization, sanity, and a fair playing field into the entire telecom industry and potentially help the local VAS space to grow.”

Source: myjoyonline.com/

Movenpick Ambassador Hotel, Accra, Ghana — There’s no better measure of a company’s effectiveness than major external recognition – by its appreciative customers, peers, business publishers, and by professional organizations whose job it is to judge quality. The long list of awards and accolades won by SMSGH proves that the company has never wavered from its commitment to excellence on all fronts: from technology to customer service to operational excellence and innovation.

In what is becoming a norm lately, MPower Payments, the country’s premier online payment solution, has earned SMSGH a prestigious industry award – “Mobile App of the Year” at the Ghana Telecom Awards 2014 held on Saturday, 31st May 2013 at the Mövenpick Ambassador Hotel in Accra.

The awards, organized by MobileWorld, and adjudicated by an independent panel of leading technology and communication industry experts honored several industry brand leaders in various areas of activity: products and services, communication, and innovation, among others. The night also provided an exceptional opportunity for stakeholders to network and reinforce relationships.

The General Manager of SMSGH, Alex Adjei Bram could not hide his excitement. “We are delighted with this award, as it’s a tremendous seal of approval from our like-minded business friends – whether partners or competitors – for all the hard work that went into creating the MPower brand. The development and launch of MPower a year ago was an important milestone for SMSGH and will continue to play a key role in our growth strategy. We mean business.”

Picking up the Mobile App of the Year award did not come as a surprise to many as in the year under review, MPower Payments for eleven consecutive months met all key internal and external KPIs.

MPower Payments currently has some 20,000 users as of May 2014, a little over 400 registered merchants, and transaction volumes to the tune of GHC380,000 a month.

In a related development that seeks to keep up with the company’s commitment to excellence, MPower has been given the feel of an identity refresh with its latest feature which allows an MPower account holder to convert Ghana Cedis into Bitcoins – an electronic currency that is accepted globally – and buy anything online from Amazon.com or 1,000s of other websites.

Nairobi, Kenya — Ghana’s multiple-award-winning mobile value-added service (VAS) provider, SMSGH has been granted a Telecoms VAS license in Kenya.

The license was granted by the Kenyan telecoms industry regulator, the Communication Commission of Kenya (CCK), and it allows SMSGH to provide its full range of mobile VAS and online payment services in that country.

The company has so far set up an office in Kenya and hired local talents who are already serving some SMSGH corporate clients in Ghana who also have operations in Kenya. It has also attracted a few individual clients in that country already.

Kenya is one of the most developed telecoms markets in Africa with four telecom operators commanding over 30 million subscribers representing almost 80% mobile penetration. Kenya is the world’s leading mobile money market and it has thousands of VAS providers, which present huge competition for any new entrant.

But General Manager of SMSGH Alex Adjei-Bram told ADOMBUSINESS said they are fully aware the Kenyan market is highly competitive but “we are not in the least scared because even though there are thousands of VAS providers, practically none of them combines a range of services to provide a one-stop-shop experience for customer like SMSGH does.”

He said the license allows SMSGH to “provide the entire array of our messaging services and the premium services as well. They include premium content, shortcodes, and bulk SMS. It also gives us access to be able to gain connectivity to other channels like USSD, voice, and indeed the legal backing to provide any of our services in Kenya.”

“We know that we will be the only company in Kenya that does mobile and web technology with a 360 approach. We are in mobile payments, we provide content services, we are in business solutions and we provide messaging solutions. I don’t think there is any company in Kenya right now that has all these solutions that we have,” he said confidently.

Bram explained that most of the VAS providers in Kenya specialize in one service or the other but SMSGH is going in as a player that provides synergies in the various VAS spaces so anyone who goes to SMSGH would get bulk messaging, shortcodes, entertainment, mobile payment and even customized corporate/business solutions where necessary.

“We are primarily going into Kenya to learn and grow because Kenya is fast becoming the telecoms hub in Africa – but what we also find is that even though there are lots of VAS players there is little innovation in terms of breaking out of the box to provide a combination of services under one roof – so we are motivated by that as well,” he said.

In Kenya, SMSGH would be providing services through its leading and all-new MyTXTBox bulk messaging platform, which recorded a 53% increase in traffic after a recent update and now seeing traffic from Nigeria, Kenya, and from out the African continent.

It is also going with its Jamfon, on which users are able to download/purchase entertainment content like songs (ring tones), wallpapers, funny videos, SMS alerts (bibles, dating, etc), and others. Jamfon currently has over five million customers and is recording over 100 million transactions every month. It has the biggest subscriber base at SMSGH.

The company would also be providing service on its award-winning online payment platform – MPower, which is currently gaining huge traction around the world because of its high level of fraud detection. MPower currently boasts of over 20,000 accounts and processes over GHC2 million worth of transactions every month.

With SMSGH in the Kenyan market, corporate Kenya also stands to benefit from customized messaging services to give their customers a better experience.

Alex Adjei-Bram said the company also has operations in Cameroun and has recently started in Nigeria as well, adding that the plan is to operate from the strategic markets on the continent and reach other parts of the continent from there.

Localized Location Services

Bram said this year the company would focus on location-based services (LBS), where customers can find traffic information when they need it, share their location with others, and locate their friends without having to go through traditional platforms like GPRS and GPS.

He explained that the system will use the local resources of mobile networks outside of 3G system, saying that LBS uses cell site information to track things and people. It would help people to know what is happening at home while they are in the office just via the use of a modem. It will help to track relations, cars, and other things outside GPRS and therefore not expose one’s information to a third party.

The company is currently working with some consultants and partners from South Africa to develop the location-based service.

“LBS is not as developed as GPRS but it works wherever there is network coverage and so it works fine at a lesser rate,” he said.

SMSGH is currently one of Ghana’s leading Mobile VAS providers, working on the platforms of almost all the telcos in Ghana to provide bulk messaging, business solutions, content, and payment solutions to banks, insurance companies, events organizers, shops, restaurants, media houses and individuals both here and abroad.

Source: myjoyonline.com/

Kokomlemle, Accra, Ghana — SMSGH, the makers of the globally recognized bulk SMS platform, MYtxtBOX, have added new features to the platform that makes it the first in the world to allow users to send pictures, videos, voice/music in addition to text messages.

Hitherto, SMS, both in the form of single or bulk messages was only limited to text, but the all new MYtxtBOX redefine SMS and now allows all the multimedia content on the SMS platform, and they could also be sent to multiple recipients at the same time from either the phone, tablet or PC.

This is an improved version of MMS with an opportunity for interactivity, and it places the SMS platform in the class of web messaging platforms like Viber, Whatsapp, Facebook, Twitter and the others.

MYtxtBOX also allows users to create and assign a #Hashtag to ones contact group and allow recipients of bulk messages to easily reply to messages, and also allows new people to easily join the contact group by send a message to the #Hashtag.

“Your own #Hashtag works on short code 1942,” said General Manager of SMSGH, Alex Adjei Bram.

MYtxtBOX, which is available for free registration at www.mytxtbox.com, also allows users to create and choose from as many sender IDs as one wants, and gives the user the option of up to five messaging tools to upload and send messages to millions of people just by one click of a button.

The platform also allows users to monitor the length of the messages they type and thereby able to create a template for subsequent bulk messages in the future, and it also allows real-time tracking of airtime consumption in the form of analytical reports in the user’s account.

Alex Adjei Bram said the all-new MYtxtBOX also offers more than 10 ways to top up credit, including the use of mobile money, Visa Card, Master Card, ATM card, online payment, and others, and also offers great discounts as the people in the group receiving the bulk SMS increases, or depending on the bundle one purchases.

“No other messaging service offers more volume and or recurrent discounts than MytxtBox,” he said. “You register for free and pay only 3Gp per every message delivered but as the number of recipients increases the rate reduces to as low as 1.5Gp per delivery. No contracts and no service charges for the tool on MYtxtBOX. ”

Bram noted that the old MYtxtBox had 36,000 customers from across Ghana and other parts of the world, and it aggregated at least 25million text messages every month, adding that since the new features were added, more people have signed on both here and abroad and it is expected that users would hit 50,000 plus by the close of the year, which is a few days away.

He observed that the main users of MYtxtBOX have been small businesses, schools, churches, clubs, associations, societies, and other such groups that require the same communication to a lot of members/customers at the same time.

The GM SMSGH is confident MYtxtBOX would give value, particularly to small businesses like restaurants, clothing designers/artisans, and others who need to reach several customers at the same time and inform them about new stuff available.

“It is also great for big businesses like banks who need to broadcast available promotions, new services, new offers, and other vital information to several customers at the same time,” he said.

“We have been doing bulk SMS for the past eight years. We have mastered the game and we believe this is a game changer because it redefines bulk SMS and where it is expected to go in the future,” Bram said.

He is also glad that the all-new MYtxtBOX is positioned to drive interactivity between all levels of businesses (large, medium, and small) with their customers at a very affordable rate.

Bram assured potential users that MYtxtBOX is designed to send messages to only subscribers, and not to broadcast unwanted messages to persons without their express permission through signing on to a particular bulk SMS group through the #Hashtag of that group.

The new MYtxtBOX platform also offers improved support services when the user adds a Support Ticket from his/her account.

Source: Myjoyonline.com

iSpace, Osu, Accra, Ghana – SMSGH and Dev: Congress teamed up for Ghana’s first ever eCommerce Hackathon. The event dubbed the Dev:Congress MPower API Hackathon 2013 was hosted at the iSpace, Osu in Accra.

The winning entry was “Fundr-Africa” a crowdsourcing platform where individuals can create campaigns to generate funds to help with social problems in Africa. It was developed by Osborn Kwarteng, Bright Ahedor, and Kingston Tagoe, and out of the other applications presented, it was judged to have the highest levels of creativity, technical difficulty, polish, usefulness, and overall complete utilization of the MPower API.
The DevCongress team worked out the modality of the event and managed to convince SMSGH, the brain behind MPower, to provide sponsorships. The event brought over 50 developers and web enthusiasts together to take part in collaborative computer programming. As a result, the 60-second presentation time limit was pretty strictly enforced, but teams still had plenty of chance to wow the judges and the audience.
“It’s a value exercise. It allows you to quickly think about a lot of different things,” Yaw Boakye, co-founder of Dev: Congress said of the event. “It’s an opportunity to try something you might not otherwise.”

Hackers were restricted to utilizing first the MPower API plus other SMSGH APIs to work on an application of their choosing. C.T.O of SMSGH, Kwadwo Seinti suggested in advance that some consider creating an application that “benefits the society in some way”.

Fueled by soothing music and fortified by a range of nourishment and cocktails, the young hackers worked for 10 consecutive hours on their applications. The majority of applications hacked at the event revolved around Fund Raising. This goes a long way to emphasize the difficulty and need to apply technology and commerce in the generation of funds for groups and the advancement of socially relevant causes.

The 1st and 2nd runner-ups took home GHs1,000 and GHs500 respectively. Prizes were issued instantly into the winning teams’ MPower account which was projected for all to see. Hackers who were unable to complete their apps were given the chance to do so within 14 days. The first team to present its final app wins GHs500.

The Judges for the event were, Kwadwo Seinti (C.T.O of SMSGH), Alfred Rowe (nCodeDevLab), and Reginald Royston from Berkeley University (Researcher)
The Hackathon also attracted professionals in the banking sector. Attendees found the topics of the event applicable to many different fields. “MPower Payments API is the single most complete API for dealing with Telecos in Ghana and electronic money business”. These were the words of a merchant who has successfully implemented the API for processing payments online.

The event was crowned with a charged party atmosphere with great music from DJ Loft and cocktail engineering by Desny’s Cocktail Engineering.

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DevCongress is a budding developers movement aimed at becoming the most vibrant across the software developers space in Ghana and Africa.

SMSGH remains Ghana’s leading mobile value-added-services company with services and applications in use by more than 7 million mobile subscribers. The company aims at blending communication, content, and commerce to create Africa’s most useful technology aggregation company. Its flagship solutions include MPower, MYtxtBOX, and Jumpfon.

Ghana’s technology and software industry is relatively a younger one and with this comes many challenges for those who are in these fields. Countries like Kenya, South Africa, and Nigeria have received some level of international recognition for their software industries. In some of these countries, they have had huge multinational companies buy out some of their budding startups.

In Ghana, the software industry is growing and already is seeing some promising startups that may soon become multinational. In this article, I take a look at five of such startups that are ready to be skyrocketed.

1. RetailTower

RetailTower is an e-commerce marketing solution. RetailTower enables merchants to create campaigns on price comparison engines.

They seamlessly integrate between e-commerce platforms and comparison shopping engines. With a few clicks, merchants can export their inventory product descriptions, images, and prices from e-commerce platforms such as Shopify, Magento, and osCommerce to publish their products on shopping websites.

RetailTower has over 11,000 online retailers who are all outside of Ghana an indication of their potential in terms of growth and expansion.

The company was adjudged the Utility APP of the Year 2013 at TopAppAwards, Ghana.

2. Dropifi

Dropifi is a smart contact widget that helps small businesses better analyze, visualize, and respond to incoming messages. They promise to help small businesses offer better customer support, capture leads and drive sales through the roof.

Dropifi has over 8000 small businesses as customers all over the world which include TKC Apparel, Colombia International, and ALMA Soul among others.

With the nature of their business and customers, it is expected that they will soon have offices in some countries in Europe and the US to address their growing customer base.

Dropifi has been featured on many international platforms including Forbes, the Huffington Post, and TechCrunch, and was recently selected as the first and only African startup to be among the 500 Startups.

3. Leti Arts

Leti Arts is a startup that is focused on Africa’s superheroes. Leti Arts is bringing Africa’s rich folklore to life through the media of comics and mobile gaming.

This tech company is set to launch The Epic of Ananse, an exciting new comic book series, and mobile game that reimagines the ancient fable of the African trickster god.

With their target market and intentions of running TV series around these superheroes, they might soon expand into other African countries. Already, they have offices in Ghana and Kenya.

Leti Arts has been featured on the BBC World Service, and Polygon, and were recently selected as World Summit Award (WSA) Nominee. They were winners of the Entertainment APP and APP Developer category of the TopAPPSaward 2013, Ghana.

4. mPawa

mPawa is a job-matching service developed by Innokiq. mPawa supports the posting of jobs and the onward notification to blue-collar workers in Africa.

They wish to bridge the gap that exists in the current blue-collar recruitment space; that is getting blue-collar workers into a centralized location and allowing employers to easily reach them.

Their focus on the African continent and the successes in the countries they are already in indicates a possible expansion into other African zones.

mPawa has offices in Ghana and Kenya.

5. SMSGH

SMSGH is a Ghanaian tech company that provides bulk SMS, corporate SMS solutions, mobility, and web solutions among others.

Their story of three young graduates coming together to build Ghana’s first non-telco internet SMS messaging gateway and software is an inspiring one.

They have not only succeeded in building an idea into just a company but a company that sees millions of cedis as yearly revenue. Their turnover is expected to reach GHC10 million in 2013.

SMSGH processes about 10.8 messaging requests every second and over 28 million business-critical & subscriber messages monthly with more than 7 million mobile subscribers relying on them to inform, alert, notify, transact, interact, monetize, and share mobile data.

Their vision of becoming an international brand for business messaging is on course and we might soon see them expand into other African countries.

They were adjudged the APP company of the year 2013 at the Topappawards. One of their products, Mpower Payments was also adjudged the most innovative new app 2013, finance app 2013, top user experience app and was the overall winner, the top app of the year 2013 at the same TopAppAwards, Ghana.

Source: opinionghana.com

MPower Payments, a Ghana-made simple and seamless online payment app, won five awards including Top App of the Year at the second TopApps Awards this year.

The comprehensive online payment platform, MPower Payments, developed by SMSGH won Web App of the Year, Most Innovative New App of the Year, Top User Experience App of the Year, and Finance App of the Year. Plus the makers of MPower, SMSGH were also adjudged App Company of the Year.

Currently, MPower Payments integrates all cedi-based electronic payment systems including Mobile Money and ATM cards, and links them to both online and offline merchants in a way that enables users to make payments for goods and services online without exposing their details to cyber criminals.

It is very high on security with a green bar SSL, verified by US-based DigiCert on the advice of Dun and Bradstreet. It means in the rarest circumstance where a user’s details are compromised, DigiCert provides insurance cover for the user so it will bear the liabilities.

MPower Payments, which went live online about a year ago, attracted some 4,000 users by July 2013, recording transactions to the tune of GHC120,000 a month.

But currently, two months on, it now has over 15,000 registered accounts, recording more than 10,000 active users doing transactions of up to a million Ghana cedis.

As of July, it had a little over 400 registered merchants, but according to Senior Product Manager, George Mensah “we now have more merchants and many more and bigger merchants are coming onboard to ensure by the second transactions.”

The platform allows users to safely move money even from bank accounts and Mobile Money accounts to their MPower account for online transactions and vis-a-versa.

George Mensah believes the decoration of MPower Payments at this TopApps Awards would drive innovation, relevance, and commercialization in the app/software development industry.

“This goes to show that when you are developing an app you should think beyond the nice features of the app and think about how it can make life easier for people and how you can monetize it,” he said.

MPower Payments is currently a strictly cedi-based platform and active in only Ghana but SMSGH plans to take it to the rest of Africa by the third quarter of next year (Q3-14).

General Manager of SMSGH, Alex Adjei-Bram said the company’s emergence as App Company of the Year was also apt because they have developed several relevant apps like the JumpFon, which provides users with a bevy of mobile entertainment content on short code *714#.

It also has a bulk SMS app called MYtxtBox, and several other SMS aggregation apps for banks, insurance companies, media houses, political parties, and several organizations and individuals across Ghana and parts of Africa.

Meanwhile, at the TopApp Awards, organized by PopOut, eleven other apps, and one individual won competitive and honorary Awards.

The other Award winners include Mobile App of the Year – Nkyea Twi Phrasebook; SMS App of the Year – Infoline, Social App of the Year – Farmerline; Entertainment App of the Year – iWarrior and Kijiji; Utility App of the Year – Retail Tower and Health App of the Year – MoTech.

The others are Education App of the Year – MyPassCo; eGovernance App of the Year – 233Law, and Esoko won Agriculture App of the Year, while Eyram Tawiah of LetiArts was adjudged App Developer of the Year for developing iWarrior and Kijiji, believed to be Africa’s first game app in Apple Store.

Speaking at the award ceremony, Hon Victoria Hamah, Deputy Minister for Communication, emphasized the fact that “data is the future” and the apps which are developed locally must be “relevant to the business community and civil society”.

She emphasized the fact that with the continuous increase in bandwidth and mobile subscriptions, the country is ready for a data consumption revolution that requires the development of more apps.

The Deputy also said she was thoroughly impressed with the quantity, quality, and relevance of the apps exhibited at the Awards.

In her welcome address, Madam Dorothy Gordon, Director-General of Ghana-India Kofi Annan Centre of Excellence in ICT, revealed that apps developed from Ghana are ranked higher in terms of quality and finishing than most from other African countries, in the World Summit Awards, of which she is a judge.

PopOut, the organizers of the annual TopApps Award hope to host a more elaborate and highly competitive awards event next year with sponsorship and strategic partnership.

Managing Director of PopOut, Maximus Ametorgoh believes “this will create a sense of competition among the app developers and also empower the youth through the creation of innovative applications.”

“We want to be able to give more prizes by way of cash, resources, and packages to winners next year. We want the Telcos and other industry players to come on board. We live in the age of apps. Apps are the drivers of data consumption,” Ametorgoh said.

He further contended that the “internet is used to consume content online so there is the need to collaborate to create apps so subscribers can consume more data. People do not use the internet because it is cheap or free. They use it because of the content they want to consume. If there is no relevant content, people will not subscribe to or use the internet even if it is free.”

TopApps Award is an annual applications exhibition and award event which gives app developers in Ghana the opportunity to showcase their innovative apps and games to technology and business participants as well as win awards for their outstanding products. The apps are judged based on their market relevance, originality, and innovativeness.

Partners for TopApps Award 2013 include Google (Ghana), Ghana-India Kofi Annan Centre of Excellence in ICT, Nokia, Erke Ghana, EventStreet Africa, TelecomEye, GhanaBusinessNews and Citi97.3fm. TopApps Award is a PopOut initiative.

Source: www.myjoyonline.com

A similar story was also published on www.citifmonline.comMPower Payments, a Ghana-made simple and seamless online payment app, won five awards including Top App of the Year at the second TopApps Awards this year.

The comprehensive online payment platform, MPower Payments, developed by SMSGH won Web App of the Year, Most Innovative New App of the Year, Top User Experience App of the Year and Finance App of the Year. Plus the makers of MPower, SMSGH were also adjudged App Company of the Year.

Currently, MPower Payments integrates all cedi-based electronic payment systems including Mobile Money and ATM cards, and links them to both online and offline merchants in a way that enables users to make payments for goods and services online without exposing their details to cyber criminals.

It is very high on security with a green bar SSL, verified by US-based DigiCert on the advice of Dun and Bradstreet. It means in the rarest circumstance where a user’s details are compromised, DigiCert provides insurance cover for the user so it will bear the liabilities.

MPower Payments, which went live online about a year ago, attracted some 4,000 users by July 2013, recording transactions to the tune of GHC120,000 a month.

But currently, two months on, it now has over 15,000 registered accounts, recording more than 10,000 active users doing transactions of up to a million Ghana cedis.

As of July, it had a little over 400 registered merchants, but according to Senior Product Manager, George Mensah “we now have more merchants and many more and bigger merchants are coming onboard to ensure by the second transactions.”

The platform allows users to safely move money even from bank accounts and Mobile Money accounts unto to their MPower account for online transactions and vis-a-versa.

George Mensah believes the decoration of MPower Payments at this TopApps Awards would drive innovation, relevance, and commercialization in the app/software development industry.

“This goes to show that when you are developing an app you should think beyond the nice features of the app and think about how it can make life easier for people and how you can monetize it,” he said.

MPower Payments is currently a strictly cedi-based platform and active in only Ghana but SMSGH plans to take it to the rest of Africa by the third quarter of next year (Q3-14).

General Manager of SMSGH, Alex Adjei-Bram said the company’s emergence as App Company of the Year was also apt because they have developed several relevant apps like the JumpFon, which provides users with a bevy of mobile entertainment content on short code *714#.

It also has a bulk SMS app called MYtxtBox, and several other SMS aggregation apps for banks, insurance companies, media houses, political parties, and several organizations and individuals across Ghana and parts of Africa.

Meanwhile, at the TopApp Awards, organised by PopOut, eleven other apps, and one individual won competitive and honorary Awards.

The other Award winners include Mobile App of the Year – Nkyea Twi Phrasebook; SMS App of the Year – Infoline, Social App of the Year – Farmerline; Entertainment App of the Year – iWarrior and Kijiji; Utility App of the Year – Retail Tower and Health App of the Year – MoTech.

The others are Education App of the Year – MyPassCo; eGovernance App of the Year – 233Law, and Esoko won Agriculture App of the Year, while Eyram Tawiah of LetiArts was adjudged App Developer of the Year for developing iWarrior and Kijiji, believed to be Africa’s first game app in Apple Store.

Speaking at the award ceremony, Hon Victoria Hamah, Deputy Minister for Communication, emphasized the fact that “data is the future” and the apps which are developed locally must be “relevant to the business community and civil society”.

She emphasized the fact that with the continuous increase in bandwidth and mobile subscriptions, the country is ready for a data consumption revolution that requires the development of more apps.

The Deputy also said she was thoroughly impressed with the quantity, quality, and relevance of the apps exhibited at the Awards.

In her welcome address, Madam Dorothy Gordon, Director-General of Ghana-India Kofi Annan Centre of Excellence in ICT, revealed that apps developed from Ghana are ranked higher in terms of quality and finishing than most from other African countries, in the World Summit Awards, of which she is a judge.

PopOut, the organizers of the annual TopApps Award hope to host a more elaborate and highly competitive awards event next year with sponsorship and strategic partnership.

Managing Director of PopOut, Maximus Ametorgoh believes “this will create a sense of competition among the app developers and also empower the youth through the creation of innovative applications.”

“We want to be able to give more prizes by way of cash, resources, and packages to winners next year. We want the Telcos and other industry players to come on board. We live in the age of apps. Apps are the drivers of data consumption,” Ametorgoh said.

He further contended that the “internet is used to consume content online so there is the need to collaborate to create apps so subscribers can consume more data. People do not use the internet because it is cheap or free. They use it because of the content they want to consume. If there is no relevant content, people will not subscribe to or use the internet even if it is free.”

TopApps Award is an annual applications exhibition and award event that gives app developers in Ghana the opportunity to showcase their innovative apps and games to technology and business participants as well as win awards for their outstanding products. The apps are judged based on their market relevance, originality, and innovativeness.

Partners for TopApps Award 2013 include Google (Ghana), Ghana-India Kofi Annan Centre of Excellence in ICT, Nokia, Erke Ghana, EventStreet Africa, TelecomEye, GhanaBusinessNews and Citi97.3fm. TopApps Award is a PopOut initiative.

Source: www.myjoyonline.com

DevCongress in partnership with MPower Payments and SMSGH is hosting Ghana’s first ever E-Commerce Hackathon, which would gather software programmers to build services that solve everyday problems.

The maiden event dubbed ‘DevCongress MPower Hackathon’, is slated for Saturday, October 5, 2013, from 08:00am to 10:00pm at the iSpace Foundation, Osu Ako Adjei.

Chief Solutions Architect at SMSGH, Kwadwo Seinti told Adombusiness, Hackathon is an opportunity for business owners, entrepreneurs, IT managers, sales managers, customer care managers, and finance managers to register their website programmers to join other app developers in learning how to accept mobile and electronic payments online.

According to him, the gathering would also provide the opportunity for the website managers of various businesses to be introduced to the MPower Payment platform, which is Ghana’s most comprehensive payment platform that integrates all e-payment services such as Visa Cards and Mobile Money.

Seinti recalled, for instance, that paying for adverts on Myjoyonline is still manual and cumbersome, but that could also be made electronically and be integrated with the MPower Payment platform to enable Myjoyonline clients to place ads and pay directly online.

He is therefore urging businesses to “take advantage of this perfect opportunity to turn your business into a thriving online business where customers can buy, and actually pay for your goods and services online.”

“Free registration for the e-commerce hackathon is available on www.EgoTickets.com,” Seinti said. “This event will be powered by programming interfaces from Ghana’s only real online payment service, www.MPower.com.gh, and SMSGH.com.”

Meanwhile, electronic transactions on MPower Payment platform have shot up from 4,000 in July to about 13,000 currently, and the financial value of those transactions has also shot up from about GHC120,000 to more than a million Ghana cedis now.

The main transactions used to be the purchase of mobile phone airtime, but now ticket purchase, particularly for Roverman Production plays and other events by National Theatre are also on the increase.

Source: www.myjoyonline.comHackathon 2013

Kokomlemle, Accra, Ghana – SMSGH a leading brand in mobile communication, content, and commerce aggregation has been nominated in 6 categories for this year’s Top App Awards.

Top Apps Award is Ghana’s premier apps exhibition and awards event. After weeks of intense judging activities, the shortlisted nominees for the 2013 Top Apps Awards were outdoors on the 25th of September 2013 via a statement on the website of the award, www.topappawards.com. According to the organizers the awards received over 50 nominations for 27 apps competing for 14 different award categories.

This year’s event is the second edition riding on the back of a successfully organized event last year. The categories include Mobile App of the Year, SMS App of the Year, Social App of the Year, Entertainment App of the Year, Utility App of the Year, Health App of the Year, Education App of the Year, eGovernance App of the Year, Agriculture App of the Year, and App Developer of the Year.
Awards will also be given out for Web App of the Year, Innovative New App, Top User Experience App, Finance App Company of the Year, and the much anticipated Top App of the Year.

Barely a year into its introduction, MPower Payments, received as many as 5 nominations – Web App of the Year, Innovative New App, Top User Experience App of the Year, Finance App of the Year, and Top App of the Year.
SMSGH has also been nominated for the coveted App Company of the Year for the marvelous work done at aggregating various domestic and international application services.

Commenting on the nominations, the Chief Technology Officer of SMSGH, Mr. Kwadwo Seinti, expressed delight and applauded his team of dedicated developers and nCodeDevLabs an app development partner on MPowerPayments for a good job done. He said “MPower is leading the dawn of a new era where online merchants and shopping enthusiasts will enjoy a convenient, safer, and overall better payment experience’’.

The top Apps Awards and Exhibition event is slated for Friday 4th October 2013 at Ghana-India Kofi Annan Centre of Excellence in ICT at 5pm.

The year’s event partners include Google, Nokia, Ghana-India Kofi Annan Centre of Excellence in ICT, Erke Ghana, Citi 97.3FM, TelecomEye, and GhanaBusinessNews.

Kokomlemle, Accra, Ghana – 24th September 2013 – SMSGH, a leading brand in mobile communications, commerce, and content aggregation weekend participated in Ghana’s biggest annual corporate sporting event, the Citi Business Olympics, emerging as the winner of the Chess trophy.

The event saw over 50 corporate organizations from the Accra-Tema metropolis competing for honors and bragging rights in various sporting events — beach soccer, table tennis, lime and spoon race, 50-meter dash, beach volley, tug of war, chess, scrabble, snooker, arm wrestling, etc.

SMSGH staged a comeback to the Citi Business Olympics having stayed away since its first appearance in 2006. Competing in more than 10 games with a staff team of 23 it was easy for anyone to tag the underdog status to the team. In the end, Mr. Andrew Kwame Nyakpo, a Software Engineer, emerged winner of the Chess competition, defeating all contestants and ousting the reigning champion.

Apart from this, Team SMSGH had good runs in many other competitions, qualifying for finals of the Business Obstacle Race, Snooker, and the 50-Meter Dash, and ousting the reigning Tug-of-War and Arm Wrestling champions in the quarterfinals to prove to corporate Ghana that the team is not only a force to reckon with in mobile aggregation, but also in sporting competitions.

Announcing the list of winners of the entire competition on CitiFM’s Tuesday morning show, the host Bernard Avle, said he was not surprised at SMSGH winning the Chess trophy as according to him SMSGH “…are the geeks of this world”.

The Citi Business Olympics, critically acclaimed to be the biggest corporate event in Ghana, is an annual event organized by Citi 97.3 FM, an Accra-based radio station. This year’s event held at Muuston Beach, Kokrobite in Accra was its seventh edition.

SMSGH remains Ghana’s leading mobile value-added-services company with services and applications in use by more than 7 million mobile subscribers. The company aims at blending communication, content, and commerce to create Africa’s most useful technology aggregation company. Its flagship solutions include MPower, MYtxtBOX, and Jumpfon.

MTN Ghana is positioning itself strategically to consolidate its lead in the data market by opening up more platforms for App Developers to come up with locally relevant apps for a soon-to-be-launched MTN App Store on the MTNPlay platform.

MTN, like all the other telcos, has already opened up its SMS platform for App Developers to run value-added service (VAS) through shortcodes.

But Innovations Manager at MTN, Abdul Latif Isahaku told ADOMBUSINESS MTN is gearing up to open up its USSD (unstructured supplementary service data), WAP (wireless application protocol), and Voice platforms for App Developers to come up with fresh apps on all these platforms to enhance data consumption, greater experience for smartphone users on MTN and a continuous revenue stream for App Developers.

The telecom market leader already commands 65% data market share as per the National Communication Authority’s data market statistics, but it sees more opportunities to grow its market share and data revenue through collaboration with App Developers.

Isahaku told ADOMBUSINESS MTN is proud of its growing data revenues but “every day we watch our voice and SMS revenues being threatened so we are pursuing our vision to provide a new bold digital world more vigorously to capture the data market.”

MTN has therefore launched an App Challenge, which is the first proactive move by a telco in Ghana to invite App Developers to put the Apps into the MTN App Store and rest assured of regular revenue flow.

“The winning apps would be the seed apps to start the MTN Apps Store, which would continue to invite more locally relevant apps through similar competitions every year and through other avenues. But the focus is to encourage apps that could not be easily found in other App stores like Google Play and Apple App Shop,” he said.

Local App Developers have been looking forward to telcos opening up their APIs (application programming interface) to allow app developers to directly bill users of their apps, but Isahaku said users of apps in the MTN App Store would be billed through deductions from their MTN airtime, and that can only be done by the MTN.

“We however acknowledge that the apps are the intellectual property of the App Developers so we can assure them of a very fair revenue share arrangements. We are adopting a number of revenue share arrangements that would favour each category of App Developers on our platform,” Isahaku assured.

Meanwhile, for the participants of the App Challenge, each contestant would have the chance to pitch their App to a carefully selected panel of judges, and five final winners would be selected. Each of the five would win a token of GHC10,000, and one Samsung Galaxy S4 handset.

“The overall top winner would get a fully-paid trip to attend an industry conference outside of the country in addition to his/her GHC10,000 and Galaxy S4 handset,” Isahaku said.

As part of promoting the App Challenge, MTN is organizing two road shows in Kumasi and Tamale in the coming weeks, ahead of inviting submissions.

Meanwhile, some App Developers have been telling ADOMBUSINESS MTN’s move is in the right direction because it provides a ready market for apps and would help local app developers easily monetize their apps.

But they believe the drive towards boosting data revenue makes it more imperative for telcos operating in Ghana to learn from giants like Google, Apple, and Safaricom and adopt revenue share arrangements that favour App Developers.

Industry giants like Apple and Google maintain revenue share arrangements that give them not more than 35% of revenues from app downloads, while the greater chunk of the revenue goes to the App Developers. Some of them have actually invested heavily into tech startups and put huge sums of money in the hands of App Developers to come up with new Apps.

But in Ghana, telcos keep between 55% and 70% of the revenue from the SMS-based apps that the VAS providers use to generate revenue for telcos. And telcos are not investing in tech startups either.

General Manager of SMSGH, Alex Adjei Bram thinks “the telcos must recognize more the role apps will play in enriching mobile service portfolio and revenue generation for the telcos, and open up a lot more channels beyond SMS.”

He said, “telcos should review their revenue share positions to align with the global industry practice.”

Bram is confident the telcos would eventually open up some more as some of them have already invested in state-of-the-art Service Delivery Platform (SDP), which could further improve billing platform connectivity.

“Beyond what the telcos can do, there are also service aggregators (such as SMSGH and Rancard) with sophisticated platforms to enable app developers to distribute and monetize apps across telcos and countries. The benefits are left to the local developers to harness,” he said, adding that up to 65% of app revenues for SMSGH are generated by developers outside of Ghana.

MD of POPOUT, Maximus Amertogoh is urging telcos to invest at least 70% of their R&D (research and development) budget into product development in start-ups, adding that the telcos could acquire the startups to trigger an innovation revolution in the app development space.

He also recalled that last year alone, Apple paid US$10 billion to App Developers because it had a revenue share arrangement that favors the App Developers. He thinks telcos should take 30% and give 70% to the App Developers.

On the question of the opening APIs, Amertogoh thinks it would be mutually beneficial for the telcos to do so, but “we need to get more people to use technology first before we focus on the payment. We need to also develop products of commercial value to attract more users or increase the frequency of usage.”

Source: www.myjoyonline.com

Kokomlemle, Accra, Ghana – SMSGH, a leading brand in mobile communication, content, and payment aggregation has had its co-founder/General Manager, Alex Adjei Bram featured in a United Nations General Assembly conference on promoting entrepreneurship as a means to tackle the world’s most pressing problems. The conference hosted on 27^th June 2013 included a showcase of some top entrepreneurs from around the world.

The conference – which was the result of the passing of an Israeli-led resolution calling on member states to promote entrepreneurship — is part of efforts by Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Israeli Mission to the UN to steer away from conflict-oriented issues and brand itself as a world-leader in using innovation as a means of battling poverty, creating jobs, and increasing growth.

In attendance were the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, the General Assembly President Vuk Jeremic, and representatives from around the world, including Kuwait, Tunisia, and Bahrain.

“Entrepreneurs must be encouraged to stand at the frontline of socio-economic change, in the service of sustainable development,” President Jeremic, said at the conference. “They are the ones who are often best-placed to take the first crucial steps towards breaking the cycle of poverty in their surroundings.”

As part of the conference, a slideshow to recognize thriving entrepreneurs was played on a screen in the main Assembly hall during the event. Twenty-eight entrepreneurs from different backgrounds across the world were captured with varied inscriptions based on their expertise and innovations.

See the full list here

When asked what entrepreneurship means in email correspondence, Alex wrote ‘For me, entrepreneurship means a life-long vocation of innovating for human comfort and advancement.’

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The Israeli Mission to the UN represents the Jewish State and the Jewish people on the global stage of the United Nations which has worked to promote international peace, prosperity, and security through UN institutions for over sixty-four years.