Tag: Feature

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.

Ghana’s only online payment service, MPower Payments, has recorded over 4,000 active users and is currently processing thousands of transactions to the tune of about GHC 120,000 every month.

MPower also has more than 400 corporate customers and merchants. Its green bar SSL certificate has been verified by DigiCert on the advice of Dun and Bradstreet.

MPower was established by  SMSGH to aggregate all cedi-based electronic payment systems in a way that enables users to make payments for goods and services online without exposing their details to cyber criminals.

The service allows the user electronically to deposit money via a Speed Banking voucher, Visa card, Mastercard, Mobile Money (MTN, Tigo, Airtel) or direct bank deposit into their MPower account, and to use this balance to transact business online anytime, anywhere.

Currently users can purchase airtime on MTN, Airtel, Vodafone and Expresso, pay their DSTV and ECG bills and pay for goods and services from a number of merchants such as yougora.com, ahonya.com, tisu.com.gh and dtechghana.com.

Source: www.telecompaper.com