Author: Kaluka wanjala

Last week, I told you that Infinix was planning to launch its own e-commerce site, Xmall, this week. Well, the company has officially launched the platform which it will use to sell its devices. One of the devices that is debuting on Xmall is the recently announced Infinix Hot S3X. The Infinix Hot S3X has been in some Infinix retail stores for Ksh 21,599n but is now available on Xmall for Ksh 17,399. The Infinix Xmall will take a bite into Jumia’s market share as the latter has been the unofficial ‘Home’ of Infinix smartphones online. The two companies have…

LG Electronics has launched its first B2B showroom in Kenya. Located at 14 Riverside, the center will display the vast array of LG’s leading B2B products and solutions. The new center will give business owners, integrators, and contractors a chance to engage and learn about how LG’s leading line of commercial solutions can contribute to an increased bottom line. The opening forms part of the company’s on-going commitment to provide innovative business solutions to Kenyan customers. The center that is also targeted at government and business partners, will be sectioned according to LG’s business units and include all the latest…

Jumia Food customers can now pre-pay for their food deliveries, as the online food delivering company commences online pre-payment options (credit cards and mobile payments) in Kenya and Uganda. This new payment option leverages the prominence of online payments in Africa, a continent that boasted 100 million active mobile money accounts in 2017. “The process of paying for your food just got a lot easier, with the introduction of online pre-payments. This is in addition to the post-payment option, which highly featured cash and Mpesa on delivery. We are now providing our customers with the security and freedom to pay…

Infinix is set to officially launch its own e-commerce platform, Xmall, in Kenya this coming week. I am meant to understand that everything is in place and we should see the platform go live as early as next week. Having its own channel for online distribution is an interesting strategy that makes sense if you think about it. Infinix has always and still pushes sales online better than most of the other brands we have locally. The company partnered with Jumia since the beginning to push sales online and this worked well for both companies. It got its name and…

Google today announced the launch of its second Launchpad Accelerator Africa class as part of its ongoing efforts to support entrepreneurship on the continent. The accelerator, which is housed in Lagos, Nigeria, has already demonstrated its value. The first Launchpad Accelerator Africa class saw 12 startups graduate, with more than 20 teams from Google and 40 mentors from nine countries supporting them. The startups have directly created 132 jobs and, between them, have raised over US$7 million in funding. Their products are being used by approximately 4.5 million people. “The growth of entrepreneurship in Africa is critical to the survival…

If you have been searching for a budget smartphone to buy in Kenya, you may have seen some manufacturers saying their smartphones are powered by Android Oreo (Go Edition). What does this mean and should you care about it? Some devices such as the Nokia 1, Nokia 2.1, Tecno Spark 2 are referred to as Android Go smartphones that you can get in Kenya. So, what does Android Go means and should you care about it? I will try and answer these two questions in this post. I will also use the words Android Oreo (Go Edition) and Android Go…

Towards the end of every year, we normally get a new flagship smartphone from Tecno. This device normally falls under the Tecno Phantom series and is usually the most expensive device from the company. Last year we had the Tecno Phantom 8 that was available for Ksh 37,000 and you can read all about it here. This year, we may not be seeing a Phantom 9 or any Phantom device according to insider sources. It is not clear why this is so but I am told there are no plans to bring a new Phantom device to the market just…

Songa by Safaricom is a music streaming service that has been available in kenya for a few months now. The streaming service has a significant selection of Kenyan and African titles but I can’t say it is popular just yet. I have been using Songa but I just don’t use it consistently and most of the times I forget I have it on my phone. The platform does not have most of the recent songs from popular artistes and this may be the reason why I just don’t use it as I would love to. Songa is a subscription-based service…

Google Search has now made it possible for Swahili users to get more intelligent and contextualized results of people, things and entities that Google already knows about. Swahili is one of the most spoken African languages and Google has now made it much easier for the over 100 million Swahili speakers to search for things they care about. The information is presented to users in an infobox next to the regular strings of search results. “When someone conducts a search, they want answers as quickly as possible. To help Swahili speakers discover new information more easily, we’re now making the…

HMD Global has just brought it yet another affordable Android smartphone to the Kenyan market. This new smartphone, the Nokia 2.1, is now available in the country for Ksh 11,500. The Nokia 2.1 lands in the country less than two weeks after the company announced that the Nokia 5.1 is available in retail stores in Kenya. Unlike the Nokia 5.1 which is an Android One phone, the Nokia 2.1 is an Android Go phone and this basically means that it comes with a tweaked version of Android that is optimized to run smoothly on entry level smartphones. The Nokia 2.1…