My Boarding Pass to Dadaab

As I boarded the twin engine turbo prop charter aircraft at Wilson at 7.43 am on Wednesday 22^nd May, I didn’t know what to expect on the other side. I had heard so many stories about Dadaab Refugee Camp; many negative stories of insecurity, dust storms, unbearable heat and scorpions. That sort of gave me a sick feeling in my stomach but I remembered Eleanor Roosevelt’s advice – “Every day do something new that scares you.” I wasn’t going to turn back. I was going to do this.

We arrived at about 9 am and were received by the UNHCR team of Erin and Rocco. We immediately got some chilled bottles of water (dude, that place is hot!) and boarded 2 armoured trucks to Hagadera. Dadaab is nothing like I expected. Immediately you get through the main gates from the air strip, you see a “Dadaab Equity Bank Branch” sign post. There are also several M-Pesa shops all over the main town. Seeing that Safaricom green sort of gave me a calming feeling – Some sort of reassurance that I could use my Saf’com number to call in case I needed help. We drove through a long stretch of road. Interestingly, we had to drive on the road’s shouldes which were a lot smoother than the actual road. Possibly the effect of rain water which I hear rises to knee level when it rains. Onward onto a police check-point where had to stop midway to Hagadera to get our assigned police escorts. Nothing too fancy, just 3 APs at the back of a blue police Land Rover. The same blue Land Rover I (and possibly every other Nairobi youth) is used to avoiding in Nairobi became my sense of security in a strange and forgotten land. There was a fire exchange incident between police and bandits just the pr Read more »

image courtesy - itpro

Symantec Corporation Internet Security Threat Report, Volume 18 (ISTR) has in a 2012 study revealed a 42 % upsurge targeted attacks compared to 2011 results on the same.  Designed to steal intellectual property, targeted cyber-espionage attacks are increasingly hitting the manufacturing sector as well as small businesses, which are the target of 31% of these attacks. In addition, consumers remain vulnerable to ransom-ware and mobile threats, particularly on the Android platform.

Here is a detailed World and Africa Rankings Chart report. “This year’s ISTR shows that cyber-criminals aren’t slowing down, and they continue to devise new ways to steal information from organizations of all sizes,” said Sheldon Hand, territory manager, Indian Ocean Islands, West Read more »

Image Courtesy, evanszablowski's Blog

Kenya has a new government that has promised laptops to the kids who are going to class one next year. This is part of the promised deliverables that H.E. President Uhuru’s, in his TNA party, made during presidential campaign rallies and it got so many people talking. After a brief research on the web, I got some good information on ‘laptops’ and unsupervised kids. Read it below:

Sometime early in 2012, some MIT Media Lab students embarked on a journey to a pair of remote, isolated and illiterate villages in Ethiopia. The two villages with about 20 first-grade-aged children each sat about 50 miles from Addis Read more »

Last week on Saturday Kampala was abuzz with talk of how the Ugandan Warid Telecom Uganda, a subsidiary of Abu Dhabi based  Essar group had been bought out by the second largest teleco and market  challenger Airtel, subsidiary of Bharti Airtel from India. It was confirmed later in the week with a Presser from Airtel. Most people were surprised that for the first time Airtel was not on the receiving end of a re-brand having gone through a series of 5 re-brands since its start back in 1995. That in itself has been an arduous journey which has brought them many fortunes and quite many misfortunes as they struggled to erase the bitter taste the very first brand had left in people’s mouths. And no, I will not go off on a tangent. Read more »

I was going to start off this article with the AHA! That ‘Electricity is Expensive’ but I reconsidered. Why? Because there’s no surprise there. Electricity is Expensive Everywhere. And it is getting more and more pocket-unfriendly.

In fact, if you have the new age Conlog pre-paid electricity meters like me, then ‘unaumia’. I did a small survey of what eats up my hard earned units and unplugged all my appliances one by one, each on its own week.

My small survey showed me that an empty fridge is the biggest culprit right next to the instant shower and iron box. But since you use the last 2 items periodically then my one door Samsung fridge is the one that eats up the most number of units. Read more »

Microsoft recently added 2 step authentication to its services and added an Authentication App onto the Windows Store. We blogged about it here. Now WordPress has it. And it got added just a week ago.

Reposted from the Official WordPress Blog – We know your blog is important to you, and today we’re proud to announce Two Step Authentication: an optional new feature to help you keep your WordPress.com account secure. For those of you who use Two Step Authentication with your Google account, you’ll know how useful this feature is for keeping your account secure.

Two Step Authentication works like this: when you log in to your WordPress.com account, we’ll prompt you to enter a secret number. To get that secret number, you’ll need to downlo Read more »

Image Courtesy, the Verge

What is 2-factor authentication? As the name already suggests, this is a process that most companies are now adopting to ensure that you use 2 steps to login to your online accounts to reduce fraud/illegal activity on or using your account.

Who already offers 2-Step authentication? Google has had it since 2011. So has Facebook. Dropbox, the online file-sharing and cloud-store for files, has had it since 2012. Apple’s iCloud started the 2-Step verification in March 2013 and now Microsoft is also on board to offer good account protection to its users.

This allows you to set up a password on an account as well as the need to key in a code sent to your mobile phone to access an account. These settings are now available on Microsoft services like Outlook, SkyDrive and Office Web Apps and offer an excellent layer of security that wo Read more »

I am a lucky Guy. I was even lucky enough to be in Kigali, Rwanda first week of April to witness the announcement of the Microsoft 4Afrika Initiative in Rwanda. For those not in the know, the Microsoft 4Afrika Initiative is a commitment by Microsoft to help up-skill 100,000 members of Africa’s existing workforce and help an additional 100,000 recent graduates develop skills for employability (by bridging the opportunity divide), to place tens of millions of smart devices in the hands of Africans and to bring 1 Million SMEs online all this by 2016. This commitment from Microsoft was set in motion by Microsoft aims to actively engage in Africa’s economic development to improve its global competitiveness. Louis Otieno, Microsoft Director of Africa Initiatives owns this project.

The goal of the 4Afrika inititative is to disseminate affordable smart devices built specifically ‘4Afrika’ with an AppFactory aimed at encouraging application development by Africans for Africans. The initiative will also run an education platform aimed to develop tech Read more »

Nokia has been rolling out new camera features and this will affect the entire range of its Lumia smartphones. This will include the Cinemagraph digital camera lens and updated Camera Extras with object remover.

These features are already available on Windows Phone 8 phones and this update will continue to roll out on the Nokia Lumia 900, 800, 710, 610 and 510 smart phones in the coming weeks.

Another update that continues to roll out is the Windows 7.8 software update. This update also has these new camera features and users just have to keep an eye out for them.

Cinemagraph as explained by Nokia’s Kingori Gitahi, is like a piece of Hollywood magic in your pocket because it lets you bring your pictures to life by animating a part of the picture. When combined with the new features on Windows Phone 7.8, Nokia Lumia will feel like a brand new device. The Read more »

Intel and iHub have entered into a partnership agreement to foster and grow the developer community in Africa through targeted investments in mobile app development and to collaborate with select universities in Africa to enhance developers’ ability to create rich user experiences on Android devices based on Intel technology. 

The partnership between Intel and the iHub, a business incubator, in Kenya to foster and grow the developer community in Africa through targeted investments in mobile app development. This will also include online developer resources, university training programs, device seeding programs and expansion of technology hubs. The iHub, headed by Manager Jimmy Gitonga, catal Read more »