Govt. snatching milk from young entrepeneurs

The government wants to turn Kenya into an ICT hub. IT outsourcing being the new buzzword.

It would even seem that there is potential, given a few success stories, and the interest shown by companies like Google in the Kenyan market.

It would also seem logical that the government would then lower the cost of adopting ICT, and encourage local initiatives, isn’t it?

Well, no. The government wants to license the pants off various kinds of local ICT initiatives. Ksh 100,000 ( $1,400) as license fees may not seem like much, but its a lot of money in Kenya (about ten times the cost of a hiring an assassin).

Note #1: Where are these content providers they want to license anyway? I am having a hard time finding a reasonably efficient internet connection.

Note #2: I think the ICT outsourcing potential of Kenya is highly over-rated. I lived in Pakistan for 6 months. Its a country with significantly lower living and operational costs than Kenya. The outsourcing business there had rapid growth, but they still struggled in face of competition, and mostly took on a lower rung of outsourcing work as compared to their bigger neighbor, India. Reason for this being that few countries were willing to trust any confidential data processing in Pakistan (Islamic country, absence of a proper system of legal redress). Point being its a bit late joining the starting line-up when the race is already over.

Note #3: I think there is more money to be made in the regional ICT market. There is a fairly large market size, few dominant players, and lots of potential for online and offline information based services. Just as long as governments don’t tax and legislate the market to death.

Revealed: Google Suggests solutions to problems !!!

So I found this new thing called “Google Suggest“. This is what the god-like people at Google say about it:

“Our algorithms use a wide range of information to predict the queries users are most likely to want to see. For example, Google Suggest uses data about the overall popularity of various searches to help rank the refinements it offers.”

Fine.
So I ran a few tests :

Understandable. Though I didn’t get the part about the muslim country. Must be something to do with a bunch of Americans thinking Obama is muslim and connecting the dots to Kenya.

Alright. Time to end those panga jokes I guess.

So much disrespect for a president. Its high time the government blocked Google, and locked all these malicious searchers behind bars.

Whats a “Raila Odinga removal tool” ? Sounds obscene, like something my proctologist would make good use of.