The rumor mill has it that the mysterious ‘French company’ trying to buy Zain is actually Orange Telecom. That would make perfect sense as I can’t think of many other French companies with a few billion dollars lying around to make major mobile operator acquisitions…
The Zain brand has only been in the Kenyan market for [...]

Last week at the Google I/O Developers’ Conference, I was lucky enough to snag the hottest phone money can’t buy (at least, not for a little while). Google may not have an iPhone killer yet, but if this little piece of awesomeness is any indication, they sure are trying.
Powering up the phone takes about 30 [...]

It appears that, despite breaking off negotiations last year, Bharti Airtel is interested in partnering with MTN again. Forbes reports…
NEW DELHI - Exactly a year after he called off a merger between his flagship Bharti Airtel, India’s leading mobile phone operator, and MTN, billionaire Sunil Mittal is having a second stab at adding the South [...]

Last week I rebutted an article from the New York Times about the developing world being a collective boost to Web 2.0 application user numbers, but a bane in the sense that they have a hard time monetizing that international traffic. As I wrote that post, I had one of the projects we were working [...]

When Twitter announced that it would be scaling back it’s SMS services for people outside of North America and Europe, it was a huge blow. Given that Twitter is only made up of about 8 million users (6 million if you don’t count the dead profiles and spammers), to Twitter it must have seemed rather [...]

Despite updates to the service and impressive growth, there’s still a lot of speculation that eBay may soon sell or spin-off Skype. I like, Skype, VOIP for international businesses is like heaven on Earth. It allows me to have a phone number in major business hubs (North America, UK, etc) which serves to reduce the [...]

Indian telco Tata Communications has bought an additional 30 per cent stake in South African network operator, Neotel, to become the majority stakeholder in the company …

The managing director and CEO of Tata Communications, Srinath Narasimhan, said in a statement that Tata had bought the 30 per cent stake previously held by the South African [...]

UNICEF Ethiopia has developed a platform that uses mobile phone text messages (SMS) to monitor the distribution of high protein food to under nourished children in over 1,800 feeding centers in Ethiopia. The SMS reporting system is used to coordinate distribution, supplies and find out the number of fed children and the need for more [...]

Intel, the inventor of microprocessors and the world’s largest semiconductor company has signed a contract with Kenya Data Networks (KDN) and Alcatel Lucent to offer Kenya the first mobile WiMax trail using Wimax 802.16e technology. The technology will provide wireless broadband service at affordable prices, sending data up to 75mbps without cables. According to [...]

Christian Kreutz explores the growing trend of mobile devices as a disruptor in developing countries…

The simplest and most powerful form of mobile activism in the future will probably still be ordinary communication. However, in all fields of activism such as advocacy, awareness, research and protest, the mobile phone can be a strategic tool for communication, [...]