Innovation or Daylight Piracy ? Take a leaf from Apple Iphone

I know we are in third world country, and trying very hard to be self reliant - Finance Ministers Uhuru Kenyatta 1 trillion budget . However this does not mean that you take advantage of your fellow Kenyan in the most blatant of ways possible, even though we have high poverty levels and the largest slum dwelling in Africa, every mans intellectual property is worth protecting.

I've seen some noble efforts in our country today trying to protect and breed talented new developers, new innovative ideas and growth in the ICT industry such as the IHUB project, which gives an incubator to ideas to grow and lets enterprise firms pickup ideas and develop them in conjunction with the developers. Should I go on again about how ushahidi.com was an idea born in African and now its being exported, this are some of the ideas being born in trust and shared out, for the good of man kind.

Now just because your racking in the largest profits in Kenya's Economic History i.e. Safaricom 21 Billion Kenya Shilling profit, does not account for anything if you cannot help your fellow Kenyan and promote them to think and Payup or share in their good ideas that may help your organization to propel into greater prosperity call it Corporate Social Responsibility.  Its only common sense that if your going to ask a bunch of human beings to innovate on your behalf so that you can further use this item to make muller, that you at least compensate in cash on in kind(not everyone wants money). Please Safaricom do some research on the internet on how IPhone Apps have become such a hit from enabling developers make money of its. I'm particularly taken aback by your resent terms and conditions on your innovation site Safaricom innovation , if you want developers to innovate kindly give them some sort of motivation or at least help them feed their families, and uplift the lives of many.

Create for Dummies

Marketing something you've created is one thing, making it sell is another thing, I've always been a firm believer of developing and creating for dummies. What is that you ask? what has made Google Web applications sell over Yahoo(my first public email was on yahoo and I believe for almost everyone at least born before AD1985), why more and more users prefer the latter and fundamentally they are the same, email is email, Chat is Chat. Some years ago Apple was a none existent company but now its the largest technology company in the world surpassing Microsoft in the stock market two weeks ago simply by selling Hardware!. You can say they have large marketing budgets- okay that's true they are money rich, however you can put up the best Ads on the web and billboards, get people talking about it but it never sells- oh and by the way they did not start out money rich.

I believe in living by one simple principle as my Computer Science Teacher once said "Keep It Simple Stupid" KISS, programming 101 don't over think the solution there is always a simple way out. Now back to Google and Apple, the main reason that their products sell is the simple fact they are easy to use, no training needed you just buy one and get on with it emailing, chatting, itunes, texting. look at the iphone, a recycled HTC phone but with no buttons no crazy OS running on it , no stylus, just simple.

Corporates have for years suffered trying to upgrade their staff from Office 97, Office XP, Office 03, Office 07 and now Office 10, don't get me wrong,  I love Microsoft products they make the best office productivity tools in the world, but they can be so dumb complicated some times even for a developer it takes some serious will power and time to get moving or even change over (we know everyone has a degree of resistance to change- rule of thumb). Half of you reading this Blog have either a blog site, twitter accounts or are a Facebook account (oops! apart from the security settings craziness), why? because they are simply made any dummy can use it.

So next time you Develop or Create anything keep "KISS" as your motto, remember your trying to create a solution not another problem, so invest in some good User Inter-phase.