Year of ICT earthquakes, innovations and scandals

This year has been vibrant in the ICT sector characterised by innovative products.

The telecommunication sector was particularly upbeat, with the launch of innovative products, and market diversifications.

Across the ICT industry seen as the new frontier to grow the economy, these are some of the most remarkable things that happened.

Mobile banking

The lucrative mobile money transfer business intensified this with the entry of two additional players.

With the launch of Zain’s Zap and Essar Telecom’s yuCash, competition took a new twist characterized by revolutionary products.

Safaricom’s Mpesa, the first in the market, went international to UK, and opened a new platform for its 7.5 million subscribers to connect to.

It main competitor Zain introduced a new concept allowing its users to send and receive money via their bank accounts.

With M-pesa, one can retrieve money through PesaPoint ATMs too.

YuCash— launched in the four quarter of this year which Obopay, a top international player in mobile banking and payments technology — added to all this by giving the sender an opportunity to attach a short message with each transaction at no cost.

Yu also has a contract with its competitors that allows its subscribers to receive money from either Zap or M-pesa.

GTV collapses

The exit of Gateway Television (GTV) was the first evidence in the local market on the global recession that hit last year.

Many Kenyans were rendered jobless, while its subscribers had no source of redress.

It further affected millions of subscribers and sports fans in 22 African countries.