Meeting with the Google team

I had the opportunity to meet up with Mr. Mucheru, who is now the head of Google’s Africa operation as pertains product penetration. He did make me aware that Egypt and South Africa also have Google offices but only in sales capacity, which is why his appointment was churned out as Google’s first African employee.

In his days at the helm of Wananchi Online, we had been collaborating on a few ideas that touched on convergence of communication. We had looked at creating a product that would cross cut devices and deliver local and customizable content free or at minimal cost.

The project was christened – Project Anywhere as the platform was to transcend boundaries and devices. We had looked at various open source options and had kinda settled on one particular (half) open source platform that would deliver email and sms functionality as well as give capability to build on it to expand functionality.

Our major impediment then became cost of acquisition (remember half open source ), and venture capitalist firms had too many questions and banks…lets just say we were not their core business and wouldn’t be for a long time to come.

We busied ourselves refining user experience and picking at our product as we awaited funding from several promising angel investors. Several false starts is what we had…until today.

We walked through our product / service offering and it future and way in which Google can partner and support the same. Key highlights of our talks was the monetizing of content, building local content repositories and having the internet (read as technology) add value to individual as well as corporate users.

Google has met us halfway, as they will have a presence at the local exchange points (KIXP), meaning that they will bear the costs of any outbound traffic, and local traffic will be kept local reducing costs. This will also improve the access speeds of our services.

We will also have access to Google’s development team, to help tweak and bring our ideas into life in record time and to world class standard…those geeks have to amount to something aye! Imagine plug-in in to their weekend boot camp…

We are looking at payment integration, location services, content channels, education and messaging solutions as a start.

The good news is, we are ready to go. As from end of next week we will be officially online, riding on scalable infrastructure and world class technology to boot.

It has been a while coming, but we are here.