5 November 2012
- I presented at Demo Africa in Nairobi on behalf of Balefyre. Here's a transcript:
- Host
- good morning everyone are you having a good time all right I think I really enjoyed that first panel of demonstrators they did a really good job I'm very excited to be here my job here is very easy i'm going to be introducing the demonstrators in this next category the category is enterprise and these companies hope that they attacked a lot that the technology that they have will be disruptive in their particular sector and first up we have from South Africa I'll Joseph and his team they have a they run a company called balefire and what they hope to do is introduce technology they have an end-to-end solution that allows mobile network operators to extend the lifespan of the existing us SSD infrastructure they already have a pattern for their application and they wish and they hope and believe that mobile operators will be able to offer an enhanced customer experience with this product please welcome on stage from South Africa el Joseph
- Earl
- that's me
- Kanthan
- is this mike life can you guys hear me all right and we have a clock that's ticking. Good morning all. if any of you have been walking through the streets of Nairobi and I assume most of you have been because this is a beautiful city you probably get people passing out flyers like this one which I picked up yesterday which says something like gospel laughs and worship dial star 811 hash to search and download your favorite tune. And for those of you over here from the first world this is a particular piece of technology that separates us in Africa from the first world. it's a technology that's called ussd. the guys from MKZ over here earlier thought that they were dealing with SMS technology; no it's not, it's actually ussd. ussd allows you to do essentially what would have been called apps if they were develop today and to give you an example of how this works — Earl? can we show them very quickly what ussd looks like? can we cue the ELMO please?
- Earl
- thank you okay hello can you hear me yeah what I'm going to show you is an application that we developed for an NGO in South Africa it was for the Mobile Alliance for maternal action and what you'll see here is I put in the code and what you'll see is the core is a kind of response it asks me what language I want and do I have a baby yes I have to what month is your baby due January do you want an SMS for hiv/aids information yes and that's basically the process that we go through and that's that's ussd in action as as it is now.
- Kanthan
- the problem that we have is that ussd as a particular piece of technology has a couple of limitations in the time going forward there are two specific limitations the one is that there are a number of modern devices they do not have dialers built-in and very good examples are some tablet devices such as the ipad the other disadvantage is that technology is going forward in terms of the carrier side such as LTE do not support ussd on a native basis and what we have done is engineered to pieces of technology that allow you to extend the lifespan of ussd so that it goes forward into this new world where you have LTE capable devices as well as devices without pads built in the two piece of technology are firstly a ussd over IP protocol which we patented which is called us STX and a dialer application that works on your smartphones or tablets that is called em dau and what this also allows us to do is in addition to expanding the lifespan of us SD into the new world technologies it also allows us to create an app like feel with the new technologies. Earl? Can you show them M-Dialand USSDX in action?
- Earl
- okay so i'm going to show you the same application that is sitting on the backend called mama and this time it is it's getting the same server but just in a nap way so again I go through English yes I'm pregnant it's during January and that was a whole lot quicker with it in an app feel but coming off the same back-end infrastructure.
- Kanthan
- so essentially the target market that we have for us sdx & M de first and foremost it's the telecom operators because there's a substantial investment throughout this continent on applications that have already been developed for ussd such as the mal my application that we saw just now such as gospel laughs and worship that we saw on the streets out here the M kazi guys who've come up with a business plan this morning their business cannot continue into the next generation if they don't have our technology we're very pleased that we were first on the world to come up with this particular piece of technology we've signed up already MTN south africa as our first customers we are in an advanced stage of discussion with safaricom in kenya and we hope very shortly there will be our second customers and we are hoping that telecoms operators in particular mobile phone manufacturers who don't have built-in dialing capacity will come and speak to us so that we can look at partnerships to extend ourselves into the rest of the continent. If you want to find us we are in stall E6 right out there. It's Balefyre — B A L E F Y R E dot C O dot Zed A. is our website. For the Americans among us, that's Balefyre dot C O dot Zee A. thank you very much.