Recently, NandiMobile, a start-up from the MEST Incubator won the “Best Business” award at the LAUNCH conference in San Francisco. As a small startup that grew out of an entrepreneur incubator program in Ghana, this is quite an accomplishment. NandiMobile has tapped into the ubiquity of cell phone use across Africa as the hardware of choice for their SMS based customer service business.
“Nandimobile’s objective is to leverage the high global mobile penetration rates to create mobile customer service technology that enables businesses to connect to their customers through their mobile phones and easily engage, inform and manage their customer relationships.” -Nandimobile
The prospects for NandiMobile’s success are great. Allow me a amount to illustrate the vastness of the market that they are poised to be a major player in.
- In the early days of Twitter the service was primarily a SMS based business. Before we had smart phones with full functioning web browsers intact and dedicated apps, anyone wanting to interact with the site simply sent a text message as their status update.
- One particular demographic that flocked to the service in droves and are a dominant force on the site to this day are African Americans. While in-home broadband has been gradually spreading throughout the US, millions of African Americans still access the internet via their cellphones. Hence, Twitter was the perfect match for them to connect to world.
- If we look at a rapidly developing nation like India we see that SMS based startup GupShup has tapped into widespread cell phone use as the least common denominator to connect over 26 million Indians to the internet. They are essential the Twitter of India.
This brings us back to NandiMobile and their aspirations to be the go to source for customers and businesses looking to connect in Ghana, Africa. The upside to their growth looks tremendous, once they have a foothold in Ghana, they can spread to other African nations and eventually the world. The global African diaspora numbers in the millions and Nandimobile is positioned to be the service that connects those people and businesses together on a global scale.
Watch the video interview above as Robert Scoble interviews the founders of NandiMobile.
Do you think their service will be a major success? Let us know in the comments below.
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