Iridium Interactive Blog » Company News

How Small Business Owners In Kenya Can Take Advantage Of Technology To Scale-Up Business

iridiumInteractive — Mon, 29 Sep 2014 03:27:01 +0000

The number of small businesses in Kenyan has been growing over the years and this has brought about an increase in competition. Luckily, we live at a time where technology is transforming the world into a global village.

As Kuza Biashara Founder & Chief Mentor, Mr Sriram Bharatam, shares in this interview with CNBC Africa’s Bonney Tunya, small business owners can effectively leverage on technology to Learn, Connect and Grow.

Some Quick Takeaways From This Video

How young entrepreneurs can benefit from our recent partnership with AITEC-Africa
Insights into Kuza Biashara training for small businesses
Insights into Sri’s TED talk on “Why start-ups fail”
Insights into the TIBU system done by Kuza Biashara’s sister companies to improve healthcare services to TB patients

This is definitely an interview worth watching…and as usual we’re counting on your to SHARE IT!

iridium drives success at Annual AITEC Banking & Mobile Money COMESA Conference 2014

iridiumInteractive — Tue, 16 Sep 2014 18:47:26 +0000

The AITEC Banking & Mobile Money was a major success according to attendees – all thanks to all the partners and sponsors who worked together to ensure everything went on as planned. Iridium Interactive provided digital coverage for the event…and in line with our mantra “Putting the Dot on the Dot”, went above and beyond the call of duty to deliver a seamless experience for all partners, exhibitors and guests.

About the Event

The AITEC Banking & Mobile Money conference was held at the Kenya School of Monetary Studies which is 5 Kilometers from the Nairobi CBD. The event was themed “Finance SMEs – Fire Up The Economy”. More than 350 guests attended, five of whom were young entrepreneurs who were sponsored by iridium interactive.

Notable speakers and moderators includes Mr. Fred Matiangi, Kenya’s Cabinet Secretary For Information, Communication and Technology; Mr. Sriram Bharatam, CEO iridium Interactive; Heshan Devani, Founder VenCap Kenya; Mr. Sean Moroney, Chairman AITEC Africa.

#AITECmobilemoney – Twitter Trendsetter

If you are a Twitter fan of Twitter, you are familiar with the word hashtag. In this event, iridium Interactive took full charge of this Twitter handle, broadcasting to the entire world. In time, other guests and partners at the event joined in and the debate went viral. In less than 48 hours, word of the event reached over 184,000 twitter accounts. Cumulatively, our social media experts estimated the aggregate reach to be almost 500,000. Our sister organization, Kuza Biashara, also contributed to event success. Through the use of its popular blog which enjoys broad readership and its Facebook Page which has over 109,000 Likes, Kuza Biashara brought an near-instant buzz to the event bringing it to the attention of over 25,000 SME owners who form part of its client-base.

Comprehensive Coverage

A dedicated team of video production expert was on the ground to provide comprehensive video coverage for the event. Working tirelessly and with minimal breaks, the talented team set their eyes set on one goal – capturing every moment of the event and presenting it out to the world in the most elaborate ways possible.

The event was a success, all thanks to you…

Thanks to everybody who made this event the success of which participants, sponsors and organizers alike can be proud. We look forward to making #AITECmobilemoney2015 trend…see you there.

iridium Signs Up with KPMG Top 100 Midsize Companies as Digital Partner for East Africa

iridiumInteractive — Wed, 25 Jun 2014 09:33:57 +0000

iridiumInteractive has steadily been creating a competitive environment for entrepreneurs. In this regard, we have partnered with KPMG Top 100, for the second consecutive year, in a bid to raise the bar for entrepreneurs in East Africa. iridiumInteractive has played a very active role as the official digital partners for the Eatst Africa Top 100 Survey.

This initiative is to identify Kenya’s fastest growing medium sized companies and showcase business excellence, highlight & celebrate the country’s most successful entrepreneurship stories, who have contributed to the wealth and jobs in the country. Beyond the Top 100 there is also another level, the Club 101. iridiumInteractive has been encouraging the members to push themselves to get into Club 101.

Partnering with KPMG Top 100 Survey for the second consecutive year, iridiumInteractive made a positive impact by contributing towards creating the digital assets, which is the online platform where prospective participants could learn about the survey and even fill in the survey and perform their financial calculations.

And as thought leaders, iridiumInteractive brought in the media buzz by leveraging the Social Media to promote an opportunity like this. This not only enhanced the reach to the prospects but also showed them how they can leverage this and go beyond. iridiumInteractive, when it first partnered with KPMG Top 100, brought in a spate of innovative ideas, which were very openly embraced by the Policy Team and the people behind KPMG.

As Sriram Bharatham, CEO and Founder, iridiumInteractive affirms “There is no other platform like KPMG Top 100 as of my knowledge right now in East Africa. And what really encouraged us and what we are seeing here is that as a team, collectively, all the partners are really driving at setting the bar higher. This is the 2nd consecutive year that we are part of it and we have already raised the bar. And we will continue doing this till there is a time we can see, there is a change coming in.”

Sriram Bharatam Champions EO East Africa Chapter, wins Randi Caroll Award

iridiumInteractive — Tue, 20 May 2014 10:16:52 +0000

The Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO) is a global network of more than 10,000 business owners in 45+ countries. For a quarter century, Entrepreneurs’ organization EO has been supporting entrepreneurs in all corners of the world, chiefly through introduction of new chapters. EO East Africa is the newest addition to the EMEA region and a key player in growth of Africa’s entrepreneurial landscape. Sriram Bharatham, an EO member for a decade, is champion and Chapter President of EO East Africa.

Sriram Bharatham realized the need to have a community of entrepreneurs who could trust each other and serve as a sounding board for learning and growth. He wanted to create a group of likeminded entrepreneurs who would share common core values and work together towards nurturing and growing their career paths. As he says “ The chapter launch is one of the high points in my life”

Sriram Bharatam who pioneered EO East Africa Chapter in August 2013, as the Founding President of Entrepreneurs Organization East Africa received the Randi Caroll Award for the Best EO start up Chapter globally at Athens. The Global Leadership Conference was attended by 1,100 Entrepreneurial leaders from 46 countries. EO East Africa achieved a membership of over 45 in just one year.

Sriram Bharatham expresses his mission, his goal in establishing the EO Chapter “ We wish to create a positive learning environment and help local and regional entrepreneurs leverage the EO network. We are also pursuing opportunities in the form of local and regional learning events, which will serve as an opportunity to create once- in-a-lifetime experiences for our new and prospective members. As Chapter President, I want to set the right structure and culture, and nurture leaders who can sustain and grow our influence beyond East Africa. And as a task force member of EO’s Africa 750 initiative, I’m helping EO achieve 750 members by 2018 and roll out Africa as an independent region. As a chapter, we’re confident that we will play a major role in achieving these targets”

Iridium Interactive Helps ALA Transform Student Placement Process by Optimizing ALA’s Investment in ‘Salesforce”

iridiumInteractive — Tue, 15 Apr 2014 09:48:36 +0000

African Leadership Academy is a world class pan African secondary institution that aims to educate and develop outstanding students into principled, ethical leaders for Africa. Since 2008, ALA has found, nurtured and connected the best and the brightest youth from 54 African countries to be shaped into Africa’s future leadership cadre.

As a young organization, ALA was thrilled to have the ability to utilize Salesforce under the “Power of Us’, program run by the Salesforce Foundation. Unfortunately, ALA’s Salesforce implementation across differently, rapidly growing departments, were not coordinated as a result of which data became increasingly complicated and problems arose with data integrity and duplication due to data uploads with inconsistent review and clean up. Things got complicate further by the creation of two silos of data, -Salesforce and a password protected portal.

Iridium Interactive stepped in to optimize ALA’s ACN platform into a scalable, user-friendly one that allows its Staff, Students and Graduates to interact with one another, identify opportunities like internships, mentoring and job openings, and also support ALA’s graduates at university and throughout their careers.

Using the Salesforce platform , Iridium built a robust ACN portal with a fully personalized user experience for prospective students and applicants The portal consolidates all the information the potential students need in one place and displays necessary information to students at different points in the application process.

Sriram Bharatham,CEO and Founder of Iridium Interactive spoke about the challenge “ ALA teams were working in silos on various islands of systems. Data integrity and reliability was at high risk and as a result, the communication with ALA graduates were ad-hoc, intermittent and mainly via email, all this resulting to highly dissatisfied users. They made an excellent choice of working with Salesforce but the biggest challenge was that it needed to be tamed internally along with other islands of systems in place”

Sharmi Surianarain, Director of Lifelong Engagement, Africa Careers Network, ALA, appreciated Iridium’s role “ Iridium Interactive helped us to significantly streamline operational efficiency and simultaneously enabled the ACN team to provide imporved feedback, timely notifications, closely matching with opportunities stated with career interests etc.

The ability to process over 1000 applications, link with over 400 partner organizations and over 800 students in network, have greatly improved ALA’s customer service orientation, with Iridium’s infallible guidance

iridiumInteractive Wins Kenya’s ICT Board Tandaa Grant for Local Content Innovation

iridiumInteractive — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 18:44:59 +0000

Innovation has led iridiumInteractive to make its mark emphatically in the Kenya’s agenda of dynamic growth. Receiving the Tandaa Grant for Local Content innovations touches new frontiers. Tandaa is a brand of the Kenya ICT Board that promotes the creation and distribution of locally relevant digital content through the Tandaa Symposium and seed money to ICT entrepreneurs. Digital content is any content that can be consumed from an electronic device eg. Personal computer, mobile phone, game console, and digital TV. Such content is easily and effectively distributed through the Internet and can consist of services, entertainment, data or information.

‘Connected Kenya‘ Summit , a landmark event on Kenya’s educational horizon celebrates Kenyans who have developed ICT Solutions that drive economic growth and social development in Kenya’s “Vision 2030” . iridiumInteractive stole the limelight by bagging one of the Nation’s top innovation awards. These awards were jointly given by the Kenya ICT Board and the Kenya Vision 2030. All the applicants to the awards were required to be registered as a business in Kenya and it was mandatory to have had their products in the Kenyan Market for at least six months. There were 400 applications for various categories from all over the country . The competition was tough and the applications were reviewed by a high ranking team of independent judges, who represented the ICT private sector, academia, public sector and civil society.

iridiumInteractive won the award in the most hotly contested category of the “Best Innovation in the Education and Training Sector”. Sriram Bharatham, CEO and Founder accepted the award. Speaking on this occasion, Sriram Bharatam (Sri) said, “This recognition is a testimony that we are in the right direction and is a great motivator to the 50+ team members at iridiumInteractive across 20 locations in Kenya, to now scale this idea and reach out to transform as many Kenyan small business owners as possible.”

An enriching experience for the team, a giant leap forward towards reaching their goal.

iridium Interactive and NASSCOM Foundation – Celebrating the World Environment Day and National Technology Day

iridiumInteractive — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 11:00:48 +0000

What would you on a Saturday morning? Well, we decided to do something different. We decided to start our day in a peculiarly different way, we thought why not just use our time and teach basic skills to the under-privileged kids.
On last Saturday, NASSCOM Foundation organized a workshop on the lines of the World Environment Day and the National Technology Day, inviting volunteers to teach basic skills and impart learning through a scavenger hunt held at the Umeed Aman Ghar. We were super excited and were among the first to reach.

Later all the volunteers were divided into teams and each team had 3-4 kids from the school; in our team we had Atul, Fayaz and Rohit. In the scavenger hunt, we were given environment based clues and we had to click photographs of the answers hidden in the premises. We were also briefed that each team would need to present their findings at the end of the game, with the underlying objective of imparting basic skills to the children and explaining them various things about the environment.

We began the search and taught these children on how to operate a camera and take photographs. This training just went off for 5 minutes and in a flash these kids became PRO. They took some wonderful photographs and had a very different perspective of looking at things. After getting all the clues we sat and we explained and made these children copy photographs to a PC and then put them into a PowerPoint presentation. And later our team also presented.
It was amazing to see how a small game and a brief interaction can empower these kids with these skills (operating a camera and understanding basics of power point), which otherwise would take a lot of time. The kids, of course, didn’t want us to leave but we had to.

This Saturday was not just another day, it was much more. We all were not only content of the time we had spent but also happy of having made some new friends.

NASSCOM and iridium's pledge for a Clean Delhi!!

iridiumInteractive — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 07:12:31 +0000

NASSCOM Foundation in India partnered with Let’s Do It Delhi to help clean up Bhikaji Cama Place in Southwest Delhi, India on 20th March, 2010 at 7:30 in the morning. The small but inspired NF team comprised of 31 volunteers from various Indian companies like Newgen Software, WNS, iridium Interactive, MphasiS and Students’ Partnership Worldwide – India Project Trust. The enthusiastic iridium team- Manish, Sinchita, Janhavi and Nitu, along with the NF team took up to cleaning one of the many lanes at the Bhikaji cama complex. While cleaning, what came as a shock for the team was that the maximum garbage comprised of pan masala and gutkha packets – all of which are plastic and hence is non-biodegradable. Most people in the metros have the habit of littering after they have used the contents of the packet. What we don’t realize is that this garbage adds to the city’s dirt dump. Would we do it in our house??? I’m sure each one of us would say NO. When you wouldn’t dirty your own house with garbage, why do it to your city. After all, it is home to many people who do not have a house to live in. The open city space is their home.

This cleanliness drive has enthused us iridiumiites and we, right now, right here pledge to keep our city clean and also create awareness amongst people in our own big or small way and make our cities a heaven to live in. Spread the word and let more people join in!!!!

Manish is a Practice Director at iridium Interactive and spear heads the Web2.0 and Social media practice.

Construction versus Software Industry- iridium reveals the Analogy

iridiumInteractive — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 12:17:45 +0000

We hope to keep up our inspiration alive to build a Smart Office here at iridium Interactive. Even with all the experience we had of building offices renovating them many times in the past 10 years, little did we realise that there is so much similarity between the Construction industry and the Software industry.

Everything looks perfect when we showcase the BRD because by then 98% of clients are not too sure of what their requirements are it is easy to get a sign off on the BRD, in this case, Specs of our office.

The slight trouble begins at the Wire-frames, rather on completion of Wire Frames which in this case is the marking. All was well till then, now suddenly everyone at Iridium feels we need to have more Free Zones, or an additional Meeting Room (no one thought of it at the BRD/ Specs stage). “This can still be accommodated no problem, we are with you dears “, we say and move on.

We design the homepage and the inside page. Here we get a sample of the Tiles we are going to use, the Decolam color, Fittings to be used etc etc. Strangely they get approved or rather people say “you know it better, take a decision, go ahead, we are with you”.

The big trouble begins then. Having got a sign off on the Wireframes and the designs, we get all the actors/ developers and get the work started. Carpenters have started installing partitions, Tiles are being laid out etc etc, now starts the big trouble . “The tiles seemed good when looked at a single piece” I hear, followed by “The colors looked pleasing then, but may be we need to have some more brightness, so why dont you show us more options? The partition here makes the office a little too formal, lets just break it open and make more free space”.

This is a time to break a few walls, to accommodate new changes to the design, thanks to our imagination – have more free space. I tell them, “Change Request, lets accommodate it after Go Live, in the next phase”, they look at me shockingly and say “Aren’t you supposed to be the experts, you should have thought of all this before, didn’t you know Yellow looks better than Orange and Gym takes priority over Conference or Conference takes priority over TT Board, whatever…”

I look at my team with a shiver knowing what they would say , “Sure, no problem. Another 2 weeks”.

Having taken into account the creative & spontaneous views of Iridium‘s hardworking team, we move ahead.

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iridium Interactive gets the coveted Online Partner of NASSCOM status for third consecutive year…

iridiumInteractive — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 06:32:37 +0000

As the NASSCOM India Leadership Forum (NILF) convenes from Feb 9^th to Feb 11^th this year, it gives me great pleasure to be present in Mumbai for the 18^th edition of this annual conference as NASSCOM’s official online partner. iridium Interactive got this status for the third consecutive year. We have partnered with NASSCOM to create a SOCIAL Networking product, called NASSCOM Connect, to add value to every NASSCOM NILF delegate’s experience. NASSCOM Connect is a social networking platform which is a combination of Linked-in and Facebook, that will help attendees and delegates to maintain ties and continue their dialogue in the virtual space. A unique platform, the NASSCOM Connect enables the delegates to touch base with each other before the event kicks off on February 9th at Mumbai this year.

I completely look forward to this epic forum since it is undoubtedly Asia’s largest leadership conference with a diverse mix of inspirational experts from the industry. Flooded by the outpour of registrations, NILF boasts of a record registration of 1650 delegates this year from countries all over the world and India. This is going to be one opulent event with the stalwarts of the IT industry who will be present there.

Exactly this time around last year when the economy was caught in the clutches of recession the theme of the event was mainly focussed on how to tackle the downturn. This year holds particular importance as the industry recovers from the financial slowdown, we look forward to new times, new dimensions, new outlooks and the opportunity to explore new directions which is also the theme of this event this year ‘New Times, New Ideas, New Directions’

Do check this out….

The NASSCOM EVENT online destination: http://indialeadershipforum.nasscom.in
NASSCOM EVENT BLOG : http://indialeadershipforum.nasscom.in/blog
NASSCOM EVENT NETWORKING PORTAL : http://indialeadershipforum.nasscom.in/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=76&Itemid=92

You can also avail the live updates from NILF from : http://indialeadershipforum.nasscom.in/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=207&Itemi d=262