27 months

It’s no secret that mobile phones are firmly entrenched as the predominant mode of telephony in almost every African nation. In a continent of one billion people, the number of African mobile subscribers today is estimated to be around 300 million, representing a penetration rate of roughly 30%, according to the Africa Telecom News Mobile Factbook. With the popularity of handset sharing in smaller communities, the actual number of Africans using mobiles is likely to be higher, with growth rates that continue to outpace North America and Asia.

Africans increasingly depend on mobile telephony and information technologies for both social and economic interactions. Pan regional giants MTN, Vodacom, Orascom and others, together with smaller regional telecoms, are rolling out 3G and EDGE-based mobile data services to their subscribers. Despite this, handheld devices with Internet access remain a comparative luxury for most Sub-Saharan Africans. SMS is still the most popular, and affordable, non-voice value-added service. Meanwhile, broadband penetration in Africa continues to hover at around one percent.

Given these factors, wouldn’t it be nice if there was an intuitive method for mobile users to find, connect and interact with one another?

The First Mobile Mobile Phone Directory
This was the question posed by Fritz Ekwoge, the enterprising coder behind Kerawa.com (interviewed on this blog and profiled here). He noted that there was no mobile phone directory in Cameroon, not to mention for most of the continent. Without an easy way of contacting businesses in his country, Fritz set to work prototyping Africa’s first mobile mobile phone directory. That’s not a tautology, Fritz points out. His new directory service, iYam.mobi, is purely SMS-based, which means that any handset is capable of creating a profile and querying the iYam directory with a simple text message. Thus, it’s the mobile directory that goes everywhere you do.

iYam is a targeted, wholly appropriate solution designed specifically for African mobile users. It’s also the sort of service that, after using it the first time, leaves you wondering, “why didn’t I think of that?”

I was fortunate to give iYam a test drive during the private beta, along with Erik Hersman and others. During this time the iYam prototype was running on a modest hardware platform consisting of a pair of Samsung mobile phones connected to a laptop with Bluetooth. My impressions are given below. The service enters its public beta today.

Using the iYam Directory
The beauty of the iYam directory is its simplicity and ease-of-use. Since the service is entirely SMS-based, getting listed in the directory is as easy as sending a text message. iYam permits you to use only 155 characters to describe yourself. With this constraint, you’re forced to make those characters count. Twitter users are already familiar with this concept.

Fritz sent me a pointer to some simple instructions on using iYam’s service. Less than a minute later my profile was registered in the iYam directory and searchable by anyone in Cameroon—or Africa, for that matter. I simply composed the following SMS:

…and sent it to iYam’s MTN number. iYam replied with an SMS indicating that my profile had been created. Next, I sent a request to iYam to see who else was listed in the directory. This took the form of the straightforward query, “find engineer limbe” which returned an SMS with the contact information for the top five software engineers in my area. I found several new people who I might then contact for an impromptu meetup, or hire for their services.

Directory results are returned as an abbreviated list of names and corresponding phone numbers. Want to view someone’s profile? No problem. Simply send “whois [number]” to iYam and you’ll receive additional details for that individual or business. The fourth and final command you can send to the directory is “me” which returns the profile associated with your mobile number.

Thoughts on iYam’s Future
Needless to say, the potential for this application is huge. I demonstrated iYam to friends and business owners in my neighborhood, all of whom grasped the value of the service immediately. The first response from nearly every Cameroonian business owner was, “how do I get listed in the directory?”

Currently, finding a product or service in Cameroon depends on local knowledge, referrals from friends, luck or some combination thereof. For example, searching for a specific laptop model in Douala may involve an exchange of phone calls and text messages with a half dozen well-informed friends. Imagine instead sending “find laptop douala” to iYam and getting a list of results back. One might then send an SMS with specifics to each of the top five business listings and receive replies on pricing and availability.

One obvious usability question has to do with accessing paged results, as the directory currently returns only the top five listings. Fritz indicated that he’s heard several suggestions for how to handle this, so expect to see an update in the near future.

There’s the bigger question of how to shape iYam into a business. Erik Hersman tackled this side of the equation with Fritz in our email exchange, so I’ll defer to him in his parallel coverage of iYam.

That the service requires nothing more than a low-range mobile phone and SMS is perhaps its greatest strength. This was clearly borne out by the informal product testing I did with local Cameroonian business owners. People genuinely appreciate that a computer or Internet access isn’t required to create a profile or query the directory. It’s a powerful democratizing service built on an inexpensive, familiar, widely available device.

I think iYam also succeeds in just about every way by capitalizing on the philosophy of small software, in which a competitive advantage is gained from the unique challenges posed by Africa—challenges that are typically perceived as hindrances rather than conditions for innovation.

Fritz reports that availability of the service will be 20-24 hours every day during the week, and 24 hours per day on weekends. Beta testers in Ghana, Gabon, Niger, Benin, the UK and Cameroon have tried the service so far. With increased usage during the public beta, Fritz says he will scale the hardware accordingly.

iYam currently operates from two servers: one for MTN, and a second for Orange. MTN requests are served by iYam MTN (00237 7487 3391). Orange requests are served by iYam Orange (00237 9626 5496). International numbers are served by iYam MTN.