The
value
of
mobile
commerce
transactions expanded by 85.5 per cent to
Ksh 3.2 trillion in 2017. The growth was
spurred by customer’s preference for
mobile commerce and the availability of
these services across the country.
5.4.3 Technology Trends
Gigabit and Petabit Wireless: Networks
at the edge are going wireless. We observe the
development of NBase-T, Terahertz wireless
and other high-speed communications
developments, and anticipate their wholesale
adoption across all sectors of Kenya. Kenya will
standardise on Gigabit/Ethernet speed
wireless networks.
Ubiquitous Communications: Internet
access is available everywhere, all the time to
everybody and everything via mobile phone,
Wi-Fi, cable and other means. The internet
protocol has become the de-facto means of
communication. This trend will intensify and
increase as available speeds improve.
Pervasive Instrumentation: As more and
more devices and elements of our environment
become network enabled, from electric power
meters, industrial equipment to household
appliances we are entering an era where
everything is producing data continuously and
everything can talk to everything else. This is
the Internet of Things (IoT) or to use more
recent nomenclature the Internet of Everything
(IoE). The ability to remotely effect physical
change inherently poses significant challenges
and provides enormous advantages. You can
now remotely monitor, manage and change
processes and states without having to
physically be present, but it also means you can
do damage, destroy facilities and injure people
remotely.
Big Data: Every person, device and
instrument has become a data emitter. The
aggregation and storage of these enormous
data volumes has led to a technical
phenomenon called big data. The storage,
analysis and interpretation of big data requires
specialised techniques and equipment for
which we must be prepared. Kenya is currently
a net emitter of data and the facilities, capability
and interest in being a sink need to be
developed. We need to develop the capacity to
store and use our own data.
Deep Learning: Machine learning is a
branch of artificial intelligence focusing on data
classification,
trend
identification
and
predictive analytics. Using big data for machine
learning is called deep learning. Deep learning
Ministry of ICT, Kenya
has led to fundamentally useful outcomes such
as accurate speech recognition, automated
expert level medical diagnosis, better-thanhuman computer vision, holistic systems like
self-driving cars and self guiding drones, and
more
mundanely
improved
purchase
recommendation systems, customer credit
rating and epidemic outbreak prediction.
Blockchain and Digital Currency: A peerto-peer distributed digital ledger that provides
an immutable time-sequenced record of all
transactions (blockchain) is a peer-to-peer
distributed digital ledger that provides an
immutable time sequenced record of all
transactions, does not require trust between
parties and facilitates electronic “smart
contracts”. Blockchain can be used to track
digital assets, assets whose ownership can be
verified digitally such as land, equities, shares
and derivatives, votes and currency. It’s most
famous implementation is in Bitcoin, but it not
limited to those domains. A blockchain’s
integrity hinges on strong cryptography that
validates and chains together blocks of
transactions, making it nearly impossible to
tamper with any individual transaction record
without being detected.
The Sharing Economy: The Sharing
Economy is a socio-economic ecosystem built
around the sharing of human, physical and
intellectual resources. A sharing economy is an
economic model in which individuals are able
to borrow or rent assets owned by someone
else. The sharing economy model is most likely
to be used when the price of a particular asset
is high, and the asset is not fully utilised all the
time.
Sitting in any large parking lot are dozens
of cars, which represent hundreds of millions of
shillings of non-performing depreciating
capital assets. Putting those assets to use, when
the owner is not using them, is the basic
operating model of ride-sharing and online taxi
companies.
Communities of people have shared the use
of assets for thousands of years, but the advent
of the Internet has made it easier for asset
owners and those seeking to use those assets to
find each other. This sort of lending is
sometimes referred to as a peer-to-peer (P2P)
rental market.
Sharing economies allow individuals and
groups to make money from underused assets.
In this way, physical assets are shared as
services. For example, a car owner may allow
someone to rent out their vehicle while they are
not using it, or a homeowner may rent out their
home while they are on vacation.
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