Two companies have announced a deal today that will see them trying to push Value-Added Services out through as many mobile operators in Ghana as they possibly can. Combining txtGhana’s connections with Kirusa’s VAS apps, they hope to make hay as networks in the country try to upgrade their customer offering.
What’s the story?
Let’s have a quick look at the two companies involved here.
txtGhana makes a lot of wild claims about how stupendously popular it is – most importantly, it claims to have deals in place with all four operators in Ghana, including Vodafone. It does a lot of work with SMS (as you might have guessed from the name), and it offers a lot of different services to operator built around text messages, including content, marketing, short codes, etc.
Then you’ve got Kirusa. These guys are based around somewhat sexier services like Voice SMS (apparently very popular), various types of mobile content distribution, and 3G/IMS services.
The deal between them will see txtGhana bringing the Kirusa platform to all of it’s operator partners, and seeing who bites. Kirusa has the platform, and txtGhana has the local contacts and content. They hope to offer a range of mobile content services to Ghanaian operators, including “religious, motivational and lifestyle content”.
txtGhana is one local division of a larger company called txtAfrica – and presuming that this initial deal goes well, Kirusa can expect to see it’s platform brought to a lot more African operators. Surinder Singh Anand, Vice President of Product Management at Kirusa, said, “We are delighted to tie up with txtGhana… their experience and understanding of the mobile terrain of Africa is impeccable.”
What we think?
I know mobile applications are seriously hot, but they really fall under the larger category of “mobile services”. All over the world, people want their mobile devices to be able to do more. They want better services – now, this drive may have been kick-started by mobile apps, but it has gone far beyond that now. It’s the services that people want, and they’ll find ways to get them regardless of whether their phone can run sophisticated applications or not.
