Day 1 highlights at East Africa Com 2016

Amy Turner - Digital Content Marketer, KNect 365

 

Day 1 of East Africa Com was a roaring success!

Throughout the course of today's panels, workshops and keynotes, we gained a great insight into the most pertinent developments, challenges and accomplishments of the ICT and tech sector in East Africa. Here is day 1 summed up in 5 quotes:

“Every company is a tech company”

Tony Wood of @First Consulting made this bold statement in his Introduction and Chairman’s Welcome and it rings true. The digital disruption is happening, from start-ups in their infancy to huge multinational corporations.

“The African model is a collaborative one”

The overriding theme of many discussions on day one has been that of synergy and collaboration. This was summed up perfectly by Convergence Partners Chairperson, Andile Ngcaba, during his Investment Briefing.

“I don’t see 5G LTE being rolled out by 2020”

This was the almost unanimous vote of our ‘Beyond Voice and Data’ panel. One or two of the panelists tried to be optimistic, but as Orange Kenya Telkom End-to-End Engineer, Ibrahim Empamba, stated: “We won’t even get to know the 5G LTE frequency until 2019”.

“We don’t think of Netflix as the competition”

Today saw the introduction of East Africa Com’s first ever dedicated broadcast stream. Rather than viewing them as competition, the panel of media and television experts saw the introduction of Netflix to the market as a challenge and an opportunity to introduce high quality, local content to the East African market.

“We believe connectivity is a basic human right”

Intelsat’s Brian Jakins gets to the crux of the matter and highlights that fact that nearly all major telecoms and tech projects have a similar objective - connecting the last mile. In case you missed it, you can read about Intelsat's Globalized Network here.


Tomorrow we'll have another highlight round up, with a full event report to come.

For those who couldn't make it today head down to the Radisson Blu, Upper Hill Nairobi tomorrow to benefit from the great content, networking and supplier exhibits and showcases.

East Africa Com runs until 19 May. Visit our website for further information.

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