Technology entrepreneurs discuss opportunities for generating revenue online

By Our Reporter

The emergence of online platforms as alternative sources of news and information has created opportunities for business to turn their ideas into money-generating projects. A number of technology entrepreneurs are generating money from their ideas with minimal capital investment.

With the power of online media, many bloggers have emerged as leading authorities on various subject. Some blogs have transformed into leading sources of information commanding millions of hits per day catching the attention of advertisers.

But, one of the challenges that bloggers and budding tech entrepreneurs face is how to use online media to generate revenue from the services they offer.

It was one of key discussion points at the recent Vodafone Power Talks forum. The forum whose theme was “ICT: Endless possibilities for your business” explored ways of how tech entrepreneurs can use the power of online media to revenue for their businesses. Vodafone Power Talks is an initiative of Vodafone Uganda that brings together individuals, and businesses to share knowledge and experiences on the transformative power of ICTs for real empowerment and growth.

Abdu Sekalala is a tech entrepreneur whose ideas transformed him from a computer science student at Makerere University’s School of Computing and Informatics Technology (CIT) in 2012 into the  billionaire he is today. He has developed many applications - his most successful being ‘Wordbook’. As a student at Makerere University, he developed Wordbook, a dictionary application that enables users to find definitions for complex words complete with synonyms and antonyms. He benefited from a partnership with Nokia which gave him a platform to market his product through its Nokia OVI store.

Sekalala admits one of the challenges for technology entrepreneurs is how to grow their business beyond the initial excitement that a new application generates. “The challenge is how to grow the business beyond the one million downloads,” he says.

Stone Atwine, the Founder and CEO of remit.ug, an online platform that enables users to send money and receive money on cellphones in Uganda from anywhere in the world, is optimistic that monetizing online services is increasingly becoming easier. remit.ug uses the existing mobile money infrastructure to enable holders of Debit and Credit cards send money to any registered mobile phone in Uganda.

According to Derrick Sebbaale, Vodafone Uganda’s Chief Technology Officer, the emergence of smart phones and tablets has given many technology entrepreneurs an opportunity to develop mobile applications that can turn them into instant billionaires.

 “As Vodafone we would like to see more Ugandans take advantage of the current opportunities that’s why we offer high speed internet at an affordable cost,” he added.       
 
Vodafone Uganda launched its commercial operations in Uganda on February 9, 2015 offering both voice and 4G LTE high-speed data services. Vodafone’s data plans range from as low as UGX 1,000 for 50MB per day to UGX 124,900 for 10GB per month.