Kerawa Coder on Twitter

We’ve just created a new twitter account for kerawa.com. This twitter account contains mainly the ramblings of a Kerawa developer, which in occurrence happens to be Fee.
Follow us here:

http://www.twitter.com/kerawa_coder

Meanwhile you can continue getting Kerawa.com twitter updates via: http://twitter.com/kerawa

The African classifieds business

This is a first of a series of posts about what I think of the African classifieds business.
Disclaimer: I will be very biased in my opinions, because of my interest in Kerawa.com.

I haven’t been on the internet since childhood. Normal, I am an African in Africa. I may even say I am around 6 years old online. Pretty old , huh ? If I bring this up, it’s because I am trying to recollect how the local African internet sites were when I discovered the internet. I do remember that in my early years online, most top local websites were newspapers. These online newspapers were particularly relevant because most Africans in the Diaspora wanted to know what’s going on in their respective homelands.

It turns out most African locals weren’t that interested in these online newspapers. The locals who did visit those news sites may have done this because of lack of other local content. Well, that was before classifieds came along.

The top three useful killer apps on the internet are: Email, Search, and Classifieds. Period. I won’t bother justifying this claim. The main difference between online clasifieds and the rest is that it is very easy for an email and search solution to grow internationally. However the online classifieds business is a complex beast which we are only beginning to tame.

I use the term online classifieds very loosely here to refer to any web property that permits individuals to submit ads which the public can view, and expect to get responses. Some of these sites may be classifieds, but don’t define themselves as one. For example, a forum may be considered a classifieds if its users start heavily using the forum as a medium for posting ads. Some Yahoo Groups could be considered online classifieds solutions. A dating site is just a much specialised classifieds solution.

Scarcity in dedicated classifieds solutions has caused our usual ingenious African selves to use services like forums, mails, and social networks as a means of posting ads. Do not get me wrong. These media really do provide a plausible way of posting ads. But nothing beats a dedicated online classifieds solution.

Some Africans are seeing this need and are participating in creating really helpful online local classifieds. We too have done our part. In fact, we’ve done more than our part. We’ve created the African online classifieds. We’ve created Kerawa.com.

Fee, from Kerawa.com.

Kerawa stats 2008: Top 10 kerawa.com cities

These are the top 10 Kerawa cities with the highest number of valid ads posted so far in 2008.

Kerawa Stats 2008: Top 10 Kerawa countries

Since we are into statistics this end of the year, we are adding the statistics on the 10 countries with the most ads posted on Kerawa.com from 01/01/2008 to 07/12/2008.

PS:  We had to abandon the « International » country on kerawa.com right after a few months because it was becoming too spammy, and hard to manage.

As noted by WhiteAfrican here, we are spread across Africa, but still lacking in activity in East Africa. This has to remedied in 2009.

Kerawa Stats 2008: Number of valid ads posted per day

Another set of statistics on Kerawa.com. After statistics on Kerawa traffic, here are the statistics on the number of ads posted per day on kerawa.com from 01/01/2008 to 07/12/2008.

Kerawa.com, profiled by WhiteAfrican

Another profile of Kerawa.com on the blogosphere.
This time from WhiteAfrican @ http://whiteafrican.com/2008/12/13/aiming-at-an-african-classifieds-marketplace/

Kerawa.com Statistics (Preview)

Internally, we’ve been planning on releasing Kerawa.com statistics before the end of the year. We love statistics. And so do you 🙂 .

We will commence with traffic related statistics, the source being our Google Analytics report from 01/01/2008 to 06/12/2008.

Internal Challenge:

Having obtained an overview of how we are faring thus far, we’ve set up a new challenge for ourselves :   Reach 200 000 visits and 1 000 000 pageviews before the end of the year.

That means we have to gain the following :

• 200 000 – 184 880 = 15 120 visits
• 1 000 000 – 938 675 = 61 325 pageviews

All in about 24 days !!! Our report at the end of the year will tell us if we’ve reached this goal.

What cometh in the full report at the end of the year ?:

This report was just a preview, and may not be as detailed as desired. There are many unanswered questions that may be popping in your minds right now. You may equally want to know how many ads are being posted every day and other statistics that Google Analytics might not necessarily have an answer for.  By the end of the year, we would have given some more detailed analytics on our online classifieds for Africa .

We are strong believers that the classifieds business is a local business.  Global statistics may not necessarily portray Kerawa.com activity level in select African countries.  We hope to publish statistics for  Cameroon,  South Africa, Ghana ,  Senegal ,  Ivory Coast ,  Nigeria,  Algeria,  Morocco , … in the coming days.

With so much data in our hands, this could be both fun and revealing.

Kerawa.com et le myriagone: une histoire d’amour?

Kerawa.com

Le mot du jour est « Myriagone« ; un myriagone est un polygone à 10.000 cotés.

Qu’est-ce qu’il y’a de si particulier avec le nombre 10.000 ?

1. En anatomie, chaque neurone humain est estimé être connecté à 10.000 autres neurones
2. En informatique, le problème de l’an 10.000 est le nom des bugs potentiels qui surviendront quand on écrira les dates avec 5 chiffres

Tout ceci est sur Wikipédia, sur l’article relatif au nombre 10.000 .

Mais, ce que vous ne trouverez pas sur Wikipedia, c’est le fait que le 20 Octobre 2008, Kerawa.com a dépassé la barre des 10.000 annonces !
Kerawa.com héberge les annonces africaines depuis plusieurs mois maintenant, en étant présent en Algérie, au Cameroun, au Ghana,etc..
Depuis le lancement, nous avons aidé 10.000 annonces à trouver des candidats intéressés.

Ceci prouve une chose: Kerawa.com est en croissance, et cette croissance va durer.

Merci de votre confiance à tous, rien ne serait possible sans votre participation à tous.
Kerawa.com

Kerawa Myriagon

Word of the day: Myriagon.
A myriagon is a polygon with 10 000 sides.

What could be so peculiar about the number 10 000 ?

• In anatomy, each neuron in the human brain is estimated to connect to 10,000 others.
• In computers, NASA is expected to build a 10,000-processor Linux computer (it is actually a 10,240-processor)
• In geography, Land of 10,000 Lakes is the nickname for the state of Minnesota.
• In orders of magnitude (speed), the speed of a fast neutron is 10,000 km/s
• In scientific units, 10,000 square metres is one hectare
• In zoology, there are approximately 10,000 species of birds.
• In software engineering, the Year 10,000 problem is the collective name for all potential software bugs that will emerge as the need to express years with five digits arises.
• …

And many others found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_thousand

Kerawa.com

What you won’t find on that Wikipedia article is that on the 20th October 2008, Kerawa.com reached, and crossed its 10 000 ads milestone.
Kerawa.com has been serving free classified ads in Africa for many months now. Be it Ghana, Cameroon, Algeria, Morocco, and others. Since the launch of Kerawa.com, we’ve helped 10 000 ads find the right public.

I guess this proves one thing:
Kerawa.com is growing, and is here to stay.

This would have been impossible without your participation. For that we say “Thank you”.

Introducing Kerawa Gamma

Kerawa Gamma will be launched on the 20th August 2008.

Kerawa Gamma is the sequel to Kerawa Beta, which we launched in March 2008.

Just as Kerawa Beta came to ameliorate our users’ classifieds experience, Kerawa Gamma has come to fix some problems identified in Kerawa Beta, and improve on some other areas. Mind you, this is not just a small bug fix. No, it is a total redesign of user interaction at Kerawa.com.

We’ve matured since the launch of Kerawa Beta. We’ve understood better the market we are entering in. We continue to serve more and more classifieds in various African countries at an increasing rate. Our growth has forced us to adopt some new strategies. The improvements in Kerawa Gamma are focused on improving the user experience, permitting users find what they are looking for on Kerawa, minimize the risk of error, harness the power of the community to help us fight scam, spam and other forms of abuse on the system.

You thought Kerawa Beta was cool? Just wait till you we launch the new Kerawa Gamma.

Below is a screenshot of our new Kerawa Gamma homepage:

Système de vérification des emails

Face à la recrudescence des erreurs de frappe dans les mails, plusieurs annonces nous sont retournées en erreur par les grands domaines de mails (Yahoo, hotmail, Gmail, Mailbox, AOL, Camnet, etc..)
Il est probable que des utilisateurs de Kerawa.com orthographient mal leurs adresses emails, et les mails de vérification ne leur parviennent donc pas.

Cela engendre des créations inopportunes d’annonces dans notre base de données, annonces que ne seront jamais mises en ligne. Bref, une création inutile d’entropie! Et nous luttons contre toute augmentation de l’entropie de l’univers, sauf si cela est strictement nécessaire.

Pour diminuer ces créations inopportunes, nous allons bientôt mettre en place une double saisie de l’adresse mail. L’annonce ne sera créée et validée que si les 2 adresses saisies sont strictement les mêmes.

Nous pensons diminuer significativement les erreurs de cette façon.
Nous imaginons que la double saisie est une tâche de plus pour tous nos utilisateurs, mais le système n’en sera que globalement meilleur ainsi.

En cas de problème avec cette double saisie, n’hésitez pas à nous contacter.

Celebrating 5000 ads served

 Oof !!! Already 5000. Already 5000 stuffs that have been kerawised.

 Right now there are around 1400 being served on Kerawa. The majority has long expired, while some were scams and spam.

 The lucky ad number 5000 is from Nigeria. Someone is selling his Ford Explorer at N 1,800,000  . We will feature this ad on Kerawa.com Nigeria.

 It reminds me of the very beginnings of Kerawa, where we said we will do 1000 ads in 20 days. Now we are 5000 ads old. We are no more that young 🙂

Kerawa Introductions

Welcome to the official Kerawa blog where we will try to cover the latest inside news on Kerawa.com, the free online African classifieds. And like all first « official » posts, we will start with some introductions.

Kerawa reviewed by Timbuktu Chronicles

Your website, Kerawa.com has been reviewed by Emeka Okafor on his cool blog Timbuktu Chronicles.

The article is here, and we wish to thank him for his article.

It will help us get our service well-known in anglophon parts of Africa.

Kerawa lance son offre « Partenaires »

ça faisait un moment que nous y réfléchissions, désormais, c’est sur les rails.

Kerawa.com lance son offre « Partenaires« , un service qui permet aux PME/PMI de bénéficier des avantages de l’Internet sans les inconvénients de la gestion d’un portail web.

Grâce à cette offre, les entreprises pourront bénéficier:

• d’une page personnalisée pour la présentation de leurs annonces
• d’un label « annonce validée » symbolisée par une étoile à côté de l’annonce dans le listing
• d’une assistance à la maintenance des annonces qui ne sont plus valables
• d’un suivi personnalisé

Nos 2 premiers partenaires sont l’agence immobilière LOGCAM et le portail d’informations 20mai.net.