Beloved friends, to keep you up-dated we have made a small summary report from our week end, the so called birth day weekend. It has been totally fab!

Friday 8 September
To purchase things via a mobile phone is called mobile commerce or just m-commerce in short. Today we have made our first shaky steps in this field. We had a splendid idea, to pay for some sodas by transferring credits/air time from our pre-paid mobile SIM-card. We chose a seller with whom we had been speaking before, and made him such a proposal, the guy didn’t even have a mobile phone so he then went and borrowed one from a friend. This was followed by tough negotiations and bargaining in Kiswahili, English and brochure language in order to convince them about the feasibility of such a service. We settled for a deal, got the phone number and transferred the money. The sending was successful but no money showed up on the seller side. We then tried to call the number they gave us and an Indian lad answered, we had transferred Tsh 1000 to the wrong person! The phone owner had given us the wrong number mixing up 6 with 9, hey they are rather similar?! This ended up with the phone owner paying for the soda with his “own” money!! This gave us a rather bad conscience, so we ended up paying the phone owner for his expenses.
This gave us the idea of a travesty on the old Jobo slogan: “M-commerce when profit is not your primary objective” We hope you get an inner picture of this hilarious scene!

This was exactly what we needed to get in the right mode for over nightly adventures later on. It was Jonas bday a perfect day to look deeper into Dar es Salaams nightlife, after spending one hour in a cab, travelling a normally 15 min ride, we ended up at a Ethiopian place, Addis in Dar. The food was both delicious and interesting; of course they served pancakes, just in another way. After this huge and enormously filling meal we head on to a place called Q-bar. Our academic supervisor had sent us with a greeting to his old schoolmate David who was supposed to run this place. Luckily he did and we hanged around there until 4 or so when we decided to head back and wake up the guard at our hostel so he could let us in. In alles it was a fairly good evening, almost very good!

Saturday 9 September
Since the dalla-dallas started running at six we were happy that we slept till nine. A little lazy and slow moving we managed to get us out to the resort we spend last week at, nothing spectacular, just the ordinary white sand, blue sky and a chair to rest in. There we met some nice Norwegian girls, who were doing there exchange at the local university. And along with us they preferred the beaches at the weekends.

Sunday 10 September
After an early evening last night, the adventure of today was… a beach and some swimming. We took a boat out to a super nice resort, to a cost of almost nothing. Out there we rented snorkelling equipment and went out and looked on the reef and the wreck outside. For Lars it was his debut with these things and we quote: “feels like swimming in an aquarium” the scenes were just lovely, even thou the visibility were not at top rate. Our new friend Alan, who works in Dar, guided us around the place and we enjoyed some freshly caught and grilled fish. Let’s put it like this, an ideal ending on a great weekend.

Now we are shaping up for a new week with hopefully and most probably just as much interesting and spectacular as the last. Some points from the next weeks’ calendar are; get documents, attend some meetings, further improvements of the m-commerce platform, :-), and much more.

With childish smiles on there faces,
Jonas and Lars

Live!

ps. in this moment Jonas is discussing the introduction of m-commerce in tanzania with a businessman at the internet cafe. And to be honest, these kind of discussions appere all the time. It makes so much fun, meeting strangers that are truley interested in our topic and also an eloge for the Tanzinian people and their way to treet foreginers. And yes some people see us as walking purses, but not everyone.