Moving to uplink speeds, South Korea once again led the pack with an average of 18.04Mbps while Ghana tops Africa with an amazing 6.35Mbps and ranked 12th in the world, Rwanda comes in second place again with 2.40Mbps and ranked 25th in the world, Kenya in third place has an average uplink speed of 1.55Mbps and ranked 36th in the world.

Strange how Rwanda tops Kenya with far significantly better speed tests when they buy their broadband service through Kenya. Is internet service cheaper in Rwanda?

NB: In an attempt to keep things as even as possible, Net Index only counted results from nations in which tests were taken from at least 75,000 unique IP addresses.
Based on user test info generated over the past 30 days.

With the UN’s approval of a one-time ivory sale late last year, and a growing demand for ivory in China, its hard not to point fingers at the Chinese for an upsurge in the murdering of elephants. Chinese workers in Kenya are buying ivory tusks that have been hacked from the carcasses of illegally hunted elephants in a banned trade that could run down the herds in one of Kenya’s most famous wildlife reserves.

Recent raids at the main airports of Kenya and Nairobi had two shipments of bloodstained tusks headed for Thailand seized. While the final destination is still not known, these shipments may be part of the growing link between China and elephant poaching.

To top it off, most ivory smugglers arrested at Nairobi’s Jomo Kenyatta International Airport were found to be Chinese nationals.

Also noted is that poaching is on the increase due to the increased demand for ivory in Asia, no matter what the cost.

Wildlife experts in Kenya are reporting a disturbing increase in elephant killings that coincides with the arrival of Chinese workers for massive road projects. Most of the elephants killed have been in proximity to where the Chinese are working.

The Chinese government has denied any connections to the increase in the poaching of the wildlife for the ivory.

It cannot be denied that the Chinese have a hand in the increase in the poaching, all fingers continuously point towards Chinese nationals living/visiting Kenya. Chinese nationals working in Kenya purchase the ivory at local prices, and make a lot when they smuggle the ivory back to China.

How will the Kenyan government react to curb the increased poaching? How will the Kenya Wildlife Services in charge of the parks where the elephants are being killed going to handle the situation? How will they take action against these illegal poachers?

The best description for customer service would be – it is a service offered to customers before, during & after a purchase, and quality control – maintenance of quality of goods & services.

I do not really think Kenyans take these two seriously. Primarily on the third stage of customer service. Once you have purchased an item or are subscribed to a service, you will never get good customer service. I have had this issue with various large “blue chip” companies. If it is not rude customer service, it will be an inefficient customer service that just never gets back to you. And yes all of you know what I am talking about because you have all at some point gone through the same phase of frustration, most probably in the service industry.

I have yet to understand why they fail on customer service, do they not want us to go back to them with our business? Sometime back I walked into a shop to look for something and no one at the shop gave me any attention for almost 15 minutes, this really set me off and I went to the managers office to complain. The manager did nothing about it and asked me to look around for what I was looking for. Now, how would they expect me to ever walk into their business again?

Customer Service really should just be practiced along:-

1. Answer your phone – When someone calls they want to to talk to a real person no some fake recording. Get a decent call forwarding. Or an answering service. Hire staff if you need to and make sure your calls are answered with a smile.
2. Listen to your customers – What is worse than when the person you are complaining to is not really listening to you? Listen to your customer and respond positively.
3. Train your staff to ALWAYS be courteous, helpful & Knowledgeable - Courtesy goes a long way. Get your staff trained on how to handle queries professionally and have them be knowledgeable. Customers do not really like it when they are told ” I do not know, let me get back to you”.
4. Do NOT make promises unless you will keep them – reliability is one of the key elements of customer service, if you say you will have the TV fixed by Friday, have it fixed by Friday. Nothing disappoints a customer more than find out a promise was not fulfilled.
5. Deal with complaints – No one likes complaints, but you are bound to get them at some point. Deal with them, and if you are able to give it an extra bit of attention, you will have a happy customer who will bring their business back to you.

These are just a few of the elements of Customer Service that could have your customers smiling and recommending you to their friends & family.

Many a times you find that a new business has started off really well; great customer service, great products & services or just great restaurant with good food, atmosphere and service. But as time goes things start to fall apart, and quality becomes a thing of the past. Once again all of you out there have definitely at some point or the other experienced this too.

Quality control heavily relies on customer service, this is because if you are listening to your customers and acting upon it, then your products and services are going to meet their expectations. Maintain the quality of your goods and services and continously keep setting the bar for your standards higher and you are always going to have happy customers.

Your views & comments are welcome as always.

Windows 7 is an almost from scratch operating system, not just a UI redo like Vista. Windows 7 is stable, smooth and has even more graphical enhancements, most noticeable is the new task bar, security enhancements and device management make it even safer to use. Microsoft has gone through much pain to make sure that Windows 7 would be compatible with majority of the hardware out there unlike Vista where users had to purchase new hardware.

The installation was fairly simple. The clean installation (meaning I had nothing on the computer) took about 5 clicks to start the installation and 23-25 minutes to complete.

New features are mostly visual.

• Jump lists
• Snap
• Aero
• Peek
• Snap

These visual improvements are extremely useful in their own way and add a real touch of elegance to an otherwise dull Windows environment. They also aid in making usability a whole lot easier. The taskbar stands out the most, you can pin your most used applications onto the task bar with large clear easy to see icons. Mouse over one and all windows associated with that program appear in preview. Mouse over one of those preview panes to reveal an X to close the window. Hover over the preview to show a full-size preview of the program, or click on the window to bring it to the front. This is arguably better than even OS X’s Dock.

Jump lists are another new taskbar improvement that make recently opened documents easier to get to. Right-click/left-click and drag on any program icon pinned to the taskbar to see a list of files that you’ve recently used in that program. In Internet Explorer, this will show recently visited Web sites.

The show desktop icon is now part of the taskbar itself. Mouse over to the right corner. Hovering over the Show Desktop box reveals the desktop, and then hides it when you mouse away. Click on the box to minimize all your programs. It actually reveals the desktop by making all the other windows become transparent.

Snap reinvents resizing open  windows by capability to drag a window’s title bar. Drag a program window to the top of your screen to expand it to full screen. If you want to work in two windows simultaneously, drag one to the left edge and one to the right edge of your screen, and they’ll automatically resize to half the width of your screen. Dragging a program away from the top or sides will return it to its original size.

Windows media player has been improved to, drop any music file or even folders into the music folder in your personal documents, and Windows media player automatically detects them all. There is also a new stream option, you can stream your media library over the internet. Setup for streaming is extremely easy.

Windows 7 feels faster than Windows XP and Vista, after having used Windows 7  RTM for just about three months, it still feels faster for me when launching programs, opening the control panel, and dragging icons, files, and folders around as compared to Windows XP. But keep in mind that the perception and reality might differ based on hardware and usage.

In summary, as said earlier Windows 7 is Windows that actually works. Microsoft have taken the good features that never worked in Vista and sorted them out and made them work, at the same time removing the huge chunk of stuff that was not required. Microsoft had stated their intentions with Windows 7, they are now in a place they can compete with OS X.

What does Windows 7 mean for the Kenyan market? Nothing really! With Windows 7 Ultimate priced at $299 (Upgrade) & $399 (Full) I feel that the Kenyan market will be slow to adapt to Windows 7, only people that will use it will be those who get it with a new PC, general public that are interested in using it will go down the hack/crack lane to get their hands on this lovely OS. I really wish Microsoft could have given the African market a better pricing scheme.

Please share your views and comments.

I did browse through the blog and noticed only 2 blog posts were done, one in June the other in August. I guess this was more of a test and learning phase for the people who will be blogging from the City Council. Now that you have advertised the site, please put it to work. Its a really good initiative to reach out to the people providing them with information and at the same time taking in their views and comments. It also puts into motion the notion of working hand in hand to progress together.

I have seen Town Clerk Philip Kisia, respond constantly in the dailies watchman section, so I am confident that once the blog is in full use he will get to the public in a much easier and efficient way.Through this blog Mr. Kisia feels the general public will now have the power and opportunity to run the city. The Council should use this site to make people aware of all existing and new by-laws.

The council needs to start embracing technology in many other areas to improve its services to the city of Nairobi and also to cut the losses in makes due to improper transactions taking place in various areas and due to improper records.

Meanwhile kudos to Mr. Kisia for making the move and its the beginning to something good once fully in use.

I would love to see what you guys out there have to say about this and welcome your views and comments.