Lula: a device that enables to sell prepaid mobile services in South Africa
Because of the risk of fraud
and theft, isolation of some regions , it is difficult to distribute products like vouchers or prepaid
services. Nomanini, a startup based in South Africa, built a
device that enables local entrepreneurs to sell prepaid mobile services in
their communities. The Lula (which means “anytime” in colloquial Zulu), is a
portable voucher sales terminal that is used
on-the-go by people ranging from taxi drivers to street vendors. It generates and prints codes which people purchase to add minutes to their mobile phones.
Nomanini runs on Google App Engine. To make a sale, you press a few buttons, App Engine processes the request, and the voucher prints.
on-the-go by people ranging from taxi drivers to street vendors. It generates and prints codes which people purchase to add minutes to their mobile phones.
Nomanini runs on Google App Engine. To make a sale, you press a few buttons, App Engine processes the request, and the voucher prints.
During November 2012, more or less 40,000 people bought airtime through the Lula, and Nomanini hopes to grow this number to 1 million per month in 2013.
Technologies or Services
used by Nomanini to run Lula: High Replication
Datastore, NDB and Memcache ; Extensive use of push Task Queues ; Blobstore for storing file records ; Logs API, Mail API and XMPP for reporting and real-time notification of
issues to our development team ; URL Fetch API to link to third-party API’s such as sending
SMS’s and integration to mobile networks for airtime voucher purchase ; Google Cloud Storage and Google BigQuery for mining our data for interesting trends and ProdEagle for real time
metrics visualization.(image from nomanini)
The company was founded in 2010 to
solve the problem of distributing mobile prepaid services in townships
and rural areas. The simple “mini-business” concept was born with the
design on the portable lula transaction terminal.
