Ghana-made @Nandimobile's #Gripeline wins best business at Launch Conference

News broke Friday of NandiMobile, a Ghana-made start-up from the MEST Incubator winning a“Best Business” award at the LAUNCH conference in San Francisco. I was so excited about this, especially from my friends Edward Tagoe Twitter: @ttaaggooee, Anne Amuzu and Kwame Pocho. Edward had told me he was coming for a conference in San Francisco earlier this month, turns out it was a conference aligned with a competition of almost 100 Silicon Valley start-ups! For a Ghanaian-made product to win this international award in the Bay Area of all places, it is a monumental achievement. Mind you, this is not Ghanaians living the US or Ghanaian-Americans, these are Ghanaians who've been schooled in Ghana, worked and learnt in Ghana and built their products/software in Ghana. Like Jorn Lyseggen (CEO of the Meltwater Group) said, "software can be made ANYWHERE!" Congrats to @Nandimobile group.

I have already blogged about the Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology (MEST). It's a school set up by the Meltwater Group to train software entrepreneurs (for 2 years). Read about the start-ups that have come out of MEST so far. Aside producing capable software entrepreneurs, they have been supporting Barcamp Ghana from the get-go.

Nandimobile won the award for their product Gripeline. From their website,
Gripeline is a customer support service that allows customers of companies to send feedback, comments and questions to companies using their mobile devices. It also provides an avenue for representatives from the companies to respond from an online computer interface in real time with an answer or response. The messages can be sent by end-users via SMS or WAP channels. These messages are aggregated and delivered to the companies’ online accounts which can then be accessed by customer service personnel(s) in charge. The panel enables the company to monitor, analyze and respond to the messages.


See Nandimobile's pitch


Watch the Awards ceremony


The LAUNCH conference is a platform for new start-ups to showcase their products and services to an ‘early adopters’ community. The conference also provides opportunities for already launched companies to showcase new products. This year, from the 23rd – 24th of February 2011, the conference hosted close to 100 start-ups from around the world, showcasing their ideas and products at the San Francisco Design Center.I was nervous myself and felt my heart beat a little faster when they walked on stage, but throughout their presentation they both showed a lot of confidence and made all of us proud!

Congrats to Nandimobile and the whole MEST team!

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