BRCK has always been committed to innovating in emerging markets. Regardless of what we’ve accomplished in the past, we aren’t going to be complacent about the future. And BRCK Labs is how we plan on ensuring that. 

At BRCK, we understand that the technology paradigms that work in other parts of the world do not necessarily apply in Kenya. The hardware needs to be more rugged with power and data backup. The feature set needs to be tweaked.  The costs likely need to be spread out. The user interaction will be from a different understanding, on a different device, and for different reasons than what is presented at CES in Las Vegas.

And over the last five years, BRCK has developed several products specifically designed for the East African context. This includes the original BRCK V1, Kio Kit, PicoBRCK, Magma (LTE), SupaBRCK, and now the Moja Free WiFi platform. This is an incredible achievement, especially considering that many startups in North America develop on a single product over several years.

The Moja platform continues to gain traction with users and advertisers alike. We are now at over half a million monthly users, and those numbers are climbing steadily. We are currently pushing to double the number of Moja buses and are actively expanding into other countries.

BRCK has just finished restructuring internally to position the business so we can handle this network expansion. And, as the platform matures, we are also asking ourselves, “Okay – what’s next?”

We are BRCK Labs; we make cool shit!

Emerging markets such as Kenya present countless opportunities and the challenge is often around deciding which one to pursue And so, as most of BRCK continues to grow the Moja platform, the BRCK Labs team is now tasked to come up with answers that question and pursue those possibilities.

What is cooler than a complete educational solution in a box, you ask?

Or a ruggedized edge computing router providing free WiFi to average Kenyans?

I admit it – those are going to be hard to beat.

But what about a country-wide weather station network that can help farmers across Kenya understand weather patterns? (Currently, Kenya only has 4 or 5 official weather stations and the data is not public.) Or a sensor that can report from extremely remote locations whether a motorcycle (a possible poacher) has driven by? Smart houses are all the rage in North America, maybe BRCK should pursue a device that adds smarts to shelters in refugee camps and slums.  How about a device that allows people to provide energy PAYG services? Or a device that interconnects solar home systems to create a resilient mesh grid owned by the community? Clinic in-a-box, micro-generator, community-based blockchain micro-insurance, the first African array of micro-satellites – the opportunities are incredible!

It is both a dream come true and a fairly big responsibility to head BRCK Labs.  To be a part of the next disruptive technology that will once again get BRCK on the cover of National Geographic or ranked in Time’s Top 50 Genius Companies.  Five years ago, no one would have ever predicted that BRCK would be rolling out free WiFi and innovative LTE services; who can imagine what technology we will develop in the next five years!

2016 proved to be a busy year at BRCK, after we announced our funding round. We started off by getting into our new office, upgrading from the small room we’d used for the previous two years.

There was a blur of events, with some of us speaking at WEF, TED, ITU, and many others. A number of visitors came through, the biggest being Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg.

We had the good fortune to win a number of awards by the year’s close as well:

• Fast Company’s 2016 Innovation by Design Awards
• Sustainia Top 100 2016
• AfricaCom: Best Pan-African Initiative 2016
• ITU: Global SME Award 2016
• African Entrepreneurship Award 2016 Finalist

The real work we do is focused on what our customers need, and we figure that out in two ways. First, we spend a lot of time with them. Second, is we do quite a bit of internal testing, as can be seen from the expedition to Mt. Kenya, testing out some new sensor connectivity products.

Some of this work is done just because it’s good to do, as Juliana and Rufus continued to support the Africa Cancer Foundation work, going all over the country to bring connectivity in their efforts to help with cancer screening.

We get very close and spend a lot of time with the people using our products. The Kio Kit, our education solution has been doing well, but we always strive to make it better. Mark, Alex and Nivi lead much of this work as they visited schools, spending time with teachers and students from Malawi to Tanzania, as well as here in Kenya with our trip to Samburu, spending 7 days with Kiltamany Primary School and working with one of our partners, Liquid Telecom to speed up their overall network (see video below).

Liquid Telecom delivers internet to pupils at remote Kenya primary school from Liquid Telecom Group on Vimeo.

Other partnerships have continued to grow. Intel has become a great partner, where we work with both their chip and education teams on multiple products and projects. The same applies to our local partners in Upande, who we’ve teamed up to do quite a bit of intense water sensor work in a county in Kenya. New partners this year include; Swissport, Illuminum Greenhouses, Norwegian Refugee Council, Close the Gap International, BookAid, and Paygo Energy.

Stuff we make

Kio Kit now in 11 countries
We started shipping the Kio Kit in the beginning of the year. After getting the kits out to a few customers in some pretty hard to reach areas, we realized we needed to harden the case to manage the rough transport that is required to get it to its destination. The hardware and software teams continued to improve both, culminating in what we feel is the best holistic education solution on the market.

Kio Kit to be used to scale up a rapid response to educational needs in emergencies. In partnership with the Norwegian Refugee Council, youth and out of school children in Dadaab refugee camp will use the Kio Kit to improve their literacy and reading skills in English and Somali.

Our customers agree. Not only have they been back for repeat orders, but we’ve shipped Kio Kits to 11 countries around the world – stretching from the Solomon Islands to Mexico, and of course here in East and Southern Africa.

BRCK v1 goes end of life
As we get ready for the next generation of BRCK hardware, we decided to stop orders on the old BRCK hardware. Since the end of 2015 the team has been pushing hard on the next generation core device, using all of the lessons we’ve learned from both the original BRCK and the Kio Kit. The new BRCK will be an enterprise-grade device, more details in the new year.

R&D – continuing the innovation cycle
It turns out that there are a number of companies across Africa who badly need an IoT solution that works in our environment. Something reliable and inexpensive that can connect information from their valuable equipment and assets to the people who make decisions.

The original BRCK box states, “connectivity for people and things”, and what we found out is that the BRCK v1 might technically be able to do some IoT work, but it wasn’t the right device for it. 2016 has seen us go through the early stages of our new PicoBRCK device, an answer to the rugged IoT needs across Africa’s enterprises. While still in development, we expect a final product in 2017.

2017: The Year Ahead

Expect two new products this year from BRCK, as mentioned above. A lot of the hard work put in by the hardware, software, and design teams in 2016 will bear fruit this year as we get to final productization and are able to scale out for customer orders. Much of the effort from the BRCK team will be spent on finalizing and shipping these products, while also supporting and growing the base for Kio Kit.

On the business side of the house, we’re ramping up our supply chain to manage the increasing demand for all products. We’ll continue to extend beyond Kenya into other interesting markets, which always includes East African countries, and many Southern African ones as well. We also have a few surprises up our sleeves which we can’t talk about in public quite yet. 🙂

A huge thank you to our partners who we’re doing so much work with, and of course our families who are such a great support in the ups-and-downs of a young company’s life. A big thanks to our friends at Ushahidi, the iHub, Gearbox and Akirachix who make life in the Nairobi tech ecosystem such a wonderful experience. My biggest thank you goes out to the BRCK team, the ones who you don’t see on stage and who sometimes clock crazy hours to solve problems, run spreadsheets, create new designs, think up new ideas, and who code, solder and respond to our customers day in and day out.

I mentioned BRCK’s “You can do hard things” slogan at the beginning of the Mt Kenya posts.  And it has come up a number of times in other BRCK posts as well. I am going to do my best to relate some of the unique difficulties that we faced over the last few months on one of our projects.  Our upcoming PicoBRCK is meant to be a generic platform for IOT devices.  In our first application we are in the process of installing about 50 of these units across a water distribution network to measure water flow and transmit the data to the cloud.  This will help the municipality get a better visibility of where their water is being used or lost.  (In some cases up to 70% of the treated water is lost.)  This post is a summary of the kinds of challenges we have faced in this project.

1. Typical Hardware Design Issues 

Every engineering endeavor has it’s challenges including technical and logistical.  For example, the sensor we had to interface to for our water project application of the PicoBRCK was completely new to us and the datasheet was less than clear.  So it took a bit of testing to understand how to read the electronic pulses coming from the sensor.  This is a normal part of any hardware design process no matter where it is engineered.  However these kinds of issues are inevitable and can often cause project timelines to slip in otherwise ideal development environments.  The blog at bolt.io (blog.bolt.io) reveals a lot of these nuanced difficulties of doing hardware development in San Francisco.

PicoBRCK deployment kit.

But in addition to these kinds of challenges we have some additional categories that really make life interesting.

2. Classic “Design-in-Emerging-Market” Challenges

As we got ready to push out the PicoBRCK prototypes I realized that I had forgot to order one part for the solar charging circuit.  A part that could have arrived at my desk the next day was completely unavailable locally and so we had to get creative to revamp the charging system for the prototypes.

Also because very little is available locally and customs officials are not used to importing circuit boards, specialized batteries or electronic components, various parts of the PicoBRCK arrived after we were already back from Mt Kenya.  And everything we have to import incurs a monetary cost and a schedule cost.  The cold reality is that the resources we work with simply take twice as long and cost twice as much to get to our office.

These supply chain issues and lack of local resources are the typical challenges that we usually mention when we have to summarize the unique challenges that we face.

Preparing a PicoBRCK for deployment.

3. Structural Challenges

However, there is a final, less well defined but oh so prevalent category.  On a recent trip to install the PicoBRCK prototypes we encountered a number of interesting (read: HIGHLY frustrating) issues which demonstrate these types of challenges beautifully.

First we found that some of our SD cards that we had purchased locally were failing.  We realized that the quality control on parts coming here is not quite what it is in other places; it seems that knock-offs and quasi-legit parts abound.  (I saw this in Tanzania with fake flash drives that reported as 32GB BUT when you tried to actually copy more than say 4GB everything fell apart.)  Emerging markets are a dumping ground for poor quality components.

The RF cable and SD card that gave us so much trouble.

Next we realized that some RF cables that were made for us locally were significantly degrading the cellular performance.  It was not a straight work / not work situation and this issue alone took significant effort on the field to troubleshoot.  Similarly we needed some parts (labels, gaskets) laser cut and there are actually a number of options around Nairobi. But our BRCK staff ended up teaching one laser shop on how to tune their laser and another place burnt their laser trying to cut our gasket.   Even the most basic of elements in a system might be stretching the capability of the local manufacturing chain.

Then, after our initial installation, the units all started discharging indicating that they had been unplugged but the local technicians reported that everything was plugged in and turned on.  I drove the 4 hours up the next day only to find that although everything was plugged in it was not actually getting power.  The power outlet was of such poor quality the contacts were bent out of position.

Troubleshooting network connectivity issues.

Now, three times over the last few weeks we have been flummoxed by the cellular back-haul failing.  Sometimes the whole connection goes down, sometimes just the data portion of the connection fails and other times the behavior of the connection is different.  Just like pulling my hair out to figure out why my circuit is not working, only to discover a bad connection at the power bar, a flaky cellular carrier is very difficult to identify when we are troubleshooting our own code.  (And that is quite an understatement.)  The code for making a connection via a modem is well documented and everyone agrees that it just works; but of course “everyone” is operating in another environment.  As a result we have had to create some incredibly robust GPRS code that catches all these corner cases and accommodates them.  (Huge kudo’s to Reg on this front!)  The most basic infrastructure (in this case cellular and electrical outlets) inhibit the development of more sophisticated infrastructure.

Typical power outlets.

Why we push on

In the early days of BRCK we prided ourselves (and we still do!) at making do with whatever resources we have available.  There are definitely situations where this is an incredibly valuable skill.  But to develop world class solutions one needs the proper tools.  A good friend of mine is luthier and insists on have exactly the right tool for every job he undertakes.  Otherwise he will not be able to live up to his customers expectations.

Some reading this post may, at this point, be feeling sorry for us or assuming that BRCK has no future under such adversity.  However, there is a  larger factor at work which propels us, and numerous other startups, to success.  Our customers are demanding world class solutions.  They know what is possible, they see the opportunity in their market and they know that BRCK has the expertise to overcome the unique challenges that crop up in emerging markets.  So while the challenges are significant they are simply an indicator about how burgeoning the market is.

With the recently announced learning division of BRCK Inc led by Nivi Mukherjee, comes this exciting news about a major agreement signed between BRCK Inc and the venerable Kenyatta University.

Do see the announcement on the Kenyatta University website too.

Kenyatta University, BRCK sign digital literacy MoU

Nairobi, 7 August 2015 –Kenyatta University, a leading Kenyan academic institution and BRCK, a local technology firm based in Nairobi, have today signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to promote digital literacy in the country.

The MoU covers among other areas, joint collaboration in the design and development of innovative technological solutions, research, advocacy and stakeholder engagements, content development and training and capacity building.

Speaking after the signing ceremony, KU Vice Chancellor Prof. Olive Mugenda said the partnership will enable the two organisations to leverage technology as an enabler of delivering educational content and impart knowledge, skills, attitudes and values that will have far-reaching changes in the education sector.

“It is a great pleasure to partner with like-minded organisations such as BRCK with whom we have a shared vision and an appreciation of the role that technology can and should play in the overall education process. Both BRCK and KU are at the forefront of developing and rolling out cutting edge digital solutions that will transform the way education is delivered resulting in an enhanced learning environment that offers competitive advantage in the workforce for the young people of Africa and generations to come,” she said.

The partnership will also firmly establish Kenya as a global hub for digital education, by creating a unique centre where deployments of digital learning solutions, teacher training, curriculum design and device design, manufacturing and logistics knowledge gained will come together leading to a 21st century digital education centre.

The two organisations will leverage each other’s strengths to ensure a successful joint venture delivering uncompromised standards and techniques in teaching and learning. Kenyatta University has a dedicated division of research and a very vibrate innovation and incubation centre which has seen the creation of winning start -up companies in the country.  The institution also has a very strong digital school which was re-engineered recently.

On the other hand, BRCK has an unrivalled ability and capability to develop innovative connectivity technologies making the two partners a formidable, dynamic, forward-thinking team.

As part of the agreement, Kenyatta University will host the manufacturing and assembly plant which will enable the institution to manufacture more tablets. This will result in the creation of jobs for the youth, technology transfer and will also mitigate depreciation of the exchange rate through local production rather than importing the devices.

“We were the first university in the country to use tablets to deliver content to the students in the digital school. The tablets are very interactive with software that makes teaching easy and interactive. Following our partnership with BRCK, we hope to start a manufacturing plant to make cost effective tablets as well as scale up their use to other schools,” Prof. Mugenda added.

This partnership will create the infrastructure and skills not only for the digital learning but design, build and manufacture a myriad of technologies in future creating indigenous digital solutions for a myriad of applications in education and beyond that will be deployed around the continent.

BRCK Board member Juliana Rotich said: “Education has been identified as the common thread that will shape a sustainable future for economies around the globe and digital technology is one of the tools that will provide a leg-up to this new mode of learning. Through this joint venture, we aim to overcome barriers in the sector and offer constructive value through content, connectivity and functionality.”

About Kenyatta University

Kenyatta University is an international university based in Nairobi Kenya. It was established in 1985 through an Act of Parliament. The University’s main campus is located along the Thika Superhighway, 20 kilometers from Nairobi City center with 10 Satellite campuses and Distance and elearning Centers each. It offers over 500 programmes across 17 schools.

By April 2015, the student population was over 70,000 with a staff capacity of over 3,000, both teaching and non-teaching. Its infrastructural set up among other key ranking points has placed the University as the best in the country and regionally.

Kenyatta University has a cutting edge over other universities due to their emphasis on practical hands-on knowledge and the skills training imparted to both students and the larger international community.

Kenyatta University is home to some of the world’s top scholars, researchers and experts in diverse fields. The institution prides itself in providing high quality programmes that attract individuals who wish to be globally competitive. Towards this end, the University has invested heavily in infrastructure and facilities to offer its students the best experience in quality academic programmes under a nurturing environment in which its students learn and grow.

The university has partnered with other key organizations for example Young African Leadership Initiative (YALI) which is supported by the U.S. Government and the African Centre for Transformative and Inclusive Leadership (ACTIL), which is sponsored by the UN WOMEN.

About BRCK 

BRCK is a hardware and services tech company based in Nairobi, Kenya.  As the first company to pursue ground up design and engineering of consumer electronics in East Africa, it has developed a connectivity device also known as BRCK, which is designed to work in harsh environment where electricity is intermittent. BRCK can support up to 40 devices, has an 8-hour battery life when the power is out, and can jump from Ethernet, to WiFi, to 3G, to 4G seamlessly. The initial BRCK units started shipping in July of 2014 and by February of 2015, thousands of BRCK’s had been sold to 54 countries around the world.

BRCK is a spin-off from the world acclaimed Ushahidi, a Kenyan technology company which builds open source software tools and which has received accolades for the impact that its creative and cutting-edge solutions are having around the world.

 Media contacts

Evelyn Njoroge, africapractice [email protected] 0721704712

Sally Kahiu, africapractice [email protected] 0706322488

The BRCK and Gearbox tables at Maker Faire Africa in Johannesburg

We’ve been excited to show up at Maker Faire Africa (old site) in Johannesburg for quite a few months, so actually being there yesterday was a big deal for us. Especially as we had driven 4,400km to be here and it was our primary goal for the journey.

The BRCK table certainly drew our fair share of interest at Maker Faire Africa this year. While Maker Faires elsewhere often feature the likes of fire-breathing dragon statues and other impressive works of art, making in Africa has a slightly different tone. The Faire in Joburg had plenty of amazing artwork – not least of which was a 30-foot tall LED light sculpture made of CNC’ed plywood and steel that looked amazing as the sun went down – but it also featured a leveling device for brick layers to make high-quality masonry easier to achieve. There’s a strong enterprising spirit to many local makers, and lots of them were keen to learn BRCK’s story of starting a hardware company in Africa.

From questions about sourcing components, to finding access to tools, financing, and marketing expertise, makers from across the continent wanted to know BRCK’s story of taking a uniquely African innovation to commercializable product. We held a joint workshop with the Gearbox team on how to take a product design from idea to prototype to production, and showed lots of people how they could leverage their experience in the local market and knowledge of the local context to develop innovative new products that no one else in the world would be capable of making.

While this year’s MFA is a bit smaller than in years past, we were still in great company with people building drones, robots, DIY kids electronics kits, 3D printers and a guy who built his own art car and skinned it in denim. (The best coverage is found on HTXT.africa. There were these guys who had built a small remote-controlled hovercraft who kept sliding it around, as well as a whole space setup for people to 3D print and make their own things.

Prototyping to Manufacturing

MFA is a great event, if for no other reason than that it brings together the engineers and inventors in an area together. There’s a lot of learning and connections made, and then more things happen afterwards. The other thing that happens is that people who are inventing new things are found by media and business people who can help them.

Last year there wasn’t a Maker Faire Africa, so we at BRCK weren’t able to showcase our prototype-level devices. This year, we had one of the more polished items at the event.

There’s a lot that needs to happen between your first hacked together prototypes and a real production run of a new product. This is why I think providing an on-ramp to manufacturing is the obvious place to go next with Africa’s inventors. This is why we’re helping to build Gearbox in Nairobi. We need people, training and machines that can take guys with great ideas and early prototypes, and move them into becoming real businesses.

The foundation is a lot more hardware-based prototyping, whether that’s Fundibots in Uganda, MakerHut in Zambia is trying to foster a community around hardware, and there’s a lot of activity in robotics groups by engineering students in Kenya, South Africa, Egypt and Senegal much of it happening in their respective tech hubs.

[As an aside: read Bankole’s post on “Africa needs an Industrial Revolution“]

The next layer is what we need to plan for next. So, while we’re thinking of Gearbox in Kenya, there are others doing the same in South Africa (who has always had a great manufacturing base). What others are out there? Who else is creating a program, space and bringing together that city’s inventors and engineers to not just create prototypes, but take things to market?

“Shipping BRCKs”, if you say that title out loud, and quickly enough, you’ll know how we feel just about now… 🙂

First shipments: July 17th

That date above is the most important thing that everyone wants to know. Next week we’ll test the BRCK production line, and ship out the first batch of devices. Finally.

It’s been all quiet on the BRCK front since May as we buckled down on two things; first, making sure the quality of the cases was up to par, and second, using this time to keep improving the software. I can tell you that we’re finally there on both items!

We’re all extremely grateful for your patience, and we’re excited to finally get the BRCK into everyone’s hands.

Nairobi Launch

If you’re in Nairobi, we’re having a launch on Wednesday, July 9th at the Sarit Centre. Our partners, Sandstorm, have been kind enough to let us do a “takeover” of their store, and we’ll have BRCKs on display, showing how they can be used for business, personal use, and for connecting to the Internet of Things (IoT).

You’ll have a chance to use BRCKs, a few will walk away with free devices, and you can ask the team any questions you might have.

Come by and see us.

Building BRCK – Assembly from BRCK on Vimeo.

[Some shots from the factory, building BRCK, this week.]

I know that we weren’t naïve in the early days of BRCK thinking that it would be easy to build an amazing hardware device in Kenya. We couldn’t have been. We aren’t rookies. This isn’t our first rodeo – as the expression goes – and yet we still find ourselves months behind on getting our product shipped. Did we miss something obvious in our planning? Were we unrealistic about our capabilities and capacities? Did we simply have some incredible misfortune?

Honestly, the answer to all of these – at least on some level – is yes.

Sure, Reg and I have experience in bringing hardware products to market. We know the pitfalls of having injection-molded plastics made in China not looking correct. We’ve made small mistakes on board layouts that required last minute hand fixes and reworks. We’ve had suppliers completely drop the ball in meeting their delivery commitments. These things are absolutely normal and expected in designing hardware products – particularly if your entire company sits in the same room as the soldering irons and oscilloscopes.

On the software side, Emmanuel, Wesley, Erik, and I have all brought software systems and products to market. We have sat in the meetings were we suddenly realized that a critical feature/function had been completely overlooked. Participated in the user testing sessions where the look of bewilderment on the face of the tester causes your heart to sink into your stomach. Pushed ourselves through “highly productive” 3 am coding sessions that take hours the next morning to unravel in the clearer light of day. This is the reality of startup software engineering in the age of Android and Flappy Birds – actually I think it has always been this way.

We know these realities. They aren’t foreign or unexpected to us. And yet with every delay or misfortunate turn of events we still all stare at each other in shock and disbelief. We expect things to be different at BRCK. We see ourselves as a rugged and tenacious group of creatures that have our skin thickened by the hot African sun and our eyes steeled to navigating the rocky road ahead. It’s who we are. When we adventured out on BRCK Expedition Turkana we should have seen that this was a harbinger of things to come: trucks breaking down, satellite receivers mysteriously running out of credit, routes getting flooded, and the unlimited supply of things-not-going-as-planned. Sure we got frustrated. At each other. At the circumstances. It’s a natural human reaction. But we never gave up. We didn’t even entertain it in conversation. We all dug deep into the beautiful resource called human spirit and plowed ahead until we reached our goal. Sure we’ll do some things differently on the next expedition, we are fools to not learn from our experiences, but we know that the only thing that really matters in setting off is our collective resolve to persevere and push on towards the mark.

Which brings me back to BRCK. Earlier this week we finally received our delayed set of production plastics from China. They were awful. They looked nothing like the first articles that had previously been sent through or the amazing cast cases that were molded from 3D prints. As we sat and stared at the disfigured hunks of plastic that were meant to hold the product of months of hard work our hearts – once again – sank and we stared at each other in disbelief. Although we briefly entertained proceeding with production using the “ugly” cases, we know that we are flag bearers for engineering and designing products the right way in Africa. While we live in a culture where the standard of craftsmanship is often “good enough” we must be an example for something much higher.

So we are sadly forced to delay our production one more time and ask for patience. Patience from our customers who are eager to get their hands on a BRCK. Patience from our team as we continue the sprint to get BRCK to market. Patience from our backers who have shown so much faith in our vision and the potential for BRCK to be a game changer in the market. It’s a big ask on our part and we don’t make it lightly. We won’t sit back during this time and simply wait. There are many things that we know we can do better on the software and usability side of BRCK. We will continue pushing ahead on making the user experience more intuitive and useful. We will take our handful of ugly BRCKs and put them to the test in as many challenging situations as we can find. We will do everything within our abilities to use this misfortune as an opportunity for making BRCKs better. As painful as it is for us to be in this situation today, I know that at the end of this journey we will look back and be grateful for the additional opportunity to ensure that BRCK really lives up to its full potential as a world-class hardware device from Kenya.

We’re working with our case manufacturer to get a new timeline for delivery, which we’re expecting to be no more than a few weeks.