Saya Mobile’s co-founder and CEO Robert Lamptey says they are set to end the use of SMS in Africa and globally with their free cross-platform chat service.
The founders now expect their new application to be used by more than 50 million devices by 2014.
Saya Mobile, a Ghanaian mobile software start-up developed for high-end mobile telephony markets, is a free cross-platform chat application for group and individual messaging via phone and Facebook contacts.
“We realized how much people believed in our app and we vowed to work on and improve it. We are also planning to launch Saya Mobile across Africa and not just here in West Africa”, Said Lamptey.
Lamptey says that Saya has three levels of chats allowing one to chat with their phone contacts, Facebook friends and location-based chat.
Their StreetChat can also put people together in one chatroom based on their location making it a virtual meeting to deal just with anything. It can be used by institutions, agencies or individuals looking to discuss issues.
Lamptey hopes that as mobile Internet in Africa scales to heights, thousands would turn to Saya for its simple free mobile chat instead of sending charged SMS.
The availability of data, increase of smart phone shipping into Africa and the growth of local mobile content will boost the use of the more intuitive and fun Saya instead of SMS, he hopes.
Saya is currently available on J2ME, Blackberry, Android, and iOS.
Eight days after the app’s launch, over 56,000 messages had been sent on Saya. 18 days later, more than 20,000 downloads and 400,000 messages were sent using Saya.
Lamptey and Badu Boahen founded the Saya Mobile in January 2010. The chat was launched on February 20, 2012 in Ghana.
