KIRUSA CAPTURES THE IMAGINATION OF GHANAIANS WITH CELEB CONNECT SERVICE
Partners with Makeba to bring top African celebrities on board
Accra, Ghana, New York, USA, and Cape Town, South Africa, Wednesday, 20th November, 2013: Kirusa, the leader in voice and social media solutions for mobile users in emerging markets, announced a partnership with Makeba Creates, a leading celebrity agency in Ghana. This partnership enables top celebrities like John Dumelo, Efya, Mzbel, Reggie Rockstone, amongst others, to more personally engage with their fans in their own voice.
Using Celeb Connect, celebrities can share their daily lives, thoughts, and emotions in their own voice with their fans. Participating stars can call or use smartphones to leave messages. These messages are then delivered immediately to fans, who can listen to what is happening in their most cherished celebrities’ lives, in the celebrities’ own voice, which creates a “Voice Twitter”-like experience. Ghanaian subscribers can see messages, call, and listen to what’s happening over the phone, or on the web at vobolo.com, and can share with their friends on Facebook and Twitter. Further, the fans get an opportunity to speak and engage with the celebrities on-line and off-line.
The Celeb Connect service, powered by Kirusa’s Vobolo™ social media platform, is currently available to mobile subscribers of Airtel, Tigo, and Vodafone in Ghana. Airtel and Vodafone users can dial 2510 and Tigo users can dial 1001 from their mobile and subscribe to the service.
There is a huge interest amongst Ghanaian people to listen to the daily happenings in the lives of their stars, with a whopping 860,000 people following John Dumelo, Efya, Mzbel, and Reggie Rockstone in the first few months. To share a perspective, these stars have 240,000+ followers on Twitter and 700,000+ on Facebook.
Makeba Boateng, CEO, Makeba Creates Ltd., states, “Kirusa’s Vobolo platform is unrivaled in its state-of-the-art technology and innovative solutions. Our proficiency in our respective fields delivers a privileged service to the fans. Connecting celebrities to consumers is an inevitable development of the digital age. It has been happening online for many years now and using mobile voice is an added dimension.”
Mrinal Roy, COO & Executive Director, Airtel Ghana, adds, “We have seen a tremendous response to the Celeb Connect service on Kirusa’s Vobolo platform. Our subscribers all over the country are excited at this new offering where they get an opportunity to hear their favorite stars; and also an opportunity to speak with them.
Inderpal Singh Mumick, Founder and CEO of Kirusa, shared his views on the collaboration and its overwhelming success. “Bringing together our respective expertise, we, along with Makeba, aimed at bringing people closer to the celebrities they admire, and to empower them to speak to the role models they idolize on screen. The response from celebrities and from Ghanaian people has been excellent. We are in talks with religious, sports and political celebrities to present them on the Vobolo platform, and also intend to take the Vobolo platform to other African countries.”
“The Celeb Connect service is not only a dream come true for the fans, but also for us celebrities to connect with their fans. By providing a “Voice-Twitter”-like experience, Vobolo has brought us one more step closer to our fans, in a way not possible with any of the other social media platforms. It is interesting to know how one’s daily routine, feelings and emotions affect one’s fans. They are a focal point of our celebrity existence. It is important for us to know their expectations from us. Kirusa has brought in an exquisite experience to the lives of Ghanaians, and Vobolo is a fantastic platform to stay connected with them”, added actor John Dumelo.
About Airtel in Africa
Airtel is driven by the vision of providing affordable and innovative mobile services to all. Airtel has 17 operations in Africa: Burkina Faso, Chad, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Republic of the Congo, Gabon, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Madagascar, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia. Airtel International is a Bharti Airtel company. For more information, please visit www.airtel.com, or ‘like’ the Airtel Ghana Facebook page via www.facebook.com/airtelgh or follow us on Twitter via the handle@airtelghana
About Bharti Airtel
Bharti Airtel Limited is a leading integrated telecommunications company with operations in 20 countries across Asia and Africa. Headquartered in New Delhi, India, the company ranks amongst the top 5 mobile service providers globally in terms of subscribers. In India, the company’s product offerings include 2G, 3G and 4G services, fixed line, high speed broadband through DSL, IPTV, DTH, enterprise services including national & international long distance services to carriers. In the rest of the geographies, it offers 2G, 3G mobile services. Bharti Airtel had over 275 million customers across its operations at the end of July 2013. To know more please visit, www.airtel.com
About Makeba Creates
Makeba Creates is a Ghana based celebrity agent. Established in 2001, Makeba Creates PR (MCPR) is a Public Relations Consultancy brand based in Accra/Ghana. MCPR focuses on its own self products as well as customized strategic campaigns in the areas of Business, Management, Fashion, Entertainment, Special Events and the Arts. For more information visit: www.makebacreates.com
About John Dumelo
John Dumelo is a leading African movie actor and entrepreneur. He has acted in over 80 movies with elites like Ramsey Noah, Omotola Jalade Ekeinde, Ini Edo, Jackie Appiah, Majid Michel and Nadia Buari. John recently won 2013 Nollywood Entertainment Awards Pan African Actor of the Year in USA , Africa’s Most Outstanding Actor 2011 at the Afro Australian Movies and Music Awards in Dec 2011 in Australia. He also won the Best African Actor Award at the African Entertainment Awards in April 2012 in Malaysia amongst several awards. In 2011, he did a Hollywood movie with Hollywood star Kimberly Ellis in Ghana and recently this year starred in a movie titled One night in Vegas alongside Hollywood actor Jimmy Jean Louis. As an entrepreneur Dumelo owns several businesses including a film school, a hotel and a real estate company. He has also positively affected over 1500 school children with educational materials across West Africa through his charity, the John Dumelo foundation.
About Kirusa
Kirusa is the leader in voice and social media solutions for emerging markets that enable mobile subscribers to “Have A Voice!” and share their stories with their family and friends across the globe. Kirusa’s solutions include the hugely successful Kirusa Voice SMS service, the world’s most intelligent voice SMS solution, used monthly by over 80 million mobile users in four continents. Kirusa has integrated its Voice SMS platforms deployed at carriers around the world into an Exchange Service to provide interoperability, which when combined with its cloud-based Vobolo social media platform, culminates in the extraordinary InstaVoice app for voicing. Kirusa is pioneering a suite of smartphone and social media applications that facilitate mobile subscribers in every corner of the world to connect with each other, as well as their favorite celebrities, and participate in TV polls and brand campaigns using the power of voice. Kirusa’s platform provides open APIs to enable third parties to offer mobile applications. Kirusa solutions are built on its patented technology, and its highly reliable and scalable open multimodal platform, which processes over one billion events a month. Kirusa has been recognized as one of top 100 technology companies by Silicon India, and one of top 25 emerging technology companies by Smart Techie magazine. Headquartered in New Jersey and led by an experienced team of wireless telecom executives and technologists, Kirusa has offices in four continents. ‘Kirusa Voice SMS’, Vobolo, and InstaVoice are registered trademarks of Kirusa, Inc. For more information visit: www.kirusa.com.
For further inquiries, please contact
For Airtel Ghana
Donald Gwira
Head Corporate Communications and External Affairs
Airtel Ghana
[email protected]
For Makeba Creates
Makeba Boateng
CEO
Tel: +233 (0)244 386 860
E-mail：[email protected]
For Kirusa
Alchemy Corporate Communications
Anju Makin
Tel: +91-9810170135
E-mail：[email protected]
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