GhanaBee.com Launches - News On Your Mobile Phone

Sunday, September 2nd, 2007
by George Appiah

Ghana Bee is a new web service that provides a mobile-friendly access to aggregated news from major Ghanaian media houses. As far as I can tell, this is the first Ghanaian website built solely for mobile devices.

While all the 4 mobile phone operators in Ghana now support some form of Internet access, I’ll be the first to admit that there are very few local websites that are usable at all on mobile devices. And when you’re paying by the kilobyte, as is the case with GPRS/EDGE rates in Ghana, you have no room to experiment with poorly designed websites.

In its present form, Ghana Bee simply displays a sanitized excerpt of content collected from several Ghanaian news sites via RSS, and provides a link to the original source. Other features and are in the works, and SMS integration is also planned.

The website was built by Yours Truly overnight, with much of the time going into Stumbling/Facebooking/Twittering/JTVing and very little actually going into development of the site.

Here are screenshots of the site, as seen on Nokia N70 and Sony Ericson K750. Interestingly, I don’t even currently have an Internet-ready cellphone. These screenshots were taken with cellphone emulators. So go give Ghana Bee a try and send me your screenshots, if you can.