App that delivers directory-like capabilities

Apptuned Managing Director James Owino (left) and CEO Davies Ray Amayo. [Photo: Beverlyne Musili/Standard]

Most people often do not have emergency contacts for whenever a need arises and in this age of technology, physical directories just will not suffice.

A young group of entrepreneurial techies have now come together to solve this problem and make life easier for everyone by putting emergency numbers as well as government and business contacts in the palm of your hand.

Apptuned Limited, a software development company founded in 2014, recently launched a mobile application dubbed the Kenyan Directory after realising just how difficult it was for Kenyans to access not only emergency contacts to police stations, fire stations and hospitals among others but also contacts to government and public agencies.

According to the firm’s Managing Director James Owino, the app also has a web-based version that compiles contact details to all emergency services and public offices for the entire country.

“We did a survey and found that most people have numbers of their relatives or friends as their emergency contacts. It is good to have such only when these people are qualified to deal with some issues such as medical and are always within reach. But we realised that this is not always the case.

We, therefore, decided to develop this app so that you can always get emergency contacts whenever you need them wherever you are,” he said.

The app has an up-to-date contact management system that has offline capability which comes in handy for those living in areas with network issues.

The mobile application is the second part of the system designed by Apptuned with the web application being the main part.

“Given that the mobile app is free for download by android users, the company will earn from the web app which will include featured advertisements from different companies at a fee,” explained CEO Davies Amayo.

So far, the products’ reception in the market has been good. They hope to expand to the East African region and hopefully attract partners that can help them to expand.

“We have had several versions of the app before launching this one. We continuously compiled suggestions to make sure that the final version was something the consumers wanted and are happy about the response. We will, however, continue to make it better,” Amayo said.