Building Analytics and Data Science at A Start-Up, by Kathleen Siminyu, Head of Data Science at Africa's Talking
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Africa's Talking is a pan-African PaaS company based in Nairobi, providing API solutions for SMS, voice, and payments across multiple countries. Their data science team focuses on analytics and utilizes a variety of tools and architectures to enhance their service offerings. Key lessons learned include the importance of having a dedicated data team and managing organizational expectations.
Building Analytics and Data Science at A Start-Up, by Kathleen Siminyu, Head of Data Science at Africa's Talking
- 1. www.africastalking.com 1The Business of APIs Building Analytics and Data Science at a Startup
- 2. Kathleen Siminyu Head of Data Science ● Mathematics and Computer Science background ● Self-taught data scientist ● Co-organiser of Nairobi WiMLDS (We turn 2 on Dec. 8th!) ● Organising Committee Deep Learning Indaba ● Head of Data Science at Africa’s Talking
- 3. www.africastalking.com 3The Business of APIs Africa’s Talking is a Pan-African, Platform as a Service (PaaS) company based in Nairobi, Kenya. Our world-class infrastructure is created for developers and relied upon by businesses. We avail the complexity of SMS, VOICE, USSD, AIRTIME & PAYMENTS via simple API calls and at a fraction of the cost. ABOUT AFRICA’S TALKING One Continent. Unified platform. Unimaginable possibilities.
- 4. www.africastalking.com 4The Business of APIs By The Numbers Active Countries Planned Countries 2018 Nigeria Ethiopia Côte d’Ivoire Kenya Botswana Tanzania Uganda Rwanda Malawi Zimbabwe Zambia DR Congo Sierra Leone Senegal Gambia Ghana South Africa Mauritius 11 Countries 20K+ Developers 30M+ API Calls Daily 5K+ Businesses
- 5. www.africastalking.com 5The Business of APIs Airtime Pinless airtime top-up from 1 wallet across 4 markets SMS 2-Way Bulk and Premium SMS APIs across 6 Markets Payments One wallet for all your mobile, bank and card payments across 5 Markets USSD Unified Push/Pull USSD API across 6 Markets Build intelligent cloud-based Voice applications VOICE OUR APIs
- 6. www.africastalking.com 6The Business of APIs Echo Mobile High impact mobile surveys via SMS, Voice, Airtime and USSD iShamba Using Voice & SMS to connect agriculturalists to experts in the field M-Kopa Customer engagement through SMS to provide affordable solar to off-grid homes CIC Bima Providing life insurance through airtime Naivas Bulk SMS for promotional content & customer engagement mShule Quality and personalized learning through SMS, USSD and voice USE CASES Over 5,000 business are currently consuming our services. Here’s how:
- 7. www.africastalking.com 7The Business of APIs Session Overview • What We Did • Lessons Learnt
- 8. www.africastalking.com 8The Business of APIs What We Did Technical assessment of our data situation - taking stock • Our core infrastructure is written in Scala • Analytics service powered by Redis, Cassandra and Akka Actors - mainly to service client dashboards • MySQL databases with client info • Different softwares used by finance, client relations, • Applications logs with everything else that didn’t make it into a DB
- 9. www.africastalking.com 9The Business of APIs What We Did Explore opportunities and use cases for analytics and data science • Clustering of clients and markets • Time series predictions to predict traffic on our infrastructure • Anomaly detection, especially for our payment products • Building developer profiles using features like programming languages, errors, sophistication
- 10. www.africastalking.com 10The Business of APIs What We Did Explore architectures and tools that might suit our needs • Settled on a lambda architecture ---> allows us to run both batch and streaming analytics jobs • Our stack • Apache Kafka • Apache Spark • HDFS from Apache Hadoop collection of softwares • Apache HBase • Scala - programming language of choice • Docker • Apache Mesos • Kubernetes • Apache Avro • Apache parquet
- 11. www.africastalking.com 11The Business of APIs What We Did Build the team in-house • Hiring proved a challenge, almost no one in the ecosystem had experience with these tools • Changed tactics and convinced several engineers to slowly start porting their skills to become data engineers
- 12. www.africastalking.com 12The Business of APIs Lessons Learnt • Have a dedicated team solely focused on data • Distributed systems can be a hairy situation esp security and logging • It’s important to manage expectations from the rest of the organisation • Buy in from the whole organisation is important to avoid duplication of efforts • Hold off hiring until you know what you are building and what kind of talent you need
- 13. www.africastalking.com 13The Business of APIs THANK YOU