Nomanini is a social enterprise company that sells a “business in a box.” Called Lula, this portable orange device is like a little digital vending machine for prepaid vouchers for mobile airtime, electricity, water, and insurance. (Many in Africa use prepaid mobile to pay for such services.) People can buy one of Nomanini’s boxes and quickly set up a “mini-business” to supplement their incomes.

Chief executive and founder Vahid Monadjem is an Iranian-American who was born in Germany and raised in the U.S. and Swaziland. In 2008, he took a job with the prestigious consulting firm McKinsey, where he worked as a global fellow for emerging market product development. From his post in Johannesburg, South Africa, Monadjem found that reaching consumers was his biggest challenge. Most people do not have computers, Internet access, or even smartphones, and many do not even have a documented home address. Mobile prepaid services are so popular because they don’t require Internet access or a bank account, and you can purchase them in small or large amounts.

In this problem, Monadjem saw an opportunity for himself and the locals. He left McKinsey to found Nomanini, which means “anytime” in Zulu, in 2010.

“There are about 200,000 minibus taxis driving around South Africa serving 20 million commuters everyday,” Monadjem said. “It occurred to me that the sale of prepaid vouchers could more efficient if we developed a solution that could be distributed to people on minibus taxis. Not only would you be providing a really important service for people living at the base of the [economic] pyramid who need these central services, but you would also be giving a massive sector the benefit of additional income.”

The Lula can print these prepaid vouchers on the go. Owners can sell the vouchers anywhere, in minibuses, their homes, or even just walking around on the street. They deposit their earnings into a Nomanini account to reload the terminal and earn a commission on all of their sales. The terminal costs about $200 and is “built like a truck” to endure whatever Africa can throw at it. The backend system and all of the transactions are run on the Google App Engine.

In December, 40,000 people bought airtime through Lula devices. Monadjem told me stories of Vuyile, a man who worked as a night shift security guard and barely earned enough to support his family. Through Nomanini, he has increased his monthly income by 20 percent.

The success of the business is largely due to the Nomanini’s intimate understanding of the African market. Monadjem and his cofounders strived to develop a uniquely “South African born-and-bred solution” that specifically targets the needs of the local population.

“What is missing with a lot of tech efforts in Africa is learning from the market,” he said. “Rather than importing the latest solution from the U.S. or Europe, we need homegrown solutions, particularly in transactions. There is massive expansion in the mobile space, but we need to build solutions that work with unreliable networks, poor internet connections, and a user that may be screen illiterate. If Nomanini is successful, hopefully we will get another set of entrepreneurs to be thinking about Africa as a target market rather than trying to build a video-sharing service.”

Right now, Nomanini is only active in South Africa, but the company has received requests for the boxes from all over the continent. Projects for Kenya and Nigeria are in the pipeline as well as plans to sell additional types of vouchers.

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Three months ago, Napster founders Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning unveiled Airtime, a web-based video chat service explicitly billed as a service to find and connect to new friends, in a glitch-filled PR disaster of a launch. It was supposed to be a better ChatRoulette, the fad video-chatting service that hit four million monthly visitors shortly after launching but ultimately fell victim to the one-eyed monster.

So far, it seems that the rocky beginning successfully presaged the future, as usage of the Facebook-connected app has made massive moves in the wrong direction, while competitor ChatRandom’s traffic is soaring.

Currently, according to AppData, AirTime has only 500 daily active users, and only 10,000 users have accessed the app in the last month — a 50 percent drop from the previous month. Plus, only just over 18,000 people have liked the app on Facebook.

Source: AppData

AirTime audience drop

Conversely, ChatRandom, which explicitly bills itself as a “ChatRoulette Alternative” offering “Free Webcam Chat with Strangers,” is killing it, according to the site’s co-founder, Allen Fox.

He says the site is getting 250,000 visitors a day and over 8,000,000 users a month. (A quick peek at Compete.com stats says he’s not completely talking out of his hat.)

ChatRandom was founded earlier than Airtime, in mid 2011, but with much less money and much less fanfare. Why is that site seeing successful user growth while Airtime, with its star founders, tens of millions in cash, and celebrity endorsements is failing?

Fox cites just one reason, but I see at least two.

The first, and the claimed reason, is anonymity. ChatRandom allows people to pull up the site, hit a button, and immediately start chatting. Airtime, on the other hand, wants you to log in via Facebook, tying your live video chat very definitively to your identity.

That is the key differentiator, according to Fox.

“Users on video chat sites are meeting people they have never met before, and that fundamentally drives the demand for privacy and anonymity,” Fox said in a statement, adding that ” … it’s clear that most chat users prefer anonymous private chat versus a more revealing option linked to social media.”

I don’t completely buy it. Yes, the anonymity is important, and it’s an important part of ChatRandom’s success. But it’s not the only factor. Another important factor — put simply: ChatRandom is essentially a porn site.

ChatRandom’s “chat with girls”

In three minutes playing with the site, I encountered the famous ChatRoulette “penis problem.” And when I couldn’t find anyone else to actually chat with – very few users seemed to be available for a site with 250,000 visitors a day — I clicked the “Chat with Girls” button.

Shocker of shockers, there’s an over-18 verification step, scantily-clad ladies of the nighttime variety, and an invitation to chat with “the hottest girls” for free.

Hmmm … I may be naive, but somehow I don’t think these are just random strangers, unless the population’s average hotness number has just gone WAY up.

Porn is huge on the web; this is no shock. And for Airtime, trying to compete against anonymous adult encounters was always going to be tough. So I’m not surprised that ChatRandom, essentially a slightly more sophisticated and more monetized version of ChatRoulette, is seemingly succeeding.

But I am surprised that Parker and Fanning aren’t putting up a better show in creating and developing their own audience for random stranger chat. Somehow, the product needs to be more compelling to attract more users.

Even if Mark Zuckerberg did try it out.

photo credit: Stewf via photo pin cc

And finally we gear up to say goodbye to Sarah Mitroff, who is trading-in her VentureBeat intern experience for a sweet gig at Wired. What’s that? You say you want to follow in Sarah’s footsteps? Then perhaps you should apply!