From the Series
Mabvuto Langa, Ambarish Kumar and Kerry Barnard founded Kalimba Radio, a music app designed with Zambia in mind. The founders designed the app when they discovered a dearth of Zambian music (“Zed” beats) online.
The app, which is currently only available in the US and Zambia, caters to the Zambian market where the cost of buying data is prohibitive: the app can be used with out using mobile data or Wi-Fi.
To access music on Kalimba Radio, the user downloads the app from the Google Play Store or Blackberry World. While the user is connected to a Wi-Fi network they can access up to 50 MB or 8 hours of Zambian music.
The “downloaded” music is not saved on your phone; it is just cached on the app so that the user can listen to it over and over again – even when they’re no longer connected to a Wi-Fi network.
Kalimba is giving old Zambian music and up-and-coming artists exposure. The application currently only has Zambian music available but the founders plan to extend the library to include music from other regions of Africa.