(A column highlighting scientific, technological, engineering and design innovation in Africa)
Dropifi is a smart widget developed by three young Ghanaians that allows small businesses to better analyze and organize incoming messages from existing customers and prospects. Replacing the traditional “contact us” button on a web site, it gives companies critical insight into the real personalities and emotions behind messages, allowing them to re-route the messages to the appropriate persons in their organizations based on business rules they set.
Effah Mensah, Kamil Nabong and David Osei, graduates of two of Ghana’s universities, co-founded Dropifi in November 2011, three months after they were admitted to the Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology (MEST) in Accra, Ghana. While at MEST, the three-man team won Ghana’s first Startup Weekend event.
Dropifi recently launched an extension on Magento Connect, an e-commerce platform owned by EBay. Using the extension, stores on the Magento platform can quickly respond to incoming messages, see message trending data in relation to industry metrics, see the demographic and social media profiles of their clients and analyze the real emotions behind the messages they receive.
Companies can generate more business leads, make better business decisions, offer a more personalized and better customer service experience, save time, increase productivity and boost their return on investment.
The Dropifi plugin can be downloaded directly from Magento Connect. Users can simply embed the Dropifi javascript integration code into their own pages without touching their original code.
Dropifi is the first African company to join the 500 Start Up program in Silicon Valley. It has been featured in Forbes magazine’s list of Top 20 Tech Startups in Africa and was named the World Best Technology Startup Company in 2012 by Kauffman Foundation after it won the prestigious Global Entrepreneurship Week Startup Open Competition in 2012. It has also been recognized as a top global startup by leading media houses, including TechCrunch, The Huffington Post, and Yahoo Finance/ CNBC.
