Feem
Feem was conceived by Cameroonian serial entrepreneur, Fritz Ekwoge Ekwoge (F.E.E), in April, 2010, within the confines of the beautiful city of Buea, Cameroon. Fritz is a computer programmer who learned to program at the age of 14 on a TI-82 graphic calculator in his Cameroonian high school, because there were no computers around him when growing up. His passion for software led him to a path of obtaining a degree in software engineering, got a job in the corporate world, and eventually quit to focus on tech startups.
Fast forward many years, Fritz was already fully immersed on his first startup, iYam, a bulk SMS tool, and Steve Jobs had just launched the iPad. The iPad was still in its initial phases at the time, and there weren’t many solutions available for the iPad at the time. One thing the iPad excelled at even at that time was taking good photographs, and it was also a great device to watch movies on.
However, Fritz encountered two major issues when using his iPad on the daily. He couldn’t easily send photos captured on the iPad to his Windows PCs in his office, and he couldn’t transfer videos on hiw Windows PCs to his iPad. Bluetooth was super slow, cables were super clunky, iTunes required the iPads to fully trust the PC, and it was impossible to use any means to send photos from the iPad DIRECTLY to other devices without passing through the Internet. Yes, there were solutions like Dropbox at the time, but Internet connectivity was not a given in our part of the world; and even when Internet was available, it was super slow and super expensive.
The last sentence is interesting and needs to be expatiated a little more. If you’re reading this from a developed nation, you’re probably accustomed to fast, always available Internet connectivity, with free Wi-Fi everywhere. This wasn’t our reality in Cameroon at the time, and is definitely not the reality of so many other people in developing nations. There are also many government regimes around the world that purposely shut off Internet access to curb rising insurgencies. This happened to Fritz Ekwoge when his government shut down Internet access for 3 months. That was the last straw. There had to be a better way to make file transfers work without passing through the Internet.
Fritz started working on the first version of a file transfer tool which can transfer files wirelessly without passing through the Internet. He also added offline chat between devices to make Feem a full WhatsApp alternative that doesn’t require Internet connectivity to work. He called it FEEM (which stands for Fritz Ekwoge Ekwoge Messenger).
Such a tool could only be useful if it works on all major computing platforms. It was a gruesome task to make it work everywhere, but Fritz was conceived this was a problem worth solving. Fritz started by building Feem for Windows. Then Feem for Android. Then Feem for iOS. Then Feem for MacOS. And finally, Fritz launched Feem for Linux. Feem was even launched for the defunct Meego platform and the defunct Windows Phone platform.
Feem was an instant. We quickly realized many users were craving for such a solution; not just in developing nations, but in developed nations as well. It turns out Internet acccess is not guaranteed everywhere, even in developed nations. Users have also become more privacy-conscious and don’t necessarily want to use the “Cloud” for their sensitive files, especially after revelations from the likes of Edward Snowden.
Feem was also awarded multiple awards, the most notable being first place in the Czech Starcube Startup Incubator program in 2015.
Many years later, Fritz is still working on Feem. He recently released Feem v5 because operating systems have changed significantly from the time Feem was first launched. It has been a labor of love all through these years, but Fritz and his team will continue working on Feem for many more years to come. It’s our passion. It’s our raison-d’etre.