Two very different events, one identical failure point: a room full of people waiting for a single moment — a jackpot winner, a couple's first dance cue, a bouquet toss — and the reveal depending entirely on a person with a microphone or a laptop that may or may not cooperate. Anyone who has run or attended a casino draw night or a wedding reception in East Africa has seen some version of this go wrong.
A Dar es Salaam-engineered platform called Event OS, built by local company Ellertek Solutions, is being positioned to fix that specific gap — and it's built around a regional reality that a lot of imported event software ignores: unreliable power, expensive or patchy internet, and mobile money as the default way people pay.
How It Works
"Event OS runs from a single Windows laptop and turns every screen at a venue — TVs, projectors, phones — into a synchronized display, updating everything in under a second," said Micah Edgar, CEO of Ellertek Solutions. "Critically, it's built to run with no internet connection at all once activated, operating on the venue's own Wi-Fi or a self-contained hotspot."
Edgar also says the system is power-cut proof: if electricity drops mid-event, the platform and every connected screen resume exactly where they left off once power returns.
For Casino Draw Nights
The module built specifically for gaming venues is called Jackpot & Draw: a live jackpot counter, pre-loaded draw schedules, and a synchronized winner reveal that fills every screen in the room at once rather than relying on someone shouting a name from a stage. Ellertek Solutions' pitch here is squarely about disputes — every draw action is logged in what they describe as a tamper-evident audit trail, so a contested result has a timestamped record behind it rather than just competing accounts of what was said.
For casinos, it's bundled with a digital signage module (for promos and offers between draws) as a package priced at:
- TZS 525,000 per month
- TZS 5,355,000 per year (discounted)
For Weddings
The same underlying technology is packaged separately for weddings and event planners, including:
- A countdown timer
- A live-updating programme that flexes with the day's actual schedule
- Synchronized winner-style reveals for things like bouquet tosses
- Live guest voting from phones, including best-dressed polls
- A guest photo wall that projects guests' own phone photos onto the reception screens in real time
For MCs and planners, it's a way to make a reception feel produced rather than improvised on the fly. "We welcome everyone with a taste for excellence in the entertainment and event management industry to embrace this new way of managing their events," Edgar said, naming MCs, casino owners, corporates, and event organizers as exactly who Ellertek Solutions built the platform for.
Already Live in Dar es Salaam
This isn't a purely theoretical pitch: Princess Casino Dar es Salaam has already begun running Event OS for its draw nights, making it one of the first casinos in the region to move jackpot draws onto a synchronized, audit-logged system rather than a manual announcement.
Why It's Worth Watching
What makes Event OS notable regionally isn't any single feature — it's that it was built around specific East African constraints rather than adapted from software designed for reliable power and internet. Full bilingual support (Kiswahili and English, switchable live), mobile money payment through M-Pesa, Tigo Pesa, and Airtel Money, and a licensing model where modules simply expire rather than auto-renew all point to a product designed for how venues here actually operate, not a foreign platform retrofitted for the market.
Ellertek Solutions offers a 3-day trial with every module unlocked, letting a venue test the full system on a real event before committing to a monthly module fee. Full pricing and the trial signup are at live.ellertek.co.tz, or learn more about the company at ellertek.co.tz.
Whether this becomes standard at casino draw nights and wedding receptions across the region remains to be seen — but the problem it's solving is real, and familiar to anyone who has sat through a draw night gone sideways or a wedding programme that fell apart by the second toast.