Digital Crossings

Startup Weekend Lagos Is On

2011-09-10T14:13:00.001+01:00

The hall is large, the teams are clustered in different parts of empty space quietly working on their products. The quietness belies the intensity with which the teams are working. You can’t really tell at first glance what is going on. No company brand banners litter the room. No customer t-shirts worn by the participants. Nothing really shows that out of this room, out of this weekend could come Nigeria’s next internet phenomenon. This is Startup Weekend Lagos .

Lagos Startup Weekend is a product of the Startup Weekend franchise. Like similar events, it brings developers, designers, project managers and investors together for one weekend to create a technology business or product from scratch. Hopefully, the outcome will be the beginnings of a viable business and/or product that can do well in the real world.

For a nice change, I am not the blogger standing by watching the work being done. I’m actually one of the startup teams working on a great product with lots of potential. It’s called www.FindJimoh.com and it’s a tool to help you find reputable artisans in your area. The “reputable” comes from the fact that the artisans are recommended by your friends and neighbours who have actually used them.

Dej.

Play!

2011-08-31T23:08:00.000+01:00

Exactly one year ago, in the blog post "Pause", I went on a hiatus from my regular posting schedule of an article every week. Like Captain America, Digital Crossings remained on ice while the tech world moved on. Man, did it move on! RIM struggling in its traditional markets, while exploding in Nigeria? Google buying Motorola? Apotheker (NOT HP) giving up on hardware? An age ending as Steve Jobs takes a bow? And I wasn't on hand analysing what impact any of this might have on Naija? That's virtually a crime.

Well, the hiatus is officially over and I ask you to join me as I reboot this blog over the coming weeks.

PLAY!

Dejo Fabolude.

Elections 2011: Now that we have all this data, what do we do with it?

2011-04-12T22:01:00.001+01:00

There is some serious data out there and we may be missing an opportunity to gather it, curate and use it to significantly transform the way the Nigerian nation functions.

Nigerians have taken to mobile technology like fish to water. Initially, it was just voice and SMS data. Information that is locked up in the data stores of the telcos. Over time, Nigerians began to adopt the mobile web and systems like Facebook, Twitter and the Blackberry with the eponymous blackberry messenger. The explosive adoption of this across the country was debated by many as a great opportunity for business, education and social change, while others sneered at social media in particular as having no real power to change the status quo – especially politically.

Then the 2011 general elections began to draw near and various groups began to strategise. Politicians Like President Jonathan opened Facebook Pages ostensibly to engage young Nigerians. BRF greeted me and thousands of Nigerians “Good morning” from his twitter page everyday. At the other end of the spectrum, Gbenga Sesan gathered bloggers, developers and social media experts together to figure out how to get the word out to people to register and vote. The discussions also included how to use technology to make sure the wishes of the people are recorded and honoured. Similar groups developed and developed tools and systems, including Enough is Enough (EiE) Nigeria’s ReVoDa, Google’s Nigeria Elections Monitoring Map, and other Ushahidi-based solutions such as Reclaim Nigeria.

Almost by magic, Nigeria became an information nation with millions of reports being pushed to the public internet via tweets, Facebook updates, ReVoDa reports, BBM messages, photo-sharing sites, YouTube, voice and SMS. INEC itself, amazingly, impressively, is using the tools, particularly BBM and Twitter to publish and collect information and reports on the elections. In one short week, between April 2nd and April 9th, Nigeria became a nation in which digitally generated and distributed information actually became at the centre of the people’s psyche. With almost no governmental expenditure we have the richest data set this nation has ever created existing in structured databases. The possibilities are limitless.

The problem is it could all very well be wasted.

Information generated needs to be analysed and curated for it to be useful and it is unclear that enough effort is being made to corral this data into a form that can be usable. Specifically, there are two ways to gather and use the kind of data being generated almost every second.

The first is real time response. On the 11th of April reports flowed via the Twitter stream giving up to the minute reports of events. Everything from missing ballot materials, violent attacks, procedural violations and requests for clarifications. All are things INEC and the security services needed to respond to immediately. It would be ideal if INEC had personnel analysing this data real time, pushing intelligence up to decision-makers who are initiating immediate responses to the situation on the ground. I did read some responses to Twitter queries from INEC’s Twitter account (@inecnigeria), but there is much more that could be done with the tools. After all, Ushahidi-powered solutions have been used for rapid deployment of rescue and relief materials in the midst of natural disasters. Indeed the app was born out of the Kenyan election crisis. It is unclear whether INEC are equipped to respond to this flow of information or not, but this was a vital opportunity that should have been taken advantage of.

Having gathered the data, it can be used to plan for the coming polls. Much of this data is from the point of view of voters which will differ from that of electoral officers and security agents. This will give a unique perspective that can be used in the deployment of security agents, avoid errors (like the one in my polling booth where our records were sent to another booth further down the express) and develop more efficient methods for accreditation.

When the elections are all over, the data can be used to validate published results, pursue legal disputes, prosecution of criminals, demographic studies, sentiment analysis, and planning of the next set of elections (LGAs, the inevitable reruns and 2015).

Aside from the electoral process, the information that has been generated thus far and will be created over the next three weeks is an opportunity for scholars, businesses, historians, rural and urban planners, journalists, technocrats and many more to obtain actionable information.

However very little of that is going to happen unless we the tech community do something about it. We are not yet a nation that knows how to handle and respond to large flows of real time information. Nor are we a nation with laws that can make use of and respond to crowd-sourced, digitally generated data. However, this election is our learning opportunity and while the traditional institutions may not be prepared for this (the independent observer was writing the results from my booth on paper, while I tweeted the same results and had it worldwide in seconds), the Nigerian people have gone digital.

It will be a riotous, tumultuous process. We will make mistakes. People are using the tools to spread as much disinformation as they are spreading the facts. The fisherman in the remote village doesn’t have the digital tools, nor the literacy to report online how everyone was intimidated into voting for a specific candidate, nor could the cattle herder affirm the validity of the results via email. The farmer doesn’t know to send an SMS to an Ushahidi app reporting the failure of INEC officials to show up. A lot of this is focused around the major cities, around a demographic, around a certain educational minimum. Still it is a start. A huge one, and I for one am glad to be along for the ride.

Dej.

BarCamp Lagos is this Weekend

2011-03-07T21:39:00.001+01:00

BarCamp Lagos is happening this Weekend. Find the press release By WebTrends Nigeria, the organisers, below.

It's finally here, Barcamp Lagos… We are so excited to make this happen this year. Last year was super-successful and we surely believe we can replicate and surpass that this year. Last year, we discussed about local content, this year we will focus on start-ups, mobile revolution, e-payments, business and monetization. We do recognize these are some of the challenges we are facing in the industry. We will bring those who have experience building technology business from scratch to taking it public.

We have confirmed attendance of Chika Nwobi, Founder of Mtech communications, Stefan Magdalinski of MIH Internet Africa, Lola Masha of Google. We will update you as we progress but in the meantime, we do recommend that you register to attend, remember; your registration is your entry ticket.

If you wish to sponsor us, talk to us now. barcampnigeria@gmail.com or call 08096880957

Click here to register.

Date: 11-12^th of March 2011.

Theme: Technology Business Models; from Idea to Profitable Business.

Venue: University of Lagos

Oladejo Fabolude

http://www.digital-crossings.com

March of the Androids

2011-01-10T22:36:00.001+01:00

Early last year when the iPad arrived on the scene, my African iPad series imagined what an Africa-specific tablet would be like and concluded with a concept of a tablet that ran on Google’s mobile OS, Android. Now, in January 2011, three Android tablets are prominent right now in the Nigerian market. The Samsung Galaxy Tab, the Starcomms MyPad and Encipher Group’s Inye.

The Samsung Galaxy Tab is being marketed via a partnership between Samsung Nigeria and Etisalat. The Galaxy Tab is the world’s most successful android tablet so far. At 7 inches, it is significantly smaller than the iPad, but that is what some people like about it, and you can make calls from it without going through a special VOIP app like Skype. Coming from one of the top electronics companies on the planet, the device has the characteristic Samsung quality and very nice specs (available here). It’s being offered at 125,000 naira which includes 250MB of internet data, free calling minutes and free text messages per month for 12 months.

Starcomms should be commended for creating their so-called MyPad. This device is a self-branded Android tablet so clearly meant to be a “Nigerian iPad” that they named it after the Apple product and even use an image of the iPad on their marketing products (which is rather silly). It must be said that Starcomms continues to be the local telco that stretches its boundaries and thinks outside the box. Unless the promo is over, they are offering a deal at 75,000 naira that includes the MyPad with their new wireless izap modem with 250 hours of unlimited internet data valid for three months. By itself, the MyPad is 55,000 naira.

Then there’s the Inye. If the Galaxy Tab and the MyPad got married and had a child it would be the Inye. This 7 inch Nigerian-branded Android tablet retails for 45,000 naira and the specs are available on the product page.

I’m not one to do feature by feature comparisons or in-depth product reviews, but I will say what strikes me the most about these 3 products. I think the Inye stands apart from the others. In creating this product, Saheed Adepoju and Anibe Agamah come closest to the clarity of vision Steve Jobs has for the iPad or the Googlers have for the Android platform.

Ultimately Etisalat and Starcomms are telecommunications companies, Nigerian telecommunications companies at that. Their business is to get people making phone calls and browsing the internet charging airtime by the second and internet time by the kilobyte. Consequently I think they will treat the Galaxy Tab and the MyPad just like handsets and PCs. In a sense they are complete devices in themselves and all Etisalat and Starcomms have to do is market them vigorously and watch the money roll in (or not, if the populace doesn’t bite). Despite having their name on it, at the end of the day it’s one product in their list of products and services. It says a lot that Starcomms doesn’t have a product page for their tablet. Never mind, Etisalat who have no stake real stake with the Samsung and could easily add the Motorola Xoom, the Apple iPad or indeed the Inye to their stable without blinking an eye.

Not so the Inye. This tablet is a platform effort as evidenced by several initiatives by Encipher Group. For one thing, they plan for an App store akin to the Android Market or the Apple App store where you and I can find specifically relevant apps for Nigeria and Africa. This app store will bundle in mobile payment systems native to Africa to enable users purchase apps and developers monetise. Secondly, very early in the development cycle, Encipher Group’s Saheed Adepoju began to engage the Nigerian tech community focusing on winning the hearts and minds of these early adopters and I think the input of this group may have helped shape what this product will eventually look like. Thirdly they are partnering with content providers whose business is bringing the technology to African culture and African culture to technology. Lastly, they have a full supply chain system in the works with customer support. In other words, they are committed to shaping this product to the environment it is designed for.

Of course their success is not assured, Samsung is, well, Samsung and a lot of Nigerians really don’t have confidence in Nigeria-branded electronics, though the lower price may make it attractive. Furthermore, Etisalat, Samsung and Starcomms have deep pockets and wide distribution networks already in place that really won’t cost them anything extra to leverage on for their tablets. However, the Inye has one thing I believe the others are lacking and that is depth. Inye is being shaped to be a 21st century computing device that resonates with the Nigerians. It will be uniquely ours. It might well be the Nigerian iPad. Having said that, they may want to explore partnering with a Telco like Samsung did to create a bundle of some sort, though I would be surprised if they are more interested in maintaining a distance from the Airtels and MTNs.

Time will tell of course. With the ease of churning out Android-based devices, all three will need to stand out among a deluge of devices that will hit the global and local market this year and it will be a monumental effort for either the MyPad and the Inye not to be lost in the crowd. They will need to find a way to hook into our lives and for the moment at least, the Inye has the better strategy.

One way or the other, we Nigerians will win. Just as we leapfrogged the West with our adoption of mobile phones, we will leapfrog in our adoption of the next decade’s computing platforms.

Dej.

Android Image Courtesy of Android Guys.

2011: Rise of the Nigerian Internet

2011-01-01T23:40:00.000+01:00

Today is January 1, 2011. For the last 3 weeks, most of the blogs and online publications I read have been reviewing 2010, making predictions for 2011 or both. Webtrends Nigeria’s Sheriff Shittu even asked several of us in the Twittersphere what our predictions were.

Looking at my end of year posts at the end of 2009, I realise that I didn’t do a review of predictions, instead I did a wish list. Sadly most of those items are still not fulfilled. Not yet. No stable electricity, no real eGovernment and the election preparations are just beginning to ramp up. Having said that, many of them were always going to be multi-year things anyway so I definitely do hold out hope to see them to pass. Most importantly, I should actively participate in helping them come to pass and in 2011 I plan to play my role. I hope you’ll play yours.

However, I do want to make one wish for this new year. It’s actually a wish and a challenge at the same time: we need a Nigerian internet. Let me hasten to say that I don’t mean we need to set up a parallel network, nor do I mean that we should set up our own equivalent of the “Great Firewall of China”. What I mean is that we need to start to develop internet solutions and mobile apps that are especially relevant to our peculiar socio-economic, ethno-geographic, political, linguistic and spiritual situation.

Google and many of the other internet majors all pushed out to create products that are global in scope, but many of them did not start that way. Indeed for many of them, like Facebook, if they hadn’t first found success in addressing the needs and desires of a very specific segment of their society they would never have been in a position to scale to a larger user base.

The intriguing thing is that as the internet has broadened to encompass such as vast variety of cultures and societies, the major internet companies are now focused on localisation. The rising stars of the internet are focused on creating services that take advantage of the peculiarities of your locale. Think Yelp. GroupOn. FourSquare. All of these base their value proposition on things within a few kilometres of where people are. Ushahidi’s power is in its ability to generate data from local events. Google is building localised versions of their sites and you can do searches of sites in Nigeria alone.

We are here and we know our society and its needs better than anyone else. before we look outwards, we absolutely need to look inwards building things that the man in Lagos, the woman in Lokoja and the child in Lafiaji can absolutely relate to.

As we created Nollywood, we now need to create the “Ninternet”. There are already efforts ongoing to create this and just by being Nigerians, even when we clone stuff we put in our own twists. Still we need to create things that appeal to the mainstream rather than just tech enthusiasts like me.So I keep an eye on sites like www.Gyst.com because they are headed in the right direction.

The thing is, if we don’t do it Google, Facebook and their ilk are already muscling in. TechCrunch is already painting a big fat target on Africa. If we don’t move now we will find ourselves overrun by a deluge of “invaders” bringing things that are of real value, but which lock us out and further export our wealth overseas.

Dej.

Image Source: Times Atlas

A Second Digital Crossings Christmas.

2010-12-25T11:39:00.001+01:00

We thank God for seeing us through to a second Digital Crossings Christmas. The sentiments I shared last year still hold true, but the message of Christmas holds true for all time: the greatest of gifts is in a child born of a virgin in the humblest of circumstances.

I shared this poem last year also and it is several years old, but the third verse is brand new. Enjoy.

AN AFRICAN CHRISTMAS
Why sing we songs of mistletoe?
Why exalt we the pure white snow?
What meaning, tell, Rudolph's red nose?
What romance bears fireside repose?
In an African Christmas?

Why not dream of harmattan air?
Why not laud bluest atmosphere?
Extol the smell of burning grass,
Sing of dust, not frost on glass
In an African Christmas

Why spend so on tinkling bells?
Why gorge 'til your belly swells?
The lust of things, halt, dispel.
The true Yule tale we must tell well
In an African Christmas.

It's not the seasons of the year
That shape the wondrous Christmas air,
But Mary's infant meek and mild.
Praise then, all men, the Holy Child
In an African Christmas.

Oladejo Fabolude

Breaking the Silence

2010-12-17T10:35:00.000+01:00

A year ago today, Tejiri was born.I wrote this blog post while I waited for news of her birth and posted it once she was born.

A few days later, my mother-in-law held Tejiri in her arms. Well, a year has gone by, and on this day of Tejiri’s first birthday, my mother-in-law is not here to hold her. She will never hold her or any of her grandchildren again. My mother-in-law was taken away from all of us, in part by a deadly (but survivable) disease, but primarily by indifferent medical care.

We talk about poorly equipped hospitals. How about when a hospital is fully equipped, but is staffed by indifferent and inept medical personnel who more than likely got their jobs without merit and have no professionalism and little concern for the human beings entrusted in their care? When a needle can go in the place? Be administered at the wrong time or not at all?

We all rave, rage and rant at our leaders – the Senate, the House of Reps, government officials all. We forget that they are ordinary Nigerians like us.Ordinary Nigerians like doctors, teachers and messengers. If they were doctors, their patients would die. If they were teachers, their students would fail. If they were messengers, their despatches would be delivered a day late and a dollar short. Guess what, patients are dying and students aren’t learning. The problem isn’t just “them”. The problem is also us. It starts with us. You see “them” were once us.

However, by being in positions of authority, their impact is elevated above that of a grenade tossed into a room and become artillery fire raining down on a nation– 25% of our national expenditure. Their defence of it being only 13% (or did they claim 9%?) is ludicrous in their failure to understand that they shouldn’t even be up to 1% of our national expenditure. Instead they should be contributing multiplied billions to our GDP in growth-friendly legislation, but I digress.

More than ever, technology now enables us do what is needed to reshape our nation. If we didn’t know it before Julian Assange shows us how a few people, with cheap tools, can move the whole world – for good or for bad. We in this nation need to use technology to change things in favour of the multiplied millions in Nigeria. Assange’s method is one way. Khan Academy is another. M-PESA is another still. As might be MainOne.

So technology will help us get information out about the upcoming elections. Where to register, where to vote and how the vote is being handled. Technology will help us know what the candidates stand for and what they have done in the past. Technology will help us protect the vote as we collate information from multiple sources that will give us a true picture of what really happened and hold it up to the world’s scrutiny. Technology will help us hold our leaders accountable once we have them in office.

Technology will help us come up with new educational paradigms and help the lowest of the low get access, at the minimum, to the same content as the privileged. Technology will help develop our communities like a Malawian village boy who created electricity by harnessing the wind or as a group of young men and women are doing with solar in Ondo. Technology will help us change the way we manage our personal health, as well as change our healthcare systems.

However, technology will only HELP. Unless, we the people, choose to do something, the technology cannot do anything. www.enoughisenoughnigeria.com used the technology to get the word out, but it was the marching in the streets that got attention of those whose attention needs to be got. Similarly, technology must be used to support actual human activity for it to be meaningful. It cannot be used to abdicate responsibility.

A good place to start is with these coming elections. There are tools out there already available and being developed to help support free and fair elections. However, they are meaningless if we Nigerians do not go out to register and then to vote.

This blog has been on a hiatus, and this is not a return, not quite yet. However, I break the silence to honour my mother-in-law, to celebrate my daughter and to use both of them to appeal to whoever is out there listening: let us work for a day in which no more grandmothers are sacrificed on the alter of mediocrity. Let us bequeath a better Nigeria to our daughters, and our sons, than our fathers bequeathed to us.

Dej.

Image Courtesy of Gbenga Sesan and The “Enough is Enough Nigeria” Coalition.

Pause

2010-08-31T07:04:00.001+01:00

This is my 100th blog post on Digital Crossings.

I started this blog in order to start writing again. As a university student, I had fully planned writing to be a key part of what I do for the rest of my life. Of course, like many can imagine, things didn’t work out that way. After putting writing on my New Year’s resolutions lists for several years, in 2009 I actually started writing again. I didn’t care what I wrote as long as I could write (call it my Startup story if you like @Possicon). I wanted to write regularly, so I committed to writing at least once a week. As an IT guy, I chose to write, what I imagined would be easy, non-controversial and would not require a lot of regular effort.

From that perspective, this exercise has been an unqualified success. Since February of 2009, I have written a blog post every Tuesday and a few more besides. It hasn’t always been effortless or non-controversial, but it has been a lot of fun. Right now, I can’t imagine not writing weekly.

And yet there won’t be a Digital Crossings post next week Tuesday or for many Tuesdays to come. This is the blog post in which I press the “Pause” button on Digital Crossings.

In the process of writing, I haven’t just been putting words out there. I have also, as a consequence of this writing, done a lot of learning. I have learned about technology initiatives going on around the world in the internet space. I have also come in contact with various people around the Nigeria, Africa and the rest of the world, doing creative things. Their stories have made me think, their actions have impressed me, and their challenges have, well, challenged me.

All this has made me realise that at the minimum, I have to re-think this blog, what its focus is and what its future should be. On a bigger scope, I also have to reconsider what I bring to the Nigerian and global tech community. I work in corporate IT. Corporate IT doesn’t really have a local voice serving its needs in Nigeria in the way that TechRepublic, Eweek, CIO Magazine and the rest serve Western and global business IT. Getting involved in collaborative ventures where IT professionals in my company, in my industry and other industries can grow professionally may be worth pursuing. On the other hand, there are a vast range of possibilities in the Nigerian internet space (43.9 million users?!). I have spoken extensively on what startups and internet businesses should be doing and I can either continue to be an armchair analyst or build something and put it out there. Clearly one is easier than the other, but the other is far better than the one. Then there are partnership opportunities with some of the existing efforts and many technological delights to just enjoy and explore without necessarily being analytical about them. Furthermore, tech was never my first love in writing.

These are just thoughts running through my head, but to harness them (or to quell them) I do need to step away from my central platform, this blog, for a while. So for the next few months (about 2 or 3, but I have not fully decided yet) there will be no regular blog post from me on this site. However, every once in a while, when I am intrigued enough (or riled) enough I will put pen to paper or finger to key and write. I will also still be very much a Twitteratti, I will still be part of conversations around the blogosphere and will graciously accept (hint, hint) opportunities to write for people.

Quite a number of amazing people have made this first part of my journey as a blogger a rich and fulfilling one. There’s Startups Nigeria’s Loy Okezie who has been in many ways my entry point into the community and continues to open doors. Sheriff Shittu (and I still don’t know what his @Possicon Twitter handle means) of Webtrends Nigeria whose his passion and leadership in the space have been inspirational. There’s ICT Works’ Wayan Vota who connects many dots across Africa and the West and was the first to republish one of my posts. Mambe Nanje of Naijaborn and Camerborn (and all sorts of “borns”) stands out as the single largest commentator in a blog devoid of actual conversation. Then there’s the Titanic Gbenga Sesan whom I have never met in person, but who was instrumental in getting some of my work into newspapers and industry publications. His incredible energy for the people reminds me constantly of what the tech is really about. To these and other tech professionals and enthusiasts who I have encountered along the way and those few hundreds who have endured my multiplicity of words, I say thank you. Very much.

Dej.

Pause button courtesy of Greenlantern33 on Flickr.com

If We Have To Register Our SIMs, Then Let’s Benefit From The Effort.

2010-08-24T18:17:00.001+01:00

I have written criticizing the rationale behind the new SIM registration requirement. However, there isn’t really any groundswell of opposition to it (no #NoSIMRegNigeria hash-tag on Twitter). Unless our history of not doing such things well comes into play, soon enough there are going to be several huge databases lying around the place that would have the names, addresses and biometric information of at least a quarter of our populace. Indeed if the NCC is to be believed, we have already passed the 50% mark in tele-density. My reasoning is if that data has been gathered, and it is our data, then we should derive some positive benefit from it, not just the government.

While I still stand by my recommendations around have the data should be stored and accessed, I believe there are opportunities for the citizenry to be served by that data. This will have to be built upon secure APIs providing controlled access to that data. This also assumes data quality without which no benefits can be achieved whether in security or commerce. Be that as it may, I believe the following benefits can be achieved.

Digital Commerce Personalisation.

Many services collect our phone numbers today in order to contact us for notification. Some of them, like banks already collect all sorts of bio-data already which they use to provide you service. For organisations that don’t need to gather and store this kind of data, they could use the aforementioned APIs on a as-needed basis. Sort of like the way users of InterSwitch’s online payment processor don’t store or even access your card details, instead they go off to InterSwitch’s site to complete the transaction, this data set can be used to provide a similar set of opportunities for other businesses to provide you personalised services without explicitly collecting, storage or even being able to “read” that data. For instance, someone could build a custom cake site where I go to order a birthday cake for my wife. So I don’t forget, I go in and place the order 3 months before her birthday. The only personal data of hers that I provide is her phone number. The baker’s site code goes and fetches her name for the icing of the cake, her birth date to enable the baker know when to prepare the cake. When the cake is ready, the baker provides the number to her courier who uses that to obtain the delivery address. The baker never has this information, only the courier company gets that info as it wasn’t relevant to the baker’s apps use case.

This is clearly a contrived example with all sorts of holes in it. For instance, ideally there should be some way of getting permission before any of the hidden information is revealed to the third parties involved, but since it should be my wife providing this permission, it would ruin the surprise. Furthermore if I am going to be prompted by some mechanism to authorise that some site should go off and get my info, why don’t I just provide it directly? However this is not an attempt to develop robust business rules, but to demonstrate some of the possibilities.

Data Transmission Brevity.

This is related to the first. A widely used tool in Nigeria is SMS. We use it in an amazing variety of ways. One of its limits is you can only put so much information in a text. The capabilities of SMS in initiating financial transactions, doing registrations, etc can be simplified if we exchange a limited set of information by SMS which then authorises back end systems to exchange the needed personal details.

Identity Validation.

As long as we are going to be going through a process of validating our identities (please see my previous post where I expressed doubts about how well this can be done), then having validated it, shouldn’t we be able to use our phone numbers as “certificates of authenticity” on eBay-like sites as I discussed in my “A few ideas: Part 3” post? This ease of identity validation is one of the reasons why eBay can work in Europe and the US and not necessarily work well here in Nigeria.

These are three potential benefits that I can think of. Do they make sense or do you consider them a load of bunk? Can anyone else think of some other than these and the ones the government is touting? Let me know in the comments section.

Dej.

Picture of a 1GB SIM from Samsung courtesy of Tech2.com.

Making the Nigerian Internet A Level Playing Ground

2010-08-17T18:29:00.000+01:00

Last week two significant things caught my attention. First Google and Verizon seemed to trying to preempt the US Federal Communications Commission’s attempt to reach consensus with the major stakeholders in the US internet infrastructure space. The two giants appeared to be proposing rules that would keep the internet a level playing ground, so called “Net Neutrality” rules. However several analysts expressed concerns over clauses that appeared to give them loopholes to make the wireless infrastructure of the internet less than open. Today, the wired internet (based on fibre optic and other physically wired connections to people’s homes) is the largest part of the means of internet access in the US. However, it is clear on several fronts that the mobile and thus wireless internet is the future and these two titans appear to be trying to position themselves to have clear advantages, arguably at the expense of customers and competitors alike.

The second significant event was the report that according to the ITU 43.9 million Nigerians were now using the internet. 43.9 Million. That’s nearly 30% of our population. That’s more than 4 times the regularly mentioned 10 million Nigerians. There are many things that run through my mind as I think of it. The opportunity, not just for commerce, but for education, cultural transformation, and so much more.

Now to tie these two things together. The mobile internet is the internet for Nigerians. Most of us, just as it was with telephony, have never really experienced wires and internet access together and the huge benefits of mobility will only strengthen that part of our technological culture. Like we did with unwired telephony, we are leapfrogging Western society in that regard and just as with mobile telephony we can enable a myriad of societal benefits. My concern here is that the enablers of mobile internet access, mostly the same enablers of mobile telephony, could deliberately put in road blocks that stunt this growth in order to wring the most money out of us that they can. Whether Google and Verizon are misguided, misunderstood or mischievous their actions could further cost the US even greater loss of their position of internet leadership and the wrong choices here could keep us from rising to ours.

Don’t get me wrong, if you investment in something, you deserve to reap the benefits from your investment. As I see fibre optic cables being run down our major highways and read about GLO-1, Main One, SAT-3 and others with monetary values in the billions written in the same sentence with them, I am constantly conscious of the huge expense that has gone into putting these things in place. It pains me when I see road construction rip those cables out of the ground. These Telecoms firms should make as much money as they reasonably can from their investments. However, in the rush to profit they shouldn’t act in such a way that they significantly raise the barriers of entry to the internet that will keep the rich and poor both from getting cheap, fast and reliable internet access. They shouldn’t make it too expensive for entrepreneurs to deploy quality internet based services in-country.

You hear me Globacom, MTN? Don’t be like Google or Verizon. Don’t be evil.

Of course evil is in the eye of the beholder when the smell of money is in the air. We pay 25 times more per kilobyte for mobile 3G internet access than they pay in the UK (i.e. usage without a contract just per usage charges) and the providers go smiling to the banks. That price may drop with all the fibre coming into Nigeria over the next few months, but I suspect that without intervention the prices may not fall to an equitable level. This is why our own FCC, the NCC should put policies in place today, that will protect our digital tomorrow. This isn’t just about pricing, it is about making sure that the decisions that are made for today and for tomorrow will help us achieve the societal advantages that the internet can bring whether or not the gatekeepers care for it or not. They need to start the engagement today that will protect the Citizenry while continuing to ensure that this is a viable investment climate for communications technology infrastructure investment.

Dej.

How to Lose A Customer

2010-08-10T19:00:00.000+01:00

My bank, Guaranty Trust Bank (GTBank) recently started migrating customers away from the InterSwitch CashPlus ATM/Debit Card to the more secure “Chip and PIN” (EMV) technology. Their chosen solution is the Naira MasterCard product in still in partnership with InterSwitch. The process has been painful for me because I use my card to pay my bills online. The problem is that the Naira MasterCard doesn’t work on the old or new bills site that InterSwitch has set up (www.quickteller.com) and there is no prognosis for when it would be turned on for bills payment on their site. My problem actually started before the new card was issued. First GTBank reduced the ATM limits on the old card without informing users or at least not doing it in a way that caught my attention until I ran into problems when I needed cash for a transaction. Then they disabled the ability to use the card on most websites with equally little customer engagement. This significantly handicapped my ability to run things the way I used to.

In the pursuit of a solution, I spoke to GTBank card services, but all I got were explanations, not solutions. Almost by accident, I discovered that I could still do some of the transactions I couldn’t do online at the ATM. At least with the old card. Once that was replaced with the Naira MasterCard, that avenue went away. So I ended up having to go waste valuable time lining up in a banking hall to pay bills that for over a year I had been paying online.

Since GTB wasn’t offering me any solution, I finally managed to speak with InterSwitch personnel to be sure that it wasn’t a bug and that Naira MasterCard wasn’t yet active on Quickteller.com. They confirmed that it wasn’t in fact active yet, but (and this is the point of this post), that their Verve Card was fully functional on the site and I could get one if I had an account with a participating bank. It immediately occurred to me that several dynamics were in play in this conversation. First InterSwitch didn’t really have that much of a stake in the MasterCard thing and would be very happy if I moved to Verve, secondly my bank was at risk of loosing revenue from me and people like me because they had deliberately (I am tempted to say “with malice aforethought”) put barriers in place that were suddenly making life difficult for their customers. Third, with only a little effort I could restore my comfort zone by moving to another bank, the same way I had moved to GTBank. Lastly, the other banks were not using the opportunity to market to people suffering through this change.

All this highlights the dearth of a personalised customer orientation in big business in Nigeria. It is these little things that can make or break a relationship with customers and take revenue away from a business. There are several key lessons that I could spell out here. For one thing, you don’t leave loyal customers in the lurch when you are making this kind of change. As part of the process, you dedicate as much to the front end of managing the customer experience as you do to making sure that the technology at the back works the way it should.In corporate IT, we call it “Change Management”.

I won’t say much more than I have already said. However, we press forward with business models, especially on the internet, that cannot count on being able to afford huge expensive media blitzes to win or retain customer loyalty. As we do this, let us bear in mind that it is the simple inexpensive acts of making individual customer’s lives better, i.e. our value proposition, that will be the single strongest marketing campaign we can ever conduct.

Make each person feel special and millions will beat their way to your doorstep.

Dej.

A Few Ideas Part 3: Solving the Trust Issues

2010-08-03T18:11:00.000+01:00

This is the third of the three ideas I had committed to share in response to Gbenga Sesan’s challenge. The whole ideas thing came out of my Clone Wars series where I had claimed that there are enough local problems to use technology to solve rather than creating copies of technologies that don’t necessarily solve anything. I seriously love Twitter, but it doesn’t in and of itself solve any problem. However, a whole slew of things have been built on top of it that solve a variety of problems.

On to today’s idea. EBay is one of those unique web-based businesses that was profitable from day one. EBay’s original business required very little infrastructure because what it did was connect buyers with sellers and take a cut of the transaction for providing this connection. This brokerage model is an excellent one that many have tried to replicate the world over.

You and I both have stuff we would like to sell off and make some cash from, but the problem in Nigeria is that we generally don’t trust each other, and unfortunately we have good cause for this lack of trust. As I wrote in a post last year, my very first attempt to sell something on eBay itself was hijacked by someone trying to dupe me in Surulere. This kind of issue makes it hard for people to do commerce with strangers online in Nigeria and those who have tried to replicate eBay type systems have had it really difficult. First Naija for instance, seems to be depressingly empty despite appearing to be well implemented (though I don’t actually have any information as to why it is empty). BidNigeria (see their “about us”) also looks interesting, but time will tell how it does.

EBay works in the US and similar societies because it is relatively easy to locate people and bring the weight of the law down on them not because they are intrinsically more honest. People (for the most part) are more trusting in these societies because broken trust is easier to punish. Where people are duped, it is because the people they sold to or bought from have succeeded in presenting a false identity or false location information. Ironically, the SIM registration thing may actually be a tool that could be used to address that here in Nigeria, but that’s not the solution I’m looking at.

The solution is fairly simple, and as one of the speakers at BarCamp Nigeria 2010 pointed out the banks, faced with a similar problem, have worked out a solution. Banks require all new customers to be validated by an existing customer. This, known as the “web of trust”, is based on the fact that if I trust you, then I can probably trust the people you recommend. It’s a bit more involved than this, but at the core, this is what it ultimately is.

There are various ways to implement this. One of the most obvious is to use the social graph that exists in systems like Facebook. Your relationships on these platforms are based on existing real world relationships (at least they are if you have been judicious in who you “friended”) and you already know to what extent you can trust the persons you are connected to. Another option is to build your own social graph specifically for this product – in effect, building your own social network. There are other possible ways to do this and smarter people than me are already working on it. Either way, build your auction or peer-to-peer sales solution connecting people to people they already know and they will already have data as to whether or not they can trust the buyer or seller.

Let me close this series with this thought, I am conscious I am giving away ideas that could be used to build businesses, but I am doing it for at least two reasons. First, the ideas are not particularly unique, earth-shaking or even very original. Look around, someone somewhere is already implementing them in one form or the other.There really is nothing new under the sun. Secondly, and more importantly, ideas are not worth very much. Really they are not. We’ve heard the old story about the cemetery being the richest place in the world because ideas are buried there. Yes and No. An idea is only worth as much as its execution. No more. Coke, Pepsi and Dr. Pepper are essentially the same idea. It’s the execution that makes the difference. The iPod is synonymous with MP3 players, but Apple did not invent the idea. Yet their execution gave them most of the market. Great executors don’t always originate ideas, but they do them better than everyone else. Many VCs won’t do NDAs (non-disclosure agreements) with startups who are just pitching ideas, because the very next startup is going to pitch the same thing at them. They also don’t sign up many startups until the startup can show that they can out-execute the other guy doing the same thing and differentiate themselves.

I am not suggesting that you shouldn’t protect your business plans, designs, specifications, or algorithms. They are all work product, but ideas themselves are a dime a dozen. Most importantly, when you share an idea, the idea itself can grow in the sharing and you get something more concrete and more doable from the conversation. Yes you risk someone stealing your thunder, but if it is so easy to implement, it may not be worth your time anyway. My final word is this: as much as we compete, we need to collaborate as well and sharing ideas is the first step towards that.

Dej.

The handshake is courtesy of Spring Stone @ Flickr.com

A Few Ideas Part 2: A Reputation Engine

2010-07-27T18:28:00.000+01:00

In response to a request to talk about specific problems that technology can be used to solve in Nigeria, I wrote “A Few Ideas”. This was a misleading title since only one idea was actually discussed. The plan had been to discuss 3 different ideas in the post, but it turned out that that would have been too much for one post. So I’ll be detailing two ideas in two following posts starting with this one.

In the first post, I suggested a mobile app for improving vehicular and road safety by crowd-sourcing a map that could warn drivers that they were approaching a bad spot in a road, and could potentially be used by governments to plan road maintenance. This second idea is also something of a crowd-sourced mapping solution. In Nigeria, we are way too used to bad customer service. I walk into a shop, get treated badly and the next customer walks into the same shop, gets treated the same way and the cycle continues. We should break this cycle.

Specifically, I would like to propose an app where Nigerians can go online to give a thumbs up or a thumbs down for a specific product, service, institution or facility or the intersection of these. As simple as that.

So if I find that the service at the Mr. Bigg’s in Ajah is exemplary, I can go online look to see if it is already rated on the site. If it is already rated, I can give it my own rating. If it is not, I can add the facility, tag the service, provide the location and add my own rating. Then someone else who wants to go to the same place to buy food can look it up on the site, see the ratings it has received over time and make an informed decision. This system will also be kept as simple as possible either excluding the means of providing longwinded reviews entirely, or limiting free text to something even shorter than the Twitter standard 140 characters. It also a product that could be built on top of existing social networking platforms in order to make use of the existing relationships people have built on the likes of Facebook and Twitter. This would strengthen the value and validity of the ratings.

With an app like this, we can begin to build what amounts to a reputation engine for various business and services from large corporate chains to small traditional markets, government institutions, schools and social services. It could even serve as a discovery engine for these services. The value to the end user is that you get to see what people really experience as opposed to what the service advertises. So I go to the places where people are enthusiastic and avoid the places where people get mistreated.

The businesses themselves could potentially receive value from this. So if I run an institution that has branches, I can go online to compare the reputations of my Apapa branch and my Ikeja to see how they are doing in the eyes of the public. I could also see how my competitors are reputed compared to my business. I could use it to make investment decisions for my business.

How does the developer monetise? Adverts, for one. People are already thinking of products and services as they visit this site, so they are already in the frame of mind to click on links. I’m not even suggesting a Google Adsense thing here, I mean the developer selling adverts directly to businesses. That way, they get to keep more of the revenue and can do hyper local services better. The developer can also develop and sell analytics services to businesses that could assist them in their planning and customer relationship management.

Just like the first week’s idea, there is nothing inherently original and groundbreaking in this idea. Review sites have been on the internet for most of it's history. The American website Yelp does something pretty similar this. The Kenyan site GotIssuez is more activist, but uses the same principles and the recommendation engine in Amazon.com is one of the reasons for the fantastic growth the site experienced. Forum sites like Nairaland do this type of thing in free flowing interactions on the site. However something that targets the Nigerian marketplace in a structured, searchable form and addresses our own needs has great social change potential as well as good business potential too. In addition building a mobile component into it so that people can rate from their phones, search for ratings and even search for products and services would make it more powerful and useable.

Of course a system like this could easily be manipulated to make a particular business or service look really good and another one look really bad, so technology would need to be developed or adopted to prevent this kind of gaming. There are all sorts of challenges I can see with this product such as Yelp has experienced, but it would serve as a good means for good service to be publicised and bad service to be known and avoided.

Dej.

Thumbs Up and Thumbs Down --- Image by © Matthew Borkoski/Monsoon/Photolibrary/Corbis as found on Flickr.com

The SIM Registration Thing.

2010-07-20T19:47:00.000+01:00

The SIM registration thing has been on the edge of my consciousness for a while. Each time I read or hear some announcement about it the media or come across something on a telco’s website about it, the thought occurs to me that someone who understands the industry really should write about the potential economic impact of this new law. One of the things that has contributed to the growth of cell phone usage in Nigeria is the extremely low barrier to acquiring one. I actually think that one of the reasons fewer people have acquired postpaid lines is the relative complexity involved in getting one. I believed that the new rule would have some kind of chilling effect on the industry, but was hoping that someone more knowledgeable than I am would write about it.

Despite this, I hadn’t actually gone looking for any writing about it, Until Oluniyi David Ajao’s blog post popped up in my Twitter stream. Niyi’s post (which for some reason has disappeared from his blog page, but it is still cached on Bing) doesn’t look at it from a commercial impact perspective so much as it is an examination of the touted security “benefits”. He is harsh in his criticism. For the most part, I agree with him. I don’t think the reasons for the new rules are well thought out or are hard to circumvent. In particular, in a country where it is easy to get multiple driver’s licenses and passports (official ones) in multiple names, the idea of being able to tie a SIM to an individual who doesn’t want his identity divulged is laughable. At the very minimum, a kidnapper can use his victim’s cell phone to make his ransom demands, and can make those demands while on the move, thwarting any attempt to use triangulation or GPS to track them. It also assumes an investigative efficiency that the law enforcement agencies cannot be expected to demonstrate.

My concerns over the impact of this on commerce appear to be valid if MTN’s experience with such a law in South Africa is examined. There was a drop in line acquisition and thus business growth attributed to the law, and I fully expect the same to happen in Nigeria. However, these are not the biggest concerns. A larger issue is this: do we want any large organisation, a telco or a government agency to have unfettered access to our location data without our explicitly choosing to give them that information? Do we want to give telcos information that is not specifically required to enable them provide me a service and get paid for it? Am I expected to trust that they will implement adequate security protocols to make sure that my data is not mined and used in fraud, identity theft, impersonation and even by the selfsame kidnappers to track me down? My fingerprints in MTN’s database? All over the world governments are vehemently resisting the likes of Google capturing and storing personally identifiable data and our government is asking private organisations to capture and hold this information in trust? This is why we need a Federal CIO.

At least one writer finds the idea to be a good one. Though I should point out to “Jacob” that the countries he refers to capture this information for billing purposes because they mostly sell contracts (postpaid lines) not prepaid. Some might argue that if you are not engaged in or planning to engage in criminal activity, you should have no course for concern. Maybe. It is also true that it is the innocent that are worst hit when institutions mismanage or abuse the enormous powers they hold. The criminal usually escape unscathed. Simply put, I don’t trust the telcos or the government to do right by me with my data. I also do not trust them to take the necessary action if the scenario presented itself for them to apprehend criminals or save lives.

However, my protestations are a tad too late.The ship has sailed and we will have to deal with the effect down the road. The time to get involved in the debate is long past. For now, let me make some suggestions on governance to manage the situation.

All systems that store any of this information should be subject to strict laws and controls about encryption and access. At a minimum the kinds of controls that govern financial records (on the scale of the US PCI and Sarbanes-Oxley IT systems rules) should be enforced. If these are not already in place, the process should be stopped until they do.
No data should be provided to any law enforcement agent without a warrant from a court of law.
Location data, if captured, should not be retained for more than an agreed upon timeframe? Perhaps 3 months at the most.
No commercial use should be made of this data without an explicit opt-in by customers (Indeed, if you are going to use my data, not only should you get my permission, but you should pay me for the privilege).
Any data breach should immediately be published to the public.
Equip the police. Technology is only as good as the human infrastructure and people processes behind it.

If nothing else, this situation brings up the fact that we absolutely need to have a national dialogue about information and communication technology and the rights and privileges of the citizenry. We who understand the technology and have some insight into the social economic impact should keep a very keen eye on what our governments come up with and be vociferous in providing support when appropriate or criticism when needed

Dej.

Picture of a 1GB SIM (!) from Samsung courtesy of Tech2.com.

A few ideas

2010-07-13T20:42:00.000+01:00

Gbenga Sesan had this to say in reponse to one of my posts. ‘Dejo, I'll like to know what problems you refer to (in Part 2) when you say, "...by cloning an existing product you run the risk of solving a problem that doesn’t exist in your environment while ignoring rich opportunities that you could be addressing." I think that is the nexus of your brilliant series (which MUST be pushed to a wider audience, maybe through regular ICT reporting channels), and it'd be great to identify such problems and who knows, there may be people waiting to have a go at them. Thanks.’

I replied by promising that ‘I'll do a postscript next week listing at least 3 specific problem domains and speculating on possible solutions’ (What had I just let myself in for?).

Coming up with an idea is the easy part, building is the hard part. Still, the ideas we put out there may just inspire someone to grab on to one of them and make something worthwhile. Some of these ideas may be way out there in terms of craziness and seem like flights of fantasy, but with some of the new technology coming out everyday and becoming more and more affordable the wildest things can become simple to accomplish. Yesterday’s science fiction is today’s reality. Just yesterday Google announced App Inventor, a new development tool that will enable ordinary people with no programming skill whatsoever to build applications for their Android phones. One person built an app using App Inventor that could detect when he was driving (accessing the GPS on his phone) and would automatically respond to every text message with a response that he was driving and couldn’t respond. This is reminiscent of the website building tools that everyone and their dog used to build websites in the good old days and resulted in the extraordinary growth of the internet. It actually deserves a Digital Crossings post of its own. Which brings me to the first of my set of problems and possible solutions.

The Problem.

Nigeria is covered in bad roads. We are used to the situation, but they have resulted in far too many deaths. In my opinion, the worst roads are those that are smooth for good portions and then suddenly collapse into a porthole. Drivers lulled into a sense of security by the smooth portion come suddenly upon the bad portion and all sorts of accidents can occur. The obvious solution is for the people responsible to fix the roads. Thousands of dead Nigerians are evidence that they are not doing it.

A Solution.

Like so many things in our nation, the citizenry may need to take care of themselves. Movements like Light Up Nigeria and Enough Is Enough are applying pressure in various ways to get action from those with the responsibility on a variety of things. However, if we can’t solve the fundamental road problem just yet we could develop an early warning system. With technologies increasingly available in more and more mobile phones a driver along the roads of a city like Lagos is constantly broadcasting location information. Some have accelerometers that can detect bumps or dips. Some have voice control. A mobile phone application can be built that uses the capabilities of different phones to record trouble spots. As a driver drives along and encounters these trouble spots the phone can detect when the car moves in an unusual way, or the driver using voice control tell the application that this is a bad spot. This information is then broadcast via one of several possible means to a database that collates multiple reports and plots them on a map. Multiple reports are what give a report validity.

The second piece of this application gives a driver an audible alarm when they approach such a bad point giving them enough forewarning to slow down. This may even be used to develop a system to prioritise what gets patched.

Final thoughts.

This is not a unique solution (a clone). I have heard of similar solutions elsewhere already and it is the kind of thing that can use crisis mapping technology (like the one that starts with “U”). Secondly, there is the problem of getting this on people’s phones – never mind the development challenges of building for phones with different capabilities. Ultimately, it relies on crowd-sourcing which requires skill to raise to a critical point before it becomes useful.

Told you some of these ideas could be way out there.

Dej.

Clone Wars Part 4: The Advert Trap.

2010-07-06T20:17:00.000+01:00

The Clone Wars series started out in my mind as a commentary on all those Nigerian social networking sites popping up across the internet. The original idea was to speak out against them, but as you can see from the actual series itself, I changed my mind along the line. Still, I do advocate we do more than just churn out social sites.

Having said that, it isn’t just social sites that are being cloned. We are also cloning revenue models. Just like with cloning web services, there is nothing wrong in copying someone else’s successful monetisation method, but we severely limit ourselves by not giving more thought to our models.

The most popular monetisation model for internet services in the world today is adverts. Google did not invent the advert model, but they have made the greatest success out of it. They make almost all their products free to customers and get advertisers to pay for them. This has created an internet culture where users expect most internet-based services on the internet to be free.

In Nigeria, we have a history of not paying for intangibles such as services as software. While we have never had problems paying for items and products, we have historically found it difficult to put a fair price on a technical service or intellectual property. Probably every society faced this difficulty at one time or the other. When I started out, you could get a disc for a few hundred naira that had Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop, several versions of Windows, and everything Autodesk had on the market. When my boss back then tried to make a business of selling legitimate copies of AutoCAD at the proper price of $3,000 he was thought to be insane. Google with their free services; the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) movement; file sharing sites and such merely cemented what was already culturally ingrained in us. On top of all that there is the long-running problem of the lack of any payment mechanism for online services. I call it a problem, but it really wasn’t because very few people actually wanted to pay for anything online, but those who did – until the last few years – couldn’t.

I said all that to say this – because we are so comfortable with free online services, the ad-based revenue model seems to be the most natural revenue model for a Nigerian web enterprise. The problem is that I don’t believe that it truly fits our society, not yet, Not as means for technology entrepreneurs to find prosperity anyway. I looked for empirical evidence to support this belief without any success. In particular I looked for information on Google’s ad revenue per country, but it isn’t out there or I’m not looking in the right places. So I have to rely on anecdotal evidence and have to say that if most Nigerians are like me and the folk I know, most do not click on ads. Another example. In two conferences I attended in Lagos with Google staff present, a show of hands was asked for of people who use Google AdSense on their sites and blogs. A good number of of folks raised their hands. Another show of hands was asked for of people who made up to a hundred dollars per month from their sites. The number of hands that went up were just 2 or 3 in each conference.

I believe that advertising, if done right would be a good business model, for the ad engine provider. However, as a source of revenue for some other service, it may not be the best model in Nigeria right now. I an open to correction on this by someone with more empirical data, but my instinct right now is that Nigerian internet entrepreneurs need to look elsewhere for monetisation. Having said that, you lose nothing by signing up for an AdSense account and having Google sourced adverts alongside what ever else you choose to use to monetise. Aero Contractors does it, why not you?

I believe that the strongest source of revenue for Nigerian internet businesses for now is to make money from things people are already familiar with – physical goods and real world services. Michael Rappa, over at Digital Enterprise lists the following models:

He goes into detail on each model in his article and it makes educative reading. I think that at the stage we are in the Brokerage, Merchant and perhaps the Utility models are the most suited for our level of development. These models definitely require a lot more work to make happen than just inserting code as provided by an ad engine into your site, but several of them may actually serve us better than the advertising model does. At least consider them in your startup’s plans.

The Clone Wars series ultimately seeks to help us break free from a mindset that builds generic products and services that do not elevate our societies, our psyches or increase our incomes. As Nigerians we must differentiate. We must apply the mental discipline that is needed to innovate. For all our sakes, we must.

Here ends the “Clone Wars”… for now.

Dej.

The 3 cows are courtesy of Mix over at flickr.com

Clone Wars Interlude: Impress Me.

2010-06-29T19:17:00.000+01:00

I seriously need someone to impress me.I mean impress me like the iPhone impressed me. The original iPhone as well as its two successors, are half-baked pieces of plastic with horrible battery lives, no user replaceable parts, a dearth of standard cell phone features like SMS receipt notification, horrible cameras, inaccessible storage, meaningless bluetooth, and completely locked in software. And yet the first time I touched the interface, I was sold by its usability, the beauty and simplicity of its interface and the power of the app store. I was impressed.

Impress me like the netbook phenomenon. A fully functional laptop for less than fifty thousand naira that could do what 90% of the populace actually need computers for with up to 10.5 hours of battery life in some cases. This is the computer for the ordinary Nigerian with our power problems, constant mobility and simple computing needs.

Impress me like MapQuest.com impressed me. The first time I went online and could generate turn by turn instructions in a strange city just by providing my starting point and destination. Now the likes of NavTeq and Google are impressing me even more by making that mapping technology available on my cell phone for live turn by turn directions.

Amazon.com impressed me. Bezos and company did not just create a virtual store in the cloud that can provide to most people in many countries almost any consumer item they can order. They created a supply chain masterpiece that became so efficient they can ship many goods for free, and offer that same supply chain system to other businesses for order fulfilment.

Ushahidi is awesome in providing a simple scalable crisis mapping technology that is disrupting long established systems and providing information for rapid action and intervention where needed. It is currently Africa’s foremost technology offering to the world. ZipCar is intriguing. A car available to you anytime, anywhere without need to actually own or maintain one, that you can leave anywhere and pay low fees to use? Intriguing.

Skype is so cool in providing a means for free internet calls across the planet, then low-cost calls to more conventional phone lines – including video. Of course all that is dependent on the cost and quality of your internet service, but still it impresses. Twitter impressed me by presenting an ultra-simplistic service that has spawned an astonishingly vast number of emergent properties and services that is the envy and model of other online entities large and small.

Impress me like Aero Contractors impressed me with their highly sophisticated use of eCommerce to generate cash flow for their business during their times of difficulty (whether they were successful is another issue entirely). Impress me like www.DokitaSays.com. An organically growing medical resource that has content that caters to the medical needs of local Nigerians providing enough information for people to make informed decisions about their health and healthcare. That is serious crowdsourcing and should be copied by the lawyers and other such professions. Academic Earth makes me applaud their collecting the best free academic content from around the world into one place where I can get it and actually learn. I may not get a degree, but I can get an education.

Impress me like my ISP (and all the rest of them) has FAILED to impress me in not providing an online payment mechanism for renewing subscriptions. For goodness’ sake, the internet is their business right?

I have gathered these examples of hardware, software, technologies, and technologically delivered services (mostly) from abroad to say something I have said in a variety of ways already. I am convinced that a Nigerian somewhere is going to create a solution that uniquely addresses something in our Nigerian environment in a way that will impact our society the way that the advent of GSM did. GSM and similar services are infrastructure services and they are key and fundamental. However they are the equivalent of highways. They are necessary for transportation and to engender commerce and communication. Like the expected influx of fat bandwidth pipes over the next few months, we should relish their presence, but that celebration should be quickly tempered by a desire for places to visit. That’s the whole point of a highway. The real excitement comes from what is at the end of the road. So I seek the applications built on top of all that infrastructure that will fundamentally disrupt the way we do things in this country.

I know someone, somewhere is working on something that will do that. Probably in Ajegunle. Maybe in Lekki. Certainly in Surulere. At UNILAG. ABU. Covenant University. FUTO. UNN. An Andreesen. A Page and Brin. A Shuttleworth, a Jobs, a Gates, a Hewlett and a Packard.

Go ahead. Impress me.

Dej.

If you know of a tech solution that provides genuine value to the lives of Nigerians, why not post it in the comments here or Tweet about it with the hashtag #ImpressedMe

Photo of impressive building in Prague design from Jemil75 at Flickr.

Clone Wars Part 3: Platforms.

2010-06-22T20:05:00.000+01:00

Doing clones is usually an attempt to replicate a successful business model. The most common type of clone out there today is the social network and every second start-up in Nigeria seems to remarkably resemble Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn or Twitter. As I said earlier, there is nothing wrong with duplicating successful models in and of itself, but I am concerned that we are not doing it the way the Japanese, the Koreans and the Indians have done it. What these societies have done is take the technologies and products of the West and put their own peculiar spin on these technologies, made it their own and created products that the world beats a path to their door for. Names like Samsung, Toyota and the city of Mumbai stand testament to this.

In an attempt to get our folks thinking about alternatives to social networking as a business solution I will be looking at different business segments and business models. One of the richest possibilities out there is internet platforms.

Wikipedia defines a platform:

In computing, a platform describes some sort of hardware architecture and software framework (including application frameworks), that allows software to run. Typical platforms include a computer's architecture, operating system, programming languages and related user interface (runtime libraries or graphical user interface).

I would say a platform is a technology solution that other technologies can be built on top of and that enables third parties to also earn revenue. Platforms are the heart and soul of modern internet technology efforts. The most successful technology businesses of all time have all been platforms. This is because they have all created avenues for third party solutions. In my opinion, Microsoft’s greatest successes weren’t the Windows and Office products, but a certain programming environment called Visual Basic. VB allowed millions the world over to rapidly create fully functional business solutions of their own. The success of the iPhone is the App Store which has enabled the developers of its over 200,000 applications earn 1 billion dollars in revenue. The flavour of the moment, Twitter would not be what it is without the access it gave to third parties to use its functionality in their products. Amazon is betting it’s future as its cloud offerings, as is Microsoft. Google’s Adsense extends the reach of their successful Ad-based revenue model by enabling site publishers to make money from Google’s adverts. Their newly acquired AdMob technology will enable mobile app developers better monetise while helping Google get more entrenched. WordPress host’s the world’s biggest and most successful blogs. Ushahidi, though free and open source, is a platform that has put Africa on the map in a way that no other technology offering out of the continent has. More important than earning revenue, it has been used to save lives from Haiti to Chile.

There are all sorts of platforms. It doesn’t have to be very complex. A hosting service is a fairly common type of platform. In this internet age, we all need inexpensive, powerful and reliable hosts that can support varying workloads. The more exciting platforms are those that make software capabilities available to third parties. Something as simple as Yrn.me’s API puts the URL shortening service on the way to being a platform. It will be interesting to see what more the developer can build into the core product and expose to other developers.

The most popular revenue model on the internet today is the advertising model. There are opportunities for a locally developed advertising platform to use the peculiarities of the Nigerian environment to bring rich revenue generating opportunities to Nigerian web businesses. Waiting on a heavily taxed cheque to come in from Europe, a la Google Adsense, cannot be the best we can get in Nigeria.

I should note that while a platform has a great deal of potential, it is also fraught with difficulties. Building up infrastructure is capital intensive, especially if the platform includes hardware investment. Maintaining availability becomes more complex and more important the more people and systems use the platform. The world goes ballistics when Google are offline for 5 minutes and while we have all been extremely forgiving of Twitter’s hiccups, I would imagine that those who build their businesses on it have their blood pressures elevated when it goes offline.

Still, a platform that is well executed is one way to success and longevity in the rapidly changing internet ecosystem. To get your creative juices flowing, take a look at Programmable Web, a site that is focused on APIs and how they are used. Not only will you get ideas about platforms you can build, but you’ll also discover platforms and tools you can build into your own apps.

Dej.

The Clone Wars continue…

The absolutely beautiful photo of Milan Train Station at Midnight is courtesy of “Stuck in Customs” on Twitter

Clone Wars Part 2: Pros and Pitfalls

2010-06-15T19:50:00.000+01:00

My last post was the first in my Clone Wars series. Clone, in this context, is a web enterprise that is pretty much a copycat of another existing one. I suggested that that is not necessarily a bad thing and there is a history of highly successful enterprises that started as a clone of a predecessor. Creating an enterprise that is a copy of an existing one has its benefits, but I think the pitfalls exceed the benefits.

First the benefits. It doesn’t take a lot of work to create a clone. Not as much work as when you conceptualise, research, stretch the borders of know computer and internet use and have to introduce a new paradigm of doing things. With cloning, the concept is already out there. The hard engineering has been done. There may even be open source code or toolkits that help you create your clone. Consequently you can have your solution up and running with a lot less effort than if you had to create something unique. You end up getting to market a lot more quickly.

When you are copying a well-known product, people are already familiar with the concepts behind your product. So if you have used the iPhone or the iPod Touch, then using Android is very familiar already. Almost every search engine is used exactly the same way. This benefit means people can begin using your product very quickly.

Another benefit is that cloning gives you a point of reference to work with in applying the same solution to different problems. So Yammer uses Twitter as a point of reference and built a Twitter clone that is used within organisations. What they did was clone an existing product set and target it at an a different demographic. Similarly, because no product is perfect, you can take the basic feature set and tack on something that addresses the weaknesses. So when Facebook created universal “Like” and the “Open Graph” protocol, there was a backlash against the perceived privacy issues and annexing the Internet. This resulted in the launching of an initiative called the “Open Like” project with a goal to create the best features of Facebook’s new system without any of the baggage.

Now for the pitfalls. The problem with cloning is when there is a dominant player whose features you are emulating you have a lot more work to do in convincing people that they should use yours instead of the “incumbent”. I have had debates in these pages and on other sites on why it is hard for me to switch from Twitter, Facebook and Bit.ly to similar local products that emulate their features. My argument at core is that I don’t see anything attractive enough in the alternatives to switch. You will always have that problem with a copycat product. What makes it more difficult is that sometimes you do add a feature that is compelling and different and just when people are thinking of actually moving over to your offering, Google implements something that suddenly moves it even further ahead of your offering.

Another problem of doing this is that you run the risk of your product being defined only in the context of the product you cloned. Like in secondary school where younger siblings with popular brothers or sisters are only known as so and so’s younger brother, you may only be known as the iPhone wannabe. That is not somewhere you want to be. It becomes a lot tougher to differentiate yourself and differentiate is what you absolutely have to do. Mind you, this could play in your favour especially where, like the aforementioned iPhone, the other product is more expensive or less accessible to your target audience.

Lastly, and I think this is the most important pitfall, by cloning an existing product you run the risk of solving a problem that doesn’t exist in your environment while ignoring rich opportunities that you could be addressing. Do we need Twitter clones? Facebook Clones? Nigerian search engines? A local YouTube? A Nigerian Yahoo? Maybe we do and maybe we don’t. However I can list a whole bunch of other things that we definitely do need that our brightest and best are not bending their considerable talents to because they are solving problems that don’t exist. Why clone eBay when you can bulid a Web of Trust platform can be used as the backbone for a thousand services that need authentication and validation in a society the western systems for identity documentation (drivers licenses, passport and social security numbers) are unreliable at best?

Cloning may be what your do and you stand a chance of creating a successful product, but I would suggest you aim higher and put your creativity to work conquering problems that surround you that no one else has solved.

Dej.

The Clone Wars continue…

Very eerie image taken from Flickr courtesy of Imapix

Clone Wars: Part One

2010-06-08T16:41:00.000+01:00

For some time I have been planning to do a series of articles called, euphemistically, “the Clone Wars” because the jump-off point was the large number of web enterprises that seem to be copies or clones of other better known web enterprises. The idea for this series has percolated in my mind for some time, shifting and taking form being shaped by new information, events and perspectives.

Most recently, I was at BarCamp Nigeria 2010. The theme was “Creating Local Content for Nigerian Web Market”. I was meant to moderate a panel on the subject of “Business Models”. This meant that there would be a panel of experienced internet entrepreneurs to answer questions that I would put to them on behalf of the audience. Unfortunately due to time overruns, that panel couldn’t take place which was unfortunate because it would have been a valuable discussion. I bring that up because the whole issue of clones is an issue of business models. So the Clone Wars series will ultimately be an exploration of some of the possible business models available in the Nigerian business space, and the pros and cons of each of them.

To be absolutely clear, what I call a clone is not necessarily a duplicate of an existing web enterprise. That would be bordering on copyright infringement. That’s not what we are talking about here. For our purposes, a clone is a web enterprise that has similar features to another one. It usually tries to solve the same problem the other “original” site is solving, usually with the same approach. Sometimes, even the name lets you know that the that the site is doing that. So “Twitter”, a sound a bird makes. “Kukurooku”, a sound a bird (rooster) makes. Kukurooku imitates the micro-blogging phenomenon called Twitter.

And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.

Everything we celebrate now as new and fresh found its existence in some previous iteration. It would be hard to believe that before Zuckerberg built the first version of Facebook in his dorm he wasn’t already aware, and maybe even a member, of such sites as MySpace, Friendster and Hi5. The graphic below shows the timeline of the creation of social networking sites both familiar and obscure.

The original Facebook might well have been envisioned from using one of these sites. Zuckerberg may have reasoned that he could do it better than they were doing it. Maybe he decided that he could build a Friendster that would serve his college community better than the big site (local content anyone?). Maybe there was some massively irritating thing he kept running to in the sites of the day which everyone he know also hated that he wanted to fix. Facebook created in isolation? Highly unlikely. Even today, until they bought FriendFeed, Facebook was notorious for cloning their features.

So the social networking clones of today are following in the footsteps of others that went before. One of the things that has always happened in the business world is that people emulate those who have been successful in the same enterprise. So if Twitter is hot right now and people are flocking to it in droves, it makes sense that if there is something about Twitter that draws customers in their millions, we can build something similar that draws customers at least in their hundreds of thousands. We may even reach and exceed the millions that the original had. When Google shot to number one, there were incumbents like Ask Jeeves, Lycos and AltaVista . Yammer, a Twitter clone for business is certainly making a go of it. Surely either Pepsi Cola or Coca Cola is a clone of the other. Both are very large businesses today.

However, there are both benefits and risks to cloning and we will explore them in our next instalment.

Dej.

Timeline Image courtesy of Danah M. Boyd and Nicole B. Ellison’s Article on “Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship”.

Clone Wars poster courtesy of www.fantascienza.com and is almost certainly the property of LucasFilm.

Nigeria Needs A CIO

2010-06-01T20:28:00.000+01:00

First it was word that the President was going to use Facebook to communicate with the people. Then it was the announcement about a plan to spend a significant amount of money making internet infrastructure available to schools across the country. Now I hear the government is also going to be using Youtube (unfortunately, I can’t seem to find the link to the news item).It seems someone in Abuja woke up and discovered all these tools of the 21st Century.

All this sudden interest in modern information technology is a good thing and should be applauded. As long as the government’s interest is awoken, let me use the opportunity to make a suggestion. The Federal Republic of Nigeria needs a Chief Information Officer, a Federal CIO.

I work in a fairly large organisation with thousands of workers and the what keeps the organisation functional and profitable are the information technology tools that the workers use to do their jobs. Providing that technology, helping to develop and implement technology policy and strategy is an IT department headed by an IT Manager otherwise known as a Chief Information Officer. This IT department doesn’t do technology for technology’s sake. The IT function is to provide technology to achieve the organisation’s goal.

Nigeria needs an IT department. I know we have a Ministry of Information and a Ministry of Science and Technology, but their portfolios are too broad for this. While it is possible for someone in either of these organisations to fulfil this role, I believe this is a role that belongs in the Presidency, pretty much the same way the Department of Petroleum Resources is in the Presidency.

The United States of America has such a role. Vivek Kundra is the Federal CIO and his job is described as follows:

The Federal Chief Information Officer is responsible for directing the policy and strategic planning of federal information technology investments as well as for oversight of federal technology spending. The Federal CIO establishes and oversees enterprise architecture to ensure system interoperability and information sharing and maintains information security and privacy across the federal government. According to President Obama, as Chief Information Officer, Kundra "will play a key role in making sure our government is running in the most secure, open, and efficient way possible."^[1] …
Kundra has made it a priority to focus on the following areas: (1) ensuring openness and transparency, (2) lowering the cost of government, (3) cyber-security, (4) participatory democracy, and (5) innovation.^[32] One of Mr. Kundra's first projects was the launch of Data.gov, a site for providing access to raw government data.^[33] Another project launched by Mr. Kundra in June 2009 was the Federal IT Dashboard, which gives an assessment (in terms of Cost, Schedule and CIO ranking) of many large government IT projects.^[34]

Nigeria’s CIO should have a similar job, specifically, I would recommend the following:

The CIO should be responsible for developing an information technology platform to be used by all tiers of government in running their operations. This platform would specify a standard set of procedures for collecting, creating and storing government information, a set of tools for accessing and transforming that information for actionable intelligence, and security policies to ensure the integrity and availability of that information.
The CIO would define a set of standards that would use information technology to enable government operate more efficiently reducing bureaucracy, wastage, duplication of effort, cost of running the nation and time to get things done. These standards would also have make provision for the prevention and detection of fraud and corrupt practices.
The job would involve developing a simple mechanism to enable the people of Nigeria engage their governments in any form, shape or fashion using telephony and internet technologies. Similarly this mechanism would enable the government aggregate information about what is happening in the lives of ordinary Nigerians in order to formulate policy and proper deployment of resources.
The CIO will serve was a resource to the various ministries and parastatals in the execution of IT projects. Indeed the law establishing the office will require that all projects that have an IT component over a certain naira value to include the CIO’s office as part of the project.
The CIO will also guide the Senate and the House on the formulation of laws that regulate and promote information technology, ecommerce and internet privacy and that enable law enforcement agencies battle cybercrime.

Nigeria is long past due taking IT seriously as a tool to run the government. While various government agencies have a variety of initiatives, internal and citizen-facing, there needs to be a top-down unified approach to incorporating IT into the fabric of our nation. A federal CIO, who does the job well, will be a potent force in bringing our country into the league of nations making their people’s lives better by using modern technology.

Dej.

Picture of President Goodluck Jonathan courtesy of OnlineNigeria.com

Dear Dora, Don’t Do This.

2010-05-25T18:10:00.000+01:00

BusinessDay reports that the Federal executive council is planning to spend 3.6 billion Naira on computers and internet connectivity in 260 schools around the nation. Professor Dora Akunyili made the announcement, no doubt because it’s her job to share the word, but also because her ministry would probably be responsible for making it happen.

I’m a firm believer that every Nigerian should have internet access for education, commerce, communication and entertainment. Such a plan shows that our leaders are turning their minds to the future and realising the necessity of raising our children on the technologies that will elevate them to prime position among their peers. Nevertheless, I think it is a rotten idea and I’ll tell you why.

I work in corporate IT and one lesson we learnt over the years is that technology is only a viable investment if it supports a valid business process. An investment in IT infrastructure for schools is only valid if it supports a properly designed educational curriculum with an educated and motivated staff to deliver it using a set of well iterated designed tools and processes. While I am not privy to the FEC’s plans, and with no details so far beyond the press release, it is unclear whether the plan takes this into account.

Yes we need to enable the next generation become comfortable with technology, both from the perspective of teaching them the fundamentals of maths, science and from using it in the classroom. First, however, we need to enable the faculty be competent and comfortable with the technology. I don’t mean the teacher tasked with teaching a computer class. I mean all the teachers. The teachers need to be able to prepare their lessons on computers. They need to be able to do research. To be able to use technology tools create, to grade and score tests. To be able to confer with other teaching professionals across the world. There also needs to be incentive to do this. If they’re not well paid and well trained, I fear we may see the next wave of 419 rising from the staff rooms of our nation’s schools (aided by the students) using computers provided by the government.

Secondly, the technology tools need to be used to teach the subjects themselves – not just as show pieces for “this is a monitor. This keyboard. This is a mouse.”. The technology should be used to teach English. Maths. Music. Physics. Biology. Elementary science. The curriculum showed be woven around the tools and the tools used to present the subject matter.

Lastly, a comprehensive, powerful yet simple educational software stack needs to be developed or purchased. This stack would have the curriculum, the digital forms of the books to be used for all the schools and classes. It would have tools for tracking student progress and for identifying educational deficiencies, exceptional students – as well as malpractice (both among the teachers and the students). This technology would enable customising the appropriate plan for each student’s need. It would be used for testing students as well as aggregating results across the nation. It would be used to define as well as validate educational policy. An example of a platform that can be used and built upon is Moodle.

The 3.6 billion is better spent on a whole bunch of things before the idea of internet access and computers for the schools themselves are even considered. And I’m not even going to start on the other infrastructural things that need to be in place to make the FEC’s plan viable (electricity supply, anyone). In short, information technology needs to be used to fix the educational system itself before anything else, otherwise the money will be wasted. Until that is done, I’ll have to say don’t do it, dear Dora. Please, don’t.

Dej.

(Thanks to Loy Okezie for pointing out the Business Day article to me)

Picture courtesy of flickr.com

BarCamp Nigeria 2010 Takes Place This Saturday

2010-05-19T22:49:00.001+01:00

Barcamp Nigeria 2010 takes place this Saturday, the 22nd of May, at CITS, University of Lagos, Akoka, Nigeria. From the event’s website:

BarCamp is simply an ‘unconference’ - an ad-hoc gathering of people with the simple desire to share and learn in an open environment. Unlike a conference, at a barcamp everyone is both a speaker and a participant. The content is provided by all attendees based on their interests.
BarCamp Nigeria 2010 will be held at CITS, University of Lagos Akoka, Lagos, Nigeria on 22 May, 2010 as a way to bring people interested in technology, on a variety of levels and topics, together in one place for a day of sharing, learning, networking and brainstorming.
Barcamp Nigeria 2010 theme is: “Creating local content for Nigerian web market.”

I plan to be there. If you have an interest in creating technology solutions to Nigeria’s problems or using technology to make a living or you just want to hang with a bunch of folks who are excited about the opportunities on the internet, you should be there too.

You can register right here.

Dej.

My First Interview – Answering Questions About the “Afrislate”

2010-05-19T21:33:00.000+01:00

A couple of months ago, I wrote a 3 part series called the “African iPad”. In it I described the features of a hypothetical African tablet device based on the design principles of the Apple iPad. After that, I mentally told myself that I was not going to spend anymore time writing about the iPad, slates, or tablets – at least not for a good long while. However, in not-as-far-as-it-once-was China, someone read the series and had a few questions of their own.

www.Shanzai.com, a Chinese technology site that focuses on the tech culture also called “Shanzai”, contacted me about doing an interview on the subject of what an African tablet would be. The interviewer, Tai-Pan, had previously written his own article about the subject. You can find the interview published right here. I share my thoughts on the hardware and what needs to be in place in Nigeria for such a device to be successful.

By the way, you should spend some time on the Shanzai site. They cover a very fascinating technology culture that has sprung up in that part of the world.

Dej.

Does the President Know What He's In For?

2010-05-18T21:34:00.003+01:00

When I heard that President Jonathan Goodluck promised to engage young Nigerians by opening a Facebook page focused on electoral reforms, I was impressed. However, I couldn't help but wonder whether he realised what he is in for.

Social media is not like the usual websites. On a website, you can still, to some extent, get away with static information. On social media sites like Facebook everything is about the conversation. We will expect to see his policies, his plans, and read news items. However, the unspoken contract is he needs to hear us.

While images of the President scrolling down to see the latest posts on his wall play across my imagination, in reality I fully expect he will have a team of social media experts who will set it up and manage it for him. Their charge has to be keep the conversation going in both directions. For a few years now, Nigerians have used social media to express their hopes, their pain and their outrage. Groups like LightUpNigeria, National Online Assembly, Enough Is Enough Nigeria, and many others have been using social media for a while now. However, the political class has mostly been insulated from all that. The President needs to be exposed to the crashing roar of the wave that is online Nigeria. In his being exposed to it, our voices may flow down to influence the other levels of government.

At the same time, he needs to be insulated from it. He needs to be protected from the gale while he steers the ship of state in the right direction. His social media team needs to be able to make our voice coherent. They need to filter the signal from the noise and yet not sanitise it. They need to let him truly hear what we moan about the most, but also hear the sheer brilliance of the solutions that many a voice has proferred. Thankfully, there is an abundance of tools that are designed to curate actionable information from social media. If they will use them. It is all useless, of course, if they do not.

The beauty of social media is we can very easily see the outcome of the conversation and know if we are getting the silent treatment or if our words are taken into account.

All in all, it will be an interesting experiment to watch. Welcome to our world Mr. President, enjoy your stay.

Dej.

P.S. My computer has crashed, so this was typed with one finger on my phone. So I wasn't able to create links, but you can follow me on Twitter and on Yarnable.com My handle is @the_dej on both sites.

Debating the African Internet Industry with Kachwanya

2010-05-11T20:00:00.000+01:00

A couple of weeks ago I posted my response to a conversation that started on Techmasai as a blog post. I called it “Clone Wars: The Prelude”. The gentleman who started the conversation brought the discussion over here by posting a response to it. I tried to reply his comments, but the commenting system said my reply was too long. So I decided to make it a blog post again. The commentator, a Kenyan blogger and software consultant who maintains a very nice looking blog over at www.kachwanya.com, wrote his thoughts:

I followed you here. The point here is not about the ethnic group or what we popularly call our own, the point is based on the interest of the nation or the continent for that matter. I hope you heard several times when they talk of National interest, basically it has to do with protecting the locally based products and services and even people. Let move a way from the web a bit and take the piratical example of textile industry in Africa or the farmers in Africa, the outcry out there is that American or European farmers production get subsidized while at the same time one expect the same farmers to compete with Farmers in Africa where God love us all but each man for himself. When Obama came to Kenya back in 2006 when he was still a senator, he was asked about the same and the answer was, him and the government of US have to protect the interest of the local farmers. You see the bigger picture here is when a local company grows , it help the locals, expand the local economy, expand the economy of the nation, while when you insist in growing Facebook which at the end take everything back to US..you are not helping Nigeria to start with.
Take for example in Kenya a local company Safaricom currently running promotion or advert called Sakata Ball which appears on the sites like NYTimes, Mashable, and the question people are asking is, what is the relevant in that, why can't they advertise in the local blogs or websites since the competition is taking place in Kenya. The answer they will tell you is they want something better just the way you are arguing..it doesn't make sense at all.
You have tried to discredit China example but it was based on the phones, i wonder why you did not take direct comparison of the China websites which are thriving, because the locals embrace them. Facebook might be the king out here by design and usage but in China it is nowhere to be seen, according to this article http://www.technama.com/2009/top-10-best-social-n... Myspace is the closest but still at number 5. Now that is what i am talking about, Chinese are embracing what is made in China and through that the world is looking at their direction while back here we are discrediting the efforts of the locals.

My response is:

I appreciate the time you have taken to make your thoughts known on my blog. I also appreciate your passion for Africa in general and African internet industry in particular. I feel the same, but my perspective on how it can grow is different. Let me address your points.
I do not discredit China. Their products are cheaper and have more features than the so-called "better" products built in the West. That is how they are pushing ahead. That is how Japan and Korea rose to the place they are. China competes and grows on providing value that the West cannot. They are at the point that a Lenovo can buy up IBM’s PC business or an Huawei can muscle in on the telecoms industry. The same applies to India. India provides better quality in IT services and expertise, again at a much cheaper price. You can evangelise “National Interest” all you want, if you do not provide something valuable enough in your product that makes people want to use it, then you shouldn't be patronised whether by your own citizens or by outsiders. Even if you are patronised, better quality products will eventually get ahead and stay ahead.
This is one of the things that led to the economic collapse of the Soviet Union. They were producing goods for internal consumption that everyone was forced to use for “National Interest” not because they were good enough for the purposes. The quality continued to deteriorate until the point that Russians were standing in line for bread. The areas where the Soviets excelled were where they competed against the United States in military investment, sports, the space programs, and such.
Talking about subsidies for American farmers as the reason for the poor prospects of the African textile industry doesn’t make sense. Not when the governments of Africa don't provide the necessary infrastructure to enable competition be feasible. When everyone is spending most of their resources on providing their own electricity, water, transportation and security how will they be able to compete against the Americans, subsidies or not? Increased taxes on imported rice, cement or other imported goods has not led to an economic boom in Nigeria. National interest is served by enacting and enabling laws that drive development and investing in infrastructure.
With regards to Chinese internet business, again your example breaks down. To start with, China poses a significant barrier that does not exist in Africa as a result of using a different script (Chinese characters). A lot of Western technologies do not translate well into Chinese text hence the Chinese already had the head in producing natively compatible technologies. Secondly, the way their government runs their country makes it difficult for anyone who doesn’t not submit to their complete control of the environment to get a leg in. When your internet service can be blocked by the Great Firewall of China at someone’s whim it is hard to do business. This is similar to the way that foreign businesses who were not willing to cooperate with corrupt African governments found it hard to make any progress in Africa. Those who did prospered.
However, even if we ignore all that, you have not shown that Chinese internet businesses are providing less value to Chinese people than international providers. The government did not mandate that Chinese people use Baidu, but it is extremely popular in China because they provide the value that Chinese people are looking for and Google so far have not been able to provide. I had an IM conversation yesterday with an African entrepreneur who is exploring making his social network available in multiple Nigerian languages looking to add differentiating value. Startups Nigeria just did a story of a Nigerian medical recommendations website (www.dokitasays.com). It is a question and answer site where people can post medical questions and a set of volunteer doctors provide answers. Simple. Valuable. That’s what I ask every internet business to offer. “Made in Nigeria” is a useless assertion without those things. A Nigerian events management site, Kilonshele.com has generated a lot of buzz that Eventful.com and Eventbrite.com have not generated because it provides a local ticketing solution that these well established international sites do not. They also provide a custom experience for their partners that cannot be obtained with these international sites.
I do not want to trivialise the difficulty of challenging well-known international brands. It is hard. Extremely so. It does require building up a core base of loyal users who can evangelise your offering (which is no easy task). That loyalty grows from people believing in your product, but that only happens if your product is worth believing in. That’s how Google took over from Yahoo and Facebook unseated MySpace. That’s why, despite its constant crashes and outages, Twitter grew to be what it is today.
As a continent that has received the world's castoffs for too long, we owe it to ourselves to demand of ourselves to do better. The yam seller with the cheery smile, the clean stall, the boy to carry the tubers to my car, and the occasional price incentive who happens to hail from the other side of the country will always get my custom over the surly one from my hometown who imagines I owe him my business on that basis alone. One will prosper, the other will fade.
Even as we debate, I am building an internet product and I do not expect anyone to use it unless I can make it of good enough quality and provide a compelling feature set. I have no sense of entitlement that people should use it just because a fellow Nigerian made it. If they do use it, it will be because I have given them something worthy of their time and resources that will make their lives richer.

Feel free to join the conversation.

Dej.

Image taken from http://afamatik.com

It’s Facebook’s World, But Do We Want To Live In It?

2010-05-04T18:18:00.000+01:00

Case 1: A week ago I was asking a colleague about a movie she went to watch on a Thursday evening. Surprised, she asked how I knew she had gone to watch a movie. I told her I found out on Facebook. she said she doesn’t use Facebook. The information, with a picture and the name of the movie, was posted on Facebook by the person she went with.

Case 2: The technical events person had been calling me for years inviting me to corporate technology events. I attended a few, didn’t attend most, but for years all I knew was a name, an email address and a voice on the phone. I finally went online, popped in the person’s name and had their LinkedIn and Facebook pages in seconds. LinkedIn gave me their personal history. Facebook showed me pictures of their 3 children.

Welcome to the new world where you actions, your whereabouts, your very life may be posted online by you, or someone else with or without your knowledge, and a vast number of people may know so much more about you than you imagine. As discussed in an older post, Facebook started out as a closed system where you connected with friends and had tight control over who had access to your personal information. Last year, Facebook changed that by unveiling a set of privacy settings that pushed you towards making your private data a lot more public.

On the 21st of April, 2010 at their F8 Conference, Facebook made their 2009 moves seem like the scurrying of a mouse compared to their giant strides this year. This is not a developer post, so I won’t discuss things from that perspective but if you are a developer, you can start from here to read about the changes and what you can do with them.

For those of us who just use Facebook, the changes represent either a great new set of features to make the internet as a whole a richer experience, or it represents greater intrusion of Facebook into our lives than we are comfortable with. For most it will probably be a mix of both.

We could go into the details of the new features, but how about looking at the changes they have made to their privacy settings to start with? They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so I’ll post screenshots of the most important sections. They are pretty self-explanatory.

The consistent theme you will see across the screens is the ability to restrict who can interact with you on Facebook to “Everyone, Friends of Friends, Only Friends, or Customize”. Customize lets you become very detailed up to and including specific user names.

So make the changes you want or accept the default changes, but make a definite choice as to what Facebook shares about you. One tool that answers the question: “What does Facebook publish about you and your friends” is http://zesty.ca/facebook/. Pop over to the site, put in your Facebook ID and see what the world can see about you. Then you can go back to the Facebook privacy pages and adjust the settings to your taste. Oh, and click on the Facebook “Like” button below before you leave.

Dej.

Clone Wars – The Prelude.

2010-04-28T20:59:00.000+01:00

I have been thinking of doing a series for sometime now that I was going to call “Clone Wars” in which I was going to discuss Nigerian sites that are copies of international sites and look at the pros and cons of that approach to internet commerce. It was a series I was going to treat with a lot of care because while my initial thinking was that cloning wasn’t a good idea or something that I respected, I have since rethought that perspective I realised that there is actually a lot of potential and validity to cloning if handled well.

Well, about a week ago, Techmasai (Munashe Gumbonzvanda) wrote a post entitled “Opinion Piece: An Experiment To Utilize Mostly African Social Media Platforms” in which he said he was going to stop using non-African internet tools where possible as an experiment and to “focus and engage our primary audience more openly and regularly.”

I wrote a comment on that post:

“I'd like to see how your experiment plays out. How do you measure it as a success or not a success? It's not an experiment if there isn't something you measure and results you can share. May take on using African social media is that they have to give me something more than the competition. In other words they have to give me more value the others. So for instance with twitter, I can log on to disqus with my twitter account to post this. I can't with gistcaster. In such I pay the highest compliment to our local entrepreneurs by holding them to the same standard I would the international equivalent. They have to provide me at least as much value as their better known competition or they have to give me something compelling that the others can't. No one international gives me what www.1spotsearch.com gives me for instance, on the other none of our pan-African social networks gives me what I get from say facebook. In summary, I need differentiation from any web app from me to use it, whereever it comes from.”

A few days ago, someone replied to my comment and I was surprised at their perspective:

“I find people who claims that African social media have to give something more than the competition not sincere. The same people have Linkedin accounts, Facebook accounts and may be Mysapace. If you look at all these so called international social media, you find out they now look a like trying to do all most the same thing. I don't hear people compalaining that Linkedin now almost look like Facebook, i don't hear people compalining that Hi5 is copying Myspace. Why double standards? Why is it that when come to Africa social media then they have to give more and nothing is said of the international Social media who are copying each other left right and center? Check out www.iborian.com”

He or she is entitled to his or her opinion, but I believe the thinking is flawed and my response was so comprehensive that I decided it was worth reproducing here below and serving as a prelude to my Clone Wars series:

You miss my point which is I am going to use a social site (or any site) because it gives me features that I want or I find some other reason to like it, not just because of the origin of its creators or where their servers are located. I use Facebook and LinkedIn, but I don't use MySpace, Hi5 or Orkut. I use Twitter, but I don't use Gistcaster. I use bit.ly rather than ow.ly, tinyurl or is.gd. The other day someone tried to convince me to use yrn.me simply because it is African. I resisted on the basis that I wasn't sure that it would give me the features I wanted. After being told that it had APIs that could be used to extend it, I decided to give it a try only to find out that it was offline - and remained so for at least another 24 hours. So if I had a business (and my blog can be called my business) that relied on short urls and was using yrn.me or had used its APIs in an application, then for more than 24 hours my system would have been usable.
I am not holding African sites to a higher standard that foreign sites, I am holding them to the same standard. Many African sites are entering to spaces where there are already foreign sites that are huge. I don't expect a Nigerian site to be able to challenge Facebook head on in terms of size and feature set on day one. I do expect them to give me a compelling reason to use their service. For the social networking sites in particular, one of the things they offer as an incentive is actually a disincentive - which is their user base is local, i.e Nigerian. I call it a disincentive because I don't see why I should move to a site that is targeted only at Nigerians when Facebook has more Nigerians using it, and I can reach Kenyans, Cameroonians, South Africans, Ugandans, Americans, Chinese people and most other people (nearly 500 million) in the world. I know of one business that has built one social network for Nigerians, is building another for Cameroonians and who knows what other silo they are going to want to build for another country?
Lets talk from the perspective of technologies. How many of them give me analytics? Easy advertising capability? A development platform? The equivalent of a Facebook connect that allows me to use them as an authentication mechanism? Data portability? What are their SLAs? What swayed me to even think about using yrn.me is the fact that they had an API. Just for the sake of promoting a fellow African's tool I'm thinking of developing a Chrome extension, a bookmarklet and possibly more tools using their APIs. Incidentally I use MyOnePage.com, I'm registered with GatorPeeps (the only Blog Aggregator my blog is registered with by the way), and my blogroll on my site includes 4 non-African blogs and 3 African blogs. I have supported and continue to support the growth of the African tech industry on my blog. In particular, the African iPad series calls for the development of an African product over the use and adoption of the Apple product.
I want to know how my perspective lacks sincerity? If anything, I would suggest a mentality that demands we use something just because it is from "our own people" is the faulty one because it refuses to hold us to a rigorous quality standard and insists on nepotism as a basis of selection. This is the basis for the so-called "federal character" policy in Nigeria that insists on ethnic or regional representation in government whether or not the people have the ability to do the work well or not.

I really think the person is misguided in their opinion. However, I throw myself upon the mercy of the court. Do you thing my perspective is a valid or should African web products be held to a different set of standards when evaluating their attractiveness than their internationally renown competitors?

Dej.

Clone Wars poster courtesy of www.fantascienza.com and is almost certainly the property of LucasFilm.

Elevating The Internet Industry: 3 Things We Need

2010-04-27T08:35:00.002+01:00

Last week, we had the East/West Twitter Chat with Internet entrepreneurs from different parts of Africa and the Diaspora. You can find the transcript here, starting from the “2:01 PM” mark. The intense 90 minute session may not have quite fulfilled its mission, but it did provide valuable lessons. One of them is the lack of, and great need for, greater community among Africa's technology practitioners - whatever regional scope they may choose to exist in. Kenya has the iHub. Conferences and Unconferences are events where for a few brief moments like-minded individuals gather and share ideas and make connections. There are a few tenuous connections revolving around a few blogs and Twitter connections. This is not enough. I believe we need to put 3 things in place to strengthen what we are building.
First we need some kind of online technology business journal where our experts can contribute their experiences and ideas about running Internet businesses in Nigeria. This could also some news content to keep us informed of what is actually happening that’s relevant to our industry. It would definitely have a section that deals with all the necessary, but uninteresting stuff such as SME Toolkit covers, but more relevant to technology business and Nigeria.
Secondly, we need an online forum where ideas can be discussed, questions asked and answered and help sought and offered. This could even be the basis for a Nigerian or West Coast iHub to match the one on the East.
Lastly, we need a directory of technology efforts and businesses that serves as a repository of info on old and new entrants, provides publicly obtainable statistics and information such as services, technologies, the team, and APIs. It could even be a system that provides information about how secure the site is, what the privacy policies are, mobile accessibility and several other useful bits of info. It could also serve as a basis for some kind of community effort to advertise or at least showcase products.
There are many systems that have bits and pieces of the three things I outlined above. The examples are all over the internet such as ProgrammableWeb, Stackoverflow, CrunchBase, O’reilly Radar, and a myriad of technology and product-focused forums. However, a unified solution focused on African or at least Nigerian Internet business would be a valuable resource and one that does not exist today, at least not that I am aware of. If there is I would love someone to point it out to me. At first it looked to me that StartupsNigeria would be that kind of resource, however it still remains in closed beta and it is unclear if or when it will fill that need.
With the abundance of free and easy resources on the Internet nowadays, it would be very easy to build the kind of unified resource. Keeping it running will of course be much harder, but will, in the long term, be worth the effort. I think most of the effort would be in getting it started with and building up enough momentum to make it self-sustaining. I, for one, would be happy to contribute towards such an effort.
Any takers?
Dej.
Image Courtesy of jonhardm at Flickr.com

The Internet Business Cultures in Africa: East + West - ICTworks Twitter Chat Starts Soon

2010-04-22T10:35:00.003+01:00

The Internet Business Cultures in Africa: East + West - ICTworks Twitter Chat starts in a few hours. It may be a bit unclear to some (as it was to me) how to get into the session. It's quite simple. At the start time browse to http://tweetchat.com/room/ict4d. You will be expected to login with your Twitter credentials.

Dej.

Take A Bow

2010-04-20T20:02:00.000+01:00

In two days an event I helped orchestrate, or at the least planted the seed for, will take place where African Technology Entrepreneurs from the east and west coasts will compare notes about what makes them who they are. These are men and women who have committed themselves, for many reasons, to make the internet the tool they will use to change their individual fortunes or those of their societies, and in some cases both.

They do this in the face of great difficulty. In Nigeria we simply do not have electricity. Individual access to the internet is ridiculously expensive. let’s not even get started on the political issues. The folks on other side of the continent have their own equally daunting challenges. Still they have determined to make this their canvas for creativity and their marketplace for prosperity.

Despite the difficulties, these visionaries strive on to make their mark on the world. As a blogger, I have the really easy part. I look at what other people are doing and say things like “you should have done it this way” or “you should do this instead of that” or even “what a stupid idea that was”. I can make broad sweeping pronouncements from the comfort of my keyboard. I can chronicle in a few thousand words what people lived and suffered through. It is dead easy to be just like every armchair Arsenal fan declaring what he would have done in Wengar’s shoes. I am not one of those spending sleepless nights pounding away at lines of code that don’t compile right until weeks of inspection show that the problem was using “0” instead of “O” in the 3795th line of the 97th class specification. Tough as my corporate IT job can be, I can only imagine the challenges of driving traffic to a great digital product that no one knows or cares about that comes up as the one million, three hundred and fifty-five thousand, nine hundred and sixty-second search result – and that’s after you’ve applied every search engine optimisation principle you can find. Then some bozo like me comes along and says it’s just another Facebook clone.

Which is why I write this piece to celebrate you guys. I and others like me will continue to write, both promoting and pummelling your work because, well it needs to be done. You need to be challenged to do better. To stretch your selves. To do more. We need to write to chronicle your challenges, to highlight your victories and record your errors for all to see and learn from. For in recording, we help give perspective to your works and in our own ways shape the future.

So, before I continue with that mission, I pause to celebrate your industry, your ingenuity and your tenacity. I think you guys are doing a tremendous work and I believe, Nigeria, Africa and the world as a whole will benefit from what you do. Some of you will even smile to the bank. So what if the ISP fouls up and the hard drive crashes, or you delete all your content because you slept off on your keyboard or just before you launched someone releases the exact same product? You’ll figure out a way to make it happen. You already have.

So, the Internet Entrepreneurs of Africa, all rise. Step forward. Take a bow.

Dej.

Image courtesy of shaggy359 at flickr.com.

Internet Business Cultures in Africa: East + West - ICTworks Twitter Chat

2010-04-19T20:25:00.000+01:00

It’s official, the “East Helping West Helping East” discussion is taking place on 22nd of April. The actual title is less colourful, but more to the point. “Internet Business Cultures in Africa: East + West”. Find below, verbatim, the release from ICT Works:

Last month, we had an amazing Skype Chat on Nigerian Internet Business Opportunities - over 40 entrepreneurs and netcitizens joined in a lively debate on new business models and enabling factors to bring Nigeria to the forefront of online business innovation.

But what about East Africa? Kenya surely has the same level of Internet-based buzz as Nigeria. And Uganda isn't far behind. So this brings forth a few questions we should examine:

How might Internet business opportunity and entrepreneurship be different in East Africa versus West Africa?
What could each region learn from the other?
And what can we do now to improve cross-Africa collaboration?

These are the questions we'll discuss in the next ICTworks Twitter Chat - a freewheeling conversation around our central questions on the Twitter platform.

We'll start at 14:00 GMT (your timezone) on April 22nd with introductions, then move into the discussion, using the#ICT4D hashtag in Twitter. Be sure to RSVP here.

Handy Re-Tweet
:Internet Business: East + West Africa -
#ICT4D Tweet Chat 4/22 @ 14:00GMT -
RSVP: http://bit.ly/april-chat

Our hope is to learn from each other and find ways we can increase Internet business opportunity and entrepreneurship across Africa.

So Register for the event and join the discussion this Thursday.

Dej.

East Helping West Helping East Helping West Helping… Well, You Get the Idea

2010-04-13T17:38:00.000+01:00

Some weeks ago, Wayan Vota caused quite a stir when he wrote a post alleging that the Kenyan internet industry was better than the Nigerian internet industry. Quite a number of Nigerians weighed in on the blog and it resulted in a slew of comments and rejoinders (the Kenyans stayed out of the discussion for some reason). I suggested to Wayan then that we have a debate between the Nigerian and Kenyan industries to compare and contrast what made them what they were. Instead we ended up doing the highly productive discussion about the internet business opportunities available in Nigeria. The transcript of that discussion is here and my thoughts on it are here.

I added a bit of humour to my post reminding Wayan that he still owed me a debate between East African Internet entrepreneurs and West African Internet entrepreneurs. I believe there are interesting differences between what is happening in Nigeria and Kenya that are worth discussing. Kenyans seem to have solutions with a heavy focus on empowerment and socio-economic accessibility, while over here we seem to keep a very keen eye on the global trends and can rapidly iterate local versions of global solutions in a way that fits how our people do things.

This time Wayan agreed with the idea of a discussion and like the previous session we plan to do something at the end of this month (April, 2010). However, it has to be a meaningful discussion, not a bunch of African lions roaring superiority over each other. We came up with the following topic that we believe will be valuable to both sides and can help foster new and fruitful relationships: “The evolution of start-ups culture in Africa: how the East differs from the West and what we can learn from each other”.

We hope to get a group of entrepreneurs from both sides of Africa talking about their experiences and passing on learning points. We hope that out of this will come partnerships that will benefit Africa and the internet as a whole. While much of the thinking and discussion leading up to this has focused on Nigeria and Kenya, we do not plan to exclude internet business people from other parts of the continent and extend an invitation to all to participate.

I had to write this post before the details were worked out because one of the Kenyans that I invited, Joshua Wanyama of Afrinnovator, was cautious about participating without more information about what the purpose is. To reiterate, the purpose is getting African internet business people talking about the way things work in their societies in a way that will give everyone ideas, draw solutions to some of the pain points and cause an exchange of contact information that could result in a lot more coast to coast commerce and friendships.

I, Wayan, Possicon of WebTrends Nigeria, and others will share word on time, date, and forum once we have all that worked out. If you are interested, particularly if you are from outside Nigeria, please give me shout on Twitter at www.twitter.com/the_dej.

Dej.

Map courtesy of www.yourchildlearns.com. The interactive learning maps on the site are great for your kids to try out.

Of Viruses and Acid Rain

2010-04-06T10:21:00.000+01:00

I am one of the lucky Nigerians who don’t need to drive long distances to get to work. One effect of this is that I don’t spend much time listening to my car radio. However, one radio show I do get to hear and really enjoy listening to is the Daily Guide on Star 101 FM from 7.15 am and 7.30 am. I seriously love Moyo and Mofe Oyatogun’s take on the news. This isn’t because their reports are necessarily of scintillating intellectual content or breathtaking in vision. Instead, I like their news show because they bring texture to what is traditionally dry and monotonous. Their back and forth makes the news fun to listen to.

On two occasions however, they quite annoyed me. Late last year, December I believe it was, Mofe reported on a computer virus that was making the rounds. This virus was supposedly the most dangerous virus ever known. Microsoft and CNN were apparently both reporting it as the virus to end all viruses. For those familiar with such things, it was clearly a tried and tired hoax. And it was being reported as fact over a radio show that is listened to by thousands if not hundreds of thousands of uninformed listeners. This particular hoax has been recycled repeatedly since the last century. I wrote about it earlier in my blog post on hoaxes and talked about how to validate and verify those kinds of reports.

Act two. A couple of weeks ago, the Acid Rain hoax filled the airwaves. Apparently a text message had gone around Lagos that a rain of acid was coming and people should take cover. Again my second favourite (Dan Foster’s my first) radio personalities reported it as news. Let’s give them credit this time. They brought some skepticism to the story and followed up with a bit of journalistic fact-finding to “to see if these things were true”. Still, the results they came back with did much less that clear up the issue or expose it as the hoax it clearly was.

Both these incidents worry me because of several things. First, as I said wrong information was reported as news. The journalist apparently received the information about the virus in an email message. As a good citizen who wanted to make sure people she knew didn’t get their computers infected, she decided to let as many people as she knew know about it. For most of us that would have meant forwarding the email to as many people as we could and asking them to do the same (creating the flood of messages that was the hoaxer’s intent). My Daily Guide folks, being radio journalists, just happened to be in a position to share this hoax with all her teeming radio fans.

Most people in Nigeria don’t know computers. Beyond the basic uses they put their PCs to, they really know just enough to get into trouble. So those of us who speak to the public in any form or fashion (radio or blogs) need to be as sure as we can that we are not spreading misinformation. Because someone will believe us. The public sound of our voice gives us the fallacy of legitimacy. Consequently we have a greater duty to ensure veracity. I kind of hold myself responsible for not calling into the station or sending them an email debunking the first story. As a blogger and computer professional, I should have done what I could to get the word out over the same medium the hoax was spread.

The second incident is the more chilling one. This isn’t really a computer issue and the domain knowledge needed to debunk the hoax is different. Still secondary school encyclopedia reading was all the information I needed to be sure it was a hoax. The initial word went out over SMS before being picked up by the news media. Nigeria is a cell phone nation. The increase in our tele-density over the past decade has been off the charts. Many technology and developmental thinkers have recognised that the cell phone, for most of our population, is the equivalent of the computer and the internet. The great thing about cell-phones is that they are so cheap that most people independent of income or education can afford one. What makes them great also makes them a huge problem. If you want to reach most Nigerians as individuals you sent mass SMS. Those messages resonate more and somehow seem more authentic to many than a news broadcast. Possibly because text messages carry a sense of personal communications with them.

A similar, and worse incident, was the text about a large influx of northerners into Lagos with nefarious intent. I didn’t get that text either, but I did get the text debunking it. I must commend the security services and whoever they partnered with in getting the word out. Still, how do we know the first wasn’t true and the second wasn’t a lie to deceive us? You see the problem? We are now in age where mass communication can be done anonymously with near impunity that can have all sorts of impact on our populace.

Which is why I am concerned about what our radio and TV broadcasters present. They are in the unique position of being able to instantly spread the word to counteract false information or become the unwittingly agents of a wildfire of misinformation. They need to know and use the tools available to get the right information into people’s hands when someone else is doing their best, whether maliciously or misguidedly, to rain acidic information on us all.

Dej.

Photo courtesy of Eremi at flickr.com

No Limits: Nigerian Internet Business is Only Beginning (and I don’t mean 419)

2010-03-30T20:42:00.000+01:00

Last week, on the 26th of March, I was privileged to be part of an open discussion on Nigerian Internet Business Opportunities hosted on Skype Public Chat by Wayan Vota of ICTWorks.org. Don’t be fooled by my being one of the headliners (noted internet expert ???), I was certainly the least of the cast of participants in the discussion. I’m just a blogger while most of the people in the “room” were entrepreneurs, developers, designers, and ICT4D (information and communication technology for development) professionals. There was quite a bit of valuable material from this session to fuel discussions for some time to come. I expect to have several posts that feed off that session. I have included the link to the transcript of the discussion here.

The conversation was really multiple streams and recapping it as such just won’t work. The only way I can think to do this is to list what I consider the high points and try and treat different ones in greater depth in my future writings. So, in no particularly coherent order, here goes…

Like in so many other areas, there is no limit to the opportunity for creative and successful internet-oriented, internet-hosted and social development-focused internet business in Nigeria.
There is quite a bit of narrowness in the way we look at the internet as a business environment in Nigeria. In addition to building our own solutions that face our own Nigerian society, we can outsource design and development skills internationally for a living wage. You could be here in Nigeria and earn Euros and dollars with your PHP skill sets. We need to look beyond what we have seen people do here in Nigeria and explore what other people all over the world are doing such as developing solutions for devices like the iPhone and Blackberry.
Like the Alaba traders collaborate to get you that shoe from their warehouse (also known as the guy down the road’s shop), internet entrepreneurs need to collaborate in sharing talent, ideas and lending support to each other in order to make a challenging task easier.
In order to take ourselves to the heights we can attain, we need to take the long view on this industry. Instant monetisation should not be a target as it will not build a business that can stand the test of time.
The Nigerian internet entrepreneur needs to focus on identifying real problems that can be solved with ICT, solve those and expect to see the cash come in down the road. We really have more important needs to address than creating pure web offerings (“frothware”) that do not enhance us developmentally, economically, culturally or politically.
We need to partner with thinkers and doers all over the world including Nigerians in the Diaspora, expatriates invested in seeing development in Africa and local people on the ground already addressing real world problems and determine how we can make them more effective with ICT.
ICT is only one component of an arsenal that needs to be brought to bear on our myriad problems in Africa. In my role in corporate IT, I am constantly reminded that IT’s only value is in what it can do in solving real world problems. We must never think that ICT is a silver bullet that slay all demons. At it’s core, ICT’s role is to help us communicate, help us capture and store data, and help us transform data into information usable for decision-making.
Those of us passionate about IT need to help as many people as we can become capable of creating things using the technologies we love.
The technically minded types among us can look beyond ICT to other technical challenges such as cheap and sustainable electricity provision, healthcare innovations, agriculture, and many more.
We need to match technologists with business experts in order to get the best of both skill-sets.
There are multiple tiers to the technology possibilities. As much as the Web is the richest, we should not ignore SMS, voice and low-bandwidth optimised internet solutions.
Rather than building things from scratch we should take advantage of existing platforms, code libraries and APIs in order to extend existing functionality.
Indeed we need schools and incubation programs to better prepare our young people (and the not-so young) to take bright ideas and turn them into viable real world solutions.
While governments are a significant factor (even if it is only so we can duck when we see them coming doing the road) in providing some amount of infrastructure and regulation, and providing a stable polity, we cannot wait on them to provide anything and must embark on our missions, whatever they are as if the obstacles will melt away at approach.
When we do come face to face with those obstacles, right there is a business opportunity for us or someone else to solve.

There are a lot of very smart technologists out there that are ethnologically, socially, economically and emotionally invested in Nigeria. In the one hour or so that I spent chatting with them I was impressed with the talent in the room and convinced that if more people like this are brought together more often and in ways that we can work on things together, we can make all the difference in the world.

@wayan: you still owe me a knockdown, drag out debate on the East Coast versus West Coast start-ups thing.

Dej.

An African iPad Part 3: Envisioning the Afrislate

2010-03-23T19:06:00.000+01:00

This was going to be the article in which I tied together the concepts I had put forward in parts one and two of this series. I would have put to rest a line of thought that started when I realised that the iPad did not need to live up to the hype. I was going to go into some detail about the Android ecosystem that, at least for now, makes it the best platform to be the operating system for an African iPad. I was going to talk about the openness, that would let us modify its internals to suit our uniquely African requirements. I would have envisioned development shops opening up in every computer science students’ dorm room churning out simple yet amazing apps for the thing. I would have enthused about the ability to either download apps from everywhere, or develop a specific library (an app store) of apps targeted at some specialised group such as students, farmers or doctors. I was going to let my imagination fly to imagine a continent wide effective (finally) mobile/online micropayment system driven by the platform.

I was going to celebrate how the Android allowed for multi-tasking, access to the full hardware and allowed for a common file storage space accessible to any apps that needed that access. The fact that you could make it access any and every common tech standard out there from Adobe Flash to JAVA. The fact that you didn’t need to pay any licensing fees to anyone to use it. I was going to declare it a platform limited only by the imagination.

Then I was going to veer over into the hardware story. I would have traced the history of computing hardware in Africa and Nigeria in particular. I would have talked about the whole importation thing. The dumping of used and trashy, toxic hardware in Nigeria. Then I would have talked about Omatek, Zinox, Veda and even Anabel Mobile, as companies that are have transitioned from importation, backroom system assembly to local system factories (no different from the Dells of this world). Hardware businesses focused on a Nigerian device experience. I would have speculated on what it would take them to actually design and build their own tablet systems. I would have then held up the JooJoo which started it’s life as Michael Arrington’s CrunchPad as a demonstration of prototyping a forward thinking device without multimillion dollar R&D. This would have shown that it doesn’t take a lot to put it together – even if initially we would have gone to the Chinese to actually build it. Then I would have looked at the cost component and examined iSuppli’s analysis of how relatively cheaply Apple is building the iPad and argued that we could have brought ours in at costs close to the XO laptop’s.

Finally, I would have rounded up with a summary of recommended specs for the device and a challenge to someone, somewhere to go out and build the dream device. However, there’s no point in writing any of that anymore. You see, someone already went and built the thing.

OK, so it isn’t really the African iPad, but a few days ago, German company called Neophonie unveiled a new product called, wait for it, the WePad.

This device is spec-for-spec better than the iPad. TechCrunch put them side by side:

	WePad	iPad
Display	11.6-inch (1,366 x 768 pixels)	9.7-inch (1,024 x 768 pixels)
Processor	1,66 GHz Intel Atom N450 Pineview-M	1,0 GHz Apple A4
Memory	16 GB NAND Flash (optional 32 GB internal + 32 GB SDcard)	16 / 32 / 64 GB
Webcam	1,3 Megapixel	None
Ports	2 USB ports, card reader, audio out, SIM card slot, multi pin connector	Apple connector for camera or card reader as peripherals
Flash / Adobe AIR	Yes / Yes	No / No
App Store	WePad AppStore + Google Android Marketplace	iTunes App Store
Multitasking	Yes	Restricted, allowed only for Apple apps
Battery life	6 hours	10 hours
eBook format	All open standards	Proprietary Apple format from iBooks store
Wireless connect	Bluetooth 2.1, WiFi N, 3G optional	Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR, WiFi N, 3G optional
Body	Magnesium-Aluminium	Aluminium
Size	288 x 190 x 13 mm	242.8 x 189.7 x 13,4 mm
Weight	800 g (850 g with 3G)	680 g

Now there are lots of Android-based tablet devices rumoured and actually under development, and one should not rule out of the utility of the more conventional convertible tablet laptop form factor, but this device embodies what the African iPad really could be. Neophonie created their own custom app store like we should create our own app store while still maintaining links to the Android MarketPlace. They made provision for standard device accessories (USB) like a device for the common man should have. While no pricing has been publically set, it is expected to be significantly cheaper than the the iPad when it launches in April.

The point is, this device, this fabled African iPad, is eminently achievable. The possibilities for an educational and computing renaissance from such a device on the continent are immense. Remember, this is Africa, we leapfrog the bleeding edge of technology. We make commonplace what the more technologically sophisticated societies slowly build up to and have difficulty adapting to. We do not need to hold ourselves to the aged metaphor of keyboard, mouse and window. We can grab the new emerging metaphors that devices like the iPad, Android and Windows Phone 7 Series are, and reshape them to become what we need right here, in this place, this Africa. Without a doubt, we can and should create… the Afrislate.

Anyone?

Dej.

Regrettably neither of the pictures are mock-ups of an Afrislate. The top is the CrunchPad prototype from TechCrunch and the bottom is the WePad.

ICT4D Skype Chat: Nigerian Internet Business Opportunities

2010-03-19T18:03:00.001+01:00

Nigeria is a huge nation by any measure. Largest population in Africa, stupendous mobile phone adoption rate and 11 million internet users. The nation is a ripe platform for internet and communication services for transformation in Education, Commerce, Security and other aspects of national development. However, it doesn’t seem to be happening like it should. If anything, other African nations seem to have a better handle on this than we do.
Wayan Vota over at ICTWorks.org lit a bit of a fire when he blogged “Is Kenya beating Nigeria in Internet Business Opportunities?”. We Nigerians never take such things lying down and the debate in the comments section of his blog about his assertion got so heated, we decided to take the discussion live during ICT Works’ monthly ICT4D Chat.
A group of tech experts, bloggers, internet entrepreneurs and industry watchers will be getting together online using Skype Public Chat to tear into the subject of the whys and wherefores of the Nigerian internet industry. The discussions will be about why we are the way we are, the opportunities there are out there and the challenges to overcome.
Hosting the discussion is Wayan Vota and featured Nigerian internet experts and pundits include

The discussions are wide open for everyone to get a word in so why not join us at the next ICT4D Public Skype Chat:
Nigeria Internet Business Opportunities
ICT4D Skype Public Chat
6pm, Lagos Time, March 26th
(find in your timezone)
The official press release for the event is right here. So what are you waiting for? Put the ICT4D Skype Chat in your calender now!
Dej.
The picture of five was shamelessly liberated from www.loyokezie.com who shamelessly used our pictures.

They Called It “Technical Maintenance”.

2010-03-16T19:40:00.000+01:00

Warning: This is a rant. And it’s directed at my internet service provider, Direct on PC. They have had a problem with their base station in my area since last week. So, other than for a short period last night and a couple of days earlier, I have not had internet access for nearly a week. While irritating, it is something tangential to this problem that has me mad at them. I mean, I am upset about it, but not that much. I mean, at least I am not running a business that is dependant on them for connectivity – and I have alternatives. What is absolutely irritating about it is that other than one person, none of their support people will admit to the fact that they are having trouble with their equipment. They all insist on saying that the base station is undergoing “technical maintenance”. Oh, come on.

When your customers cannot make use of the service they are paying you for, then you have a problem. A huge one. Don’t suggest to them that they need to move their modems from the spot it has been working in for 2 years. Don’t tell them to turn it off and on. Keep in touch with your back end people and be sure of what’s going on with your infrastructure. Don’t call an identified fault and the work ongoing to repair it “maintenance” as if it is a planned routine activity. Tell your customer that you have a problem. Let them know that folk are working hard to fix it. Give regular feedback on progress or even the lack thereof. Most importantly, offer them something to mitigate the problem. I’ve lost 5 days on my subscription. The minimum you should offer everyone affected is the same number of days restored on their subscription. That’s just the minimum you should offer. There should be something additional as compensation. Not denials. Not excuses. When I broached the issue to the technical support staff about getting my missing days back, they told me to talk to customer care. Customer care, told me to wait until the situation was resolved. You. Don’t. Do. That.

I can talk this way because as well as being a customer, I am also an IT infrastructure support professional and I cannot get away with treating my customers that way. When there is a disruption to their service I am required to give them accurate information. I am required to keep them abreast of progress or at least status reports as to the current situation of things. I am required to have alternatives that will tide the business over for the period of the problem and let them get the critical business processes done. Admittedly, this is all within one organisation so it may be easier to get the communications coordinated and plan around failure, plus I have bosses who would have a few choice words for me if I tried such nonsense. However, Direct On PC is a public facing business and they need to treat the public, their customer with the respect the customer is due.

I should point out that in the 3 years that I have been using their services, I have not had this amount of downtime. In particular, they have been available even when everyone else was groaning over SAT3 outages. While their internet service is no more than average, they have been pretty consistent. Yet they do have customer service issues. It looks like, as with many Nigerian businesses, they have not thought through that part of their business well enough. They don’t seem to have a well iterated plan to deal with their customers when they have these types of service disruptions. I have called them a lot in the past few days and I haven’t always got a consistent message from them. Some immediately ask the right questions and can quickly give me the “maintenance” spiel, some go through some troubleshooting steps before identifying who I am and where I am. Sometimes I am even told to keep trying to connect.

One day, the Nigerian entrepreneurial space will learn the lesson that Harry Selfridge started teaching over a hundred years ago: the customer is king and treating as one starts with the little courtesies and considerations. Like telling them the truth about your base station.

My “African Ipad” series continues next week (or sooner if I can get my head down and write).

Dej.

Picture of the Direct on PC “Unwired” broadband modem.

An African iPad Part 2: Why We Must Build Our Own

2010-03-09T20:07:00.000+01:00

Children using their XO Laptops

We should build our own iPad. As I said in part 1, Apple’s business model is not in anyway Africa-friendly. It doesn’t have to be, but it does mean that we either do it Apple’s way or we develop our way. We have consistently seen too many “outsiders” come and try to make us do it their way.

Over the years, Africa has been on the receiving end of various schemes to make computing accessible (read “cheap”) to us. These schemes have taken a variety of forms. First there’s the second hand computer approach. Old and disused computers are cleaned up and brought over here and sold for low prices. One of the biggest downsides is that it ended up as a scheme for businesses in developed countries to get rid of their toxic junk and earn tax credits as well as good PR in the process. Then there’s the scheme that looks for low cost components that ends up building a cheap and subpar computer with minimal memory and a retarded operating system. Even Microsoft got in on the act with a version of Windows XP for sale in developing nations.

Nicholas Negroponte and his One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Project took a different approach. He set out to produce a high-quality, low-cost computer for children in the developing world. What’s interesting about his approach was that rather than looking for a bunch of cheap components, slamming them into a thin plastic casing and dumping Windows 3.1 on the box, his team developed some significant technological advancements in their bid to meet a design goal without compromising on quality. Sure their laptop, named the “XO”, had to compromise on things like storage, memory (which is expandable with USB and SD anyway) and raw processing power, but these “compromises” were made up for with what actually made it into the box.

This device contained technology that made it very readable in bright sunlight. Try that with your MacBook. It could use mains power, could be charged using a hand crank, or even by solar power. It is a convertible tablet device (though not touch-screen) and had extensive battery life. The XO implemented an innovative wireless mesh network technology that boosted connectivity the more computers there were on the network. A whole new operating system interface was developed for this device that focused on the tasks of learning with valuable software delivered by creative minds. Being shock and spill resistant, it could be used by children, those destructive monsters, for up to 5 years and live to tell the tale.

This thing had features in it that high end computers today still don’t have. It spawned competitors like the Intel Classmate PC and had Microsoft trying to figure out how to get Windows on it. Though they didn’t make their target of a hundred dollars per unit, it still came in at under two hundred dollars.

Then the OLPC went and ruined it.

This device is only available by three means. First they made deals with governments and these governments bought and distributed it. I don’t need to say anything about governments and their ability to get things that we want or need into our hands. Second was a scheme where Americans (you know, people with credit cards) could buy two on Amazon.com, one for themselves and one as a gift to a child in a developing nation (and only once a year at Christmas). The third method? Buy one off someone on eBay. So a high quality device that could change the computing landscape as we know it is made extremely constrained by its distribution model. The OLPC organisation have their reasons for doing this, but it does show that the dreamers of this product are outsiders looking in and trying to define for us how best to get our computing.

Not so the Indians. The “Hole In The Wall” computer project came about from an Indian computer scientist thinking about educating the street kids (think “Slumdog Millionaire”) of India.

Dr. Mitra heads research and development at NIIT, a leading computer software and training company in New Delhi. Just outside his office is a wall that separates his air-conditioned 21st-century office from a slum. Mitra decided to place a high-speed computer in the wall, connect it to the Internet, and watch who, if anyone, might use it. To his delight, curious children were immediately attracted to the strange new machine. "When they said, 'Can we touch it?'" Mitra recalls, "I said, 'It's on your side of the wall.' The rules say whatever is on their side, they can touch, so they touched it."

Within minutes, children figured out how to point and click. By the end of the day they were browsing. "Given access and opportunity," observes O'Connor, "the children quickly taught themselves the rudiments of computer literacy."

One boy in particular, Rajinder, has become a computer whiz and a celebrity in India. "Mainly I go to the Disney site," Rajinder tells FRONTLINE/World, but he also regularly visits news sites and likes to use computer paint tools. His teacher says that Rajinder is a much better student now: "He has become quite bold and expressive. I've got great hopes for this child."

While he didn’t create a new technology, Dr. Mitra did present technology to people who would never have been given the opportunity access to it. His experiment has been replicated in lots of Indian communities improving the quality of education of the affected children. He bridged the divide.

We don’t need to copy Dr. Mitra’s exact experiment, but we do need to copy his method of looking inward to addressing this problem and, in our different African societies, come up with ways to bring technology to our people that results in rapid adoption and a marked increase in applicable education.

One technology that is rapidly becoming ubiquitous across social strata and geographical location is the humble mobile phone. This device has amazing potential. It can and is delivering some of what we need, but its form factor and associated technologies can only go so far. I believe one of the ways get to where we need to be is to borrow a leaf from the OLPC, take the design lessons from the iPad feature set and build our own device. Having said all that, I do not believe we actually have to start from scratch to create an African product that has the design values of the iPad or the XO. The core of any computing product is the operating system and several viable options already exist. One possible operating system option is currently seeing increasing adoption on non-PC form factor devices. This OS is free. Its creators are ready and willing to support its use anywhere we want to put it. We can build any business model we choose around it. One that suits us. It even has Apple running scared.

This operating system is called Android.

To be continued…

Dej.

Picture courtesy of flickr.com

An African iPad: Part 1

2010-03-02T18:52:00.000+01:00

Earlier this week, my very first guest blog post was published in Loy Okezie’s blog. It is entitled “Why The iPad Doesn’t Impress And Why It Doesn’t Need To”. One of the reasons it ended up there rather than here was because I sold the idea to Loy before I decided to go full tech here on the Crossings. Having said that, thanks to Loy for letting someone else, me, write in his space. I mention all this because this week here I will still be sort of focused on the iPad.

As I wrote in the article, a lot has been said about Apple’s iconic tablet computer in a wide variety of media and from a huge variety of perspectives. There are extremes of adoration and approbation for the device and it isn’t even on the market yet. The only writer I know of who has written about it with an eye to its possible impact in Africa is TechMasai’s Munashe Gumbonzvanda and I am frankly not surprised. I really cannot imagine that at any point in time during the design and development process did Apple consider the needs of this continent. You and I that might want one (or at the very least are even willing to read its feature set) are the insignificant minority and Cupertino no doubt treated us as such. For the majority, it is another toy for those with more money than sense. It is a toy that is dependent on internet access, the ownership of a credit card, a debit card, or a paypal account, and a large disposable income.

And yet, at the core of the iPad could well be the key to Africa’s crossing the digital divide. Computing as we know it today is tied to the monitor, keyboard, mouse and whatever operating system you use. However you roll, Windows, Linux or MacOS X, the user experience and the learning curve are more or less the same. You have a start menu or launch pad for your applications which appear in boxes called “windows” and you did various things within said windows. Before you can use the computer you first of all have to figure out the pieces of the equipment, then you need to learn the OS, then you need to figure out how most applications work. We tout and celebrate what we call computer literacy and pad our CVs with a list of the versions of Microsoft Office we can use. Then when we finally figure out enough of the interface to be productive, we spent half our time configuring, installing, downloading, protecting and fixing the stupid equipment.

For those of us who work in IT, this is our bread and butter. However for the customers who interface with teams like mine everyday, they are resigned to, but unimpressed with and irritated by the fact that they need us to get their work done. The glory of the iPad and its predecessor the iPod Touch is that it can eliminate 90% of that interference and bring the user that much closer to their goal whether it is to consume content or, despite what many say, to create content. The iPad’s A4-size screen and it’s multi-touch interface are so intuitive that toddlers have figured it out (at least the iPhone). You don’t need expensive training to get people who are terrified of computers to use it. You do minimal configuring to get it working. Even if you are not familiar with the idiom of computing you can get productive very quickly. Perhaps Om Malik can best communicate the sheer sense of potential (even though I disagreed with him on Twitter).

The minute I touched the iPad at the Apple event a few weeks ago, I knew my world and my idea of computing had been transformed, irrevocably and irreversibly. I’m not sure why some of my friends, who have helped me shape my thinking about devices, Antonio Rodriguez for example, are disappointed with this device, whose potential is limited only by one’s imagination.

When I look at the iPad, I see a clean slate to reinvent pretty much how we think of media, information and in fact the whole user experience. Why do we have to think in terms of a keyboard — real or virtual? How can we not be excited about the very idea of a media experience based on touch?

Picture this: an African class room in some rural village somewhere. Each student has an iPad. The classroom material is distributed via Wi-Fi. Assignments are completed and submitted via the same means. The entire school library is available digitally, so no building needs to be dedicated to storing books (and this saves trees). Multimedia content is available on the device to illustrate farming machinery, remote geographies, performance art: audiovisual lessons that are easy to create, easy to disseminate and to review over and over again. They get all this without having a special class where they spend time learning computing instead of learning the things they really want to learn to do that computing has been the eye of the needle that they have to pass through.

Now you may laugh at this pipedream. Even the cheapest iPad at under $500 is expensive. It is a premium device – and the average urban African can’t afford one, never mind his rural cousin. In addition, despite my glowing praise, there are problems with the iPad that still make it less than what we need it to be in Africa. However, and here’s my point, we can have all the benefits and strengths of the iPad without its limitations.

We just have to design, and build, our own.

To be continued…

Dej.

iPad image is copyright Apple inc.

I Went For Google’s G-Nigeria Day And All I Got Was A Lousy T-Shirt

2010-02-23T20:21:00.000+01:00

Attendees At G-Nigeria Day 2010 Day 2. I'm In The Shot Somewhere

I’m sorry. I really couldn’t resist the title. Google is an American company and considering that unlike all other technology conferences I have attended the only handout given to attendees (at least on Day 2) was said T-shirt, the title, also American, just wrote itself. At the same time, it is a subtle dig at Google. Let me explain.

G-Nigeria Day was actually 3 days (go figure) of Google marketing its products to Nigerians at the University of Lagos, Akoka. Day 1 was for software developers, day 2 for marketing professionals and entrepreneurs and day 3 basically combined content from days 1 and 2 for computer science students.

Google is one of the world’s largest technology companies. I would argue that, second only to Microsoft, they are the most influential technology company in the world today. Their official arrival in Nigeria (by way of opening an office at least) in the last couple of years is definitely noteworthy and shows their willingness to invest in our rapidly growing market. Google however have a somewhat different challenge than a Microsoft or a Cisco have here. Google is three things. First it is an Internet only company. Almost every single Google product requires you fire up a web browser. Secondly it is a consumer company. Its most important products are things the man on the street would use. Google Search obviously, but also Gmail, YouTube, Blogger, Docs, Buzz, Picasa. Sure there are some business and enterprise specific offerings such as Google Apps, Google Search Appliance, and nothing keeps anyone from using the consumer apps to run a business. However Google can’t sell units to a Nigerian market because most of these products are free. Oracle can sell software or Cisco sell switches. So who would be the target audience for a Google tech event? That brings us to the third thing Google is, is an advertising company. They sell advertising against people’s content. So a Google tech event, a Google marketing event, is mainly an attempt to get content creators on board.

In the context of all that, I have to say that this event seemed…awkward. At least on day 2 (which is what I attended), as far as Google’s content was concerned there wasn’t much that was worth the journey there. I missed the AdWords and AdSense sessions (deliberately), but the sessions I did attend was on stuff already familiar or that could be picked up in 5 minutes on the relevant Google sites. The event was further marred by the factor that most of the projected content was just not visible on the screen due to the facility’s natural lighting and problematic audio. So it wasn’t a very good or very engaging set of presentations. The highlight event for me, though was the VC/Entrepreneur session in the evening. There were some valuable things said by the VCs and entrepreneurs, but the audience mood was mostly unimpressed. How do I know? Were there murmurs of discontent? Cries of “boo”? plastic water bottles through at the panellists?

No. Google provided free Wi-Fi. And we, the Twitteratti, tweeted to our heart’s content for pretty much 6 hours straight. The general tone of the tweets was that the panel could have done better. However, and this is what Google need to take away from this experiment, get a bunch of techies into a room, provide Wi-Fi, provide them a little prodding to get them headed where you want them to go, move out of the way and watch them at work. Kind of like the Indian experiment that put a computer in a wall and just let street children do what they wanted – with amazing results. From that event, I got to meet several Nigerian tech bloggers, exchanged a couple of phone numbers, blog addresses, followed and was followed by some more people on Twitter. I got a few answers to some tech issues from the audience and had some deficiencies about my blog pointed out. In order words, I connected with people – and that was the success of G-Nigeria Day. That was just me, I could see many other people connecting much better with the Google personnel and each other.

I understand that they need to get their business products in front of businesses and decision-makers. However, their quickest means of getting deeply into the hearts of Nigerians is not marketing events. It is code camps. It is in unconferences. Code contests. Don’t market at us. Your products are already free so you can’t give us freebies anyway. What you can do is put us in rooms together where we are thinking and talking about your technologies. Give us access to those technologies while we are thinking about them and while you are there to point out the little subtleties and tricks and you will get from us a response that no marketing event can give you. Building relationships with people creating content on your platforms – whether bloggers like me, coders like Michael Olafusi, or YouTube content creators is what will drive Google into a place that Microsoft’s currently occupies or just might be on the way to loosing. On the other hand, Microsoft gives event attendees a lot more than lousy T-shirts.

Dej.

To read all the Twitter comments about G-Nigeria Day 2010, search with the hash-tag “#gnigeria” on Twitter.com.

A Change of Plan

2010-02-16T00:55:00.000+01:00

When I started Digital Crossings the plan was to write for a target audience that used tech and had tech intertwined into their daily lives, but were not necessarily tech enthusiasts. As a result I have carefully avoided topics that centre on technology in and of itself even when I had very strong opinions about something.

The problem is, I am still writing about tech and my target audience still doesn't care about tech. Since I don't push products or serve as a kind of help desk or technological agony aunt, they aren't interested. The effect is I don't get a lot of engagement and the writing isn't really plugged into any community. On the flip side, much of my writing doesn't (and shouldn't) interest the tech community. I haven't been really worth their while (the exception is StartUp Nigeria's Loy Okezie who has retweeted and republished several of my articles).

I am now changing all that. While I will continue to write the kind of content I have hitherto written, I will start to write about technology in and of itself. I follow blogs like TechCrunch, Mashable, TechMasai, LifeHacker, Loy Okezie and Afrinnovator. These blogs, with differing points of emphasis, have given me a lot to think about, and a lot to write about, even as I look at technology from a perspective that is uniquely mine.

I believe that to bridge the divide as this blog wants to, I should freely express things relevant to both tech enthusiasts and non-tech enthusiasts.

So if you see articles about the design merits the new Windows Phone OS hub motif over the iPhone's widget grid, then yes it does mean I have unleashed my inner geek.

Dej.

The Deluge Is Here

2010-02-09T20:49:00.000+01:00

I work for a pretty large organisation and in order to keep people working, the computers secure, the business compliant with laws and standards (as well as maintain sanity) we have policies in place to guide the use of those computers. The other day, one of the managers noticed that a large number of people were bringing personal laptops to work and expressed concerns. Specifically he was worried that (1) people would be using these computers to take confidential company data away, (2) waste company time browsing the internet on these laptops, and (3) be displaying inappropriate material (so-called NSFW) content on these laptops. He wanted to know what company policies covered this. As a matter of fact, he was hoping we could issue an edict banning people from bringing laptops to work.

My perspective was (1) you don’t need a laptop to steal company data. 500GB portable hard drives fit into a pocket. (2) People wasting company time is not a function of a particular medium and if you banned laptops, then you should ban blackberries, iPhones and iPods, books, magazines and chitchat. (3) Again banning the device doesn’t kill inappropriate behaviour. Most importantly while we had rules controlling inappropriate use of company computing resources and inappropriate behaviour in general, these were not company computing resources.

I, personally, had noticed this deluge of computers myself and my problem with it was the owners of these computers were engaging my team members to troubleshoot these computers. I had made it clear that they were not to do this during work hours, but every time I see a non-company laptop around the premises, I see it as one more possible source of distraction for my guys. My point is I really am not in favour of people bringing laptops to work (disclosure: I sometimes do, but I can do more with my iPhone than most people can do with their laptops). Be that as it may, this situation is symptomatic of a coming clash between businesses and their workers over technology.

Let me explain. In my company, internet access is extremely tightly controlled. Granting internet access is approved all the way through to top departmental management. There are very good reasons for limiting access. Bandwidth is limited, the rise of social internet sites like Facebook.com has resulted in a lot of misuse (and yes company time wasted), it costs quite a bit to provide this access per head so for each person you give rights to you want to have value for money. So what did the great “disenfranchised” mob do? They got their own computers and signed up for their own internet access contracts. Take that management, I imagine them saying.

The wonderful part of this is that technology is becoming an integral and intensely personal part of people’s lives. When you are comfortable with something it becomes easier for you to respond to it. It helps you come up with interesting ways to use it. This benefits you both in your personal life – and at work. On the other hand, the manager was right, there is a real problem. People are consuming company time and resources on personal use of technology – but you can’t use a blanket ban to handle it. Indeed scientific studies are showing that many of the assumptions about social media usage in the workplace are not true.

In the US, from the 90s onward, technology started in the home and was imported into the office. In the 80s however, people were introduced to technology at work and it eventually crept into the homes. In Nigeria, technology adoption is continuing apace for personal use and in the workplace and the there will be sparks. Organisations are going to have to avoid kneejerk reactions and come up with ways to protect their technology investments, and the hours they are paying people for while not stifling the personal comfort their people are having with the latest and greatest technologies. That personal comfort is exactly what people need so as to let the technology stop being a novel thing, but just another tool that can be used to generate more productive business people.

Consequently, while employees need to be more circumspect about how they use both company tech and personal tech in the office, companies need to take a step back and re-asses how they can harness the enthusiasm people have for personal tech for their benefit.

As a real world example, some companies who provide Blackberry services to their employees will only provision a company provided device. some of their competitors, on the other hand, will let you provide your own device and provide access to company email on it. The first company is completely locked down security-wise, but needs to invest in the cost of the device, the Blackberry service and paying the phone bills. The benefit they gain is complete control over who has access to the Blackberry service, they limit their backend management costs and make sure the people who really need the service get it. The second company avoids the cost of the device, the phone bills and the Blackberry service and only needs to manage the backend and the running cost of connecting these devices to BES (Blackberry Enterprise Server). They still have remote wipe capabilities to remove company data if the device is compromised, but by having more people connecting to BES their management costs are more). Still, this is a win-win for both the company and the employee. The company has people constantly available to get work done wherever Blackberries work, while the employees get the tech toy of they desire for work and pleasure.

Whatever companies do decide to do, the deluge of of personal tech in the workplace is here to stay.

Dej.

Correction: During my “Year One” post last week, I stated that the blog had 990 unique visitors over the last year. The absolute unique visitor count was 544.

The opinions expressed in this blog post are exclusively mine and are not those of my employer.

Photo Courtesy Andrew Simpson at Flickr.com

Year One.

2010-02-02T19:48:00.000+01:00

Exactly a year ago, I published the very first post of Digital Crossings and committed to publishing at least one post every Tuesday. And I did it.

I started Digital Crossings for several reasons. First was the fact that I was a “fallen” writer. Having produced a huge amount of verbiage in university, it was virtually a sin that post graduation my writing had become as good as nonexistent. So this blog was an attempt to get writing again. Regularly. The second reason is that in returning to writing, I wanted to ease into it with a fairly “easy” subject. My history of writing includes poetry, fiction and Christian articles. I needed to build up some literary “muscle” – get a feel for the art of the pen again before going on to these types of writing again. As an IT professional, writing tech stuff for non-techies felt safe.

At the same time I did have something of a mission to do a tech blog that was accessible to non-techies. Blogs like Startups Nigeria and their ilk specifically target the technorati. I wanted this to be for people who interact with technology all the time, but do not necessarily know or care about concepts like “Cloud Computing” or “Web 2.0”. The writing was easy. Getting an audience hasn’t been, but the writing is its own reward.

Along the way I made new friends, encountered great technology, discovered great blogs, thought about quitting (lots of time), gotten home from work exhausted and with no incentive to write and written anyway, tried to get other writers for this blog (and failed), promised to create new segments and new points of focus (and didn’t do it), and surprised myself that I could actually do something like this with consistent regularity (if not necessarily consistent quality).

I guess what I am trying to say is that it hasn’t been as great I hoped it would be, but I have enjoyed writing this blog and succeeded at the main things I set out to do.

So where to from here? Even as I write this, I really, really want to say that I’m quitting this and moving on to other challenges. However, Yahoo has already debited my account for this domain name, so I might as well use it. I would like to get into some serious tech writing (the kind that would make my current target audience’s eyes glaze over) and get back to writing fiction and on other subjects. I will definitely start doing other writing on the web for myself and for others and pursue other tech projects.

The way I’m carrying on, you would think I had been doing this blog for twenty years, rather than one year. I’ll stop now and just give the stats:

1 Year.
63 Posts.
1,576 Page views.
544 absolute unique Visitors.
37 Comments (mine included).
48 Countries and 212 cities accessed from.

I’ll conclude by thanking you for being a part of the first year and listing what I consider to be the 7 most important posts (in no particular order) I have written – and two of them are not about technology.

Dej.

Image Courtesy of Wshooi at Flickr.com

Then there’s Jos.

2010-01-26T19:53:00.000+01:00

This is a tech blog. I have tended to avoid writing about most issues in the media eye that do not directly concern tech or its use. I even gave Abdulmutallab a miss. However, there are exceptions. Last week I focused on something that is front and centre in everyone’s view – the earthquake in Haiti. Even if you wanted to, you couldn’t avoid the deluge of information on Haiti. One of the key parts of the news is the tremendous worldwide push to provide aid to the victims. From organisations like the Red Cross, Samaritan’s Purse, CARE, UNICEF and Wyclef Jean’s Yele to corporations like Microsoft and governments like ours, the rise to the challenge has been tremendous. Most remarkable are the many and varied ways that individuals could give or otherwise contribute. There was George Clooney leading a show that millions saw, and my writing a blog that hundreds read providing or pointing people to a means to give to the cause.There are businesses giving out products for free, developers donating all sales on a particular day toward aid for Haiti and telcos enabling calls be made free to Haiti and using text messages to raise funds. Haiti needs billions for its recovery and there is momentum towards getting it.

Then there’s Jos.

On the 17th of January 2010, violent clashes erupted in Jos, Plateau State, Nigeria. This has left hundreds dead, hundreds injured and thousands rendered homeless. The worldwide news media covered these events, though the coverage paled in comparison (not surprisingly) to their coverage of Haiti. One thing however that is starkly different is the utter lack of information about aid for Jos. Who’s providing it? How can we be a part? I have searched the internet and couldn’t find anything. The Nigerian Red Cross has boots on ground in Jos providing assistance to the victims – and yet there is no information on their website about their work there or what Nigerians can do to help. An NGO, Freedom Foundation, associated with my church, made an appeal for support this Sunday for the victims of Haiti and Jos. However, on their website, there is no information about aid for Jos.

The point is, as an individual, a Nigerian citizen, it is a lot easier for me to get information on how to help an island nation thousands of kilometres away, than a small city in my own backyard. This blog post was meant to at least equal my Haiti post in terms of pointing to existing efforts and aid opportunities that people around the world can be a part of in some way to help Jos. It definitely wasn’t meant to be this short. It’s only this long because of my intro on writing about Haiti.

This post is short because there really isn’t anything to say.

The people of Jos are in need of food, water, clothing and medicine. They need help making contact with their friends and family who have gone missing and are hopefully still alive. They need help getting their homes and lives rebuilt. And that is just the beginning.

The World Wide Web. Facebook. Twitter. iReport. These are all tools that can be used to drum up support and highlight efforts. The relevant aid agencies need to use them. Join me in putting the word out. Join me in raising the call.

Red Cross. NEMA. Freedom Foundation. Everyone. I’m here. There are millions like me. Willing and able to help. Can someone, anyone, put out information on how?

Dej.

Picture courtesy of CJAD News

Helping Haiti

2010-01-19T19:30:00.000+01:00

You’d have to be living under a rock not to know what happened to Haiti on the 12th of January. An earthquake measuring 7.0 on the Richter scale struck the capital of Haiti, Port-au-Prince. This resulted in tens of thousands of deaths and effectively destroyed the capital. The rescue efforts are well under way, but in a nation with already deplorable infrastructure, helping people even harder than it would have been.

Aid agencies and governments around the world are flocking to Haiti to provide much needed help. They are giving food, medical care, machinery to clear the rubble and are engaging in various other rescue operations. All this costs huge amounts of money and while organisations and governments around the world are making huge donations, a lot more will be needed before life even begins to return to normal in Haiti.

The fantastic thing is that now, more than in any other period in human history the ordinary individual, the ordinary Nigerian, is able to add a voice and a helping hand to victims of devastation across the world. While we wait to see what we can do to help the victims of Jos, there are already plenty of options available for us to help Haiti.

First the local (and decidedly low-tech) solutions. The Lagos State Government has launched an appeal fund to raise a million dollars to aid Haiti. The funds will be lodged in a special Skye Bank account for this purpose. I haven’t been able to get any information beyond the press release for this online, and it is unfortunate that the state government has no info on their website nor did Skye Bank see fit to have this highlighted on their website as at the time of this writing, but I imagine (or hope) that if you walked into a branch of Skye Bank, they should be able to provide you with information as to how you can donate.

The airline formerly known as Virgin Nigeria, now Nigerian Eagle Airlines, is also raising funds for Haiti. They are providing envelopes on their flights for passengers to use to make donations. The funds from the state government’s and airline’s initiatives will be provided to aid agencies. So if you’re flying this period, why not give them a try?

On the more technological side of things, there are several international efforts and mechanisms to help us give towards helping Haiti. First a group of iPhone/iPod Touch application developers are donating all proceeds from apps sold on the 20th of January, 2010 to Haitian relief efforts. They have set up a site listing the software available under the program. The site has both iPhone/iPod apps as well as Apple Macintosh software. iPhone/iPod apps are generally very cheap with an average price in the range of of 1 to 2 dollars. So if you have an iPhone or iPod Touch break out your PayPal account and check out the apps available. I’m sure you’ll find one that is useful and you will be donating to a most worthy cause.

For straightforward donations, there are agencies that you can make donations to. They are agencies that have people on the ground in Haiti and rapidly deploying resources. If you have MasterCard, Visa or PayPal, you can make donations to one of the following agencies.

Doctors Without Borders
The American Red Cross
UNICEF
CNN.com has a list of aid agencies you might also consider.

Unfortunately, in the midst of this kind of situation, thieves will crawl out of the woodwork to take advantage of people’s generosity. In your desire to help, please do take the following simple precautions.

Do not click on links from unsolicited email messages offering you a means to help or pictures or info about Haiti.
Only donate online with well-known aid agencies such as the ones I listed above.
when visiting an aid site, be absolutely sure of the web address. Either type it into a browser window yourself based on information from a reliable source, or use links on well-known and reliable websites such as the aforementioned CNN.com or Mashable.com.

Don’t forget to pray for the survivors.

Dej.

Photo Courtesy of Star Telegram

2010’s “Don’ts”

2010-01-12T21:50:00.000+01:00

In last week’s post I did a list of things I believed Nigerians should do with information technology, particularly the internet, in 2010 and the newly started decade. This week, I’ll do the reverse – a list of things I think Nigerians shouldn’t do in 2010 and beyond. Again, in no particular order, here goes.

1. Don’t spend too much on the social web. I heard tell of someone who was so addicted to Facebook, she would check for updates on her wall while driving. Facebook was consistently in the top ten list of sites visited during office hours in my company. The use of social websites including Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter and their ilk has exploded over the past few years. Even existing services with no real social component are trying to introduce some kind of social element. This is only the latest in a long list of addictive web trends. Unlike others, the social acceptability of this (as opposed to porn, for instance) makes the potential consequences (RSI, time wasted, disconnection with the real world, tweetering while driving, etc) less obvious.

There is value and benefit in social interactions on the internet. I have reconnected with long lost friends, discovered valuable services and built some relationships due to the social web that I would not have otherwise. Still, if you go into a depression because no one has “friended” you recently or if you need to tweet about every bowel movement, you need to re-evaluate how you use these sites. You’re going to far. Someone online suggested going on a social web “fast” to detoxify your brain. It’s not that bad an idea.

2. Don’t go online until you have a fully functional malware protection system. That’s clear enough. Aside from AVG Free, Avast Home Edition and a few others, Microsoft has also released their own free malware protection tool called Microsoft Security Essentials. These basic tools provide “good enough” malware protection, but to have fully integrated suites that provide comprehensive protection across most fronts, you should shell out some money on the likes of Norton Internet Security Suite (which comes in an Africa specific version and pricing), the full AVG suite, PC Antivirus, Sophos, MacAfee of one of several top qualities suites. Another solution is to simply change from Windows to Linux or Apple which have much fewer incidents of malware.

3. Don’t use a computer without backup tools. I won’t say much more than read my post on the subject. However, to put it in perspective, it isn’t only from computers that we can lose data. I lost a number of significant pictures last year when I lost my digital camera and people lose contacts all the time when they lose their cell phones. Most electronic gadgets today are data centric, and come with means to back them up.

4. Don’t do internet crime. There’s this place in California called Silicon Valley where the brightest minds on the planet work to create products that will shape the world through internet and other information technology. I am absolutely convinced that the “Yahoo boys” have the smarts to do the same. Let’s turn our remarkable Nigerian minds to creative, rather than destructive genius.

5. Don’t leave your children online without a chaperone. This current generation of Nigerian kids are the internet generation. As the MTV (or Channel O) generation was shaped by music videos into what they are, today’s teens and pre-teens will be shaped into adulthood by the web. That is both a glorious and a horrific thought. The glory is in working with them to ensure they get the best the web has to offer and avoid the worst. You cannot keep them away from the web or the web away from them you can only hold their hand (or not) as they go exploring.

6. Lastly, don’t visit this this blog without leaving a comment. Seriously guys if you can make it through the blog itself, you can take a few minutes to type in your thoughts on what you read.

So what are your thoughts as to what to do or what not to do with tech and the internet in this new year?

Dej.

Image courtesy of Zigeunerweisen at www.Flikr.com

As the Decade Begins

2010-01-05T19:44:00.000+01:00

It’s 2010 and a fresh new decade has begun. The “noughties” saw tremendous advances in technology. This was best represented in Nigeria by the explosion of cell phone usage. The new decade will be the age of the internet – the mobile internet in particular. We already see the beginnings of this in Nigeria with the increasing popularity of blackberries and the milestones recorded by opera mobile, with Nigeria being in their top ten growth lists last year. Once again, we will almost certainly see Nigerians leapfrogging existing technology by adopting the mobile internet, particularly on phones, far more than on PCs and laptops.

The big question is how are you going to use the technology currently at your fingertips and coming just round the corner? With a purely cursory look at the research done by Web Trends Nigeria, Nigerians read news and talk in forums as the vast majority of their activities online. If I am going to be harsh about it, this really means that more often than not, what we do online isn’t very useful in the great scheme of things. Look at it this way, if you stopped most of what you do on the internet today, how much poorer will your life be? If your answer is – “not much poorer” or even “richer” then in 2010 and beyond, you need to rethink how you use technology. I have a few suggestions to make in that regard. Many of them are things that I have blogged about in the past 11 months, so this sort of serves as a bit of a look-back at the past year on this blog. It also feeds off last week’s blog post in which I created my 2010 wish-list. Lastly my suggestions are for institutions as well as individuals. So if you use the internet at home, or your run a business or serve in some government agency, or work in an organisation, these suggestions are for you.

1. Use the internet to make services easier to access for the citizenry. Lagos state, UME, and a few others have been using the Internet as medium for people to register for things, pay rates and taxes and get useful information. I would suggest that the ministries of information and science and technology (does that ministry exist?) come up with a unified strategy to enable every single government agency at all tiers of government go digital and connected. I believe they can deliver this framework within the next 3 years.

2. Get educated. Formal and informal educational opportunities are all over the internet. If you just want the knowledge or you want a certificate to go with it, then there are vast resources for you. Youtube.com/edu, Itunes University, my alma mater, University of Liverpool Online, and very many more, you can get enough to elevate your mind. I would suggest you decide on a 6 month or one year target of some specific body of knowledge you want to educate yourself in and look up what’s available to get you there.

3. Use the internet for activism. Most of us care strongly about one thing or the other. AIDS. The plight of the homeless. Electricity (Light Up Nigeria). Education. The internet is a great way to get the word out and drum up support on a variety of issues. Facebook Causes is a tool on Facebook specially designed for activism.

4. Get into the great online marketplace. Ecommerce is one of the great opportunities of the internet that is really yet to take off in Nigeria. There has been the historical problem of payment systems that have largely been solved, but there is the much bigger concern over internet fraud and scams that will be harder to overcome. So this particular suggestion is a multipronged one. The payment processors, Interswitch, Valucard and others, show put in place systems and education to help Nigerians be more protected and feel more protected for online transactions. Secondly, there is great opportunity for new entrants into the space to address some of the issues from new and interesting angles, so you bright internet entrepreneurs out there come up with something. Thirdly, if you sell something, please introduce a full online shopping solution, to give the opportunity to get at your products without having to contemplate getting stuck in traffic. Lastly, those of us with buying power should get willing to explore the use of ecommerce and online payment systems. You can start with bill payment which many banks offer and move on to online purchases at sites like www.MegaPlazaMall.com. Having said that, I am not advocating going on a spending spree. Just explore more ways to get your shopping done.

5. Banks should provide more online services. I know, I know. With the recent issues caused by mismanagement and the CBN’s dealing with those issues and with the job losses in the industry, the banks are not exactly focusing on IT innovations right now. Still to get ahead and stay ahead the banks need to provide new and better ways to get at their services. It is telling that GTB’s website is in the top ten visited sites (at least in December) as reported by Web Trends Nigeria. I bank with GTB and they are miles ahead of my previous bank, Union Bank, in what they provide online. However, I would like to see more. One of the things I found interesting about personal financial management software like Microsoft Money and the new darling on the block – Mint.com, was the ability to integrate with your bank account for budgeting, automated bill payment and a host of other personal services. I would challenge GTB and other banks to look to providing similar services that make their online services richer.

6. Listen more. As I said earlier, we spend an inordinate amount of time consuming information on the internet. I would like to recommend the same for our service providers. The companies that sell to us and take our money need to listen to us more. More Nigerian businesses have become turned onto Facebook, Twitter and other solutions to engage with customers. More businesses ought to do that and for those who do, we would like to see the outcome of that engagement. The aforementioned GTB uses both Facebook and Twitter to communicate with users, but I don’t see as much response to issues actually been dealt with via these forums as there could be. MTN, my favourite whipping horse, had a twitter account for all of 5 minutes, then it disappeared. If any business merely uses Twitter as a marketing environment, then it will be wasting a great opportunity to cement relationships with customers.

7. Give a computer to someone who doesn’t have one. Now this isn’t strictly the internet, but giving someone a computer will certainly be a step to providing access to it and even without internet access, a computer is a great tool for a variety of uses.

8. Use it or give it up. Taking off from the last point, if you have a computing resource, whether a computer, a computer textbook, a piece of software taking up gigabytes of space on your PC, internet access or something else digitally related, I would encourage you in 2010 to either find some productive use for it, find someone who will find productive use for it, or else throw it out. If it is software uninstall it or delete it. Go through the year without unnecessary clutter or waste.

Almost every one of the suggestions I listed above are also great opportunities for smart Nigerians to bring businesses online to address these concerns or provide these services. As I congratulate Loy Okezie on the launch of www.StartUpsNigeria.org, I would like to again add my voice to the call for Nigerians to get creative with the internet and information technology.

What would you suggest to Nigerians on the technology front in 2010 and beyond?

Dej.

To Infinity and Beyond! (Well 2010 Anyway)

2009-12-29T21:23:00.000+01:00

Everywhere you look on the internet every publication is doing a top 10 of some sort or other. Time.com is even doing a “Top 10 Everything of 2009”. Some of the more intriguing lists are the future lists - What we expect, desire or dread in 2010. While most of us aren’t that much aware of it, it also the end of a decade so the looks-back are not just for the year, but also for the millennium so far. A recent study shows that Americans consider it to be the worst decade since the 60s.

Better people than I are no doubt doing retrospectives of the year and decade in Nigeria. Instead, I stay narrowly focused on looking to the year and decade ahead in technology for Nigeria. This won’t be an highly cerebral analysis of what’s coming down the road. Instead, it will be a wish of what I would like to see come down the pipe in the coming year. So, in no particular order here’s my list of 8 things I would like to see in 2010 and beyond.

1. Number portability

Number portability is a law in place in the US and other countries that allows you to move from service provider to service provider with your existing phone number. So I can change from MTN to Zain, Glo or Etisalat without having to give my MTN number. The benefit of this to the customer (me) is that there is no customer lock-in. If I decide that a provider no longer meets my needs, then there is no constraint of convenience that ties me to that provider. The vendors would be a lot less complacent about how they treat customers if they had no means to hold onto to them other that the quality of their service.

2. Government regulation of 3G internet access.

3G internet access is currently provided by the GSM providers. It is the most convenient form of mobile internet access and one of the fastest internet connections available in the country right now. it is also fiendishly expensive and the restrictions the providers put on its use are bizarre. I have typed more than a few words about this in the past year. The National Communications Commission and the Ministry of Information need to step in and knock a few heads like they have done with voice and with text messages.

3. Free and fair elections.

This is not a technology wish per se, but a wish to see how technology can be used to give us free and fair elections. I am not talking about electronic voting necessarily, in fact, that has consistently been discredited all over the world. I am more interested in seeing technology being used to monitor, validate and secure the vote.

4. Electricity.

All of modern technology for all sorts of uses such as education, agriculture, health care, wealth creation or entertainment are dependent on electricity. The last decade brought us from a nation of effectively no phone communication to the point of being the fastest growing market for mobile telecommunications. The new decade has to be the one in which every hut has regular power supply.

5. Data sets

One of our national embarrassments is the lack of large data sets about our country and citizenry that can be used for planning and commerce. I would like to see publically available data sets generated and made public by both the private and public sectors. For example, the census information and be published online transparently and publically such an ordinary Nigerian can use the data to plan a business and understand who and where his potential audience is. Another example is a system that gathers data on the traffic flows in Lagos and uses it for better urban planning, but can also be accessed by ordinary citizens to figure out where there is a a bad traffic jam and plan alternative routes. We can use data sets about the largest concentrations of crime are in cities to make real estate investment decisions as well as more effectively deploy police. We should have access to school performance data that we can use to decide where to send our kids.

The “Data.gov” project of the US government provides information about this kind of thing.

6. App stores.

There is an explosion of Blackberry usage in Nigeria. It is probably the fastest growing mobile device segment in the nation. And yet for most people they are limited to email, IM, a few other built in applications and a relatively poor internet access experience. As every iPhone and iPod Touch user knows, the glory of a smartphone is in the mobile applications that can be downloaded for it. All of the major smartphone vendors now have sites and tools that allow you to download additional programs that significantly increase the functionality and the pleasure of your mobile phone. The problem is, as I mentioned my rant about the fencing of Africa, these so-called “app stores” are not available to us in Africa. That is just plain wrong. The vendors either make those app stores available to us, or we build our own phone operating systems and app stores here in Africa.

7. Official support for the iPhone.

We need to stop having to jump through hoops in Nigeria to get the iPhone. It’s officially available in Cameroon. Cote D’ivoire. Niger! Enough said.

8. Original and Useful web apps.

I’m kind of tired of multiple social networks. Legwork. NaijaPals. Kukuruku. Naijaborn. These Facebook and Twitter clones don’t actually add any value to me and fragment my user experience. I stick with Facebook because it gives me a richer toolset, a broader scope and the same amount of localisation that these others can give me. Now if one of them would do something useful with the Twitter API (application programming interfaces that let a third party use the data or tool of a site in another site or program) or the Facebook API then I will sit up and pay attention. My point is the up and coming tech start-ups in Nigeria need to give us true innovation and/or true value. Something that can make life easier and better such as 1SpotSearch.com does or like Kilonshele.com has the potential to be. It doesn’t have to be something utterly out of this world. Just something that once we have it we wonder how we lived so long without it.

So this is my tech wish list for 2010 and the decade to come. One or two of them would involve the government initiating or running things, but most of them don’t. I firmly believe we have to build a society where the people create for themselves what the nation’s leaders are not. We do it everyday already with our boreholes, generators and cars. Why not with other things that we can spread to other Nigerians and indeed the world.

Realistically, I think maybe half of them are realisable in the new year. The rest may stay in the realm of wishes or take much longer to realise. Then again, this is Nigeria. Anything can happen. See you in 2010.

Dej.

What are you tech desires of 2010? Let me know in the comments.

Image of Buzz Lightyear courtesy Disney/Pixar via 3 News.

Digital Crossings First Christmas

2009-12-25T14:50:00.000+01:00

Merry Christmas everyone! This is our first Christmas, but we don't have any Digital Crossings type content for this year. You could say I didn't think that far ahead. However, I will share something I wrote a long time ago. It's not tech stuff, but it does reflect our specifically Nigerian and African perspective and our philosophy on advancing the African and Nigerian perspective. It's called "An African Christmas"

Why sing we songs of mistletoe?

Why exalt we the pure white snow?

What meaning, tell, Rudolph's nose?

What romance bears fireside repose?

In an African Christmas.

Why not dream of Harmattan air?

Why not laud bluest atmosphere?

Extol the smell of burning grass.

Sing you of dust not frost on glass

In an African Christmas.

It's not the seasons of the year

That tinge the wondrous Christmas air.

But Mary's infant meek and mild,

Praise then, all men, the Holy Child

In an African Christmas.

Facebook Goes Public (So To Speak)

2009-12-22T21:48:00.000+01:00

Facebook.com, the world’s most popular online social network has just updated its privacy policy and settings. This isn’t just a a change in the wording of their policies, but a change in the settings.

Facebook’s success is arguably tied to two things. On an internet that had anonymity as one of its most attractive features, they created an environment where people were required to use their real identities. This would not have been a successful play without the other thing – the complete privacy of your personal information.People who wanted to see your material had to be invited and had to accept to be your “friend”. So you controlled the access list to your data yourself. On the basis of this and several other smart moves, Facebook has risen to over 350 million users.

With its new privacy policies, Facebook is beginning to change it’s emphasis on keeping your information private and is actually encouraging you to make your information (updates, pictures and whatnot available for all the world to see on the internet. In other words, you and the info you share about yourself on Facebook could end up in a Google or Bing search results. A lot of us really wouldn’t want to do that. There is a financial benefit to this. Searchable information is valuable information and the major search engines are willing to pay Facebook for that information. So for all their wording in their new policies about your being able to more finely control access to your data, they are really hoping you let it all become public.

However, if you would rather stay with your data as private as they were before, go carefully through the new settings Facebook has made available at the privacy centre in your Facebook profile or in the pop-up screen that may come up the first time you visit Facebook since the new settings kick in. Choose settings that maintain or improve the amount of information privacy that you have.

On the other hand, you may be comfortable with the whole world having much more information about you, your thoughts, interests and relationships. If so, I’ll see you online.

Dej.

And yes, my baby is home. She was nestled in the crook of one arm as I wrote this. Why else do you think the post is so short?

Born, this 17th day of December, 2009

2009-12-17T12:22:00.001+01:00

Born, this 17th day of December, 2009, a baby girl. And she is absolutely breathtakingly beautiful.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

From a hospital reception. Waiting.

2009-12-17T10:35:00.001+01:00

I wait for word that my daughter has been born. Daughter. Such a strange word. I'm used to "sons". I have two of them. Lovely boys. The best little men there can be. But a daughter? Wow. I'm not even sure what that means. I have wanted girl children. Would have been perfectly happy with only girl children. Having been a father of sons for over seven years, having a girl of my own is such an odd concept. A pleasing one. An exciting one. An out and out scary one.

What do I do with this alien invader whose devastating weapon will be a cute smile, a shy look (perhaps) and the word "Daddy" as only a girl can say it?

What do I do the first time I set eyes on her, hold her in my arms and know that in a way that a baby boy never can she has completely changed my world?

Will she be light-skinned or share her mom's dusky beauty? A fat baby or a thin one? Will she have a rich head of hair? Well arched eye brows? Will she be the hungry kind or the kind that needs coaxing through each feeding? When will she first open her eyes and see me and recognize me as me? What will be that unique thing that, only minutes old, will undeniably mark her as her?

Where can I get a shotgun, no, a Sherman tank to guard her against any and all? How many cartons of Raid do I need to guarantee that no mosquito ever gets near her? Where do I get the wealth to cater to her every need? Show me the fount of wisdom to which I will roll a fleet of tankers to fetch an unending supply.

A daughter. Ouch.

The Microsoft Office 2007 Home and Student Edition Sale may not be as Magnanimous as we First Thought (but it’s Great anyway)

2009-12-15T18:55:00.000+01:00

The six thousand five hundred naira sale of Microsoft Office 2007 Home Edition I blogged about last month is on. For those who missed the post, I wrote that for a period of 6 weeks, Microsoft would be selling the Home and Student Edition of their popular productivity suite at significantly reduced rates in Nigeria, Ghana and Kenya. This edition has Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote and allows you to install on up to 3 computers. I suppose three of you could band together and split the cost and install on your computers. You can then draw lots as to who gets to keep the media. At least I think you can do this, but you may have to check the end-user licensing documentation to see whether this kind of sharing is allowed.

The sale should have kicked off officially today, but was already available at some shops as early as last Friday. I picked up mine at Park n Shop.

I had applauded Microsoft’s magnanimity for this offer which makes the software temptingly cheap. It is a good deal and those with pirated versions of this and other versions can get legitimate very quickly. However, I have had to reassess my perspective of how generous Microsoft is being. Microsoft Office 2010 is currently in public beta (that means not finished yet but usable enough to test in real world scenarios) and is slated for release in the first half of 2010. So on the eve of the release of the next version of Office, Microsoft is conducting a fire sale of the old version. This is basically a case of the old practice of trying to get as much cash out of a dying horse before sending it off to the knackers for glue (and make a little more money from the glue too).

So, while the price is great, if you are at all interested in Office 2010 and whatever new and useful features it may have, you may want to skip buying this year’s model and wait on the next one. I was going to list some of the cool features that are coming in that version, but TechRepublic has a great list of features so you can look them up there. It is nearly guaranteed that you will be paying a lot more for that version of Office when it comes out than what this one is going for right now. Mind you, we all throng the shops looking for rock bottom sale prices for shoes, clothes and other stuff (Burlington Coat Factory, Primark, and the old Oshodi Oke anyone?) so I am not suggesting that Microsoft is being insidious in what they are offering. I’m just saying this might not quite be as charitable as it first appeared to be.

Now if you are like me and like technology, you can actually download the Office 2010 beta and use it until October, 2010 according to the Microsoft website. In addition, after the beta expires you can download the trial version and use that for at least another 3 months. In short you can use the beta and trial versions of Office 2010 for about a year or so before actually having so shell out money for it. However note that beta software is unfinished software. It won’t always work right. It will have problems – some of which will affect your documents. So you shouldn’t commit important documents to it. Don’t run you business on it. You could end up crying and finding out that you can’t sue Microsoft for it.

The bottom line is that the deal Microsoft is offering right now is pretty cool, however there are other options available, and a better product coming down the line from Microsoft themselves.

Now that I think about it, I wonder whether Park n Shop will give me a refund.

Dej.

Equipping the Children

2009-12-08T22:18:00.000+01:00

Some months ago, we talked about getting game systems for our kids, what would give us the best value in terms of ease of use and family friendliness. We reminisced about how we had fun using decidedly non-technical bits and pieces, and odds and ends. Times have changed. Now play has a very electronic bent with all the associated benefits and all the new risks.

However, while that is about entertainment, education and childhood development equally have taken on an electronic bent. In order to have a leg up in the world we live in today, we absolutely need to have our kids start on computers at an early age. Look at it the same way we look at the utterly essential “3 R’s””: Reading, wRiting and aRithmetic. Many of us nearly drove our parents batty as they tried to get us to string complete words together without misspelling or turning letters back to front. They underwent that self-torture because they realised how the ability to read and write clear correct English (though it could have been any other language) was foundational to academic and life success.

Similarly, we need to give the same kind of energy into raising our children today as “digital natives”. Digital natives are people who grew up with information technology tools and toys. People who grow up this way are quick to grasp and adapt to the rapidly changing pace of technology. They seem to have an intuitive understanding of how they are used and how they can be modified or manipulated to do almost anything. The thing about raising your kid as a digital native is that it will put him or her on a level playing field with other digital natives around the world.

So what do we need to do? First of all get the tyke a computer - and I don’t mean one of those bizarre pretend laptops with the 3 inch LCD screens and blocky graphics. I mean an honest-to-goodness PC (though you could actually do pretty much say similar things about the iPhone/iPod Touch and similar devices). You can get a perfectly adequate one for well under fifty thousand naira. Secondly, we need to get them the right software. The immediate thought that comes to mind is straight-up educational material. While all that is good, the computer is a complete experience for education, entertainment, and communication. In getting software for a system, all this needs to be kept in mind.

Third is an internet connection. At the heart of today’s computer-based society is the internet and all it has to offer. Of course there are risks and we will talk about them one day, but for the most part, with some simple precautions, your kids can be safe on the internet. The internet provides access to a huge volume of material for children that are great to help them grow. Over the next few days, I will point us at some of them.

All these are just tools. Now you have to sit with the kid and help him or her over the learning curve for the system itself, then the learning curves of the various programs and websites that you have validated. After all, the computer is just the tool, the software on top and the internet technologies are the things that are real value. You also need to set clear time boundaries on how long they can use a computer per day. Give them time limited projects and assignments, do the projects with them.

As you continue to do stuff like this, you will be providing your child what is needed to be prepared for the digital world we live in.

Dej.

Image courtesy of Maritime Union of Australia at www.flickr.com

The Great Firewall of Africa.

2009-12-01T21:34:00.000+01:00

The Great Wall of China is an awesome piece of world history and architecture created in the so-called Middle Kingdom between the 5^th and 16^th centuries BC. This wall stretches for over 8,000 km and was built to protect the nation then from invasion. The “Great Firewall of China“, is a euphemism for the technology the Chinese government has put in place to control what websites (mostly from outside China) their citizens can see. This prevents people in China for accessing what their governments consider to be unacceptable content. They are locked away from the rest of the digital global village seeing only of filtered view of the world. The major international internet services such as Google and Yahoo have also been a part of the Great Firewall by filtering their content as required by the Chinese government.

There is another great firewall. Unlike the Chinese one, this is not imposed by any government and it is not to keep anything from getting in. Rather, it keeps much of a continent locked out. It is not acknowledged, identified or much commented about. However, it is similarly bad for the people encircled by it. It is an insult to their right to access internet resources across the world. I refer to the Great Firewall of Africa.

A couple of years ago, after I got my first debit card, I tried to purchase something online from HP.com. The order failed. Apparently HP doesn’t accept credit or debit cards that are not issued by US banks. Good enough. That is their choice. However, I recently discovered that if you do have a US issued card, and you try to make a purchase from an IP address that is outside the US, (even if the delivery address is in the US), the order will not be successful - and they won’t let you know why. It took a conversation with their support people to discover this. Now this may not be only Africa or Nigeria specific, but anecdotal evidence suggests that other online service providers do explicitly block out Nigeria and other African nations. I work with several Americans and several of them have testified that they cannot access their bank accounts and other personal web services from within Nigeria. The only way they can do their transactions is from the office because their internet connection is routed through the UK and the US.

Services like PayPal provide financial services that make it simple, safe and efficient to move funds and perform transactions on the internet. You can tie a PayPal account to a bank account and efficiently conduct commerce, funds transfers and other services with ease. PayPal is famously not available to Nigerians, - not by IP address, but by any form of indication that you are resident in Nigeria. Their services are simply not available in way that they can be consumed by Nigerians in Nigeria - and they are not the only one. Google Checkout is a system for masking your credit card information and placing orders online. Well Google will happily register my Nigerian issued debit card in their system, but will not let me make Nigeria a shipping destination.

Wikipedia has this to say about the phenomenon called IP banning: “IP banning is also used to limit the syndication of content to a specific region. To achieve this IP-addresses are mapped to the countries they have been assigned to. This has been used to devastating effect most recently to target Nigerian IPs due to the perception that all business emanating from the country is fraudulent. Thus making it extremely difficult for legitimate businesses based in the country to interact with their counterparts in the rest of the world. To make purchases abroad, Nigerians rely on proxy companies to mediate transactions”. While IP blocking or banning is the most blatant form of discrimination, I find what HP is doing more insulting. At least with the banning, I don’t waste time on your website at all. At HP you spend time, do all the ordering, then your payment is rejected.

The reason Wikipedia gives is also the main reason many sites do what they do to us in Nigeria. From one perspective, it’s understandable in the light of the 419 problem. On the other hand, as I asked someone today, if they block access from Nigeria to prevent fraud, what do they do to prevent fraud from inside their own countries where the incidence of fraud is far greater? According to the Internet Fraud, Scam and Crime Statistics - 2009, the following stats about fraud perpetrators hold true:

· 77.4% were male and

· 50% resided in one of the following states: California, New York, Florida, Texas, District of Columbia, and Washington.

· The majority of reported perpetrators (66.1%) were from the United States; however, a significant number of perpetrators where also located in the United Kingdom, Nigeria, Canada, China, and South Africa.

The person I was speaking with had the perspective that all of us suffer from the activities of the fraudsters. Not just in the risk of being defrauded, but from our freedoms being curtailed in order to protect themselves.

Examples abound of this tacit discrimination against us and it’s not just about websites. technologies like the iPhone and the Blackberry limit what applications you can download and install, they determine what music you can buy or stream for free. All based on where you live. The XO, a special notebook designed for the poor children of the world can only be purchased by governments, or by US residents once a year. So as individual Africans we cannot contribute this innovative computing technology to our own communities because One Laptop Per Child did not take our abilities into account.

There is a fundamental disdain being demonstrated for Africans and Nigerians. It may be subtler, but no different from the mentality that thinks we live in trees and don’t wear clothes. It is the same insult that dumps toxic chemicals on our shores. It is the limited mindset that focuses on giving aid to Africa rather than engaging the African entrepreneur in a way that is a real win for all parties. It is a missed economic opportunity, and it is their loss.

As it is, all I have spoken about is ecommerce examples. Who knows what sites there are that hide useful knowledge and information simply because of conceptions (no doubt some are true) about Africans and Nigerians. Information that could be a precious resource to us all.

What should we do about it?

First of all, I think we should scream as loudly as possible. Rather than the Minister of Information complaining about jokes in a Sony advert, the ministers of trade around the continent should be putting pressure on our trading partners across the oceans to make companies remove these unjustified blockades. Nigeria, let’s use our oil as our leverage.

Secondly, we should develop our own home-grown solutions. We are a continent of very smart people. We know our peoples’ needs and interests. We know the terrain better than anyone from outside. We can create products and services for our internet that will rock the world. Let’s do an India on them and make them clamour for our technology expertise. Let’s make them come to us.

Dej.

Image Courtesy of jonhardm at Flickr.com

A Sweet Deal Indeed (Thanks Steve).

2009-11-24T22:46:00.000+01:00

I really, really shouldn’t be doing stuff like this for free. However, until I figure out how to monetise it properly, I’ll just have to share the news and let the vendor, in this case Microsoft, get the free ad.

Microsoft is making Microsoft Office 2007 Student and Home Edition available at N6,500.00 for 6 weeks starting from the 15th of December, and you will be legally allowed to install it on up to 3 computers. That, ladies and gentlemen, is a very sweet deal. To give you some perspective, I saw the software currently available in a store for N18,000.00. So it will be going for about a third of the price. I should warn you though that this version contains only Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. So no Microsoft Access for the database aficionados and no Microsoft Outlook either. Still, the deal is a sweet one anyway you want to look at it.

This offer is available for Nigeria, Ghana and Kenya. According to Microsoft, you can walk into any store where software is legitimately sold during that period and get it at that price. They should have advertising available prominently displaying the price. So no one should be able to get away with selling the pack at an inflated price.

So if you live outside these zones, you are out of luck. On the other hand, if you are a student of a British or American University, you get Office 2007 Ultimate and Windows 7 Professional at about $30 for Windows and $60 for Office Ultimate. You can access the student offers here. By the way, from my experience, if you are a student of an online program like the University of Liverpool Online, you can get these deals as the validation criteria is having a valid email address from an academic institution in these countries. So if you have an “.ac.uk” or a “.edu” email address, then you are well on your way to getting good software at rock bottom, yet legitimate, pricing. Now they would only extend that offer to Nigerian Universities where we really need those kinds of offers…

Of course, as I have mentioned before, you can get OpenOffice.org at a much better price: completely free and it can do most things that Microsoft Office can do. You just need to download and install. Most of us, do prefer MS Office. We grew up with it and is the de facto standard that everyone else is playing catch up to. Still, free is free is free.

Be that as it may, we appreciate Mr. Ballmer’s magnanimity. Thanks Steve, nice one.

Dej.

Road Kill

2009-11-17T21:13:00.001+01:00

At the start of this new millennium, cell phones were a rare phenomenon in Nigeria. The technology was expensive, service was spotty and the use cases were not very many. We generally got on without phones, never mind cell phones. Things have changed dramatically in the last half decade. Now we don’t know how we will survive without them.

However, many people are dead because of them.

15th November, 2009 was marked as the World Day of Remembrance for Road Traffic Accidents. The world was meant to stop, reflect and learn from the millions who have died from car crashes. Too many die on our roads in Nigeria daily. Most of the time we blame the bad condition of our roads, the bad condition of our vehicles or the lack of education of road users in correct road behaviour and defensive driving. We don’t consider the risk imposed by people yakking away on their cell phones while barrelling along at a murderous pace with one hand pressed to an ear and not much attention on the road.

Being a nation without much reliance on statistics, we often have to borrow statistics from elsewhere. However, for some things at least, behaviour is consistent the world over. While not wanting to do the usual bash Naija thing, I would say we probably behave worse on our roads than a lot of other places that do have statistics. At the very least we do not treat the condition of the roads with the needed caution while driving. Anyway, I went in search of statistics (to borrow) to give us something to think about. The Insurance Information Institute (www.iii.org) has an essay on various research results on the consequences of cell phone usage while driving. Most of the information is US-specific, but it is sobering and relevant to us.

The research shows a four-fold increase in accidents while driving and talking on a cell phone. This is independent of your age, gender or whether you are holding the phone to your ear or using a hands free system. 80% of crashes and 65% of near-crashes involve driver distraction as determined in 2006. This isn’t just distraction from cell phone usage, it’s not even the highest component of that stat, but it contributes to this number which has increased from the 25 to 30% of causes of crashes that it used to be.

Perhaps we can understand why people convince themselves that they can talk on their cell phones and drive at the same time. We rationalise it, maybe, by equating it to having a conversation with another person who is in the same vehicle. However, there is a whole class of idiot (and I use the term with no apology) who text while driving. The risk of an accident while texting and driving is 23 times greater than the risk of an accident while not texting.

These are stats from societies with good roads. That have required driving training before driver’s licenses are issued. They have vigilant law enforcement. Think how much worse it must be in our society. No phone call is so important that you can’t park to make it or take it. It will definitely be a lot less important if you are in a hospital bed. It will be forgotten if you are in a police cell because you killed someone while driving. The call will never be completed if you are dead. This might sound really callous, but I really don’t mind if you kill yourself, what I have a problem with is the other people you might hurt or kill in the process. Like your family in your car, the people in the other car, or the pedestrians. If you can kill yourself while leaving everyone else unhurt, please go ahead (especially, if you’ve taken a life insurance policy to provide for your family).

I am being facetious, of course, but I hope my point is coming across as strongly as I can make it. Cell phone use while driving is extremely risky behaviour and we need to change that behaviour for everyone’s sake. I sometimes use my hands free kit while driving. I often talk to my wife while she is driving. I definitely need to stop. I would suggest that you do the same. My wife, and kids (and my being whole and alive for them) are more important to me than the information I want to get or give.

Dej.

Bloody Flower Logo Courtesy of RoadPeace UK.

Driving Picture courtesy of Konstantin Sutyagin at flickr.com

SMS Spam: Stopping The Flood Before It Happens

2009-11-10T19:00:00.000+01:00

Is it just me, or is there an increasing amount of unsolicited SMS messages hitting my phone? First were all the Access Bank messages. Then there are the Dana Air messages I have received over the past few days. It hasn’t become a really irritating issue yet, but email spam wasn’t either in the early days. Now it makes up 80% of all email traffic worldwide.

Email spam is evil for many reasons. Many times it offers illegal or questionable items or activities. Other times, spam could actually be a phishing attack, a trick that ends up with your computer infected with viruses, your financial information compromised or any number of evil things. At the very least, email spam takes up so much of your mailbox and it distracts you and wastes your time. It forces businesses to spend so much on tools that block spam from your email. Expensive email storage is taken up by these messages if the spam blockers are not efficient enough.

email spam has forced legitimate businesses who want to connect with customers or potential customers to jump through so many hoops to get email messages to people. So businesses have to get people’s permissions upfront before they can send them email messages (“opting in” is the preferred term), they need to provide a means for people who have already opted in to opt out. Many countries have laws against spam.

Before email spam, there was what I could call “voice spam”. Telemarketers are often the scourge of US households. Telemarketers call your home to try to convince you to buy stuff. Many times they are making legitimate offers. Other times they are tricksters. Once, while visiting the US three or four years ago the home I stayed in was deluged constantly with phone calls from telemarketers. Not an hour passed without the phone ringing with someone making another offer. The US has systems in place called “No Call” lists in various states and cities. You register to get on “No Call” lists and telemarketers are not allowed to call you. There are legal penalties if the telemarketers call numbers on the list.

Now I said all that to say this: as businesses begin to increasingly use SMS to advertise their products and events, these SMS messages could begin to take on the qualities of spam. As a matter of fact, unlike email spam, which is a problem for ISPs, telecoms service providers actually profit from the flood of messages (they bill the senders). So there is actually a disincentive for them to be part of any attempt to control SMS adverts. However, before it becomes a problem, regulatory bodies (Madam Dora and NCC) and telecoms companies need to set up rules and systems that give users control over whether or not they can be sent advertising text messages, or filter out what messages they can receive. Businesses to which we give our phone information should be explicit in how they intend to use that information before we give it to them. We probably need our own equivalent of no call lists.

Of course, I may just be raising a false alarm. SMS spam may never become a real issue here in Nigeria. More likely though, its only going to be delayed en route to hitting us. The cost of messages may keep this prohibitive for most businesses. On the other hand, the internet has provided mechanisms for making so many expensive things (both good and bad) cheaper to accomplish. Indeed some may not share my viewpoint and see these messages as a source of valuable information and products. Either way you see it, the ability to control your personal communications and decide what reaches you or not, can only be a good thing.

What do you think?

Dej.

Photo courtesy of G-rated Birdman on Flickr.

I just installed Snap.com’s widget. It gives a live preview of the page that links point to. Let me know how you like it.

Webify Your Trade 6: We Need Your Help.

2009-11-03T18:50:00.001+01:00

The “Webify Your Trade” series hit a significant hitch when I came up against the problems of Nigerian internet connectivity. I had problems generating even the most basic sample site with SnapPages.com which uses Adobe Flash for its toolset, then had even bigger problems posting 66MB (eventually about 44MB) to a video sharing site. So the whole demo thing is on hold for a while till I figure out how to do it a lot less painfully than I did this time around.

Of course if someone in the UK, or US would like to take this up, help us set up a demo and send us the link to share here, we would really appreciate it. Any takers? In fact, let me make this an appeal to the community (OK don’t laugh): Can someone do a screen cast using SnapPages or Webs.com or other free web-based site builder to build a site that is based on the principles we discussed here and here. In the mean time, If you have created a business site yourself that looks pretty professional using free tools such as the ones I have listed or others I didn’t, let me know and we’ll do a consider it for showcase. However, it should be Nigeria focused or you should be resident in Nigeria for it to have that sense of authenticity.

Dej.

Webify Your Trade 5: The Screen Cast Video Is Up

2009-10-27T22:54:00.000+01:00

After multiple attempts and lots of frustration, the screen cast is finally uploaded. Like I said, it is rough. Amateur city. Check it out below courtesy Vimeo.

Dej.

SnapPages Website Build Demo 1 from Dejo Fabolude on Vimeo.

Webify Your Trade 4: The Screen Cast That Nearly Wasn’t

2009-10-27T21:46:00.000+01:00

This was supposed to be the post where the long delayed screen cast of a quick easy website build (using SnapPages) was posted. Except that it nearly wasn’t. And it’s all down to the inconsistency of my internet connection. It’s a tired theme, one that has been discussed ad nauseum on this site and the rest of the Nigerian blogosphere.

Despite my enthusiasm for the internet and it’s opportunities, the lack of affordable bandwidth makes it difficult to trust anything to the internet. Case in point, my attempt to create a simple straightforward screen cast of the process of building a website was fraught with frustration due to constant breaks in connectivity. Consequently, I was only able to set up a very short screen cast that shows the initial setup process of a SnapPages site.

Better than nothing, I suppose. ~~Here it is embedded below~~. I’m going to have to post it as soon as the measly 66 MB uploads successfully (in about 4 hours, if nothing breaks) as an update. It’s a bit rough around the edges (OK very rough around the edges). Clearly done by a rank amateur (moi). It shows the login process and the initial wizard for setting up the basic structure of a website. You can visit the initial site at http://digitalshop.snappages.com/Home.htm. Subsequent screen casts will add more detail and customization. ~~If I can just get them done.~~

Dej.

Webify Your Trade 3: Choices Choices

2009-10-27T19:07:00.001+01:00

Ok now, we can choose the technology. The thing is there are quite a few choices out there. Which is why we worked through what we needed first to make it easier to make the choice. There really is no scientific route to follow. Just a question of searching on Google, sites like Go2web20.net and such comparing the features of the sites that show up in the result. Sites that I have looked at in the past include the following

I’m not going to try to review or compare these services in this series (call me lazy) in this post. I will, however, take a couple of them and build sites with them. Starting with SnapPages which is extremely easy and which I have used before. The problem is – my internet connection is misbehaving. Which is the fundamental problem, in Nigeria, of all internet-based services that rely on constant connectivity. The regular breaks in connection, the drops in performance – all contribute towards making it a painful experience too many times. However, I have done this before with SnapPages and will persevere.

Dej.

A Worthwhile Windows

2009-10-24T19:53:00.000+01:00

The new Microsoft Windows 7 (http://www.Microsoft.com/windows) hit the market on Thursday and reviews were already positive before it came out. It looks like MS have a winner after the problems of Vista. Windows 7 is smoother, faster, has a better interface and, most importantly, can run on lower spec hardware (meaning old hardware or cheaper hardware) than Vista could.

Someone showed me a quote for laptops the other day and it wasn't bad in terms of specs and pricing. However, I was pretty surprised that they were Windows XP machines. So here's a heads-up: don't buy a computer that has any operating system older than Windows Vista. In fact, if possible, wait until you can get 7 before you buy. This isn't about having the latest and the greatest. 7 has advantages by itself, that make it worthwhile, but aside from that, unless the experts have shown that the OS is a bad one, getting the latest usually means that you have the one that the vendor, MS, will be supporting going forward. So when getting new computers that come pre-installed with operating systems, you should hold out for the latest.

Having said that, I'm not suggesting that you rush to the market and buy an OS just because it is new. Vista had a lot of backlash (undeserved in my opinion). A lot of people who bought computers that came with Vista downgraded it to XP. It is wise to wait and hear what the word is before deciding to buy.

By the way, if you're a student in the UK or the US with an academic email address (.edu or .ac.uk) you can get Windows 7 for 30 GBP or USD as the case may be. That's a very very sweet deal.

Dej.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone