A Few Ideas Part 3: Solving the Trust Issues

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.

Clone Wars Part 4: The Advert Trap.

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.

Clone Wars Interlude: Impress Me.

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.

Clone Wars Part 3: Platforms.

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.