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

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.

March of the Androids

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.

2011: Rise of the Nigerian Internet

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.

Breaking the Silence

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.

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

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.

Making the Nigerian Internet A Level Playing Ground

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.

How to Lose A Customer

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.

A Few Ideas Part 2: A Reputation Engine

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.

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.

A few ideas

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?).

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.

Clone Wars Part 2: Pros and Pitfalls

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.

Clone Wars: Part One

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.

Nigeria Needs A CIO

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.

Dear Dora, Don’t Do This.

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.

BarCamp Nigeria 2010 Takes Place This Saturday

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”

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.

Does the President Know What He's In For?

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.