Startup Weekend Lagos Is On

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 .

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 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.

Elevating The Internet Industry: 3 Things We Need

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.

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

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:

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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:

1. How might Internet business opportunity and entrepreneurship be different in East Africa versus West Africa?
2. What could each region learn from the other?
3. 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.

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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

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.

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

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.

Webify Your Trade

Over the last couple of weeks, I spoke to two people I know who sell things as a secondary source of income. One of them sells clothes, shoes, perfumes and accessories. The other person sells cars. In the two separate discussions, I asked for their website so I could go online and check out their wares. I was half-joking, since I really wasn’t interested in anything they were selling, but it made me think when both of them told me they didn’t have one. What made this particularly thought provoking is that both of them are IT professionals in their day jobs and I would have thought that would have been a pretty obvious tool for their businesses to have.

So I started thinking about how easy it would be for them to set up a very professional looking website for free without too much effort. Having recently discovered a site that inventories all sorts of web building tools I felt I could look one or two of the better ones and do some sort of high level “how-to”. It’s not like I haven’t touched the subject of how easy it is to get really productive with the internet before. Maybe I just needed to be a bit more specific and talk through actually building a site.

On the other hand, perhaps I should step back and look at the basics again: why should you have a website for your business? Is it really worth the effort? What are the wins? I tend to assume that this is 2009 and everyone appreciates the Web and what an enormous opportunity it is. Maybe not. Some of these points are almost childishly obvious, but I think it is worthwhile to talk about them. Well, here goes.

 

1. A website is a worldwide catalogue of your products and services.

When you create a site and post your goods or services to it, anyone and everyone can have access to it. There are currently 10 million Nigerians on the Internet and that number is growing every day. Those are potentially 10 million people in your backyard who could see what you have to offer – never mind the other 1 billion people worldwide who could see it. Now you could decide that the only people you actually want to have access to your business are the 1000 or so people you can reach with your business card, phone calls, and pounding the streets under the African sun. Perhaps you prefer to stand in your shop door and hope they see your signboard and stop by. Otherwise a website is a great way for maximum exposure.

 

2. You are easy to reach.

Assuming you provide an email address on the site (I can’t imagine why you wouldn’t) then you have provided an easy means for customers to reach you for inquiries and to place orders. If you invest in a Blackberry or even a low cost data-capable phone and a Zain N1,000 internet connection, you can check for messages on the go.

 

3. Always open for business.

A website is a shop that never closes. When you have turned out the lights, closed the curtains and turned the key in the lock, a website is still running providing people with access to your business. The more capability you provide on a website, the more of your business customers can experience.

 

4. You Build a contact list.

The secondary benefit of email is that you can now build up a contact list in a digital form. Just from the email addresses of people who email you, you have a growing list of people that you can contact with targeted marketing and product offers. You have to do this (the marketing) with care and permission otherwise it will be seen as spam. Aside from the email, you could have a contact form on your site that can captures more useful details from the customer. This is actually a method of market research. You can get a sense of what your customers want. Customers will be more willing to do this if you provide some kind of incentive or the other. For instance, you could offer a 10% discount on their first purchase. You can even have one of those features that asks them to invite a friends. These referrals are great ways to increase your customer base as people are more willing to accept offers or solicitations that come through people they know and trust.

 

5. You can update changes to your business information or service profile without much expense.

When you print a business card, handbill, or print catalogue, if anything changes you have to reprint, or as some do, modify things by hand. While having a website doesn’t eliminate that entirely, with a few online edits you can ensure that the largest part of your potential audience always has the most current and accurate business information.

 

6. You can actually make money from it.

You can set up your site to be a proper ecommerce site where people can actually pay for goods and services that you then deliver to them. Now this will take a bit more effort and a bit more money to set up than just setting up a site, but if your product is the kind that can be sold this way (and it will surprise you what can be sold this way) it is worth the effort and the investment.

 

7. It makes you look good.

Having a website improves the value of your brand, especially if your site is well designed. It makes people believe that your product is as good as your site is.

 

These are just a few simple reasons to set up a site for your business. Did I mention you can do it for free and in a short amount of time? Like everything else in life, there is even more that can be accomplished than what I have listed here, but that also requires a lot more work and I have mentioned them in various forms in older posts and will talk about them in through the lifetime of this blog. If anyone has more reasons to add the ones I have listed, please feel free to post them as comments. With next post I’ll do a proper how-to. I’ll setup a site using one of the free tools and let you see how it turns out.

Dej.

Go From Consumer To Creator.

The billboard dominated the landscape drawing the eye to it. The image on it is forgettable. Some young hustler obviously making his bid for success. The words, however, are memorable: “Go do Something”. Right now I forget whether the message was from MTN or GLO, but I cannot forget the words. The message is not new, nor is the idea a foreign one to me. The thought was not initiated by the sight of the billboard, but the tall white text does crystallise it for me.

Today, the ordinary person is suddenly capable of impacting the world in a way that has never before been seen. The ability to make changes, for good or bad, was once within the ambit of nations or the traditionally wealthy. For the self-starter it often took many years to accomplish anything and even longer for the impact to be seen. Technology has changed all that. Death has been called the “Great Equaliser”, well the internet comes a close second. Which is why so many are trying to address the issue of the digital divide. If we can bring the internet and information technology to many of the world’s poorest and most deprived people, these same people can not only change their own lives, but can in turn reach out to the world and change it.

Image Courtesy: crimzonblue on flickr

So this week, I have to say the same words to everyone out there who already have access to the internet - go do something. Use the technology you have access to to change the world around you. There are many things we use the internet for everyday. Entertainment, education, communication, acquisition. Yet much of what we do with the internet enriches no one but ourselves. That was the old internet where we went to consume the content that was out there. Usually, it was created by someone else, usually by some expert with specialised knowledge and some arcane capabilities to bring that information to the net. Today’s internet is one where every ordinary person can create something and put it out there for all the world to use.

There are many ways, with a little effort, that every Nigerian on the internet can do something that changes someone’s life for the better. It is almost frighteningly easy to do so. Many of the things you can do are free with the only cost to you the internet connection and computer (and if you can use someone else’s computer and connection even that is free). You can even use a phone. It is that easy. I should add that when I say “change the world” or “change someone’s life” I do not necessarily mean free services. Doing free stuff is very worthwhile and we also should find some way to give freely of ourselves. However those kinds of change are also what all great business enterprises are built on. The greatest business enterprise at the end of the 20th Century, Microsoft had the vision of putting a computer in every home. This vision took Microsoft to where it is today and is central to the worldwide computer revolution. So “go do something” could definitely mean go implement some great business idea that affects all of us positively.

Permit me to make a few suggestions.

Blogging

I’m blogging because it’s the easiest way for a writer to put his work out there for people to read. You can write short pieces that shares ideas, critiques systems, encourages people or shares news. You can crusade for the homeless, You can record your adventures in the business world or record your sorrows. You can even serialise a novel. Easy. One of the most popular sites to blog from is www.blogger.com – my host and it is free. It is even easier to use www.posterous.com. You don’t need to sign up for anything. Send an email containing your first blog post as text to Posterous and they will set up your blog for you. With just a little bit of effort you can even set up your blog with the potential to make money from Google AdSense (by the way, click on the occasional advert on this page if you please) or some other service. You don’t need a publisher or distribution mechanism. Write it, post it, share it and it’s out there.

Wikipedia

If you’ve used the internet for more than a day, you must have heard of Wikipedia. The free online encyclopaedia enables everybody create entries and edit existing entries. So you can contribute towards entries about Nigeria or about the Yoruba nation. You can add to the world body of knowledge on jurisprudence, or record the recipe for Zobo. This is still writing but unlike a personal blog, Wikipedia entries show up high in Google searches and a more likely place to be heard. More importantly, it is huge planet-spanning collaborative effort.

Become a Reporter

A few months ago, the brutal beating of young lady on the streets of Lagos caught the world’s (or at least the nation’s attention) because someone with a camera phone recorded the incident and posted to the web on CNN’s iReport. This incident, unfortunately not an uncommon one, was the subject of international outrage simply because someone spent a few minutes recording then uploading. Now if someone would mount a tiny camera on their car and capture the name tags of all the men in black collecting 20 naira…

YouTube

YouTube is the world’s most popular site for video posts and has developed a reputation for being a repository for utter rubbish. However, YouTube, like the internet itself is morally neutral – it takes on the character of the content providers. So, if you choose to, you can create a huge amount of quality content on YouTube. For instance, an auteur (budding or established) can create trailers or even short films and distribute then on the internet as means to introduce people to his or her work. A budding musician could showcase his or her talents with YouTube videos and get discovered this way. That is how the rapper called Soulja Boy was discovered. Recently, an entire orchestra was assembled via YouTube. Think of the millions that are spent for such shows like American Idol or DSTV’s Naija Sings. With less than a tenth of the same amount of money, much less complexity and with the potential for much more revenue, YouTube accomplished something very similar. Are there any Nigerian poets out there? How about if we start a spoken poetry channel on YouTube? Worth exploring.

Sell, Sell, Sell

EBay is an internationally renowned auction site. Ordinary people can sign up to buy and sell stuff. People have become millionaires by selling goods on EBay. We have our own Nigerian version called www.Tokunbo.com. The profit motive is pretty obvious, but there is an altruistic benefit too. To wit, you can pass on items you no longer have use for that are still perfectly serviceable to someone else who would value them. This goes a long way to reducing waste in the world. Of course, you could give it charity, but if you don’t want to do that, this is definitely a way to get something you don’t want anymore to someone else who may have been looking for it desperately. You are also not limited to used things. You can set up a business on EBay or Tokunbo.com selling new things.

Program It

All of the possibilities above require almost no technical skill. However for the technically inclined, there are an infinitely greater number of possibilities. With the website and web application creation tools out there today you can create completely new systems. You can also go in a simpler direction and assemble new things by pulling things together from bits and pieces of other people’s work. There are a huge amount of APIs (application programming interfaces) which are bits of functionality that someone else has created that other people can use. These are called mashups. For instance if you create a site that lists all the parishes of your church in a particular state, you can have a Google map embedded in your webpage that shows the location of each parish relative to some defined starting point. So Google has done all the heavy lifting, you just consume it. You don’t even need a lot of programming ability to do it. With the right skill set, the right team members and the right plan you can conquer the world.

Tweet it Sweetie

Lastly, even if you are absolutely unwilling to expend any effort, completely uncreative, or just downright uninspired you can sign up to www.twitter.com and spew out 140 characters into the ether. You don’t need to connect to friends, maintain relationships, invite people or listen to anyone if you don’t want to (but you can if you do). Surely you must have some useful thought that can take up 140 characters? Surely you can say something that brightens someone’s day? Can’t you?

Dej.

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What other ideas do you have for how people can go from being a consumer to a creator on the Internet? It’s great to share.

By the way my handle on Twitter is “the_dej”