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 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 

Of Viruses and Acid Rain

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)

  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.

The Deluge Is Here

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

 

Ignore Us At Your Peril

  Last week I wrote about the multi-storey car park at MMA2 and used it as a point to express my concern about what could potentially be the beginning of decay at that airport. After writing that post, I went over to MMA2's website and submitted a complaint on their help page. In the week since, I have not been contacted by email.

A few weeks ago, I did a piece on MTN in which I criticised their mobile Internet service. Now I didn't send a link to them to them via email, instead I sent them a link on Twitter. I never got an response or a comment and shortly afterward @mtn_nigeria disappeared from Twitter.

One of Nigeria's greatest shames is the abysmal electricity situation. A movement called the Light Up Nigeria Movement (or LightUpNigeria) was started on Twitter and now has its home at www.lightupnigeria.org. LightUpNigeria is intent on using the Internet and other media to raise a groundswell of voices putting pressure on the Nigerian government to address the electricity problem. In fact several events are planned by LightUpNigeria to mark the upcoming Independence Day anniversary.  The movement has even drafted a Proclamation. I have not been able to find any indication that this effort has been acknowledged by the government.

These three examples, particularly the last one, show the ability to use the Internet and its technologies by Nigerians to engage service providers and governments. The problem is the service providers and government are not engaging us in return. Twitter and it’s home-grown clones like NaijaPulse and Kukurooku in particular are excellent tools that can be mined to find out what web-savvy Nigerians thinking and focusing on are and Facebook, is a great place to engage one on one with customers and constituents.

Aside from these tools, there is the Nigerian blogosphere where the more eloquent Nigerians engage in conversations in their blogs on politics, technology, faith, their loves and their pain points. The wealth of Nigeria’s brain trust is freely available on the internet for every business, institution, and government agency to harness for product development, process improvement, idea generation, crime prevention, technological advancement, and societal transformation.

However, they are not listening.

There are over ten million Nigerians – people living in Nigeria – on the Internet. Not to mention the vast number of Nigerians in the Diaspora who remain very relevant to the Nigerian story.  That may account for less than 10% of our population, but we are growing everyday. You can’t ignore us. And I don’t mean filling our inboxes with unsolicited email messages or taking over every whitespace on Facebook. Loy Okezie pointed out that more and more Nigerian businesses are engaging in the use of social media (Facebook, twitter et al), but I am unconvinced that they are using these tools the right way. The day of the one-way blast of adverts is at an end. Mashable recently did an article on how to use social media to collect feedback from customers. Our political and business organisations have to engage us. Hear what we have to say. That encourages us to listen to them in turn. When our voice finds its way into products or processes and we see evidence of that, it wins and keeps our loyalty.

It seems like Barack Obama has been US President forever, but it was only a year ago when he won the election by, amongst other things, engaging the minds and hearts of the Internet generation in the US, a strategy he is continuing as president. Assuming the Republicans were doomed to lose the elections, the other Democratic hopefuls lost out, in part, because they did not realise just how vital it was to capture this demographic. Instead Obama turned them into his army of volunteers. He used the Internet to tell them his vision for the country, and by listening to them, he made them his voice.

We know what Nigeria is now, we are no USA, we do not have the depth of internet penetration that the Americans have. However, a savvy governor or a smart brand can use the Internet to create a movement for unstoppable positive public action or to exponentially extend the power of their brand. LightUpNigeria is doing the reverse – letting the leaders know what we are agitating for, keeping the pressure on. It is extremely unwise for the government not to figure out some way to use this ready, willing, and eminently able movement, virtually presented on platter of gold, to tackle the electricity problem, to “crowd source” the solutions. Nigerians are the among scrappiest people on the planet. We have shown our ability to adapt to the worst and thrive. We can figure it out and show the world a solution that will amaze. The relevant government ministry should actually sponsor the conversation on www.LightUpNigeria.org, give regular updates on progress, highlight the various contractors doing specific projects and inform Nigerians of setbacks.
At the very least they should soothe the beast before it becomes savage.

This post is not about electricity or infrastructure problems. It is about the fact that the coming of the internet age to Nigeria is an end to the inability of the people to speak and be heard. We will speak with our tweets and our blogs and that will eventually become our speaking with our votes and with our money. Listen to us now and one day, when our voice is powerful enough, that will be the sound that will carry you in our high offices, or to the highest pinnacles of business success.

Ignore us and you do it to your peril.

Dej.

Photo Courtesy of mattinnigeria.wordpress.com/