technuzu

1.) The Dumb Business Person: They read past fraud cases like quarterly reports. They are always blaming somebody for their losses and never learning from it. They are a sad species of leadership in business and everybody hates them in the food chain. These types are needed to provide food for scammers and fraudsters so that they too can keep and feed their poor, innocent families. Their chief challenge is a weak ego that cannot admit being wrong and so rather than learn their lessons, they offer up an excuse as a burnt offering which in effect prevents them from avoiding such mistakes in future. It is this ego that kept them from learning when they could have done it in the first place.

www.whitedrum.com is a new entrant to the highly competitive classified adverts market in Nigeria. There are already a few big players in this area as seen on this earlier post. Initially focused on the Nigerian and UK markets, Whitedrum.com is a product of Deltek Solutions UK and Deltek Solutions Nigeria (two different companies). The motivation for the launch could be summarised in this quote from an email I received from the CEO, Dele Oluwole:

Its been quite a busy couple of months for me. I have been involved in several projects including this personal one: www.rhetoheat.com. Its been at the back of my mind to give the social networking website idea a try. I have done so in the past but had to wrap it up. This time I wanted to try it in a different way. www.rhetoheat.com is a discussion forum with a social networking twist.

Features include:
- users can create/ have relationships with other members
- upload and share media - (only video for now), audio and photos will come soon
- maintain a profile page showing their friends, posts, bookmarked items (videos, forum posts, photos, etc).
- members can write and maintain blogs (coming soon)
- Many more features

In a recent article reviewing one of the Nigerian microblogging websites, I had compared Gistcaster.com and a few other websites to the popular twitter.com. My reference to these websites as "twitter like" provoked a reaction from the founder of Gistcaster.com, Ademola Morebise. In a comment on the article, he strongly dissapproved of the comparison claiming his was an original idea and model. I decided to find out for myself and headed over there to register an account. My investigation led me to conclude the website is more than a "tweet" sending application.

Sturvs.com, the Nigerian equivalent of digg has gone into hibernation. I have been to the website on several occasions now but the blank screen with a Nigerian 50th independence anniversarry celebration remains on the home page. Sturvs.com has been around for sometime and has quite a few users judging by the number of postings appearing daily. Obviously sturvs.com has gone back to the drawing board. Hopefully something good will come out of this. Lets keep our fingers crossed.

Interestingly, Digg.com just launched a new revamped website that has kept tongues wagging accross the internet. Several users have expressed strong dislike for the new look digg.com.

The old sturvs looks like this:

The Nigerian classified adverts market continues to expand with a new website launching everyday. I was surprised to find some have been around since 2005 and yet are relatively unknown. Granted we have problems of access to the internet in Nigeria, these underutilised services have the big task of creating awareness about themselves. I have to agree there has been a lot of improvement over the years. As at this morning a massive 4 million Nigerians are registered on facebook alone (Recent estimates put facebook at 500 million users. Alexa.com estimates users from Nigeria to be 0.8% of this). Effectively, Classified advert websites have at least more than half of these 4 million active internet users to sell their services to.

The fascination with twitter continues with yet another mimic of the website hitting the Nigerian webscape. Complete with a bird logo and 140 character entry form, I could not fail to spot the glaring similarities with the celebrated twitter.com. I am wondering if the similarities will also include a puzzlement on how to monetize the effort. Twitter remained without a reasonable income or viable business model for quite a while. Anyway, this newest attempt is the brainchild of two Lagos based Nigerian programmers: Deji Kadri and Victor Sylva.

The African movie industry is a growing and constantly improving sector. Especially in Nigeria, Nollywood has launched the careers of many successful actors and actresses. The economic potentials are there too as many businesses have grown around it. Only recently, nollywoodmovies.tv launched on Sky networks in the UK. The station streams only Nollywood movies on demand. The venture has been a hit having become very popular especially within the African community. Izognmovies is the same sort of service - online. They stream Nollywood/ African movies to computers on a subscription basis. According to the website, they have over 3,000 movies in their library drawn from Nigeria, Ghana and other countries.

The menace of hackers and spammers remain a threat to any webmaster's success. As soon as a website begins to climb the ranking scale, these "evil geniuses" take notice and there is normally a relentless swarm of attacks. Just a few weeks ago, this site was attacked. I am still working on bringing back the data I lost here and on other sites that were affected. Last sunday, Truspot reported that they had lost most of their mp3 files due to a "bug". Despite not admitting it was a hack or virus attack, they spoke about "strengthening our security system". Truspot is a music blog showcasing mostly African artistes - especially the up and coming ones. In a public notice, they said:

This is the text of the interview I had with Myne Whitman, the entrepreneur behind www.naijastories.com. She is also the author of the best selling love story A Heart to Mend. You can read all about naijastories.com on this previous post. Naijastories.com is a social network for writers and authors.

The non existence of a viable online payment system has greatly hindered ecommerce in Africa. In Nigeria, for example, there is no mass accesible form to pay for goods online. Customers still have to pay physically into a bank account for items purchased online. Utilities like debit cards, credits cards are virtually non existent. There is a big market here - waiting for any courageous investor ready to bring about this massive culture change.

You may have noticed, this site was built with the Drupal Content Management System (CMS). I gave it a lot of thought before choosing this software over Wordpress. Of course Wordpress is very good for blogging - probably the best. The most annoying thing I found about Drupal is that you have to install the text editor yourself. Up to now, I am still trying out the available editor modules to find which would be the best for this blog. Some of the editors dont have the most basic of functions - uploading image from the hard drive or any other attached device. In Wordpress, among other things, you get a nice text editor allowing for image upload from anywhere and with most of the editing functions you would need.

Despite all the privacy issues, facebook just crossed the half a billion users marker. That is 500 million users! It also means 1/13th of the whole internet population. There is no stopping for one of the world's most famous websites. Barely six months ago, they had 400 million users. At this rate, they should hit 1 billion users on or before January next year. The only other website ranking more than it is Google and we know why - Google in itself is a part of our lives. Facebook is fast becoming like that too.

Most social networks are about sharing photos and swapping latest gossips. www.naijastories.com does it differently - it is a social network for writers. Members can "share their literary works, gain recognition, and connect with their audience and each other". The website is the brain child of Myne Whitman, a published Nigerian author who wrote the best selling love story A Heart to Mend.

The other day, I came upon this heated argument on one of the popular forums about use of Content Management Systems (CMS). One web designer branded all CMS users lazy and lacking in imagination. Personally I dont see any reason why I should build a website from scratch if its going to have just basic features like on a blog or even a social network. Unless a utility is not available with existing software, it would be akin to re-inventing the wheel if one codes from scratch. Is it really worth the effort? In any case, a simple custom plugin will add any functionality to existing core codes.