My Meeting With Emkal At Midway Restaurant

A few days back, while I was on a launch break, I met Emkal - A cameroonian Afrobeat / Rap artist ( click here to view his profile on myspace ) .
He told me he was just coming from Mamfe(Manyu Division, South west province, Cameroon), where he went to shoot his new video inside some caves and tropical forest. I asked to view pictures and he showed me a couple which you can view below. After seeing his pictures men I was inspired and I told him we (AfroVisioN Group ) are going to offer him a free web presence (website) as soon as he comes back from Mamfe
I was amazed to see the technology he used to produce his shots, just check out the pictures.

This picture is inside a cave where emkal was trying to shoot a scene

Emkal tryign to get some rest after working the whole day

The African decor is all good and he photoshoped it a little to take it towards painting

Shooting a video with real smoke and sticks to make the hollywood effect: mamfewood :D

Dont go into the wild if you dont expect our wild brothers ;)

Carbon Group Investment Forum on Saturday the 21st of June 2008

I was called up by Otto Beseka the CEO of Carbon Group to attend the Investors forum hosted at FakoShip Plaza conference hall.
Carbon Group is similar to AfroVisioN Group in the sense that the guys are all below 25 years, and they are working on setting up a platform company from which other companies will be growing.
So I attended their investors forum as a potential investor and partner. We will partner with them to handle most of their information infrastructure in terms of web and softwares. But their website will be handled by another Cameoronian firm based in the UK 3klaps (www.3klaps.com).
But we as a local technology king they think they need us on other technical aspects to help them grow wider in the local market.
below are the pictures I took while at the forum or you can view them here on facebook
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=24036&l=cf1a0&id=517433359



This is Myself and the Group Founders

I am at the center trying to digest the knowledge the CEO of Carbon Group was dishing


Everybody had to take a picture but the camera failed ;)


Why wont I clap my hands when they are talking nice money making tips


Trying to be keen then the camera takes a faint picture of the moment

Do you want to be the next Einstein from Africa ?

While on facebook.com the other day, I realised one of my facebook friends with the name of "Constance E..." had posted information about a group named "next Einstein". I was curious and I wanted to read more so I went to the group page. The next thing I saw was something very good for me ( an African boy ), but its rather unfortunate I am not intending to go to school anytime soon.
http://www.nexteinstein.org/
is a place where Africans who want to become the next einstien can go and learn how to do just that. visit the site and you will be amazed.

One Website For Every Cameroonian

AfroVisioN Group (www.afrovisiongroup.com) - where I am founder and President is a Cameroonian firm dealing with web development, software development and other software related services.

We work hard everyday to introduce computerised systems to the Cameroonian people.

This time around we have launched "one website for every Cameroonian", where we offer websites as low as 50,000FCFA (110USD), to every Cameroonian organisation, firm or individual.
This is because we want to make information technology cheap an affordable by any means possible, we go extra miles and do extra research in cuting down cost and its actually paying off.
To sign up for this scheme, all you have to do is visit www.afrovisiongroup.com/contacts.php , fill the form with all the details or enquiry and in a week or so you will find your own dot com presence like a dream.
Below are sites we have hosted under this scheme or you can view all our projects here www.afrovisiongroup.com/projects.php

www.chillenmuzic.com


www.faafnet.com

P-Square New Music Videos Have Changed the Video Dimensions in West Africa

I watched the P-square videos on MTV-Base and I was amazed those guys shot the videos in nigeria.
check the videos out below:

this is actually my best song in their album



roll it - extreme dance like Micheal jackson

Uchechukwu Michael Ugo, A Creative visual Designer/web and Pianist/Producer

Uchechukuw Micheal is a friend of mine in Nigeria, I have never seen him physically but I plan to take a trip to lagos to meet him. He wants us to present this site www.2faceidibiafans.com i did for 2face ( maybe the kennis music star my like it ).
When he showed me his personal blog hosted at http://ucheugo.blogspot.com/ I had to discover that most web developers/designers in Africa also have some music talents in them. He is a graphics artist and web designer. If he is not designing he is playing music with his adorable Piano. Just like me when I am not doing business or technology I am working on music videos or listening to demos of some talented guys here in Molyko like Steveslil - www.steveslil.com

My Presentation at COSSA Seminar at the University of Buea [ part two ]

Here are the pictures I took at the COSSA University of Buea seminar.
Remember last saturday I was called up to present to students about web design, hosting and domain name infact some general knowledge in web development. so check out the pics below or you can follow this link http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=23344&l=ab1f6&id=517433359 to view on facebook ( needs no login )

Will Information Technology also bring blood shed in Africa ?

I watched 'blood diamond' the scary movie about the war in Sierra Leone and I found out this TLA (three letter accronym) DIA which stands for "dis is Africa". The whole movie revealed to me that whenever something is discovered in Africa it leads to blood shed. Things like Ivory, Gold, Diamond, and Oil have all led to brutal killings here in Africa.
So I was wondering if this DIA ( dis is africa ) will also apply to Information technology such that when the boom comes into Africa and many Africans can make money from Technology will there be some sort of War ??

My Presentation at COSSA Seminar at the University of Buea [ part one ]

Today I was called up as resource person to present at the Computer Science students Association of the University of Buea on the topic "Building a website". The event had the theme: "Technologies behind the web". I must say it was a very exciting event and the students and others were happy to learn the wonders of web building. During my presentation, I talked about domain name, hosting server/accounts, design (html/css/graphics ) alongside programming with php and mysql.
I am currently tired from the seminar which took about 4 hrs and I have to have some rest I will prepare the pictures and a detailed blog about the seminar and post later.

Problems faced by Young African Entrepreneurs below 25yrs [ part one]

I am a young Entrepreneur below 25 years in Africa and I want to put some of the problems I face alongside what some of my peers have been facing while doing business in Africa.
Unlike in the 1st world where age is just a number and guys like Mark Zuckerberg (24 yr old facebook.com guy), Blake Ross (22 yr old Firefox browser guy) can do normal business , here in Africa its a whole different situation.
Below are a couple of the problems:
- Young is equal to Wrong: As a young man, doing business in Africa, when you have a client who is an old man, about your dads age or a few centuries above you, he considers that you are not skilled enough and you could make soo many mistakes. No matter what portfolio you present, it will take the client a second thought and lower pricing to award you that project. The worst part is when its time to hand in the initial funds, they will prefer that you do the work they see before they hand in the initial funds. In other situations, if you want to tell them what is correct professionally, they will tell you to sit quit you are still young and they will say come let me advice you. Can you imagine someone with no skills in programming telling me how to build his web app or software ??
- Young is equal to Cheap: When your a young man, no matter how big your company is here in Africa. The client will not be comfortable paying you the amount he would have paid you if you were above 35yrs. So am I suppose to grow till 35 before I can be able to run my own company.
- Young has no right to take a decision: When your a young entrepreneur of my age, your parents would not want you to go the way your doing and if you follow your heart, they will either think your under a spell or your a criminal and start instructing you to do something different. personally I decided to be heady from the start but later they realised the road I was taking was where my heart was.
- Young is equal to incompetence: I can recall clients looking at me in despair after reading project documents and seeing the costing. I guess when they look at me physically and think of my age they just wonder how such a young African boy would be making such money. They dont consider the amount of time my firm is going to put in the project.

I think most African entrepreneurs should forget corruption and age descrimination, they should keep working hard and pay the price to stand out. After that their firm will be getting the clients coming.
If you are also experiencing some problems as a young entrepreneur below 25, please share your experience here.

How Firefox's Tabbed Browsing is Helping Scammers in Africa

One of the worst things about tabbed browsing is the ability to open many sites ( in tabs ) at the same time while navigating them easily without switching the windows.
The Mozilla Firefox browser has strongly pushed tabed browsing due to the ease of use it brings to web surfing. I personally see how it helps me read soo many blog articles or tutorials in the same browser. But the worst part of it all is how this our African Scammers use it to open many "classified ads " sites to post same spam on all sites. You need to see how they post about 200 spams in an hour, just with the help of tab browsing. What will happen if they put in 6 hours ? If my maths is right, one person will post 1200 items in 6 hours. Usually they have internet at home, just imagine the spam they can be posting, and still captcha cant do anything.
See how Firefox from the Mozilla foundation is helping them spam classified ads sites.

No wonder www.kerawa.com was already complaining about spam.

I went to a cyber cafe here in Buea( Cameroon ) the other day, and I saw a young boy of about 18 years working with the Mozilla firefox browser on a pentium III windows xp system with about 128 mb ram and he had opened about 50 tabs on the same Window. Beside him I found guys complaining about the internet connection being too slow [ what could be the cause of the slow lines ? ].
Actually with soo many tabs open, and about five such young guys in that cyber, then no body will be able to use the internet anymore, just because five computers are already consuming the bandwidth required by 50 computers. What will the others use now to read their yahoo mail [ ofcourse 50% browsing in Africa is yahoo mail and 40% is manual spamming ;) ].
I personally think if Mozilla foundation can put a customisation module on Firefox where a cyber cafe admin can set the number of tabs to open per window, then this issue will reduce the number of spams per day from scammers in Africa. And I think it will help to ensure the proper netiquette to be practised in African cyber cafes.
This will prevent scammers to open many tabs and copy paste ads into many classified sites. Remember even Captcha cant stop manual posting, so we have to do something about this multi tab browsing abuse.
To conclude I strongly blame the scammers for using Firefox to send their spams faster, I love tab browsing, but I want the world to see how Africans are using it for the bad side. And about Mozilla Foundation: they are not actually the ones promoting it, but people always devise bad things out of good ones.

www.afrostarups.com | a new place for african web business men

After surfing the web and talking with a couple of friends, I decided to launch a community web solution for Young Entrepreneurs who are interested in setting up their own Business' in Africa, and also Africans out there who are doing something on the web.
So I had to launch www.afrostartups.com
Like every other web venture, it takes time for it to get the users, and personally am ready to post hot articles on the site just like a blog till many others start responding and contributing.
The site talks about "hot Startups in Africa", "Startup Frequently ask Questions in Africa", "Marketing your African Startup", "fund raising and venture sources for you African Startup", "getting co founders and HR for your African startup".
But with time there will be more forums as the site grows and more people register. I love to see many web gurus come there to share knowledge so others can learn and grow their startups. If Africans can invest in the Internet they can make some money to fight Malaria, HIV and the rest.
Welcome to Afrostartups.com

Business and Fun Trip To Douala

Yesterday(May 31st 2008( I had a good trip to Douala where I met soo many interesting friends of mine, including FEE ( kerawa.com ), Enstine Muki of Njangi Host Cameroon ( betterplanning, enstine.net njangihost) , DJ Rene Cool ( So Sound Records), Mr AkoAkere Che Mone ( MTN Cameroon ), Mudjock Judith ( weboptimal.net), Suh Calvin ( a friend and prospective software developer ) and a couple of 'passerbys' who are always present in every city here in Africa.
The travel was initially intended to sign a partnership agreement between WebOptimal Cameroon ( www.weboptimal.net) and AfroVisioN Group ( www.afrovisiongroup.com ).

I got up from bed at 6 am after working on some codes for www.studentnetworks.in overnight till the early hours of the morning. So I had to continue coding till about 10 am, because I knew while in Douala, the day will go by without me working on any codes ( trying to maximise the day business wise ). After that I went online to check out a couple of mails and also meet Nino ( http://nino.akopo.com ), so we talk out some business regarding some projects we are working on.
After that, I took my bath, and got dressed up in a white shirt and pair of jean trousers (blend of young and responsible haha ).
Called my friend Steveslil ( www.steveslil.com) because we had to travel together, handling business you know how it is. After that I made a couple of calls to some guys and finaly my girl friend ( Wenie Taila -unfortunately she has no web blog or personal site, she is into the medical stuffs and far from computers)
The next thing I can remember is seeing myself at Web Optimal offices, where I had a long and very interesting discussion with Mudjock Ouafo ( which made Steveslil leave us to watch his football Match Cameroon vs .... ) and we had concrete terms on how our partnership will go along ( hey I cant tell you more than that :D).
After the business talk, she accompanied me to meet FEE, who made me stand for about 25 mins infront of his office waiting on him to come meet me down stairs but he was in another building, so he had to take a cap to join me and the rest is history.
We had to walk around Dla with FEE ( 'promene' comme on dits en francais ), where we talked on topics like African entrepreneurs and internet, building a startup, less is more, introvert, nairaland - yes we talked about nairaland.com vs blueworld.co.za but I will save it for another post.
Most of the talking was in his office, after that I recieved a call from Mr Che Mone asking me to meet him at his place. At his place it was fun and chat and fun and chat again with FEE making a reunion with his high school pals. After discussing for about an hour or so, men we had to 'sqwalleee', and meet Steveslil at Rond point, Deido. From rondpoint had to go meet Enstine Muki at his place in "Bonamoussadi".
Men the table infront of me was filled with a blend of fish, soft drinks and technology talk; very very interesting. I am not the outgoing type but I think if I go out with Software / Web developers its much fun.
The most interesting topic and center of the table ( Enstine, Myself, FEE, Steveslil) was 'information technology in cameroon and web business'. The difficulties and the work arounds, man I must say we need an official gathering like that where web developers and entrepreneurs can meet and make contacts here in Africa.
Then FEE left us because he had to go Cinema with someone. later we went to meet D J Rene, where Enstine left us but Suh Calvin was with us at this point. We talked some business with DJ Rene and he made me realise how the music industy in Cameoron was in need of serious music promoters and marketers. In his words " the Music industy in Cameroon be it Makossa, Hip Hop, Bikutsi needs marketers soo badly and the fake marketers here have no network..." but he concluded that it was better in Nigeria than Cameroon which we all accepted.
Finally we hit the road back to Buea.
The trip to Douala and back lasted about 8 hours but soo many things happened that I cant recall all.
Thanks Judith, FEE, Enstine, DJ Rene, Calvin for the wonderful time you made me spend alongside Steveslil.
"Piss Out"