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 ;)

Why Social Networks / Media Sites Cannot Get to Millions of Users in Africa [ part 2 ]

I wanted to continue "why web 2.0 ventures are not making it big in africa", so I decided to drop this post. Please read on ...

There are soo many issues why a social network/media site cannot get to millions in Africa as a whole, although the number of internet users in Africa is up to 50+ million.

[Challenge: can your venture make an African who is not interested in the internet use the internet ?]

- How many Africans have access to internet at home ( luxury )?

- How many langauges do we have here in Africa ( minimum two : internationalisation starts from day one )

- How cheap is it for our users to go to the cyber everyday just to have fun on a soo called social network where they do not make any thing out of it ?

- Are the Ventures (web 2.0 sites ) having the right networks ( business , marketing, HR, IT ) to handle such growths to millions of users, and do they have the "big problem" Venture Capital ?

- How many Africans know the importance of the internet or how to use computers not to talk of your soo called social media site ?


If you are in Silicon Valley and you have a crazy idea like twitter.com, it can explode within two years but if you are in West Africa, who is ready to invest into a "war torn zone" ( as they address us ), thinking that when a war breaks all their servers will be turned to dust ??
But I think if you offer Africans a place to meet people to better their lives( jobs, marriage, career networking ) just like what we are working on with www.webyfolio.com ( still a work in progress ) or what FEE is putting forth www.kerawa.com ( classified ads - jobs 100% important to unemployed Africans) , they will come there and also tell their friends, and with time you might get the VCs coming or you might get the traffic to make some money out of.
More to that:
If I was unemployed I bet you I will visit www.kerawa.com everyday to see what opportunities God has for me somewhere in Cameroon or Africa.

My Proposed Solutioins:

- African web entrepreneurs should take some time to study software engineering and the business behind it. Remember this process will take you about two years before you can be able to build a good solution. Go to school or hit the browser to www.w3schools.com, most of us started from there

- Before starting a web 2.0 site, look at Africa, see what they value and what they dont value, what they have and what they can afford, dont build your site because its a social network, but build your solution because it has value to give to the average African no matter his poverty. Africans dont have money and they pay to access the internet, if you want them to use your site, then it should be something worth the small pocket money they have.

- Ensure that you make a bilingual solution ( kudos kerawa.com), so that most Africans can use the solution from day one.

- Market your solution via TV, Radio, Magazins, Blogs ( pay for the marketing ) else you wont get those users. Here in Africa, we watch TV, and listen to Radio and if you tell us something on Air, we will see it. You can hit MNET African Magic, and some other stuffs like Canal + horizon.
In business if you dont pay in something you wont make anything ( correct me if I am wrong ).
But if you count on online marketing: Abi we are not in Yankee (USA), and we dont want only tech savvy guys in Africa using our ventures

- While growing your web venture indulge into something else that will give you money for the time being else you will give up. You can get a regular job, which is not the best because its bad for the growth of your venture but good for the money. You can offer other services to firms in your area like build websites and softwares ( good one but very much strainous to your team), then get part of the money and experience and contacts as positive effects to your venture.

- I have realised that most internet users in Africa are mostly tech savy guys who work in the IT industry, but the guys who dont work in the IT industry need to use our sites too. Do something that can convert the non internet user in African to become an Internet user on your site [ VERY VERY BIG CHALLENGE ]

Web Gurus of Africa this is what I want you to remember:
online ventures need patience
Nairaland.com started in 2005 but its getting 200,000 users in 2008,
Facebook started in 2003 and it became big in 2007,
Google started in 1999 and it became big in 2003,
Myspace (2003 - 2006 ).
Blogger started in 1999 and Google bought them in 2005.
So don't expect to start today and in a year you get 20 million users, but you should expect a Geometric Progression kind of thing.
like Facebook was with 15 million users in 2007 and it converted that figure to 70million users in 2008. but it took them 2003 - 2007 to get 15 million users.
I think I have exhausted all the reasons why web ventures don't grow that big in our continent.

Why Web 2.0 ventures are not making it big in Africa

I was on nairaland the other day and someone asked if the idea of setting up a Nigerian or African wide social network was a good idea.
Personally I think its a good and bad idea. Its good if it helps people share what is valuable to them but it will be bad if its just for fun like facebook.com or myspace ( Africans dont have money and they dont have free internet ).

These are some of the things to consider to make a successful web 2.0 solution in Africa:

- Daily service : Do they need something from your site everyday, I personally don't visit facebook.com or myspace.com everyday but I visit www.google.com and www.google.com/analytics everyday ( I guess webmasters know why )

- Innovations: if your site keeps getting some innovations, it will cause news and bloggers around will write about you and people will turn to visit your site. Facebook launched the platform and after that new applications have been coming up which make bloggers, journalists write more about facebook and hence giving their site more attention

- updates: if your site gives users some updates by email or phone or TV or , then the users will keep coming to your site.

Those are some of the things I believe are hindering web 2.0 ventures here in Africa. Mainly because Africans just want to replicate success stories in USA back here, but the situation here is different. Build things that will benefit the audience you target and also consider what they have and what they dont have.
For example, Africans will prefer to watch news on TV free of charge than to pay for internet to read the news. I hope you get the reason why some web 2.0 stuffs can work in USA and Europe and not Africa.
Please give me your own views towards this issue by commenting

The Internet As One Big Social Network ( web 5.0)

I guess today is one of those days where I get up with one mad Idea ( my bad ). Well I have this strong feeling that the whole internet can be considered some sort of a rival to myspace, facebook and or hi5, just to name a few of such social networking sites.

Imagine the following:

- Personal blogs or personal sites are to become your profile on this social network

- emails from your blog to another guy or using another guy's contact page to send him/her and email is "internal messaging" on this ambigous social network

- your photos on flikr and videos on youtube embeded on your blog is your gallery on this our big social network

I hope you get the picture now.

Take this as my approach:

I build a big server some where whose job is to register/login people to this whole platform(Internet). for instance to post a comment on a blog or on someones pictures on flickr you have to login to this central server. After you login, any person on any blog will get to know that you are logged in and that person can chat with you, and if you leave your site to another person's blog or website, the system remembers your login status and you can comment on any site supporting the system but the system will check if the owner of the site permits you to comment on his or her content( just like on facebook ).
If you are not friends and you are not permited to comment, then you can invite the owner to become your friend and he or she has to be informed by email then approve it.
You can also get daily feeds from the system informing you about you friends activities, and you can set what you want to recieve and what you dont want to recieve alongside what you want to be broadcasted about you (cool huh ??)
So I go to my site, I login to post a blog, after I check comments on my articles, notice new guys, visit their blogs and I comment without login and the site knows me.
All the system needs is authentication, OpenID, and also friends database, to get connections between friends, not forgeting digitizing friend activities and the internet will be approaching web 5.0 in no time.
and I must say forget Sematic web, because the internet can not stand another chance of change, we are already changing it Semantic Web come catch us.