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"

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.

Google Adsense is not working in Africa

Google Adsense the biggest ads network on the planet, which is also known as the "Google money making machine", seems to be a total failure in Africa[IMHO - anyway thats why its on my blog...].
Dont rush to comment yet, read on to get my points.
I have been running www.ubstudents.com and its having atleast 20 unique visitors per day, with such traffic in USA I guess I will be having atleast 2 USD per day, but here in Africa I get 0.1 USD on the average per day. I have also placed adsense on this blog http://mambenanje.blogpost.com, www.bushfalling.com and www.kupexsans.com , but the overall revenue from the four sites is barely 2USD per week on the average.

I have some small explanations for this though:

- Adworks is not yet used by most African firms, so most adverts that get served to adsense publishers in Africa are mostly for international viewers which is not higly targeted for our African audience and it results to low click through rates.

- A friend of mine who owns www.webmastersofafrica.com gave his own explanation as follows: African publishers are abusing the adsense program thinking its free money and thus Google has put high restrictions to the African part of the Adsense/Adworks network.

If there is any person out there with an African venture that makes a great deal from Adsense, please place a comment so I could know if its me or its Adsense not getting it right in Africa.

For example, a big website as www.nairaland.com with 200,000 registered members and an estimated daily traffic of about 50,000 unique visitors, I guess the 25 year old owner of the site would be making about 1 million USD per annum but I bet he barely makes 500K USD per annum which can clearly justify my claim that "Google adsense is not working in Africa".

I personally think African web publishers need their own ads network which will be highly targeted to advertising African products so that the African users of our sites will get to see adverts that make more sense to them. This will lead back to my open source Adverts solutions for publishers (code named admark), which I talked about in a previous post below.

Codeigniter is better than the .NET Framework

Codeigniter - www.codeigniter.com , the best php web development framework, is far better than the .NET framework's ASP.NET.
I have never used the .NET framework before but php appears to be much more efficient than all Microsoft technologies such that even Ballmer wants to buy facebook.com (php) and yahoo.com (php).
When I started programming some three years back, I was contemplating on using php or java for my web solutions. Java was more organised and mature than php but php was easy to install and run. You could find free php servers all around the place alongside soo many free php libraries and classes.
But java was too heavy and difficult to maintain by yourself ( dont get me wrong, to better use codeigniter I advice you to work with java first then apply your java skills on codeigniter projects).
Due to running cost I had to hang on to php.
I later wanted to build a framework that will remove the mess in php and make it orderly like java.
After about a week of hard work on the architecture of my framework, I decided to search the Internet for something similar, so I could rather improve upon or learn from it to build mine. I was shocked to see cakephp (www.cakephp.org) codeigniter (www.codeigniter.com) symphony and a couple of others.
I tried cake php but it gave me hell, but when I tried codeigniter it was like eating mangoes.
From there on I saw how big and powerfull the framework was and how easy it was to teach a new bie.
Ebot Ndip www.ebotndip.com , one of my students learned php and codeigniter in one week, after working on java for about two months.

I love codeigniter because its affordable and easy to learn and Right here in Africa I can host my own site running apache, php, mysql and Codeigniter, right inside my room with no stress.
I am in support of codeigniter for African developers mainly because, its easy to learn and easy to run. With Codeigniter, an African New Bee can take a period of 5 months to be equal to a guy who has been coding web apps in USA for the past ten years (trust me).

Enough of the Codeigniter jist, lets get down to why its better than .NET asp.net

The learning curve: A new bee can learn codeigniter in one month and start building great functional startup businesses while in .NET you will take about three months to do same.

Hosting issues: To host your .NET site on your own will cost you alot of money to pay to Microsoft. And in Africa money is what we dont have so I will advice all african web developers to jump unto php and codeigniter and they will never see a reason to learn any other web development framework.

Personally I started off with codeigniter in 2006 and I build www.ubstudents.com in 10 days thanks to codeigniter and phpbb, I built www.cameroonfootballers.com in a week thanks to codeigniter. I could use ruby on rails though but ruby is very stressfull to install and scale ask twitter.com

How Microsoft Can Answer Google in Six Months

Microsoft has been investing billions of dollars to catch up with Google on Internet Business.
But I think they have all the money and power to catch up but they have been doing so the wrong way. To me they are not getting it right because they have never had such a rival before.
Microsoft did not grow up with the internet, so they dont understand how to fight someone who actually made the internet valuable (Google).
I have a simple idea:
Microsoft should make Adcenta free of charge to advertisers for six months and the game will change.

What does that mean ?

What I mean is, Microsoft should make advertising on all their websites (via Adcenta) free for the next six months, alongside Microsoft should put engineers in place who will monitor the Adcenta system and the comments from the user base ( which will grow very fast in terms of users and feedback, because the ads are given out for free but still competitive).
This simply means many people will get to try Microsoft Ads even if they are using Google ads. From their comments and feedback Microsoft will then be able to improve their online advertisement targeting technology to compete with Google and even beat Google.

How Bad is it ?

The bad side is: Microsoft will get to loose soo much money from advertisers, but when the people use free advertising they will get use to the Microsoft platform. When they are asked to pay sometime in the future, users wont see any reason to leave and besides the system will be improving from their comments to suit them. This is what they did with windows some years back and this is what Google is doing with Google Apps for your domain. Is Microsoft Too Blind to see this ??

Taking Remix and Featuring from Hip Hop World to Information Technology World

I personally think, Remix and Featuring, two concepts that originated from Sean "P Diddy" Comb's Badboy Entertainment, are nice cultures that can help the Information and Technology Industry grow very fast.
For example if Google could team up with Facebook to release a social web property(hosted on a seperate domain name), all Google fans and facebook fans will use the site and the resulting solution will be a whole new web property that will generate enough revenue for share holders in both companies.
lets say Ebay teams up with Yahoo and they release a new social and marketing platform (hosted on a seperate domain name). This will employ new guys and also bring up more funds and change the way marketing (auction) and communication is done world wide within the space of two months. This is because it will automatically harvest the fan base of both ebay and yahoo.
This Remix and Featuring culture, that is helping hip hop artists make extra money by coming together to work on a song that will sell accross their fan bases is a very interesting business strategy.
Possible remix in the IT space:

Google and Microsoft - enterprise search revolution ( more money for Google, more money for Microsoft)

Yahoo and Facebook - jobs sharing community ( where all yahoo clients can login and share jobs a la facebook style)

you can come up with others.