Category: General

Read about Adedeji’s take on technology, payments, financial inclusion, career, and credit.

The Rise of Killer Smartphones

It seems Nigerians, like most Americans, are missing out on an interesting revolution happening out there in the smart phone universe. But then, if you stood on a rail track with your Beats headphones on and oblivious of the rushing train, does it make you safer? Or maybe an ostrich, with its head planted in the sand and nice rump in the air, wouldn’t know that it’s about to get bitch slapped.

That was a digression. It seems I can’t keep a conversation without drawing a wonky line.

I remember vividly how Blackberry sneaked on Nokia and ate its breakfast. Then Android + Samsung ate Blackberry’s lunch. Seems Samsung is going to be hungry tonight because two bad ass boys are around the corner, but the demolition promised would upend everything.

Quite a number of smart phone makers are all over the world with most around the middle kingdom but the cachet that Samsung and Apple have over everyone has been selling high-end phones: powerful chipsets, stunning graphics and expensive clothing. Of course, the price of this phone can buy about a third of a Tata Nano.

Here comes in Xiaomi. A recent entrant into the smart phone arena and in a few months have rocketed to number 3, sniffing annoyingly at Samsung backside. It’s on track to sell 100M smart phones in 2015. What’s the trick? High-end phones at knockoff prices. What’s their game? They want to take over the world, that is, do bloodletting with Samsung then come back and earn some money.

You wonder if a business can survive without earning a decent profit? Yes. Amazon!

So far it seems to be working and investors are pouring in more cash than Hurricane Katrina.

This would have been perfectly OK if another Chinese ain’t doing same. OnePlus is just a year old as a company and wants to push out about 5 million phones this year at cutthroat prices but with hope to make money on services.

Of course, the gloomy pictures I just painted is for the like of Samsung to brood over. As far as consumers are concerned, they could slug each other to death.

By the way, when are we getting a mobile phone with 8GB RAM and 48 hours battery?

The strong also fail and it’s no big deal

Sometimes you just need to know when to call it quits. Does that make you a loser? Hell no! Or maybe. You can’t be sure until it’s all over.

The way it is, the most important thing is to win the war but you may lose some battles or side street skirmishes in the interest of overall success of your military or career campaign.

Some stories come to mind – Apple dropping Ping, a social network (I wonder if any of you know about it) like a bad habit when it wasn’t going north. Microsoft quarantined Nokia like a virus and took a $7.6B haircut while at it.

Recently, the folks at Google had a serious heart-to-heart talk with each other and decided that Google+ should go the way of the dodo. Starting weeks ago, Google+ is getting kicked out of Google assets, inclusive of YouTube were forcing users to have a Google+ accounts has drawn backlash.

Which comes to a critical question – how do you know when to throw in the towel and declare the current adventure dead or push through and succeed? The world is replete with anecdotes of people who succeeded despite odds stacked against them. Same world is also replete with anecdotes of those who didn’t pull back on time.

Sometimes life feels like a coin toss with two heads or two tails. The luck isn’t in the spin, it’s in the pick.

How to run a WordPress blog on Amazon AWS (for free)

I got into blogging before it became a common word. Sometime in March 2001 I created my first website, dejiolowe.com, put some random information there and just literally talked about crap.

Fast forward to 2005, I moved my blog to a ColdFusion engine, BlogCFC by Raymond Camden and started real blogging. I was active once in a while but then the host was very unreliable. After all, I got it for peanuts.

Incidentally my big bro had quite a bit of leftover server capacity somewhere so I ported to WordPress. I ran that for a few years before it started fraying at the edges. The server just had a penchant for going down randomly.Along the line I became an ardent a fan of cloudy stuff and Amazon AWS leads everyone shoulders and above. Feeling jobless I decided it’s time I tried out a bit of that.
So my assignment was to create a new WordPress website on AWS from scratch.

Follow my steps:

  1. First thing you need is basic knowledge of what to do. So I searched for “how to run WordPress off amazon AWS” on Google and got some interesting links
  2. I followed Amazon’s tutorial which is pretty clear and straightforward
  3. I went over to AWS on Amazon to log in. Now if you have an Amazon account, all you need is that same username and password
  4. Following the tutorial on step 2 above, I created a free tier Windows 2008 R2 instance, configured it as explained.
  5. Then I went over to my old website to export out the content into a WXR file (a WordPress XML file format).
  6. I went over to my registrar’s domain panel (mydomain.com) to change the IP address of my domain name to the new one given by Amazon (A records in technical terms) however you can buy your domain name with Amazon on Route 53.
  7. Once the DNS name propagated across the internet, that is my domain name is now pointing to the new host, I logged into the new server to upload the WXR file in step 5 above.
  8. I downloaded a new theme for the blog.
  9. I installed all the previous plugins such as Akismet, Exploit Scanner, Jetpack and StatCounter.
  10. The interesting bit about this setup is that it’s free for the next 1 year. If I end up becoming a celebrity by then, I can use part of the endorsement money to move it to a bigger server so I can handle the expected spike in traffic. But I seriously doubt that.
  11. You don’t need steps 5, 6 and 7 if you are starting your WordPress website from scratch.

Ladies and gentlemen, that’s it.

Crispr is the new Little Boy

You’ve probably never heard of Crispr but then who has? I bet you are creepier than a centipede that killed a snake if you ‘ve.

I was trolling some biology news of recent when I bumped into an interesting story about gene editing.

By the way, I’m curious about genetics. I once did a genetic algorithm in school which succeeded in messing up my head more than anything else. Since I was already messed up anyway, another dose of scary gene science won’t put me in a worse place.

Crispr, clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats, is a genetic basis of gene editing using Cas9, some fancy protein (not your regular protein shakes) that makes this to work.

Don’t let me bore you to tears.

In a nutshell, this technique and protein will allow you to edit any gene in any cell – cut, add, do whatever you like, even if you are under the influence. You can also apply Instagram filters. Ok, that’s a lie, or maybe not! Unfortunately, it doesn’t have UNDO, AKA CRTL Z!

Scientists are already using it to edit a mosquito that won’t be susceptible to Plasmodium, but nobody is sure of what happens after. Chinese are even crazier; one of them edited an embryo, left behind by some unfortunate mum, to remove some lousy ass gene that causes beta thalassemia, a disorder that unhinges human ability to make good red blood cells. Thankfully (for now) it failed.

Realizing the power that this can be, scientists are running around to create rules to govern everyone.
My dear friend, as we all know, some dudes never play along nicely. Imagine terrorists creating superhumans? One that is strong, super intelligent (removes the gene that wants to watch Africa Magic and Telemundo), grows to adulthood in a month and can live forever.

We are doomed! Maybe not.

Someone is going to invent a type of software that can help prospective mothers select genes, behaviors, and have perfect kids. It may even be an Android or iPhone app for convenience. The Blackberry version won’t be released on time, or it may just produce annoying kids. Caveat Emptor! If the price is too high, someone will release a hacked version on Pirate Bay. Unfortunately when the baby is born, baked or cooked, it may come with a natural tattoo – ^^#^^Crispr^^%^^.

I have lost my mind.

Did I mention Little Boy? That was the first atomic bomb dropped. It brought everyone a healthy fear of mortality.

I thought artificial intelligence is going to change the world; I may be wrong, it could be something very crispy.

Instant Recharge Tracker

Only an idiot would trust a banker. Rumor has it that while the cockroach would be the last to exist after Armageddon, the bankers would be the second to the last.

The smell of easy money, when the economy is tight and Naira is testing out a new parachute, is hard to resist. I’m not a prophet but I predicted this some months ago that by year end, only a few banks won’t offer xyzAmount# service.
Instant airtime recharge is the new kid on the block for banks and it’s simply amazing for the average Joe on the street. If your nail is cropped short like mine or bedeviled with fungi like my cousin’s, then not having to scratch a recharge card anymore is a dream come through.

So, with mobile money short codes deployed to more salubrious usage, I can at least give a rundown of what the money men are up to.

BankCodePartner
Access Bank*901*Amount#Clickatell
CitibankCorporate customers. No interest, I guess 
Diamond BankProbably in the works 
Ecobank*326*Amount#Clickatell
Fidelity Bank*770*Amount#InterSwitch
First Bank of Nigeria*894*Amount#InterSwitch
First City Monument Bank*389*214*1*Amount# (Seriously?) 
FSDH Merchant BankProbably not interested 
Guaranty Trust Bank*773*Amount#Clickatell
Heritage Bank*322*030*Amount#InterSwitch
Keystone Bank*322*082*Amount#InterSwitch
Rand Merchant BankMerchant bank – probably no interest 
Skye Bank  
Stanbic IBTC Bank*909*Amount#Clickatell
Standard Chartered BankEhm.. 
Sterling Bank *822*Amount# Clickatell
Union BankDefinitely something cooking 
United Bank for AfricaDefinitely something cooking 
Unity Bank *322*215*Amount# InterSwitch
Wema Bank*322*035*Amount#InterSwitch
Zenith Bank*966*Amount#Cyberspace

Rumor has it that the money is good, and I know at least 2 banks doing over N500M a month. In fact, one of them has strolled beyond N1B in airtime sales a month. Typical margin is a neighborhood of 5%+/-.

Feedback has been positive but the major sand in the Garri of this has been network performance – customer getting debited but airtime doing what Buhari is doing with ministerial nominations. MTN, being the largest telco, probably didn’t see this coming and so every time their service has a problem, which is like every minute, something goes wrong and customers reach for their machetes. Another annoying fact is you need to have a minimum of N12 to be able to do airtime on MTN although some banks are offsetting that money for customers.