Ok, I’m an armchair futurist but I’m not ashamed of that at all. How could one be ashamed of the progress Microsoft has with HoloLens? That sh*t simply blows the mind away!
Yeah, my mind got blown with the scary realities of VR and I haven’t been able to find the pieces since.
In a nutshell, HoloLens turns the VR world upside down by overlaying holograms on the everyday objects around us. It is easier to understand by starting here and then watching a live demo here.
This may be more useful for the everyday people like you and me while Oculus Rift is suited for core gamers. The possibilities are endless though – education, business, entertainment, porn, etc.
You don’t know what I’m ranting about? Leave, you don’t belong here!
Category: General
Read about Adedeji’s take on technology, payments, financial inclusion, career, and credit.
What's SaaS and SOA to a Layman?
I’m currently driving a large automation project and while prepping my team for the technical presentation, I decided to pepper the stuff with some nice buzzwords, something I can use to impress my colleagues. I opened my hat and tossed in some SaaS and SOA.
But a benign spirit warned me not to make a fool of myself and I patiently obeyed; so I looked things up. It seems my mum’s fervently praying for me upstairs. RIP mama!
In a layman’s term SaaS means Software as a Service which means software system not within your network or installed on your PC or phone or any other random computing device. But wait, what of my Gmail and Yahoo email?
Oh, that’s SaaS! You kidding me!
Welcome to planet IT. I used to tell people that IT is a fraud. We come up with a random name to give an old thing and voila, it is as sexy as a lipstick on an 80 year old grandma. Tomorrow we are going to call the sun Self-Sustaining Electromagnetic Wave Generator.
And SOA? It means Service Oriented Architecture. It is a means of getting a remote software system to do some bit of work without itself being a complete usable software. I mean isn’t that DCOM and RPC of yore? Well, something like that but not exactly like that. To be proper SOA it must be independent of any vendor, product or technology. These days most SOA are web service based.
With SOA, a system or platform or software is built out of other reusable components. For example, you could call a Web service that sends email or gives you the exchange rate of a currency at a specific time. It could be used in app A and another unrelated app B.
A SaaS can be built out of an SOA.
Since my integration isn’t going to be hosted outside of the office, I simply chased SaaS out of my presentation and respected myself.
By the way, my descriptions may not be accurate or goofy at best but then, isn’t that what I call fluff?
Is your bank there while you are on the move?
We are always on the move, not because we don’t have anything to do but that’s the reality of our lives in Lagos. We are usually busy, stuck in traffic and when our pretty backsides are stuck in traffic for hours, we end up loving our fondleslabs.
So while in that horrendous traffic, we want to get some things done such as reading the latest gist on Linda Ikeji or transferring money to a pesky cousin. Banking is what we all take seriously because that’s where your liquid livelihood is probably warehoused. We just wanna be able to hit our bank anytime and every time, any day and every day.
If banks understand this (they are supposed to be smart guys, ehn?) then I suppose they should have mobile first strategy. Ok, that’s consultants’ speak (heaven knows I hate that bunch!). The taste of the pudding is in the eating (whosoever came up with that proverb is a wobia!) so I expect that banks should have websites tuned for mobile phones. After all if I need to pay Silifa or find out some random thing about my bank and I’m stuck on Third Mainland Bridge traffic just around Oworo, it’s my unfortunate phone, battery and data permitting, that I will turn to.
So on an unfortunate Saturday while waiting for my friend to come around, I decided to visit banks’ websites with my phone and see how they scale up.
Here we go people:
| Bank | Mobile Friendly | Secure Website |
| Access Bank | Yes | Yes |
| Citibank | Yes | No |
| Diamond Bank (*Acquired by Access Bank) | Yes | No |
| Ecobank Nigeria | No | No |
| Fidelity Bank Plc | Yes | Yes |
| First Bank of Nigeria | Yes | No |
| First City Monument Bank | No | Yes |
| Guaranty Trust Bank | Yes | No |
| Heritage Bank Limited | Yes | No |
| Keystone Bank Limited | Yes | No |
| Skye Bank | No | Yes |
| Stanbic IBTC Bank | Yes | No |
| Standard Chartered Bank | Yes | Yes |
| Sterling Bank | Yes | No |
| Union Bank of Nigeria | Yes | No |
| United Bank for Africa | No | No |
| Unity Bank Plc | Yes | No |
| Wema Bank | Yes | No |
| Zenith Bank | Yes | Yes |
How did I test?
- Used Samsung S5
- Searched for the bank name and clicked on the link
- Faffing about on April 4, 2015
What’s the secure website about?
It is increasingly common for websites to now default to using just HTTPS for all traffic. It is seen as a sign of understanding the times. However it doesn’t mean that internet banking traffic has been compromised (all banks use HTTPS for their internet banking).
Apple Watch is Evolution in Real Time
Could this be the beginning of the end or end of the beginning?
I’m not trying to sound dystopian, but an evolution may start where normal watches would join dinosaurs in the archeological dig.
Ok, what happened?
Apple launched a $10,000 smart watch. You heard me right, 100 Benjamins for a digital watch! Not even Seiko ever dreamed of that.
It’s official, Apple got into the wearable fray and everyone sat up. While we thought that the likes of Samsung, LG, Motorola and Pebble are in for a genocide, the actual victims may be far away in cozy Switzerland, oblivious of the catastrophe heading their way, faster and deadlier than a Tsunami.
The market for expensive watches has been around for centuries and it’s every man’s dream to own something he could pass on to the next generation. Till date, their prices have been largely unaffected by the global economy yoyo. The brands are classy and exclusive. The wearers, especially the nouveau riche, are obnoxious and want everyone to notice them.
Money is good.
Why do we even buy these expensive time machines? So that all those tiny chewing gum chicks can know we have arrived? Or maybe get some respect from the old cougars? It is mostly the pass to the rarefied world of the upper class.
Here comes Apple the electronic bully. With a $10K watch, the average dude that has part of his brains in his nether regions may use that as a cheaper alternative. While there are markets for very expensive watches most watchmakers are usually sustained by the cheaper, more affordable models. Take that away, and Rolex executives could find themselves mopping floors of Geneva’s local malls.
Maybe I’m just beefing. Maybe not. But I can’t help feeling schadenfreude.
MTN Nigeria made $2.6B Profit in 2014 – Beat that!
MTN Group just released their 2014 results. For once I sincerely believe I’m sure I’m in the wrong business. First thing on Monday, I’m taking a flight to Abuja to get my own telecoms license. You think I’m wrong? How can those numbers be wrong?
Ok, time to face realities.
MTN Nigeria had a bumper time last year. Forget about the pessimistic outlook splashed out on the annual report. Making $2.6B profit in a year na beanz? I tried to calculate that in Naira but my calculator displayed this result “Are you on cheap weed?” If I got that from Mallams, I would have to bring along, or say, freight along N590,534,092,350. How many alabaru can carry that?
Don’t even start me up on all the things you could do with that amount of money. But let’s try some:
I could send SMS to all Nigerians, the whole 170M of us, 868 times. What would I even say to them? At 160 characters per SMS, I could send them a short book. Nigerian’s don’t read so by the time I’m done, I would be the biggest spammer in the world.
I could be magnanimous and get all Nigerians, still the whole 170M of us, 57 loaves of bread each. The bakers would be happy. But after the second loaf, everyone won’t be having that much fun.
Or maybe I could just buy phones? I could get 3,192,076 lucky guys iPhone 6. But trust me, we may get more! With that many number of phones, Jumia would be stupid not to cut a deal.
Or get them cars? I could add 109,358 Hyundai ix35 to Lagos traffic and just make everyone’s life more miserable. Or I could be nicer and simply get 15,540 Merc S500 to clog just Banana Island alone.
Let me do something more constructive though, let’s get everyone a home. Going by the going rate of new homes in my estate, I could buy terrace duplexes for 13, 122 families. With that many homes, we may simply start a new town. Yellow Town? It may be a cute name but a nightmare for interior decorators if we had to paint houses that color.
The traffic on Lekki Road is now so terrible so I’m actually more inclined to use the money for an alternative route from VI to God knows where. I would enjoy the sparring that Julius Berger, Hitech and PW Nigeria would have in my office but trust me, I won’t get less than 200KM of 10 lane NaijaBahn between Ahmadu Bello Way and beyond Epe. I could get to the office in 15 minutes. Wait, with that type of money, do I ever need to work again? I may just charter a Falcon 2000 and fly for 23 years non-stop.
Most people think that the Lekki-Ikoyi bridge had a lot of “pork” but let’s imagine that’s the real price, I may simply build 20 of such bridges. Ha ha ha, the folks in Ikoyi with their upturned noses would have to contend with Obalende and Ikate area boys who will then have more bridges to cross than ever.
We may really build 10 fourth mainland bridges and just move on.
You know the sad reality; we lose twice more than that every year to oil thieves. Today, bunkerers steal at least 400,000 barrels of oil today. Say they sell them at $30 per barrel, that’s some $4.3B going to someone in Nigeria today and not a simple SMS, bread, phones, cars, roads, bridges, for his community. Some people will simply roast in the toastier parts of hell!