Personal Archives - Page 4 of 17

50,412,559 Nigerians on the Internet

The reality is, I’m not much better than the armchair consultants I ranted about. Some months ago I wrote that Nigeria doesn’t have more than 17M internet users. I did my calculation based on MTN’s year end result and extrapolated that for the whole industry.

Please read paragraph 5 of page 50 of the MTN Group Annual Report for 2012.

Not a bad try but then NCC poked their fat fingers into my eyes and called me a freaking liar.
Based on the current data, as of July 2013, 50,412,559 dudes are ~~watching porn~~ using the internet in Nigeria from mostly their mobile devices.

Well I’m starting to see that around. Not that I can see 50M Nigerians dancing Azonto on the internet. After all, how many users actually come around to read my rants? I’m not that popular. You never know, I could be suffering from a chronic case of megalomania.

I can’t overcome the temptation to rant.
Some years ago, Blackberry was the king of Nigeria’s fondlesmob market. But they were expensive and very bad. Sammy and Lugi boys came around but they were expensive too. Then Ching Chong! The market is now getting driven by extremely cheap, I mean outrageously cheap, Android phones knocked out from X,000 Chinese factories for the world to use. And they work! Some days ago, I heard how the 5 inch Tecno Phantom A+ apparently sold out in Lagos; at N35K a pop, that was a badass bargain :-). Now we even have N14K full Android phones and of course they are all on the internet. The executives of MTN and others must be going through a paroxysm of excitement.

By the way only about 114,760,406 lines are active now. That’s more than all the population in the other African countries combined 10 times. OK, that was a joke!

Crapware by another name is Blackberry Q10

I have nothing to say but that Blackberry Q10 is an absolute piece of crapware.

How did I arrive at this point? Not so hard. Almost everything that worked in the old BB has changed, almost no backward compatibility. Contact names no longer appear when called but for the most annoying one, the numbers for my contacts now get mixed up with others. Imagine calling Sade and it shows as Sola! When I want to call, I wouldn’t find a contact’s name unless I switch to Blackberry Balance to see the name on the work contact list but yet I can see the same name on text messaging. You can’t call a contact directly from the BBM Chat. The notes folder no longer synchronize to Documents.

Meanwhile, did anyone ever do quality assurance before unleashing this terrible but not cheap phone on the world? For a company like Blackberry, you would imagine that they would put in more than an extra effort to ensure that the basic features work. Maybe that is why they are where they are now. I wonder if the road for them is up or down.

But as for me, can’t wait to dump Blackberry forever.

The Rise of the Bionic Men

I’ve always been fascinated by science fiction, bionic men and even much more by the real science miracles; each day I watch determined scientists and engineers make our wild and sometimes horrific dreams come true.

The advancement in prosthetics is growing in leap and bonds. Many being tested are now getting connected to our neural bus – quite a few can be controlled by thoughts.

So this is where it gets interesting. Each year we get to hear about better and more versatile prosthetics. I assume that at a random time in a not so far future, we would get to a point where these man-made attachments would be as good as any natural appendage.

What happens the day after? Would we stop making them better? Absolutely not! The day after would have prosthetics better than the real-life organs.
Take artificial eyes for example – scientists are using different methods to build. Some have even gotten FDA and CE approvals. Soon they would be mainstream and then some dude would offer an artificial eye that could see infrared and ultraviolet, overlay your sight with additional information streamed over the internet – like when I see a colleague and then a visual tag pops with his name and number on my vision.

Like a Google Glass on steroids.

Or a cochlear implant that could hear sound beyond the normal human range. Or an artificial leg that can’t break or you won’t get tired running because it has hydraulics that could give a range boost. Down the line I imagine people would willingly start giving up their limbs, eyes, ears, etc. to have the artificial ones. I recently started wearing glasses but in the future, I could pop my eyes out and put in something snazzy from Samsung that can see in the dark, overlay navigation map for me or even deliver some delirious porn.

Would it stop there?

One day, mark my words, someone would deliver a complete bionic body and we would all port our consciousness to it. That’s it.

The future is bionic. The future is exciting.

But then let me be gone before we get there.

Galaxy S4 is Awesome. Yawn!

The S4 is the new kid on the block and it’s an absolutely fondle mobile. Think about it, it’s got every thingamajig on earth. 5-inch super amoled screen, a zippy new Samsung Exynos 5 or Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro processor. The only thing it doesn’t do now is brew coffee.

It is amazing how quickly we have arrived at a point where a new phone doesn’t awesomely shock us anymore. The specs are converging, the laws of hand-held mechanics are getting to a point of breach.

Can someone remember when people drool over PC config (memory, hard disk, sound)? Those times have gone – nobody cares. Nobody ever comes around to check out the sexy new laptop you slugging around. Even the tablet life is reaching that point.

So, I guess by the time Galaxy reaches the S6, it wouldn’t make news anymore. unless maybe it could make coffee but then every Chinese knockoff would be making coffee too.

Can I watch that please?

Online check-ins revolutionized air travel by letting you choose seats and meals. But why can’t we pick any movie for in-flight entertainment? Personalizing flights further would be amazing!

A gazillion year ago, you had to bribe the snotty girl at the counter to put you on a good seat. If you are snotty as she is, then you are out of luck. Trust me; you will end up sandwiched between two guys who could stink a hog into submission without any trace of metabolic conversion gene in their DNA streams.

Then some folks invented online check in. Now you could choose your seat. Then you could choose your meal. Ok, Delta invented paying to move your seat nearer the front of the plane and additional patent covered getting on the plane ahead of others.

Oh, you can even make calls on some flights now but at $5 a minute, it would probably be you saying your last good bye. Because if you were going to pay for that, how long could you talk? Poor man talk.

The screens on the popular sides are getting bigger so the movies are easier on the eyes. Sound is still poor though. Like some dinosaur gasping for last breathe.

So if I could choose my seat, select my chow, why can’t I just select all the crazy movies I want to watch on a flight? Maybe porn won’t be allowed but someone should be able to get Basic Instincts in between the list. I could select my magazine too or maybe my music selection. Can I tear off the screen and read/watch off my laps?