Category: Personal

Read Adedeji’s thoughts on more personal issues with the mix of humour and truth.

Nigerian news on my mobile, anyone?

Last Sunday I was on the road and like I do every Lord ‘s Day, I wanted to catch-up with Simon Kolawole Live! on Thisday but I couldn’t because Thisdaylive.com isn’t formatted to be displayed suitably on a mobile device. If I zoom up to what my ageing eyes could read properly, the pages extend beyond the browser and would require too many horizontal scrolling. Anyway, I gave up and that was it.

All news organizations in Nigeria have websites though the quality and design of these websites is an argument best left for another day. Save for Vanguard and maybe Thisday, the rest are online junk; crappy slow-loading messes that hardly receive proper updates. Even Thisday just earned a bit of my respect after a belated redesign. Business Day Online used to be a joy to read but then only heaven knows what happened to their webmaster. At first, it was an irritating music (yes, music on a business news website!) and now the whole site is just something else.

Anyway, back to my ranting.

The internet is alive and kicking in Nigeria, but on mobile phones. And considering that we spend most of our productive time stuck in some traffic, the mobile web becomes even more important. So, it is amazing that none of the top news organizations have their websites formatted to be displayed properly on mobile devices. You can’t even load Guardian on your Blackberry because the file size is too large.

Any news agency that is quick to recognize the potentials of the mobile web stands a chance to win a large followership (large followership translates to premium advertising) as long as it has good stories to offer for the quality of the news in Nigeria is something else. Maybe the same stuck-in-the-box thinking affecting the quality of the news is also affecting the quality of the web and the absence of a mobile site. Maybe not.

If you want to know the difference between a proper news website and its mobile version  visit Guardian.co.uk on your desktop and mobile device.

Major news websites in Nigeria:

Samsung's Central Station wireless monitor

Samsung is up to some pretty neat stuffs these days. Apart from the incredible Galaxy series of phones and tablets, they just released a wireless monitor for the European market. Yeah, you got me right, a wireless monitor.

It shouldn’t be a big deal but I wonder why it hasn’t become mainstream. Look at it, 30 years after the PC came to a street near you, we still string monitors to the CPUs (not counting the all in ones though). If I could stream movies over 4g, why can’t monitors go wireless as standard?

Same questions still come to my mind when I think of the perenial measly 1.3 mega pixel cameras on laptops and keyboards that don’t glow in the dark. But then, who knows?

Read more here: http://www.engadget.com/2011/03/19/samsungs-central-station-wireless-monitor-appears-in-europe-as/

CDMA, going going gone?

The last few days have seen some rumblings in the telecoms sector in Nigeria. News (234Next | Thisday | Business Day) had it that Telkom is thinking of pulling out of Multilinks, a CDMA operator, or has even left (depends on who you ask) because its investment has gone down the flush bowl.

That wasn’t news to me because they started a loser’s game right from the word go. Defensive or “me too” investment is always a tragedy for any organization because it shows an obvious lack of strategic direction.

But that is for Multilinks.

Starcomms, the largest CDMA operator also pawned about 80% of its base stations to Swap Tech to offset the giganormous debt on their balance sheet.

These two stories don’t really mean much, businesses always run into trouble everywhere in the world, until everyone started saying CDMA business is bad in Nigeria. CDMA operators in Nigeria are having a tough time but the technology is not to blame. In North America, some of the largest operators use CDMA and are pretty successful. That GSM is the global dominant mobile standard points more to the strategy behind its introduction and less to the technology itself.

From my own experience there are some major faults with the CDMA operators in Nigeria that is hastily dragging them to their death.

  • One, they lack strategic directions. Considering that CDMA operators came before the GSM telcos, is their current debacle not surprising? Prior to the advent of GSM, the CDMA operators preferred to sell to the “elites”. Few had more than 30,000 lines on their switches. It was the age of mobile for the “big man”. Then GSM came, the flood gate was opened and CDMA has been playing catch up ever since
  • Two, the CDMA operators restricts customers only to the phones that they provide. And usually these are very dumb ugly phones sold for exorbitant prices. So nobody wants to use them and those who do don’t use them as their main contact phones.
  • Three, phones aside, CDMA operators lacked features and service offerings. No blackberry, you can hardly browse on your phone, etc. But then the phones were basic so even if you could, the phone wouldn’t help matters anyway. Check out their websites and see the very lame products and service offerings
  • Four, when the GSM pulled right beyond them, they went into overdrive and started competing on cost. That was the last nail. After that everything just spiraled out of control.

Telecom is a volume business and unless you have a pretty good idea of what to draw in the crowd, you can’t compete. When Visafone was launched, it was a collection of different networks and with innovative marketing, leapfrogged to the fore quickly.

Vodacom (50% owned by Telkom then) had a chance to play in the GSM space in Nigeria but curiously, their boards played it away and the opportunity passed. But to show how crazy things could be, 8 years later they paid $280M to acquire Multilinks in Nigeria. Of course, the owners were ready to bail out of a losing market then and were more than happy to sell. Even despite paying top dollars, their strategy for turnaround was at best, facing the wrong direction. Today, the rest is history.

Consolidation of the telecoms market is a reality in every country. Maybe this is our time to shed the losers.

Bummer by Midsummer?

Microsoft acquisition of Nokia looks like a very bad deal. Nothing good has come from Ballmer and Stephen Elop. This may not be different. I predict that Nokia would be the loser for this.

How does it feel, as the CEO of a company, when another company associates with you and everyone screams, losers? That shouldn’t be too far from the disgust Steve Ballmer must have felt skipping back to Seattle this evening.

Today, Nokia finally let the cat of the bag, announcing the hook-up with Redmond but the market reacted to the news negatively. It stripped 10% off the share price before you could wink twice. Apart from someone in my business class, everyone feels Microsoft has just supplied the nails to pin Nokia firmly into its coffin.

No doubt, Nokia lost its mojo, and this can’t be better explained than the burning platform parable made by Stephen Elop.

I wouldn’t mind to add my outcry to this but then maybe a little bit of restrain makes sense at this time. Both guys ain’t idiots but I’m not saying they are smart either. Time will tell: In the mobile world, 1 year is like 1,000 years. By midsummer, we should know if Ballmer has made Nokia a bummer.

Database in the cloud

In January this year (2010), I blogged about how nice it would be to have database in the cloud. That blog entry was inspired by what Marc Benioff was doing at Salesforce.com. Apparently, he was loads of miles ahead of my thought. Salesforce.com has released Database.com.

Database.com is a database running solely off the cloud. There is no hardware to manage, or software to install and configuration. Just create and run. From available information, basic access is free  you get 100,000 records and 50,000 transactions a month and maybe unlimited number of tables and other objects (they didn’t talk about that). With your web applications (PHP and the rest of the gang) you can connect to a database with REST and SOAP while authenticating with oAuth2 and SAML.

However, I have some unanswered questions.

  1. Apart from REST, JPA and SOAP, what happens to JDBC, ODBC, .NET and other connectivity layers? I might want to change my database while I keep my Jurassic Park applications running just the way it is. Anyway, I guess some script kiddie will come along and write another layer to slap on
  2. Some guys love to write crazy convoluted (I mean pretty bad queries that run forever) queries; is that allowed? You know one of the issues we faced with early shared internet hosting was your “web” neighbor doing crazy stuff which drags everyone down. Those were the dark ages
  3. What flavor of SQL do we write? Oracle has its dialect, same for MySQL, MS SQL (even between versions) and loads of other nutcase GPL forks.
  4. Will I get to connect my Toad (Quest is good!)?

If this model becomes successful, it could be the end of the road for the likes of Oracle, DB2 and Microsoft (Don’t even mention Sybase, they got to the end of the road years ago). Why? Because today, the portion of the total cost of ownership that goes to tuning and maintenance of database often dwarfs the cost getting the software initially. And if Google should throw its BigTable database into the fray with maybe free 1,000,000 rows and other freebies then you can size up the impact of the impending Armageddon. And mind you, some folks are already successful on the cloud business thingy. Amazon’s EC2 is the king of the park. Google apps has even signed up US government. Seems the cloud is here to stay.

Ok, maybe I am getting dramatic but sincerely, can you remember the days when Hotmail and Yahoo used to give just a measly 2mb as email and when floppy disks were the king of data back up? Think again.

Meanwhile, we have to wait till 2011 to try Database.com out and considering that it is just some 24 days away, it isn’t a long time to wait, is it?