“If I were starting now, I’d do it very differently—but I knew nothing back then. You get this feeling when you’re out here that you kind of have to be in Silicon Valley. There’s all these great engineers out here, there’s great universities, there’s a lot of great VCs, you can get people to help you set up a company well… you can rent data center space—all this stuff,” said 27-year old Zuckerberg.

He added: “It’s not the only place to be, I think…Honestly, if I were starting now, I just would have stayed in Boston.”

[via]

The word is out: Google is secretly working on a project that is capable of making it dominate Nigeria’s Internet ecosystem in years to come. That, I call Net-Colonialism! You may call it Colonialism 2.0, if you like.

The search behemoth succeeded in keying into the  interest of the Nigerian Internet Registration Association (NiRA) by pledging their ‘support’ for the promotion of the adoption of .ng domain names.

If truth be told, Google wanted to get 40,000 (.com.ng) domain names for FREE from NiRA to show their support for the adoption of .ng domains and get small businesses to own a website with all the goodies that Google would offer the small businesses.

But NiRA refused to give away their domain names for free since that would affect their core business. So when Google was willing to pay for the domains, which would provide NiRA a whooping revenue of N40 million annually (at the rate of N1,000 per domain), NiRA bought the idea as nairastic since it would only affect web design and hosting companies which is not their core business.

Google then sought to partner with all the domain registrars in Nigeria and have them become ‘domain resellers’ (domain agents, if you like) to Google. This move would have automatically made Google a ‘Super Registrar’ and given it full control of the Nigerian domain and hosting business, perhaps fixing prices at their will.

As soon as Google realised how unethical this move would have been percieved, they backed out of the negotiations. According to a statement from Google:

“…After much internal discussion, we have decided to provide the domains at cost and have the SMEs pay the standard N1,500 /domain. However, we will no longer require NIRA to provide discounted .com.ng domain names and Upperlink will remain as our only recognized registrar.”

So why did Google back out of the discussions if they really had good intentions for the ecosystem?

If the deal had continued, what would have been the implication for domain registrars, web design/hosting companies and local developers and entrepreneurs?

Domain registrars would have had no choice but to become resellers
to Google (just as recharge card sellers are to MTN, Glo etc) and this would barely make them survive.

Web design and hosting companies would have become support staff to Google, more like labourers that would scavenge content and customers for Google and would no longer have control of the customers and thus would not make any revenue on a yearly basis either from domain/hosting renewal or from web design.

Is there a Win-Win Situation?

In my opinion, Google’s approach did not really show they wanted to become a committed partner. With this approach, Google was looking to take over and dominate the market. Period.

Google should have invited interested partners (domain registrars, web design and hosting companies) to work with them to put Nigerian businesses online in a win-win approach.

In this case, Google should have provided the software (Google automated site builder, Google apps for email and other collaboration services) and market visibility (free listing on Google Maps, etc), while the local partners provide the domains, web hosting, maintenance and support to the small businesses. NiRA, on the other hand, should have provided 1 year free domains to the small businesses in support of the initative. NiRA can charge yearly after first year, at their discretion.

A good example of this approach is Microsoft’s BizSpark programme, which essentially helps fast-track the success of early stage technology startups with all the right resources, including software, support & marketing visibility.

Here, Microsoft’s BizSpark Network Partners share their passion for driving the success of software startups through mentoring, networking, business advice, financial assistance, and peer connections. The Network Partners also understand the startup environment and understand what it takes to succeed.

If Google had borrowed a page from Microsoft’s book, this would have been a welcomed development and I’d probably be the first person to laud this move. Most domain registrars, web design and hosting entrepreneurs I’ve spoken with between yesterday and today think that Google may have a good intention, but their approach wasn’t right.

Of course, I’d love to see 40,000 local websites of small businesses that can’t afford standard costs of web designers and developers on the Internet in Nigeria within the next one year, if only Google does the right thing.

If Google had adopted this approach, the locals would be actively in the game and in charge of the customers, and not a Google-dominated Internet economy. Still, Google will make revenue from adverts in email and Google Apps will be more popular and relevant to Nigeria.

If only.

Image courtesy of Opinion Maker.

It further provides three approaches that notable and highly successful companies such as Apple and Skype use to name their companies.

via 

Last November, I had the rare opportunity of visiting Kenya’s iHub in Nairobi, during the Open Innovation Africa Summit organised by Nokia.

Before then, I’ve been a huge advocate of technology hubs (still am) and have avidly written about how positively cataclysmic their presence could trigger uber-energy and uber-action in any local technology community in Africa.

With the success of the iHub in Kenya, other African countries such as Cameroon and Uganda are keying into this model to jumpstart local technology innovations. But simply replicating the success of the iHub is not just enough, rather there are a few key factors to put into consideration if Nigeria or any other African country desires one.

Erik Hersman, founder of the iHub, summarised his recent post on What Makes the iHub Work, with these words:

“The success of the iHub has come from a strong foundation of advisors and community members who understand their city, their peers and their region.”

Here are 5 lessons we can learn from Erik Hersman’s essay on what makes the iHub work.

1. Build an independently-run and community-owned space

Although Erik’s organisation, Ushahidi built the space with funding from Omidyar Network and Hivos, the iHub is an independent Ushahidi initiative. Though the Ushahidi team has full access to the space, they use it the same way everyone else in the community does. Ushahidi realises that trying to “own” the space would fail, just as it would if it had been named the “Google iHub” or the “Nokia Innovation Hub”, Erik points out.

2. L’esprit de cours

According to Erik, the community is the heart of all that happens at the iHub. It’s the community building for the community, so their needs are better taken care of by themselves. Besides, the community’s spirit of collaboration is remarkably outstanding. As Erik puts it, “A space like the iHub needs to be put together by someone from that community of techies who understands at a basic level the needs and has the credibility within it to make it happen.”

3. Create a quality team

The iHub’s team of highly energetic and committed people was essentially key to its success. That, coupled with its advisory board made up of 4 influential and highly credible technology players from Nairobi, including Erik, made the greater community appreciate that they were being represented well.

4. Revenue model: Experiment. Iterate. Kill

In order to sustain the iHub beyond the funding, they took a very experimental approach, iterating on what worked and killing ideas that didn’t fit, instead of as Erik puts it: “creating a grand plan.”

Image via Flickr by zulusafari

According to him, the iHub has revenue coming in from members who rent co-working desks, events and their new research arm which launched in January 2011. It is even expected that 50%+ of future income will come from the research arm of the iHub.

5. Involve Corporates, Government and Academia

Early on, iHub team started talking to big technology corporations that needed an active developer and tech community, and that the developer community also needs. But, they didn’t just want to have corporate partners who sponsored the project with finance, rather who could add value to the space and help the developer community thrive, though in a mutually beneficial way. They also nurtured strong connections with the government and academia, though did not take money from them.

Final Words

While much of the iHub’s success comes from a community that works and binds together, Erik thinks that “the success of other tech hubs across Africa will be based on leadership credibility, and ability to engage their community.”

Although there’ll always be competition, Erik believes that we will succeed if we work together and celebrate each others’ success knowing that if more of us succeed, we all benefit.

There’s no better way, folks.

Ever heard of Kenya’s iHub? Cameroon’s ActivSpaces or even Ghana’s MEST?

These are all thriving innovation hubs and incubation centres that are encouraging collaboration amongst technology entrepreneurs and birthing very innovative products and services.

Little wonder, the international media has turned its attention on some of these emerging tech markets in Africa like Kenya with their beaming searchlights.

Unfortunately, Nigeria hardly gets
any of its technology companies or entrepreneurs featured in foreign media, let alone mentioned or cited in a focus on African tech entrepreneurship.

This begs some questions: Are there really Nigerian tech entrepreneurs out there? Or are there just a noisy bunch of know-it-all-but-do-nothing-developers out there?

Or could it be that there’s a disconnect between developers and tech entrepreneurs? Perhaps there are not enough entrepreneurial skills/talents out there to match the existing technical expertise?

From what I can percieve, we have developers who create a project or product, but never bother about running it as a business and on the other hand, entrepreneurs who worry more about getting the product/service out to users, instead of developing a revenue model and focusing on running a profitable business.

Personally, I feel that all the ‘noise’ we hear on our timelines everyday and at tech events over the years, could stall local innovation from coming out of (or happening in) Nigeria if entrepreneurs and developers fail to collaborate now.

In order not to play catch up to other emerging African tech markets (this may already be happening), Nigeria must have operational collaborative spaces where developers and students meet researchers and entrepreneurs, and local innovation can be birthed.

Granted, this may not be the ultimate solution, but here are 5 reasons why Nigeria must build innovation hubs sooner (now) rather than later (never).

1. The whales are coming. Or they’re here already.

By whales, I mean the likes of Google, Naspers, Groupon and their other breeds and species.

When you’re swimming in an ocean and don’t see a whale coming, or you didn’t by any chance prepare for its coming, you’d be swallowed up (and eventually die). The lesson: We need to get prepared for the coming of the tech giants (better later than never) either by building stuff they’d be interested in buying later or wished they had better competitive advantage.

2. Local clones are getting cloned.

One of the strongest unique feature of the Nigerian business culture is that we clone clones that are clonning other clones.

We don’t see anything wrong with running the same business with the same revenue model on the same street/area (make that domain name) as our supposed competition.

Not that it’s really a bad thing, but why clone clones when you can collaborate, combine resources and talents together to provide the same service and solve a need on a larger scale?

Within 5 months into this year, we’ve already seen 3 or more similar services launched by different entrepreneurs struggling to get the same small amount of customers/users to try out their services.

That’s why we badly need an ideas and innovation lab so that I’m not planning my startup in isolation and eventually launch the same startup that Oo is about to launch.

3. Isolation hubs hardly thrive.

Isolation hubs are those ones we build in our homes and laptops. Most times, we labour in isolation with limited resources (I’ve seen many of those ‘Oh no! PHCN has interrupted power’ tweets), while working on the same or similar services that someone else, somewhere (maybe around us) is already working on.

We may have built a hub around us, but how far can we go it alone? Not too far, because sooner or later, we would be stuck in that confined space and then tweet out our frustrations hoping that someone out there in Twitterland can comfort us.

But according to Bill Zimmerman at 27Months:

“The idea behind the iHub—and other new technology labs cropping up across Sub-Saharan Africa—is to put a group of exceptionally smart “doers” under one roof, provide them with a top notch work environment, generate ideas at a rapid pace, filter out the dead ends, present the best candidates to investors and produce viable businesses (and success stories) along the way.”

Hopefully, the soon-to-be-launched Co-creation Hub (ccHub) situated in the Lagos Island and the Wennovation Hub in the Ikeja area of Lagos can trigger a set of chain reactions across cities in Nigeria and put our developers and entrepreneurs out of their misery.

I believe that this is the best and surest way to grow a stronger and better technology community — one that policymakers and VCs would be naturally drawn to — that could attract foreign direct investment into Nigeria.

4. Generational commonalities.

By August this year, the Nigerian telecommunications industry will be celebrating the 10th year anniversary of GSM in Nigeria. If you’re reading this today, chances are that you’re 10, 20 or 30 years older than the GSM.

Thus since we have a generational commonality with the GSM, we have a great advantage that our parents didn’t have: living in the age of mobile technology.

Now’s the best time to leverage on this to produce local mobile content (music, games, apps, etc) for over 70 million mobile phone users in Nigeria. Why wait for the Indians or the Chinese to develop our mobile content? The fear of chinko should really be the beginning of wisdom.

5. The dotcom boom is here and now.

We’ve been waiting for the dotcom bubble in Nigeria since the U.S bubble bust in 2000.
Now that the dotcom bubble has gone 2.0 in the U.S, we are now experiencing what we might call ‘Nigeria’s Internet Boom’ which is characterized by an increase in commercial growth of the Internet.

This period which started from 2010 (I guess) would be marked by, amongst other things, the founding (and in some cases, failure) of a group of Internet-based companies, otherwise known as dot-com businesses or startups.

Again, we’re lucky to be in the generation that witnesses this Internet boom in Nigeria. What we do to tap into this Internet boom in the next 5 years or so would determine whether or not we can become Internet millionnaires (in $$$) by 2015.

This dream could be realized if we start collaborating in spaces and networks that innovation hubs provide now. And perhaps, Nigeria’s next big thing might just come out of a tech incubator somewhere in Lagos, Benin or Owerri.

You never know.

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Tech Open Day, an event that would provide an opportunity for Nigeria’s internet entrepreneurs to pitch their products and services to TechCrunch’s Sarah Lacy, is being organised by Co-Creation Hub and NigIntEnt.

Tech Open Day is an opportunity for Nigerian Internet Entrepreneurs and supporters of entrepreneurship to present their products and services to internationally acclaimed technology and entrepreneurship Journalist and Author, Sarah Lacy and other carefully selected stakeholders.

Some startups that will demo on the day include:

Bloovue helps advertisers connect with their audiences by providing simple and affordable online advertising on the largest online publishers in Nigeria.

Pagatech, an innovative, open, secure, and interoperable mobile payments platform that allows any person who has a mobile phone to transact electronically – thus turning the mobile phone into an electronic wallet.

Precurio, an open-source intranet solution designed for small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs).

CashEnvoy, a web payment platform that caters fully to the need of merchants and customers.

Jobberman, a highly intuitive job search engine for Nigeria.

Skoola, an online platform for students, graduates and professionals to learn, research and test their knowledge.

Traffic Nigeria, a traffic monitoring application that allows road users to track traffic situation in Lagos and report same if they choose to.

ConnectNigeria, an information portal for Nigeria.

Dealfish, a free classifieds site where you can find ads from your neighbourhood. (Sponsors Demo)

The event will hold at Quez’ ville, Eko Gym and Spa Complex, 9b Akarigbere Close, Off Idejo Street, Off Adeola Odeku, Victoria Island, Lagos on Thursday May 5, 2011 at 4pm.

It’ll be a great opportunity for Lacy to meet with some of Nigeria’s tech entrepreneurs, and perhaps she could discover a local product or service worth mentioning in her next book or even on TechCrunch.

It will also be an opportunity to network with other active members of the Nigerian startup community.

Sarah Lacy, one of TechCrunch’s senior editors is planning a visit to Nigeria in May 2011. She announced this recently on her Twitter page.

The internationally acclaimed technology entrepreneurship journalist and author travelled around emerging markets such as China, Isreal, Brazil, India, Rwanda and Indonesia looking for the best entrepreneurs that Silicon Valley (and perhaps the world) had never heard of and researching for her second book about tech entrepreneurship in the emerging world.

Last year, Lacy wrote a post likening emerging markets to dating, saying that she has “a raging crush on Kenya” and hoped to visit there early this year. I’m not sure if she has visited Kenya yet, but it seems Nigeria would be her third African visit to date.

While in Nigeria, Lacy would be attending the Tech Open Day with Sarah Lacy, an event that would provide an opportunity for Nigeria’s internet entrepreneurs to pitch their products and services to Lacy.

The event will hold at Quez’ ville, Eko Gym and Spa Complex, 9b Akarigbere Close, Off Idejo Street, Off Adeola Odeku, Victoria Island, Lagos on Thursday May 5, 2011 at 4pm.

It’ll be a great opportunity for her to meet with some of Nigeria’s tech entrepreneurs. And maybe she could discover a local product or service worth mentioning in her next book or even on TechCrunch.

Thanks to @OoTheNigerian for the tip.

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Google has launched a technology startup incubator for Africa called Umbono, reports Memeburn.

Umbono aims to bring together seed capital, Google mentorship, angel investors, local tech stars, entrepreneurs and business leaders.

In Zulu language, the word ‘Umbono’ means vision, sight or idea.

According to Memeburn,

“Google chose South Africa as a pilot for the initiative — and if successful, may take the model to other parts of the globe. Google says it chose Cape Town because the city is in “the process of positioning itself as a hub for innovation and technology”.

“The South African tech scene is incredibly dynamic, particularly in Cape Town,” said Luke McKend, Google’s South Africa Country Manager. “We’ve seen some terrific startups come from this environment, companies like Yola, MXit and Twangoo. Google’s latest investment with Umbono is a great extension of our overall strategy in the region to strengthen the web ecosystem.”

The incubator would provide the following to startups and entrepreneurs:

1. Funding of $25,000 to $50,000 seed capital, so that teams can focus on developing an idea into a business.

2. Free collaborative work space and bandwidth in Cape Town.

3. A full curriculum to help with business strategy and planning and the freedom to decide which skills you’d like to hone.

4. A deep bench of mentors including Googlers, VCs, and Angels that allows entrepreneurs tap into business and product development expertise unlike any other.

5. Visibility through networking and pitch events that’ll provide entrepreneurs with a platform for growth.

It is expected that successful funders will move to Cape Town and work “onsite” to take advantage of this opportunity.

I’m hoping that the incubator will give attention to and accommodate non-SA startups in other African countries.

In the interview published yesterday, I shared some of my experiences and successes on the Internet, how the Nigerian youth can make legitimate income from online entrepreneurship and what the government can do to encourage web and mobile technologies.

Here are some excerpts:

BN: How well do you think Nigerians are tapping into the various opportunities to create legitimate wealth via the internet?

LO: With an estimated 60 million Nigerians on the Internet, there is definitely a huge opportunity to reach a critical mass of people with an online product or service.