Founded in January 2011, Mobicanvas is a web tool that helps small-to-medium enterprises and startups generally to easily and cheaply build, promote and monetise their own mobile websites.

The mobicanvas web interface provides a unique way to build a mobile site without any development costs and you can have your mobile site deployed on a domain of your choice in minutes.

With mobicanvas, you can build a mobile website quickly and easily using a drag and drop feature on the mobile site builder. The tool allows you to choose from a selection of themes to customize the look and feel of your mobile site. You can change the colours, header, footer and even add your own images.

Mobicanvas lets you choose from a wide selection of widgets such as twitter feeds, weather, finance, google maps, custom forms, user polls, mobile optimized rss feeds and downloadable content (videos, audio, and images), etc to add functionality to your mobile site.

Mobicanvas mobile site builder from Mobi Canvas on Vimeo.

As an extension of the Mobicanvas service, a worldwide bulk SMS interface is offered with competitive global rates. This could come in handy should you want inform your existing database of contacts about your offerings via SMS.

Mobile sites built using Mobicanvas (e.g sitename.mobicanvas.com) come with Admob ads by default, but you can remove such ads by upgrading to a premium account which costs $10 USD (about N1500) per month. In order to host a custom domain (e.g. sitename.mobi), you’ll have to pay $10 USD and all payments are done via PayPal.

Mobicanvas has already hosted more than 100 sites since launch. Some great examples of mobile sites built using Mobicanvas include m.thedailymaverick.co.za, soulcandi.mobicanvas.com and thepresidencyfm.mobicanvas.com

This is a sponsored post.

We broke the news here on TechLoy that a new search engine for African jobs called Njorku would be launched soon.

Recently, we posted exclusive screenshots of what the job search engine would look like.

Today, Njorku.com launched (a few minutes ago) in public beta, though still buggy. The job search engine crawls the web (especially job sites) to find jobs based on keyword searches and makes them available to users.

Njorku’s search results show links to job sites around the web that have jobs related to your keyword search. However, not all search results on the Njorku job search engine are relevant, but at least you’ll get results.

What’s Cool?

The mobile version of the site makes job search faster and easier as it automatically creates a mobile version of every job site. So even if a job site doesn’t have a mobile version (and naturally takes longer time to load web page), Njorku mobile automatically converts the job site into a mobile version.

With Njorku, you can find jobs published on different job sites from different countries at a time (for now you can search for jobs in Cameroon and Nigeria).

It is still uncertain if/how Njorku would integrate SMS alerts for jobs and also with social networking sites such as naijaborn.com and camerborn.com.

What do you think of Njorku? Will you use the job search engine?

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I’m happy to announce a great opportunity for startups to promote their stuff in the next few weeks.

Because we know that startups don’t have enough money, and may not be willing to pay for adverts or even reviews, that’s why we are offering them a great opportunity to promote their startup on TechLoy for FREE.

If you have a new startup, here’s your chance to get 1-month free banner advert on TechLoy.com, an emerging technology media site at the intersection of business, innovation and culture.

This offer is available to tech startups that are less than a year old on or before June 1, 2011. The offer is valid while ad spaces are available and is on a first come, first serve basis.

If you’re interested in this promo ad offer on TechLoy (starting from June 2011), you can start by filling the form here.

Hopefully, this move would help kickstart startups to stardom

Today, Pagatech announced that they have received investment from Tim Draper, a renowned Venture Capitalist based in the United States.

Mr. Draper, who is the Founder and a Managing Director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, is known for investing in early stage companies and in emerging markets.

Some of the successes under his belt include investments in Skype, Baidu (Chinese search engine), and Hotmail (acquired by Microsoft).

According to the Paga blog,

Today, we announced the investment of Tim Draper in our company! Tim, who is the Founder and a Managing Director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, is known for investing in early stage companies and in emerging markets. Some of the successes under his belt include investments in Skype, Baidu (Chinese search engine), and Hotmail (acquired by Microsoft).

Speaking about his investment in Paga, Draper said “My decision to make this personal investment is premised on the simple fact that I believe in the bold vision of the Paga team and I trust in their ability to execute. Paga is a great innovation which will simplify life for millions of people in Nigeria and beyond. I look forward to the company being a major African success story that serves as an example for many more to come.”

Tayo Oviosu, Founder and CEO of Paga, added: “We are receiving significant attention from investors both local and international, but I must say that we are quite fortunate to have Mr. Draper as an investor in Paga. His support and advice has been invaluable towards getting us to where we are today, and we continue to enjoy the access he provides to an extensive network of business partners around the world.”

Tim launched the DFJ Global Network, an international network of early-stage venture capital funds with offices in over 30 cities around the globe. He also founded or co-founded DFJ ePlanet (global), Draper Fisher Jurvetson Gotham (NYC), Zone Ventures (LA), Epic Ventures (Salt Lake City),  Draper Atlantic (Reston), Draper Triangle (Pittsburg), Timberline Ventures (Portland), Polaris Fund (Anchorage), DFJ Frontier (Sacramento and Santa Barbara), DFJ Vina Capital (Vietnam), and DFJ DragonFund (Shanghai).

Pagatech’s mobile payment service, Paga has been in pilot testing mode since late September 2010 and was launched in February 2011 after receiving approval from the Central Bank of Nigeria.

The mobile payment service allows people to use their cash to pay bills, purchase recharge cards, transfer money, etc via their mobile phones.

Last week, Paga crossed 500 users of the mobile payment service.

Yarnable, the Nigerian Twitter-like service has been acquired by MobiQube for an undisclosed fee.

Update: We just received a confirmation email on the acquisition detail from Yarnable’s founder. It was acquired by Le Proghrammeen Solutions Ltd and Mobiqube Nigeria Ltd, both partnering to take Yarnable to the next level.

The deal was finalized yesterday after several weeks of discussions with the founder, Ahmad Mukoshy. Although we’re not sure, it is likely that Yarnable was sold for between $2000 and $3000 (about N300,000 to N450,000).

Yarnable started about a year ago and has just about 300 members actively using the site, according to Mukoshy. When asked why he sold the site, Mukoshy said that he’s been having challenges with his time and focus on other new ventures he’s running.

We also think that it’s been a challenge for Yarnable to differentiate itself from Twitter and similar services. Yarnable may also have been struggling with how to monetize the service, which in fact has been a huge challenge for Twitter.

But now that Yarnable is now owned by MobiQube Nigeria Limited, a company that specializes in developing applications for mobile platforms, as well as Le Proghrammeen Solutions Ltd, I’m guessing that Yarnable will go mobile and eventually monetize.

While it’s not certain whether or not Yarnable will remain a micro-discussion site, it is likely that ‘yarns’ would go on from a mobile app.

If the ‘new’ Yarnable could offer something unique that’ll make all of us probably stop ‘tweeting’ and start ‘yarning’, then we can say that local micro-discussion sites can go mainstream.

Earlier this week, we reported here on TechLoy that a new search engine for African jobs would be launched soon.

The job search engine called ‘Njorku’ crawls the web (especially job sites) to find jobs based on keyword searches in any African country and makes them available to users.

Today, we got an idea of what the search engine would likely look like when it eventually launches.

Here are some screen shots of Njorku:

The Njorku homepage (picture above) has a simple design and unique user interface that remind you of Google search.

Njorku’s search results show links to job sites around the web that have jobs related to your keyword search.

However, not all search results on the Njorku job search engine are relevant, but at least you’ll get results.

With Njorku, you can find jobs published on different job sites from different countries at a time, instead of visiting each site one at a time.

Njorku when launched would have features such as email alerts, SMS alerts, etc.

Njorku.com would be released in beta at the end of March 2011 and would be integrated with naijaborn.com and camerborn.com, both web properties of SYS Africa, co-founded by Mambe Nanje and Francis Oghuma.

What do  you think of Njorku? Will you use the job search engine?

Jekajo is a new music discovery site that let’s you discover Nigerian music and helps upcoming Nigerian musicians promote their music.

Founded by Adim Ofunne and Obilo Nwokogba, the same guys behind Naijalingo, Jekajo is a product of their love for music and search for a reliable local music site.

Pronounced ‘jeh-kah-joe’, the name of the site is a yoruba sentence that means “let us dance”.

What Are The Features?

Jekajo.com has a repository of songs, so you can listen to songs on Jekajo, make them into a playlist and save the playlists.

Perhaps one of the coolest features of Jekajo is that you can upload songs directly and share, follow and interact with other people.

I might be wrong but there are probably no local music sites that allows users do that.

On Jekajo, if your favorite artist or your friend uploads a music you like, you will receive email alerts. And as they share more songs, you’ll always be in the loop on the latest music in the Nigerian music scene.

With an average of 10 new albums and singles being released online every week and a growing list of upcoming artists in Nigeria, you need a platform such as Jekajo.com to stay up-to-date.

According to one of the founders, the idea behind Jekajo is not to create another social network for users to sign into and become a member of, but to leverage on other existing social networks, such as facebook and twitter and hopefully Nigerian-focused social networks focused such as Naijaborn.

Well, I’m not sure how Jekajo would integrate with social networks like Naijaborn, but it’s a music site that’s what watching.

However, they are faced with competition from sites such as Truspot, NotJustOk and others that have built thriving online music stores and have become one-stop shops for Nigerian music online.

It’ll be interesting to see how Jekajo would differentiate itself from this market.

Adloopz is a new service launched today that allows you to post adverts and share them with your friends and followers on social media platforms.

The service, currently in beta version, was founded by five Nigerian tech entrepreneurs.

Adloopz helps people to spread the news of their products/services via adverts they create on Adloopz which gets shared across several social networks.

To get a beta invite, tweet at @adloopz and ask for an invite with the hashtag #adloopzbeta attached to your tweet.

How It Works?

Once you create/log into your account, go to the settings page and setup any information you feel will help your customers get in touch with you. Then, link your Adloopz account to your social networks (Facebook, Twitter, etc).

To create an advert, simply click on the “Post ad” button, upload pictures and add meaningful descriptions about what you want to advertise. You can also indicate when and where you want Adloopz to serve your adverts.

After your adverts are created and published to the advert feed, the service allows you to loop your adverts across social networks.

Adloopz also let’s you comment on adverts, like them, share them to your social networks and email them to others.

You can also monitor and guage user interaction with your adverts via the Adloopz statistics.

Thoughts

These days, entrepreneurs are launching startups and apps that leverage on the social graph.

Startups like Lotaar and Mysifty are good examples.

The idea behind Adloopz is quite cool, and looks somewhat like RadiumOne, a service that uses your Facebook friends interactions to deliver relevant ads to users for brands and products that their friends like.

It’ll be interesting to see if this service would be adopted as well as what business models are likely to be adopted.

One of the key highlights of the 9ideas conference which held over the weekend in Douala, Cameroon was the demoing of the ‘Elephant project’.

The project, an africa-wide job search engine called Njorku was announced by Mambe Nanje, a software engineer and entrepreneur based in Buea, Cameroon.

According to Nanje, the Elephant project (as he calls it) which he’s been talking about for months on Twitter and Facebook is an aggregator for all of Africa’s jobs.

No, not a jobs feed or widget for specific jobs in a particular country, but a real search engine.

Njorku is a jobs search engine that crawls the web (especially job sites) to find jobs based on keyword searches in any African country and makes them available to users.

To demonstrate how it works, Mambe did a search for ‘Graphic Designers’ in ‘Nigeria’ and results came up from job sites such as Nairalist and others.

Perhaps not all search results on the engine would be relevant, but at least you’ll get results.

With Njorku, you can find jobs published on different job sites from different countries at a time, instead of visiting each site one at a time.

Back in 2008, I recommended a job aggregator for Africa, owing to the fact that there were too many job sites to visit daily in order to find jobs.

Over the years, more and more job sites have launched in Nigeria and around Africa, and it just makes a lot of sense to have an aggregator.

Njorku.com would be released in beta at the end of March 2011 and would be intergrated with naijaborn.com and camerborn.com, both web properties of SYS Africa, co-founded by Mambe Nanje and Francis Oghuma.

It’ll be interesting to see how APIs can be used to develop Njorku further.

Have you tried visiting BellaNaija.com from your mobile phone recently?

Apparently, the leading fashion, style and entertainment blog has quietly integrated a mobile functionality that makes their naturally slow-loading website become faster and easily accessible via mobile.

BellaNaija.com is built on the WordPress platform and as a content-rich site with millions of hits and thousands of pageviews, it makes sense to optimize their site to be easily accessible via the mobile phone.

Already, VanguardNgr.com broke into the top 10 sites in Nigeria on Opera Mini in January 2011, as a result of optimizing their site for mobile phones.

No doubt, BellaNaija.com, a site on the top 100 most visited sites in Nigeria (Alexa) will be keen on improving their traffic and perhaps breaking into the top 10 sites in Nigeria.