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Robots Will Source, Write and Publish News in Nigeria by 2030

By
Mutiu Iyanda
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0

Before 2021, there were projections that Nigerian economy would record different growth rates. For the year 2021, projections have also been made about the economy. In all, positive and negative projections were made, indicating that perfect growth should not be expected. If positive growth would occur, the place of information and communication technology has been stressed. A recent study by the BusinessDay Research and Intelligence Unit, and elev8 indicates that country’s economy would grow by $8.79 billion in the next three years to 2023, driven largely by the ICT, agriculture, health, finance and insurance sectors.

By 2022, a year before the attainment of the projected growth, 50% of global companies would decrease the number of their staff, while in 2030, robots would replace 800 million workers across the world, according a recent report. We have seen how Bloomberg and Viacom, the US media conglomerate, have used artificial intelligence and still using the technology for news production and publication. Bloomberg is dissecting financial reports and creating news stories using AI. AI is helping Viacom to know what exact information consumers want and assist advertisers in placing targeted advertisements.

In Nigeria, there are indications that AI driven media outlets would emerge by 2030. Already, the federal government has intensified its efforts towards institutionalisation of digital economy with the creation of ‘digital economy’ window within the Ministry of Communications.

Data Science Nigeria, Robotics and Artificial Intelligence Center in Abuja and Robotics and Artificial Intelligence Nigeria in Ibadan are supply-side actors that would induce AI driven media organisations. These centers are expected to impart significant artificial intelligence and machine learning knowledge and skills on a number of youths and adults.

Robots that will autonomously detect events that are newsworthy, write stories, edit and publish them are expected to emerge from these centers and others by 2023. During this year, the majority of the robots would be at the testing stage and expected to be at an advanced stage in 2026, after elimination of critical issues. By 2030, some of the established news media organisations and emerging ones would embrace robots with the intent of joining best global practices.

DuckDuckGo Records First-ever Day of Over 100m User Search Queries

By
Samuel Nwite
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0

Privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo reached a major milestone in its 12-year-old history this week when it recorded on Monday its first-ever day with more than 100 million user search queries.

DuckDuckGo builds its search index using its DuckDuckBot Crawler, indexing Wikipedia, and partnering Bing.

The record comes after a period of sustained growth the company has been seeing for the past two years, and especially since August 2020, when the search engine began seeing more than 2 billion search queries a month on a regular basis. The numbers are small in comparison to Google’s 5 billion daily search queries but it’s a positive sign that users are looking for alternatives.

DuckDuckGo’s popularity comes after the search engine has expanded beyond its own site and now currently offers mobile apps for Android and iOS, but also a dedicated Chrome extension.

“More than 4 million users installed these apps and extension,” the company said in a tweet in September 2020.

But the search engine’s rising popularity is also due to its stated goal of not collecting user data and providing the same search results to all users.

“Each time you search on DuckDuckGo, you have a blank search history, as if you’ve never been there before,” the company explained in their privacy blog.

As it highlighted last year, this lack of granular data sometimes makes it hard for the company to even estimate the size of its own userbase.

But in a statement to BleepingComputer, DuckDuckGo said that it recorded a 62% growth in average daily searches in 2020. And so far in January 2021, it receives an average of 90 million search queries per day.

For instance, on January 11th, the search engine company received 102,251,307 daily search queries, which is a record.

But this dedication to privacy has also helped the company gain a following among the privacy-conscious crowd. DuckDuckGo has been selected as the default search engine in the Tor Browser and is often the default search engine in the private browsing modes of several other browsers.

With the increasing reports of data breaches, people’s data being used for political purposes, or their behavior tracked throughout the internet, more and more people are switching to the privacy-centric search engine.

“While we don’t track our users, we study user adoption through national surveys. What we’ve learned from those surveys is that our overall growth is driven by people who want more privacy online via word of mouth conversations,” the company told Bleeping Computer.

The WhatsApp effect.

DuckDuckGo’s historical milestone comes in a week when both Signal and Telegram, two other privacy-centric apps, also announced major periods of growth.

Telegram announced on Monday that it reached 500 million registered users, while Signal’s servers went down on Friday after seeing “millions upon millions of new users” in a sudden influx the company said exceeded even its most optimistic projections.

Both spikes in new users for Signal and Telegram are a direct result of a major public relations snafu at Facebook after the company announced last week it would be blocking access to WhatsApp accounts unless users agreed to a new privacy policy that granted Facebook access to more WhatsApp user data.

On Friday, Facebook delayed the new privacy policy by three months, but by that point, the damage had been done, and hundreds of millions of users were reminded of their right to privacy, flocking to Signal and Telegram.

DuckDuckGo said its success is also connected to recent WhatsApp/Facebook controversy.

“The recent Facebook/WhatsApp privacy policy announcement seems to have had some impact increasing search similar to how it has driven people to private messaging alternatives like Signal. We’ve seen this happen before when a high profile privacy issue is exposed, we generally see an increase,” the company said.

Web data analysis firm StatCounter said DuckDuckGo has become the second most used search engine on mobile devices in the US, UK, Canada and Australian markets.

Despite the increased growth, Google still dominates web search with 94% market share in the US, DuckDuckGo commands 2.25%, while Yahoo has 1.94%. however, these developments show that Google could find itself in the shoes of WhatsApp, especially as the Silicon giant is facing multiple antitrust cases.

Join 2021 First Tekedia Live – The 2021 Winning Playbooks

By
Ndubuisi Ekekwe
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0

Dear Member,

Happy New Year once again. At Tekedia Institute, we expect 2021 to be a year of accelerated growth. There are many leverageable factors which have been unlocked as the world digitizes and new business frameworks evolve, while confronting Covid-19. Productivity is expected to improve as technology accelerates the efficiency on the utilization of factors of production. 

 In our 2021 Outlook – Growth After a Redesign webinar (video below), we shared some anchors and pointers. A new Tekedia Live is planned to discuss the Winning Playbooks we need to pay attention to, as we formulate business strategies in the new year. The virtual event, comprising presentation and Q/As, is scheduled as follows: 

  • Topic: The 2021 Winning Playbooks
  • Presenter: Prof Ndubuisi Ekekwe, Lead Faculty, Tekedia Institute
  •  Date: Saturday, Jan 23, 2021
  • Time: 4pm – 5.30pm WAT
  • Zoom Link: check here on Friday

This is an open event, rated E for Everyone. Let’s begin strong. Come with your business questions and let us co-share and co-learn.

Registration for Tekedia Mini-MBA (Feb 8 – May 3, 2021) continues. Click here to register and get the early bird benefits – https://school.tekedia.com/course/mmba4/ . Please tell your friends, colleagues and associates!

Nigeria Hits A New Milestone With 83% of Revenue Spent on Debt Servicing in 2020

By
Ndubuisi Ekekwe
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The best part of Integrated Science in the junior secondary is the course on optics. Your teacher possibly used the word “mirage” as he/she explained optical illusion. Those days it was really cool, returning back to the village to “show off” before the non-initiated with big words from social science and integrated science. Today, you would be fine if you drop “mirage” for Nigeria’s economic strategy.

Yes, we hit a new milestone in 2020: 83% of revenue was spent on servicing debts: “total revenue earned in 2020 was N3.93 trillion representing a 27% drop from the target revenues of N5.365 trillion. However, debt service for the year was a sum of N3.26 trillion or 82.9% of revenue. Nigeria’s debt service cost of N3.26 trillion has now dwarfed the N1.7 trillion spent on capital expenditure of N1.7 trillion incurred in 2020.”

According to the data seen by Nairametrics, total revenue earned in 2020 was N3.93 trillion representing a 27% drop from the target revenues of N5.365 trillion. However, debt service for the year was a sum of N3.26 trillion or 82.9% of revenue.

Nigeria’s debt service cost of N3.26 trillion has now dwarfed the N1.7 trillion spent on capital expenditure of N1.7 trillion incurred in 2020. This is also the highest debt service paid by the Federal Government since we started tracking this data in 2009.

The total public debt (External and Domestic) balance carried by Nigeria as of September 2020 stood at N32.22 trillion ($84.57 billion). Included in the total debt is a domestic debt of about N15.8 trillion.

The experts at CSL Stockbrokers Limited explained the implication brilliantly: “The significantly higher recurrent component of the budget continues to drag the country’s economic growth, resulting in poor infrastructural development. Spending more on capital projects can promote industrialization, improve local purchasing power and help the federal government’s diversification drive.”

I am apolitical and follow the facts, and I can tell you that no business in this world can survive on that debt service to revenue ratio. You can extrapolate that to any nation. In our land, any optimistic exuberance may be irrational because the avalanche of challenges are palpable, from severe pressures on dwindling oil revenues, limited  private investments, eroding consumer spending power, deteriorating currency, paralytic insecurity and declining foreign investor participation. Yet, Nigeria has the young people – and we still believe.

Because of these issues, some young Nigerians are trying alternative worlds as confident in the Naira drops. Nigeria has risen on cryptocurrency adoption. Yet, Swiss banks are sounding a warning that Bitcoin could make way just as Myspace made way for Facebook. In other words, it could wipe out anything people put in it if something new comes. So, there is risk everywhere and one thing we can hold is to make Naira resilient to avoid this possible risk on our young people.

“There is little in our view to stop a cryptocurrency’s price from going to zero when a better-designed version is launched or if regulatory changes stifle sentiment…..Netscape and Myspace are examples of network applications that enjoyed widespread popularity but eventually disappeared,” UBS strategist.

Fixing Nigeria will be challenging and the nation has to open new playbooks to make it happen. One construct which is evident is to get the National Identify Number (NIN) massively adopted so that we can deepen our credit system. Besides the credit system, NIN has the following use cases according to Nairametrics:

  • Voters card registration: NIN is now accepted as a means of identification for obtaining the Permanent Voters Card (PVC) in Nigeria.

  • Bank account opening and reactivation: NIN is being used to access a wide range of services in banks and the financial services industry, ranging from documentations for the opening of an account, means of identification for payment of second or third party cheques, to reactivation of dormant accounts.

  • Consular services at Nigerian embassies and missions: As a bonafide citizen of Nigeria, NIN is now being used as a means of identification to access a wide range of services at Nigerian Embassies and Missions abroad, amongst others.

  • International passport: The Nigeria Immigration Services has made NIN compulsory as a means of identification for anyone that wants to apply for fresh or renewal of international passports in Nigeria.

  • Driver’s license: It has become compulsory for anyone that wants to apply for or renew his or her driver’s license to show his or her NIN as a means of identification. According to the Federal Road Safety Commission (FRSC), no vehicle registration or renewal can be done without providing NIN as part of its requirements – no waiver allowed.

  • Government-related jobs and grants/loans: Most government-related jobs cannot be secured without NIN as a vital means of identification. As a matter of fact, you even need to provide your NIN in the prescribed job forms to apply for the job.

  • Tertiary admissions: Most tertiary institutions, in addition to other means of identification, accept NIN for the processing of admissions and registrations of new students.

Nigeria needs to get into a working state. Yes, we need to move from inventive thinking into innovation thinking. Without making changes, Nigeria could experience a lost decade.

Why Nations Remain POOR [Video]

Grant Fundraising Course At Tekedia Institute

By
Ndubuisi Ekekwe
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0

She knows where all the grant funds are located! And she is helping to help our members deepen capabilities on that nexus. When we reached out to her, we explained that the Venture Capital and Private people asked us to speak with her. In short the CEO of TrustBanc Capital Azeez Lawal educated me on where the alternative funds are. Yes, Tekedia members need that knowledge.

A graduate of University of Benin, Victoria Madedor works with Bank of Industry Investment & Trust Company, and will provide a roadmap on fundraising from DFIs (development finance internationals), Governments, Grants, etc. People, there are many initiatives within the government which many are not aware. I want our members to be on top of all.

Learn from the practicing experts – register today.

Tekedia Mini-MBA Edition 4

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