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Carlyle Group Investing $40 Million in Nigeria’s Wakanow

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The money continues to rain for Nigerian digital-focused companies: Wakanow got an early Father Christmas present as Carlyle Group, one of the world’s premier private equity firms, announced to drop $40 million to help the Nigerian digital travel agent pioneer scale.

Founded in 2009 in Nigeria, Wakanow is one of West Africa’s largest full-service online travel companies, providing its customers with a one-stop online booking portal for flights, hotels, holiday packages, and other travel services and ancillaries.

Part of the press statement.

Global alternative asset manager, The Carlyle Group (NASDAQ: CG), Thursday announced that it had agreed to invest $40 million in Wakanow.com Limited (Wakanow), an online travel agency focused on West and East Africa, with principal operations in Nigeria.

Equity came from Carlyle’s Sub-Saharan Africa fund and further financial details were not disclosed.

Founded in 2009 in Nigeria, Wakanow is one of West Africa’s largest full-service online travel companies, providing its customers with a one-stop online booking portal for flights, hotels, holiday packages, and other travel services and ancillaries.

This investment adds to Carlyle’s experience in the online travel sector, where it has invested in companies such as C-trip, one of the major online travel agencies operating across China, the Latin American travel and tour operator CVC Brasil, and Vasco Turismo, one of the largest travel operations groups in Peru.

Obinna Ekezie, Co-Founder and CEO, Wakanow, said: “We are excited to partner with Carlyle as we continue to grow and expand in Africa and beyond. Carlyle’s global footprint and scale as well as its extensive experience and network in the online travel sector will help us to further develop our offerings and broaden our customer base.”

Idris Mohammed, Managing Director, The Carlyle Group, said: “Wakanow has experienced incredible growth since inception, disrupting the travel market and taking market share both online and offline. We believe that this strong growth trajectory will continue as Wakanow benefits from an expanding middle class across the continent in addition to increasing internet penetration and mobile connectivity, which is driving increased online traffic. We look forward to working with Wakanow’s management team to help them deliver on their vision for growth and expansion.”

Mayowa Ayodele, Chief Investment Officer, Platform Capital, one of Wakanow’s lead investors, said: “We are happy to partner with Carlyle and look forward to working together with them to strengthen Wakanow’s market position, accelerate innovation, deepen its systems and processes to realise the vision of a truly world class online travel agency with African roots.”

Inventors Group uses Ndubuisi Ekekwe to challenge Youth to Invent – Thisday

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I am honored and readily available to support this mission of preparing creators of technologies over mere consumers. Yes, a nation of making things over agents of consumerism.

A media outfit has disclosed that it has gone into a partnership with the Association of Africa Initiatives and Inventors (AFII), to harness skills in the country.

Speaking at the event, the founder, Luz De Calcio, Femi Akinola, said the aim of the partnership with AFII was to lay down necessary foundation that will facilitate discoveries of untapped scientific and technological ingenuity and traits of young Nigerians.

According to him, “We want our children to become inventors that is why we are introducing them to established inventors in the likes of Innoson auto mobile company, Ndubuisi Ekekwe, microchipa, Cyprian Emeka, Yemi Adesokan, Ume Ifeanyi Charles among others.

The Digital Project Manager

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SCADA Services Simply Life as a Digital Manager

As project management becomes more and more linked to the digital world, it is not surprising that SCADA services are becoming a popular tool across the industry. In short, services such as this help managers keep control over data through different software programs.

SCADA stands for supervisory control and data acquisition, and there are several different programs on the market depending on what one is required for their business purposes. They are most useful in controlling information intake and analysis in real time for businesses, such as factories or communication firms. The computer program will gather all of the data to help operations move efficiently and effectively.

Comparison Shop for the Best Scada Services

A good SCADA service will make the job of the project manager seamless and easy. The learning curve will be simple, and it will provide added value to the daily operations management team in general. Many managers are forced to deal with an abundance of contractors that can make their job more difficult. However, SCADA services can help simplify their tasks. These software programs have made innovative strides to change this industry for the better. If you are in the market for SCADA software, then check out Telstar Instruments for a one-stop shop that will help you find the best SCADA and Automation services available.

It doesn’t matter if you are in charge of a power plant or a government agency, a SCADA service can help simplify your daily life. This is where comparison shopping will help you see which services will be the best fit for your needs. The program you pick can vary depending on your industry, as each sector relies on different mandates and needs. However, Telstar can help narrow down your choices, according to your criteria, making your search simple and effective.

What Type of SCADA Platform is Best?

Just as there are different industry needs, there are SCADA services designed to best help each of these sectors. In general, SCADA systems were designed to gain control and monitor various aspects of different factories or distribution. They are usually linked to the ebb and flow of society, such as the oil and gas industry or even waste management. These often include (but are not limited to) electricity, water, and pipeline management. It can even extend to public transportation and stoplight timers which rely on careful planning and oversight. The overall goal of the SCADA system is to ease time management and provide a set of eyes where the manager might not have had one before.

There are several different types of SCADA systems that have been put in place due to the rise of their popularity over the years. There are at least 4 main types of SCADA architectures, but the most prevalent used today include networked and distributed systems. Each of these programs are used to bring synchronization to the project manager’s control room where it can help transform the tasks at hand into a seamless operation. This, in turn, will increase profitability and cut down on extra corners that might not have been possible without the SCADA system in place.

Overall, SCADA helps add a level of control over various systems in a given industry. The most prevalent companies in energy and society at both the public and private level have these in place to build a competitive and well-oiled machine that works to the best of its ability. SCADA provides a centralized unit where the project manager can monitor the processes as they occur in real time. Data is handled as it enters the system to create a seamless production from the beginning to the end.

The help a SCADA system provides can mean the difference between a profitable or failed venture. There is so much data input today that it is virtually impossible to keep track of as a single individual. Thus, SCADA systems allow the project manager to grow their operations without letting quality control slip. This is an important aspect as society relies on many of these SCADA systems to help daily operations run at its best ability. Without a great SCADA system in place, a project manager’s job increases ten fold and the risk is too great without one.

How To Run A Profitable Consulting Business in Nigeria

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If you run a consulting practice, the most important phase in any engagement is understanding the customer. If you miss that element, you would struggle all through the engagement. To understand a customer, you have to approach everything with a learning spirit irrespective of what you think you are. The fact is this: the customer understands and knows his business more than you.

Yet, he is hiring you to deepen his perspectives. But never think he is hiring you because you are “smarter”. If you go with the smarter mentality, you will fail. Sure – you have accomplished many things for someone to hire your practice, but always remember that a product usage is whatever a customer uses it for.

Yes, some buy goats to eat, some buy to throw into waters for their gods while some prepare the same goats, abstain from tasting any portion and leave all for god-trees. If you sell goats, your antenna must be to manage all those different customers because the goats which you sell mean different things at utility levels to your customers. It is by listening and learning from the customers that you can understand what works.

If you serve many Igbo non-highly educated businessmen [few weeks in secondary schools if they even entered], do not waste time with strategy because they would stop you within minutes. Focus on realizable Naira amount and work backward to strategy and funding needs. Your frameworks and strategies are wastes of time. But if you show the money – the next question would be “How do we make this happen in this company?” Once they drop that direction, you can move into strategy. Always remember that most do not have structures like typical corporate entities with layers where the top management is the heart of strategy. Here, the factory man is possibly living in the founder’s house and he can ask him any question anytime. So, working on strategy must include tactical and operational components because if you expect the client to go and develop them, you will fail. He has no structure to break the big picture “strategy”. Understanding this lack of structures must be obvious as you do your costing.

Simply, running a practice is a service: you have to listen to deliver impacts. Then after you have listened, as a subject matter expert, you would bring your broader views, and accumulated capabilities to do three things:

  1. Help the client improve on what he is doing at the moment. Because technology is the enabler, it makes sense to have components of it when the productivity gain becomes critical. The technology must not just run the firm; it must also transform it.
  2. Provide deeper insights beyond what the client is doing. This is what we call Frontier Mapping in my practice. Here, with our knowledge of the client business and our understanding of the local market (read this piece I wrote in Harvard Business Review on why that is important), we can create a new future in that business.
  3. Deliver a managed roadmap which helps the client to win today even as he prepares for tomorrow. We would never ask you to abandon what is working today for something that promises to be bigger tomorrow. We will rather find a way to bring both in sync so that your transition does not affect the mission – fixing frictions in the market. The key is making sure that today’s promises fund the expected unborn future. Yes, invest in the offline world even as you prepare for the digital one because today’s business in Nigeria is still largely offline-anchored.

In our practice, we deploy proprietary management concept and execution strategies encapsulated under  CIPA (Content, Illustration, Practice and Application) to deliver new markets and territories for clients.

Finally, communicate with awareness and that means do not score own-goals. Nothing destroys your reputation when your customer sees you as being unaware: providing suggestions which everyone in the sector had tested and failed! Unless you have something new, possibly with technology which can help improve marginal cost or productivity, do not send your clients to dead-end. But awareness comes with observation which means your antenna must be sharp. It is when you combine both that you can leave memorable moments in Boards and Executive Management to approve those contracts. If you cannot provide new insights in your presentations (at least), it may be time for you to update your resume because you would struggle to build that trust necessary for a business to put its future in your hands!

[Giveaway] MacX MediaTrans is Ultimate iTunes Alternative for iPhone Data Transfer with Mac

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I got a new Mac two weeks ago, and that created a new challenge for me: how to transfer many contents which I have on my iPhone and iPad into the new Mac. This is necessary because moving photos, videos, music and other files from the mobile devices to Mac helps to clear storage space. I checked online on how I could do this effectively at the least possible time. Thank goodness, I found a solution: MacX MediaTrans.

MacX MediaTrans is an iPhone manager for Mac. It does this better than iTunes I must note. Yes, the product interface makes the whole process seamless. In the past, I had used iTunes but after using MacXTrans, I can report the following benefits and why you should try it – it is simply better than anything in the market today.

MacX MediaTrans delivers fast file transfer speed and it is also easy to use. It makes it possible to sync contents bi-directionally, from iOS devices and Mac and that implies you can move contents from your iPhone to Mac and vice versa. One thing I found very useful was the selectivity which enables the capacity to select only the files you want to transfer without having to transfer all files. By having that feature, MacX MediaTrans delivers faster speed and that means saving of time. It also ensures that you preserve space by having only the things you want moved.

More so, ove the time I have used this product, I have not experienced any error as it fixes iTunes errors effectively. It is a delightful piece of engineering which supports transfer of videos in MKV, FLV, AVI, WMV and more besides the regular ones accepted by iTunes. As you do this, you would experience elite auto compression technology with capabilities to auto compress large 4K, HD video files to save iPhone space, and auto convert video format for iOS. There is nothing comparable in the market today to what you get from these features.

Across all nexus, MacX MediaTrans delivers quality even when you are transferring non-iTunes music files. Yet, none could be as useful as the ability to turn your iPhone as a USB to save Word, to Excel, PDF, dmg, apps, ibook, etc, securely. That is how impressive this solution is and you need to test it.

All Together

With these benefits, I certainly think that you would like to explore MacX MediaTrans as you plan your backup strategy for many iOS mobile devices. Interestingly, there is a giveaway by the product creators at the moment. Yes, this Christmas giveaway will give you a license key of MacX MediaTrans for free, and you can use the solution to experience the magic of great engineering. You need to hurry as the offer lasts till Jan 10, 2019. Get it today and say goodbye to space woes, data loss, lengthy syncing, and other iTunes errors or restrictions.