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One Thing

By
Ndubuisi Ekekwe
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0
One Thing

Happy Sunday.

As we enter the ‘ember months (September, October, November and December), I want you to take the next few days, before 1st September arrives, to think ONE THING you need to do, in these four months, to improve your career or your business in 2019.

You might have noticed mine: I will give many talks. Our internal data shows that the more I give talks, the more we expand client base.  As always, the best time to audition for a job is when there is no job available. So, I want to give at least 40 talks in the next four months. Some will be open to the public while many would be closed.  But they will achieve ONE THING: expand our operations through thought-leadership.

Think your own ONE THING and get it done. Remember, now is the time to plan for 2019 as companies are making budgets. Depending on your sector, if you wait for January to engage some clients, you would be late as most would be concluding annual budgets by December. Only a business toddler waits for January to begin a new year.

If you work for state governments and show up in January, you have missed a year! Most things that would happen in 2019 will be concluded in the next four months in most African economies.

Yes, if you have a BIG IDEA, now is the time to show up and get them in the budgets of your clients [sure, not all institutions run on January-December financial year, but most do]. Get them to make your ideas priority projects by clearly explaining how those ideas will improve their margins and operations.

Now, take time and think the ONE THING.

My Company Training Event in Lagos and Abuja (Sept, Oct)

By
Ndubuisi Ekekwe
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0

This ’ember-month period, we are working in leading Nigerian SMEs, startups and big corporations, at different levels of formation and growth, helping them on business roadmaps, strategies and tools for innovation and growth. Our services cut across industrial sectors and functional areas.

We have few slots remaining: email my community manager (on click) to schedule to visit your firm. You would like our perspectives as they are deep. Yes, we do not regurgitate sound bites. We are entrepreneurs first and we will share how we are dealing with issues you are facing.

We execute our missions via three ways:

  1. Development of Business Roadmap & Strategy: A business plan is not enough to anchor business execution. A Roadmap Document is required especially in a sector which is in a state of flux [changing market, changing model, startup, competition, regulation, etc]. To avoid pursuing many windy paths or dead ends, a roadmap helps to encapsulate a profitable path to the vision with pillars and enablers necessary for success.
  2. Discovery Innovation Workshop: To innovate is to set a new basis of competition in an economy, business sector or market. Typically, it results to disruption. This workshop will focus on innovation and growth because growth is the reward of innovation. Otherwise, that innovation is actually an invention. I will be the lead instructor with my supporting crew. The table below provides the workshop structure. We can adapt this workshop to two days.
  3. Discovery Innovation Presentation: This is a four-hour seminar where we will present what is happening in your market, customized for your company, and then offer insights on how you can plot your strategies to win. This goes beyond industry statistics and typical SWOT analysis. We work to help clients see their markets in new ways, providing roadmaps on how they can unlock opportunities. It is an intense talk, combining technology, finance, political economy and strategy. As technology redesigns markets, I break the implications in short, medium and long-terms.

For more on these services and structure, please click here.

Our Community Manager is waiting to schedule a time with you; email tekedia@fasmicro.com

DSN to Publish (Sept 1) the Most Important AI Use Cases Book for Africa

By
Ndubuisi Ekekwe
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0

Data Science Nigeria (DSN) is compiling one of the finest AI books you would read so far as it concerns Africa. It is a brilliant piece coming out on Sept 1, 2018. I wrote the Foreword which I began thus:

Many centuries ago, during the great debate of the material components of the universe, a period of fundamental knowledge generation and accumulation, in which some of the finest philosophers and thinkers like Thales, Heraclitus and Pythagoras participated, the world was explained. Pythagoras postulated that the world is made up of numbers, implying that everything we do is about numbers. Largely, across markets and industrial sectors, and in our personal lives, every human and business activity comes down to numbers. It could be click analysis, videoes, sleep or practically anything; behind all is numbers.

This is to get you expecting. Yes, after reading this book, you will have many insights on how you can play a role in the AI-first startup world which is emerging. I am not aware of any better AI ecosystem in Africa than the DSN movement.

TStv Confesses on DStv

By
Ndubuisi Ekekwe
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0
TSTV Nigeria

Everyone wished TStv well when it unveiled in Nigeria; we continue to wish it well. Nonetheless, I called that a Goliath challenge because it was going against a colossal empire on MultiChoice, parent of DStv and GOtv. Press releases do not win competitions: products and services do. Simply, TStv has gone through a wilderness as MultiChoice has out-competed it badly. But the company is coming back, offering even free HD channels, as it works to fight the battle in the pay TV sector: this confession is unmistakable (read below).

Speaking on the challenges the company has faced in the past, Echefu narrated that from the date it announced the launch of TSTV, it has been fighting all the way. “I doubt if a week passed without us quenching one fire or the other. We didn’t anticipate that there would be war. We were also not trained to fight in the arena, we were pushed into. The kinds of weapons our enemies would later contend us with, showed they had stocked their armory waiting for a time like now. We may not have their kind of money, neither their kinds of weapons, ”connections” and networks, but one thing I sure know we had more than them was a determined spirit and a steadfast God. A God who doesn’t fail.

“It has not been easy one bit. Our struggles drained us financially and pitched us against all good meaning Nigerians, subscribers and dealers that believed in us. We were wrestled even down to our satellite providers but our God is ever faithful.”

While TStv is battling the markets, DStv is fighting in the court with the consumer protection agency. I hope everything will work out well for the consumers as the tendency to over-regulate will hurt innovation. The world has since become winner-takes-all: one Google, one Facebook, one Twitter, etc.

I expect MultiChoice to continue to innovate, making it even harder for competitors. And if you want to severely regulate it, you will just stunt the experiences of customers in many ways. As it pivots to the web to compete against YouTube and Netflix, even iROKOtv should be concerned.

MultiChoice has unveiled DStv Now, an internet based service with live sports, live TV, shows and movies on Catch Up. It is now available via three new lean-back apps. These apps make it possible to turn any TV in the house into an easy-to-use DStv hub without the need for a decoder.

The new apps are available for Samsung smart TVs (selected models from 2015 onwards), Apple TV (fourth generation & newer) and media players running Android TV (Google certified devices only) Apps are also expected to be added shortly for additional brands of smart TVs.

Government should not stop it. Sure, MultiChoice must be fair on its pricing, but we cannot take away the reality that this company can lose 10% of its best customers to Netflix in coming years if it does not innovate. Most times, you need money to make better products. Even Netflix has been increasing price to acquire or produce contents.

Yet, the launch of DStv Now is demonstrating that DStv believes the future may not be TV alone. So, if TStv focuses on just winning on TV, it may thrive therein and still lose as the contest might have moved to the web or at least hybridized.

Nigeria’s Cambrian Moment

By
Ndubuisi Ekekwe
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0
Nigeria's cambrian moment

“Digital start-ups are bubbling up in an astonishing variety of services and products, penetrating every nook and cranny of the economy. They are reshaping entire industries and even changing the very notion of the firm.” – Ludwig Siegele

From the lagoons of Lagos to the mangrove of Calabar, from the beautiful plains of Sokoto to the plateau of Jos, all the way to the rainforest of Owerri, there is an entrepreneurial explosion in Nigeria, and it is unprecedented. Powered by microprocessors, mathematics, the beautiful science of numbers, is being transmuted by software, eating everything on its path.

And in the process, it is making a better sense of the nation, as entrepreneurs pursue the grand mission – fixing market frictions. Unlike the golden decade (the 1990s) of Nigerian entrepreneurship when amalgams of new generation banks were born, seeding a new age in the nation’s financial system, this moment cuts across sectors. From energy to healthcare, agriculture to logistics and even financial services, Nigeria is being redesigned by the combinatorial powers of software to arrange, re-arrange and make sense of atoms and bytes.

With cloud computing, immersive connectivity, and mobile devices, a 21st century Cambrian moment is emerging in Nigeria: the data everywhere is meeting cheap, ubiquitous and intelligent digital systems to process them. This is our time: welcome to Nigeria’s Cambrian Moment.

This digital feeding frenzy has given rise to a global movement. Most big cities, from Berlin and London to Singapore and Amman, now have a sizeable startup colony (“ecosystem”). Between them they are home to hundreds of startup schools (“accelerators”) and thousands of co-working spaces where caffeinated folk in their 20s and 30s toil hunched over their laptops. All these ecosystems are highly interconnected, which explains why internet entrepreneurs are a global crowd. Like medieval journeymen, they travel from city to city, laptop not hammer in hand. A few of them spend a semester with “Unreasonable at Sea”, an accelerator on a boat which cruises the world while its passengers code. “Anyone who writes code can become an entrepreneur—anywhere in the world,” says Simon Levene, a venture capitalist in London.

In last week of October 2018, I will be speaking before investors in Boston, USA on (startup) investment opportunities in Nigeria. If you are around that side of America, plan ahead.

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