Alibaba’s Jack Ma Unveils $10M African ‘Netpreneur’ Prize [Video]

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August 9, 2018

It is about to rain more opportunities for those who can dream within the digital business sphere. Thank you Jack Ma. We want more.

Alibaba founder Jack Ma has established a new contest that will see African entrepreneurs compete for $10 million in funding, with the aim of supporting businesses that are growing the continent’s nascent digital economy.

Called the Jack Ma Foundation Netpreneur Prize, small businesses in Africa will vie for $1 million in prize money every year for the next decade, starting in 2019, a statement said. The Jack Ma Foundation will host an annual pitch competition, with all 10 finalists receiving grant funding and access to the Netpreneur community of African business leaders for mentorship and other resources.

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While the competition will be open to entrepreneurs in all industries, the prize will focus on internet-led businesses that help advance technology and innovation in Africa. Applicants must be African nationals leading mission-driven organizations, and the 10 finalists will be selected by a team of judges from five regions representing the entire continent. Applications for the first year open in January, with the finalist pitch competition broadcast on television and online in the second half of 2019.

https://youtu.be/-2922rYZSMg

Application

This is the link to track when application would open.

Smart Mac Data Recovery Software

By

Ajayi Bode

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August 8, 2018

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We all make mistakes in our digital works. But some errors are huge. One of those major errors is deleting important files that run your business or personal life. Imagine researchers crying that they have mistakenly deleted works they have invested months of work by accident. We do meet company secretaries sobbing that the presentation slide which will be used next day was accidentally deleted. Or sometimes, it is not really an accident; we just purge our Mac device only to note that we need those files within days.

If you have experienced this type of scenarios and more, there is good news. There is a solution from EaseUS for users of Mac. They have category-king recovery software to recover deleted, formatted or lost data from Mac device easily and quickly. The mac data recovery can be trialed free and it allows anyone to restore deleted files and folders quicker than you may expect. I did that and the experience was supremely awesome. You need to do same.

Features of EaseUS Mac Recovery Solution

The EaseUS free data recovery software restores crucial data for sudden deletion, formatting, hard drive corruption, virus attack, system crash, volume loss, improper operation or other reasons. It is extremely easy and safe free file recovery software for PC/laptop/Server and helps to retrieve lost or deleted files, photos, music, audio, emails, etc. from hard drive, memory card, USB, digital camera, mobile devices and other storage media. It is an omni-recovery ecosystem that can handle any media type. The key attributes are as follows:

PC data recovery wizard: Recover deleted files from hard drive, external hard drive and SSD on your PCs, laptops or servers, or even lost and formatted partitions
Memory card recovery wizard: Restore lost data from damaged or corrupted memory card including memory stick, SD card, CF card, Micro card and more
USB drive recovery wizard: Rescue data loss on USB drive, flash drive, pen drive and other removable storage media due to accidental deletion, formatting, virus attack, etc.
Other digital device recovery wizard: Retrieve lost data from devices like digital camera, mobile phones, iPod, music and video player for deleting, formatting, hardware crash and other reasons

Operating the EaseUS Interface

The EaseUS Data Recovery Software is a free software that you can download on your computer. It works perfectly for Mac systems, making it convenient to be used by anyone. Let’s take a comprehensive look at how to recover your files using this free file recovery application.

Installing and Operating the Wizard

The program is free and easy to download. After it is downloaded, simply launch the program and you will be able to observe first hand that the interface is super user friendly and easy to make sense of. You can find everything you need inside the Menu icon on the top of the window.

Beginning the Search

Beginning from the ‘Home’ screen, you can select what kind of files (documents, audio, video) you would like to search for. The next screen will ask you to select which part of the hard drive or the attached drive you would like the software to scan for the deleted file.

Quick and Deep Scans

The next step would be to click on ‘Scan’ on the bottom right of the page.

When you do a Quick Scan, the software takes just a few minutes to extract a small bunch of files from the selected place. The Deep Scan, however, extracts over hundreds and thousands of files for you to select from and recover. It is also understandable that such a difficult feat takes a considerable amount of time as well. You can pause or stop the Deep Scan anytime you want if you are not willing to wait through the two or three hours of searching. You are still able to preview and restore the files that the software has recovered till that point in time.

Exporting and Importing Scans

You can save your scan results if you would like to view them later by clicking on the ‘Export Scan Status’. Whenever you would like to view them again, you can simply choose the ‘Import Scan Status’ option and bring back the Recovery State File into the window.

Finally: Recover!

Once you have decided which files you want un-deleted, you can either right click on that particular file and choose ‘Recover’, or in the case that there are several files you would like recovered, you can tick all the files and press the ‘Recover’ option on the bottom-right corner. You can choose where you would like to place these newly recovered files. It is better to store them in a new place if they were deleted because of a damaged drive.

Ecobank’s Fintech 11

By

Ndubuisi Ekekwe

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August 8, 2018

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I noted few hours ago that Honeywell Group had unveiled an innovation ecosystem to seed startups in Lagos. Interestingly, the company is joining corporations like Ecobank and Diamond Bank which continue to put money in African startups. This is the new redesign where companies need to invest in local SMEs to build the economy of the future. In China, Alibaba and Tencent are investing in local companies, deepening their capabilities. In U.S., companies like Apple, Google and Intel have corporate investing funds. Africa needs such models. Today, Ecobank announced new 11 companies it is supporting with capital.

Ecobank, the leading independent pan-African banking group, has announced the finalists for the 2nd edition of the annual Ecobank Fintech Challenge, a competition for Africa-focused technology start-ups. The list includes eleven (11) fintech start-ups from across the continent and beyond.

An Innovation Fair & Awards ceremony will honour the start-ups on August 30, 2018 at the global headquarters of Ecobank in Lomé, Togo.

At the ceremony, the start-ups will exhibit and pitch their products to a jury for the Ecobank Africa Fintech Prize, which will be awarded the top innovator and two runners-up. The top three innovators will win cash prizes worth US$10,000, US$7,000, and US$5,000 respectively.

After the Awards ceremony, Ecobank will enroll all eleven finalists into the Ecobank Fintech Fellowship. The Fellowship will run for a period of six months during which Ecobank Fintech Fellows will benefit from an opportunity to further explore partnerships with the Ecobank Group that includes:

Multinational product roll-out support: for the start-ups deemed commercially viable to grow their businesses across any of Ecobank’s 33 markets in Africa;

Service provider & ecosystem partner deals: for start-ups with deep capabilities to become product partners within Ecobank’s ecosystem;

Technical & mentoring support: during the six months fellowship period, fellows will benefit from technical support from Ecobank’s global network of technology leaders, fintech experts, investors and management coaches.

The eleven start-ups are:

Lypa (Kenya), Wallet.ng (Nigeria), Nala (Tanzania), Litee (Benin), SESO Global (South Africa), InvestED (Sierra Leone), Eversend (France), Secapay (Nigeria), Virtual Identity (South Africa), MojiPay (Togo), Awamo (Germany

Ecobank’s Fintech Challenge is a vehicle to seed African startups largely in the financial sector.

Facebook Revamps Digital Marketing After 52% Drop on Failed “Boost” Campaign

By

Ndubuisi Ekekwe

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August 7, 2018

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Facebook Digital Marketing — RANCHO PALOS VERDES, CA - FEBRUARY 07: Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg speaks on stage at The 2017 MAKERS Conference at Terranea Resort and Spa on February 7, 2017 in Rancho Palos Verdes, California. (Photo by Jerod Harris/Getty Images)

LinkedIn Summary: Facebook became greedy. When people posted on Pages, the algorithm would not share the contents to users. To make people see the contents, Facebook would ask you to “Boost” the post. That is another way of saying “buy advertisement”. The world revolted and Facebook lost 57% of Page’s activity because no one wanted to waste time sharing things no one reads.

But the company is back. In this piece, I explain the difference between “I invite you to my new site event” and “We have launched a new site” within the construct of the new Facebook plan. Yes, digital marketing in the age of Google and Facebook continue to evolve. Get ahead.

It seems like Facebook is experiencing a drop in its Pages – the largely business and celebrity section of Facebook. This is expected as when Facebook cut out free sync of many contents, users were not seeing things posted by companies. Many left Pages, and Facebook is concerned as numbers have dropped.

An unescapable fact of Facebook’s ubiquity is that as more Pages and people compete for limited News Feed attention, the percentage of a business’ followers who see their posts declines. Reach dropped 52 percent in just the first half of 2016, for example. Some admins consider it a conspiracy to get Pages to pay for ads boosting their posts, exacerbated by poor communication from Facebook and it telling businesses to work or advertise to get more followers that they now can’t reliably access via feed. But in reality, it’s a natural side effect of increased supply paired with plateauing demand.

It was really a trap as Facebook was clearly focusing on asking companies to “boost” their posts for users to see them. Boost is nothing but paying for advertisement. Without that, no one may see your contents. Many tolerated it at the beginning until they gave up. Now, Facebook wants them back.

The company has indeed come out clean, informing the world what it has been doing. And going forward, contents from friends and families would be prioritized more over those from publishers and brands.

Maintaining personal account now is more important than any business account on Facebook and LinkedIn. They have added social before that “digital marketing” and they want you to be engaged to reach customers. In my opinion, what you share from your personal account is about 5x more valuable than the business one in the Facebook and LinkedIn algorithms. Simply, you cannot hide; your brand is now you.

The company has a plan to get them back by making sure that Pages are not just for marketing but also a vehicle to help companies connect with customers on events and socials. Hopefully, Facebook will let users know of the events without asking for payments to “boost” the contents.

That’s why Facebook is trying to redefine business Pages not as just a mouthpiece for marketing through News Feed, but a destination for customers. Today, Facebook is redesigning the Pages of the 80 million small businesses on its platform and the 1.6 billion people connected to them.

It is something to consider. If telling users that you are inviting them to test your website in an event is different from we are launching a website, PR experts will just have to adjust strategy to deal with Facebook AIs. When the company made its earlier AI update, many companies went under as they lost traffic. Now, they are back, it is time to revisit the models on bringing traffic and users via Facebook ecosystem.

Blossom That Career – Create a Separation at Personal and Business Levels

By

Ndubuisi Ekekwe

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August 7, 2018

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A major secret in careers and business is accumulating capabilities. From Dangote Group to professors in universities, there are always seasons to accumulate capabilities and skills. Your career will not blossom if your capabilities and skills are ordinary. The same applies to companies. In these videos, I explain.

Companies must develop and accumulate capabilities in order to compete in the market place. In this video, I explain how any firm can do that and why accumulating capability is very strategic. From Google to Dangote Group, when companies accumulate capabilities, they see themselves operating in the segments of markets with higher value (usually upstream) compared with where their competitors operate (usually downstream). Dangote Group can deploy massive assets and technical know-how in cement production, making it harder for new entrants and rivals