The future of autonomous vehicles is still evolving. No one has locked it up yet. But if you ask me for a company that has a chance to rule and dominate, I will tell you that Baidu is ahead through its Apollo platform. Forget Google which is one of the industry pioneers.  Forget Uber also. Both belong to the same class of companies as I explained early in the week. Baidu is doing to the autonomous vehicle industry what Android did to the mobile device sector: liberate the sector by providing the core operating system upon which self driving vehicles will run.

Baidu is putting some serious cash behind its self-driving car push after it announced a $1.5 billion fund that’s focused on backing autonomous driving tech companies.

The Chinese giant, best known for its internet search service and AI technology, has prioritized autonomous vehicles in a major way in recent years, so this comes as little surprise. Baidu made its Apollo self-driving car platform freely available to the auto industry earlier this year. That quickly picked up partners and it currently claims around 70, including Hyundai, Bosch, Continental, Nvidia, Microsoft Cloud, Velodyne, TomTom, UCAR and Grab.

Now Baidu — which is testing autonomous vehicles in both China and the U.S. — is doubling down with capital via this new fund, which it said will aim to support around 100 companies over the next three years.

Simply, if Baidu succeeds, it will assume the position of Android in the business of making self driving cars. That means car companies have to build the hardware while they depend on the operating system offered by Baidu to operate. That operating system goes beyond software to sensors and hardware devices which are very critical for self-driving vehicles. The company has a grand vision to become the leader in this sector.

Baidu is opening its self-driving vehicle platform in a bid to help drive the development of autonomous cars.

The Chinese internet giant today announced its Apollo project that will see its platform, including vehicle platform, hardware platform, software platform and cloud data services, opened to help others in the industry, particularly car manufacturers, to develop autonomous vehicles.

The initial target is to open the technologies up for vehicles in restricted environments this July. Baidu said it then plans to share technology for simple urban road conditions before the end of the year, with the ultimate goal of opening its full tech stack — covering fully autonomous driving capabilities on highways and open city roads — by 2020.

What Is Apollo?

By looking at the Apollo manifesto, you can see why this is a strong project for Baidu and why it is raising huge funds to support it.

Apollo is an open platform whose primary purpose is to become a vibrant autonomous driving ecosystem by providing a comprehensive, safe, secure, and reliable solution that supports all major features and functions of an autonomous vehicle.

Apollo’s ambition is no less than to revolutionize the auto and transportation industries, and there will be challenges of unprecedented scale and complexity along the way. Given Apollo’s enormous potential to change the world, this historic opportunity requires a unique governance model that must support a highly effective leadership which is as inclusive and open as possible in order to swiftly achieve Apollo’s vision.

In order to safeguard the architectural integrity, system reliability, and rapid evolution of Apollo, Baidu is willing to step up and exercise its leadership in driving important decisions whenever needed while preserving active participation of the wider community.

Apollo Is Huge

Apollo offers many values to partners and they include:

• “Apollo” will provide an open, complete and reliable software platform for its partners in the automotive and autonomous driving industry to develop their own autonomous driving systems with reference vehicles and hardware platform.
• In Apollo open platform, you will get the world’s leading HD map service, the only open Autonomous Driving simulation engine with huge amount of data, and End-to-End, a deep learning Autonomous Driving algorithm.
• The Apollo open platform enables you to develop, test and reply Autonomous Vehicles faster. With more participants, more data will be collected. Compare to a closed ecosystem, Apollo can evolve faster, bring benefits to every participant, and become more and more mature with the contribution of everyone.

Apollo has already onboard major global firms as partners, far ahead of any other company. If it builds critical mass with great technology results, you will see it as the platform technology of choice for any firm that wants to invest in self-driving vehicles. When they tell you that China does not innovate, remind them that a possible Android of autonomous vehicles is being created in China.

In future, you will be assured that an entrepreneur in Lagos can start a self-driving car company easily with Baidu technology than anything out there. That is the advantage it will enjoy if it solidifies its position.

Amazon plans to deploy $5 billion to win the Indian e-commerce sector. That is a lot of money and it will help it incur losses while taking market shares from competitors. With this strategy, it becomes increasingly obvious that Amazon may not really care about acquisition. It could have used that money to buy itself pieces of companies to get its market share number up. But it does not want to do that. With just 41 warehouses in India, Amazon is running a startup operation, at growth phase, in India.

Within miles of the new Hyderabad storage hub, is one of Amazon’s largest global customer service centers as well as one of its biggest software development facilities in the world. All of these are hidden from public view – except on rare occasions like this warehouse visit. They are all testimony to Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos’s aggressive Indian expansion that is backed by a $5 billion budgetary allocation.

Amazon’s 41 warehouses in India are vital in a country where the largest online retailers are marketplaces without any inventory of their own in accordance with foreign investment rules for e-commerce. Their locations are crucial because the nation’s logistics networks can be unreliable. They have to be close to sellers and with easy access to a density of buyers.

But Amazon has no choice. It needs to deploy this capital to compete as its competitors are well funded. The money Amazon has budgeted for India may not buy a sizable market share, through acquisition, since Flipkart, an industry leader in India, has a valuation of $11.6 billion after a recent funding round, where it raised $1.4 billion from Microsoft, eBay and Tencent. So, it has to go the infantry way, instead of dropping competitive ammunition from the air: Amazon has  to compete and earn market share organically in India.

Following months of rumors, Indian e-commerce giant Flipkart has confirmed that it has raised $1.4 billion in new funding at a post-money valuation of $11.6 billion to battle Amazon and Alibaba. The deal includes some big-name strategic investors: China’s Tencent, eBay and Microsoft, which join existing Flipkart backers that include Tiger Global, Naspers, Accel and DST Global.

I have noted the Indian issue to illustrate how Amazon is thinking. Its strategy goes beyond India. It recently bought Souq, a Middle East ecommerce company. Where it has not done a big ecommerce deal is in Africa. We know nothing of its budget for the continent. But that does not mean that Amazon is not coming on board. I do think Amazon is just studying the continent at the moment. And it is doing so by working to get better insights through technology and business communities. It just signed a partnership to make it easier for Zambian startups to use Amazon Web Services. It is already running a light ecommerce operation in South Africa, possibly for other reasons and not necessarily to make money through shopping boxes.

Zambia’s technology and digital startups will now receive free hosting services courtesy of a partnership between BongoHive and Amazon Web Services (AWS). The offer is available to startups that have completed the BongoHive Launch Accelerator programme.

Startups from BongoHive’s Launch Accelerator programme will get free hosting services on the AWS platform.

I expect the type of partnership Amazon has with BonjoHive to mushroom. Microsoft has a similar thing through its 4Afrika Initiatives on Azure and Google has always been local. Amazon is just getting here. This implies that everyone wants to come. But for Amazon, it needs to come with its best product, which is the ecommerce business. Until it does that, not many people will know that Amazon is in Africa.

What I expect to happen in the next few months will be for Amazon to have four locations to serve East, West, North and Central Africa. It already operates in South Africa and that takes care of the Southern Africa. With these strategically located offices, it will map its strategy to move into Africa and bring ecommerce.  Amazon will not make any acquisition. What it is doing in Africa has convinced me that Amazon will just come and compete for market share. With local players still at infancy in places like Nigeria, Kenya and Ghana, there is no need to acquire. The spending on ecommerce in Africa is less than 5% of total consumer spending. So, nothing has really happened to warrant acquisition.

Besides, Amazon’s name recognition and operational experience can generate enough buzz to get it on top. Sure, that did not happen in South Africa, but I have noted that Amazon operates in South Africa not necessarily to win ecommerce market share. It will have its moments for that.

Amazon needs Africa, and Africa will be similar to the feeling when it pioneered ecommerce in U.S. You cannot become one of the largest digital technology companies on earth without an African blueprint. It is irrelevant whether you are making money or not; the key is that you are there to defend the turf against competition. Just being in the continent will give it a favorable response from Wall Street, exactly the type it received when it bought Souq.

Amazon supports many U.S. merchants who now run businesses exclusively on its platform. African makers will surely benefit because Amazon can provide logistical support to local merchants to sell and ship continent-wide.  Through this, it will unlock opportunities for many African entrepreneurs. Enticing Amazon to invest in Africa could be a wise decision for any African government.

The telecommunication sector has become Father Christmas to the Nigerian government. According to the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), it remitted N133.4 billion (about $380 Million), in the last two years, to the federal government purse.  This fund comes from the little taxes and fees you pay when you talk or text. Simply, Nigeria is benefiting from the liberalization of the telecommunication sector.

Over N133.4billion has been remitted by the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) into the federation account in the last two years.

A document by the NCC Director of Public Affairs Tony Ojobo, revealed this yesterday.Ojobo said the commission remitted over N23 million in October 2015, after an initial remittance of N6, 856,182,132 in September of the same year.

He added that the commission’s last remittance to the consolidated revenue fund, which was on June 30, 2017 was N12, 705,154,120 and came less than 10 days after the NCC had remitted the sum of N1, 282,453,138 to the account.

Also, the NCC last year, transferred N20, 000,598,873 and another N15million in March before remitting N29, 475,867,407 and N16, 500,000,000 in December 2016.

This is the impact of a good policy. When they opened the sector to market forces, government lost its monopoly through NITEL, but today, it is making more and winning despite losing NITEL. In short, NITEL was losing money; but right now Nigeria is making money through a functioning telecommunication sector. We are not talking of the impact of GSM on the economy and the lifestyles of the citizens. We mean the money in the purse of the government.

If they do what they have done in the telecoms sector to the power and water sectors, government will even win through more fees and tax revenues. Market forces make governments look like seers and wizards because when markets function well, governments win. No matter how you see it, Nigeria now has a clear insight on what works: the telecom sector is working well and government should replicate that model in other sectors.

Remember that this monstrous N133.4 billion might not have included the taxes the telcos paid to the Federal Inland Revenue Service and to state governments. And when you consider that Nigeria was largely in recession over the last few years, you can run the numbers to see the impact of the sector in the nation’s finances in the last 17 years. We need to scale markets forces to other sectors.

I just accepted an invitation to speak in the 2017 Tony Elumelu Foundation Entrepreneurship Forum . You do not miss an opportunity to speak before the top 1,000 African entrepreneurs. These are people who are redefining and redesigning the economic architectures of Africa, from the lagoons of West Africa to the mangroves of Southern Africa, and from the grasslands/plains of Central/Eastern Africa to the beautiful hills of the North. They are demonstrating bold visions, unlocking new opportunities and pioneering new paths, for the good of the beautiful continent. In them, it is not just innovation, but sankofa innovation, with the next frontiers it brings.

It is my honour to invite you to speak at the 2017 edition of the Tony Elumelu Foundation Entrepreneurship Forum taking place on the 13th of October 2017 at the Nigerian Law School in Lagos. We would like you to lead a session on the topic ‘Extending the Frontier’. The Forum is the capstone of the flagship Programme of the Tony Elumelu Foundation and has grown to become the largest gathering of entrepreneurs from across Africa.

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Your professional accomplishments in your field inspires us greatly, and our 1000 eager young entrepreneurs will benefit immensely from your wealth of knowledge and experience. Thus, we are hopeful that you will honour this invitation to speak to the next generation of African business leaders.

The Tony Elumelu Foundation which was founded by Lagos banker and philanthropist, Mr. Tony Elumelu, is inventing a new model of philanthropy that focuses on mobilizing big ideas and institutionalizing luck through entrepreneurship. The mobility comes through a $100 million multi-year commitment Mr. Elumelu is injecting in the visions and aspirations of his fellow African citizens.

If you use the startup language, the Foundation is a category-king in what it pioneered and remains peerless. I remain honored to be serving in the Advisory Board of the Tony Elumelu Entrepreneurship Program (TEEP).

I will lead the session – Extending the Frontier –  which 1,300 participants will attend live. I like Frontiers because in my new book – Africa’s Sankofa Innovation – which came out two weeks ago, I had a chapter titled Next Frontiers.