We mean it – the hottest area in technology now is data analytic. You can also call the players WANTS, just like Quants in the investment banking field. OK, they also go as Data Scientists. These are guys/fields that focus on crunching the massive data social media and new technologies are churning out minute by minute. Companies want to make sense of them – they truly want because without that capability, they cannot have intelligence on their products, websites and indeed all areas of their operations. Facebook will not improve with having a way to analyze data they get from millions of their users.

HP, EMC, Google, Microsoft, and a host of the tech giants are buying these companies. They are the pinnacle of mathematical finesse and analytical bravado. They crunch meaningless data sets and provide your information that no one ever imagined. The leader of this pack is Cloudera. We also have Informatica. There are many of them and Africa needs to get into this. This is brain work people and we need to connect quick and fast.

What do you need? You need to be very very good in mathematics and statistics. You need to be sound in machine learning and heuristic algorithm development.  If your statistics measures up very well, it is possible you can write these codes and easily be acquired by someone. The barrier of entry is very high because this is not the domain of hackers and lucky-software coders. You need to be very good and know the stuff.

To begin, you need to understand the open source engine that drives most of these companies. That engine is called Hadoop, after the toy elephant of the son of the man, Doug Cutting, that created it. Get to know Hadoop and if you think you are ready, email tekedia@fasmicro.com and let us discuss how this can work out. We have some Nigerians in U.S that want to get into Hadoop (they know the software but do not know the maths section. These are investors; we will connect you). They are looking for partners – first rated statisticians and mathematicians.

Apache Hadoop is a software framework that supports data-intensive distributed applications under a free license. It enables applications to work with thousands of nodes and petabytes of data. Hadoop was inspired by Google’s MapReduce and Google File System (GFS) papers. Hadoop is a top-level Apache project being built and used by a global community of contributors,written in the Java programming language. Yahoo! has been the largest contributor to the project, and uses Hadoop extensively across its businesses. Hadoop was created by Doug Cutting,who named it after his son’s toy elephant.It was originally developed to support distribution for the Nutch search engine project. (wikipedia)

For better or for worse, technology has penetrated on our planet Earth. It has served people in many ways, tinkering with a gadget and exploring its various functions is charming. The advent of smartphones has made the mobile phone experience even better. Smartphones are pet to their owners and accompany them everywhere they move. Using them is a smart experience and the perception that technology has made people dump is nullified.

Dangers from exploded applications:

Though their use is heavenly, but smartphones have certain societal pitfalls too. They have globalized the world abruptly and in many easy exquisite ways. Individuals from all strata and age can access it; the wrong is for the kids with tender age. They use it excessively without acknowledging its drawbacks.

The smartphone brings whole world at your virtual doorstep which is not feasible for kids. Interacting with people of all kinds make them vulnerable to prospect threats, all their childhood we teach them not to talk to strangers, but then giving them a smartphone that breaks all the protective shields and expose them to the volatile world is senseless.

StealthGenie an ultimate safe guard:

Whether you are a working parent or a house wife or guardian by any relation, you need to have absolute grip over the interactions they make. For that StealthGenie mobile spy software is essential. Kids are smart and a smarter software can only handle them. It is the software intelligence that sneaks into their mobile phones and extract out all the information necessary to be known by the guardian.

If you are worried about the traceability of your software, then the software ensures 100% undetectable functioning and presence. It will bring to you all the secret information that they were trying to hide and all the activities they do behind your back or due to your lack of technological knowledge.

The software is handy and works effectively without complaints or signs of its presence in the target phone. The investigator can easily sneak into any live conversations, while sitting away from the target phone and view all that what is happening on the online interface. The user interface is called the Member Area and it possesses all the relevant information you are thriving to get hands on. Information about the people they call, text, email and chat appears before you and you will be in a position to identify strangers and suspicious persons.

Protective shield from all threats:

By marking certain people’s contact numbers or email addresses as important, you can get alerts whenever they are contacted. Supporting the above feature is ‘Reverse Phone Look up’ this feature brings forth all the additional contact and personal information of that person you want to investigate about. Likewise the monitoring software allow the user to even specify words on the online interface, whenever those target words are found in any Email, Chat or SMS message, the user will get notified immediately.

Parents worried about the wandering habit of their children, do not need to mourn over the rebellious nature of their child, Geo Live Location Tracking enables them to see the live movement of their children and even allows drawing and mark boundaries over the Google map provided in the online interface. They can easily view the movement of their child and even gets alerts whenever a certain boundary is trespassed.

This is how the software helps in tackling whimsical children and makes a guardian’s life easy by providing all the surveillance about the kids and their telephonic activities and experimentations with new and old pals and strangers alike.

Enjoy these  ideas from your editors.

Point: The best way to measure economic recovery is to access the cost of global shipping containers over time

Lessons to Africa: There are very simple ways to access economic growth. Instead of using statistics developed during the industrial economy for the emerging knowledge economy, you can focus on simple things that are measurable. In the last six months, Tekedia Intelligence has tracked the cost of shipping containers and notes its price correlates with the global recovery. Nations are made up of men and women and as far as we are living, goods will move. How active the economy is can be estimated by what it takes to move those goods. This calls for good statistics by AU states.

Point: Norway has mandated (legally binding) a quota of about 40% of women in corporate board. France plans the same.

Lessons to Africa: African women run and manage most sectors of African economy, except the corporate Africa. Our women raise more kids than our men. From farming to petty trading, our women are stars. However, in corporate Africa, we see few women in Boards. And we lose that knowledge, intellect  and wisdom African women provide. Now is the time for African Union to mandate all Boards to have at least 30% women in the Board. We need them; they cannot be out of the corporate Africa. The whole argument that they should stand on merit and be recognized as such is flawed since they never even get close to try. But remember: Tekedia advocates for quality and not quantity; that is appointing women, not by their political connections, but by what they will provide to African business.

Point: Technology is displacing man at the job market, and that is why unemployment is high and productivity is up. It is one of those variants of the knowledge economy.

Lessons to Africa: The world job market will continue to look increasingly sour because the knowledge economy is about brain. What has worked in the industrial economy where muscle triumphed over brain will not matter much these days. Africa needs to understand this redesign of the global job structure and restructure itself. Though more people will be needed at work, the continent must plan for what to do with those that cannot be absolved. One good area is to form alliances where all nations calculate technology-man ratio to quantify the displacement and then help the affected to go back to agriculture where the classical theory of factors of production (big land and big labor) still make sense. For the new emerging economy, that cannot employ all of us.

Point: Creative destruction is the center-piece of modern capitalism. No firm must be too big to fail and none should be salvaged over another. Let markets decide who wins and who loses.

Lessons to Africa:  In the era of bailouts, our governments took money that would have been used to develop education and health to help banks.  We must develop the same urgency of bailout to our educational system that is dying.

Point: “The best way to predict the future is to create it” (Peter Drucker)

Lessons to Africa: Until we develop the creative capabilities in our industries, we cannot predict the destines of states out of poverty.. And that creation is planning. We need to get serious with our roadmaps. When you create a thing, you have more control over it

Point: Climate change consulting will become a major industry in coming years. And because of the global nature, all nations will be involved

Lessons to Africa: In this area, we must prepare and develop programs that will equip our banks and schools to prepare for this new industry. We must put legislation and train our own people into this business. Let us have firms that are experts in climate right there in Africa instead of depending on expatriates to do this for us.

Point: High quality science is very important, but not sufficient to create a strong company or industry.

Lessons to Africa: Our science and technology development must be an amalgam of science, law, marketing,economics,  management, and others to be effective. Collaborations must exist among all these groups if we hope to make progress.

Point: $100b went for Greek bailout from 16 euro nations. Discontent voters will change euro govts and bring new politicians. Within a decade, a major euro-zone nation will pull out of euro. I predict that political revolution will force an opposition part to campaign to pull out of the currency union within a decade in one nation.

Lessons to Africa: Stop the single currency union program and focus on developing infrastructure and knowledge

Point: “Businesses acting as businesses, not as charitable givers, are arguably the most powerful force for addressing the issues facing our society”, Michael Porter, Bloomberg Businessweek, June 6, 2010

Lessons to Africa: In this era of corporate enshrined social responsibility, the most important and vital responsibility firms can do to our communities and cities is simply to be businesses. Whether they give money to NGOs or not is not that important if they continue to create jobs, reduce unemployment and poverty. We have to encourage firms to balance that giving with survivability. I saw in Owerri, Nigeria where a local conglomerate charitied itself into bankruptcy because the owner could not resist to help. Being business as business is  just as good; we need them to be there for long.

Point:  We live in an era of  information deluge; from individuals, firms to nations. In that data and information are secret codes for greatness and wealth if harnessed.

Lessons to Africa: Now is the time to translate that data into intelligence and help your citizens. From farming to bakery, corruption to education, there are solutions; yet, we do not use them. African Union needs a Chief Knowledge Officer (CKO) who will seek, analyze, and provide knowledge intelligence to the union. Similarly, it is time African states have Ministry of Knowledge Economy; we need focus on the evolving normal.

Point: China will certainly surpass Japan as the world’s biggest oil importer to become #2, behind U.S this decade. It is already # 1 world’s exporter.

Lessons to Africa: You can measure your economic vibrancy by looking at your energy consumption. When you consume so little because your major cities are always in darkness, it means you need no consultant to tell you to reform. Energy consumption is a simple factor to measure national economic health and activity.