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Home Blog Page 7632

Zenvus – A New AgTech Company for Smart Farming

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Dear Tekedia Readers,

Greetings. We just launched an AgTech (agricultural technology) venture. Zenvus monitors farms with electronic sensors communicated via GSM, WIFI or Satellites to cloud servers where we have built computational models to help farmers understand How, What and When to farm. It tracks humidity, nutrients, pH, etc.  It also uses special cameras to build Vegetative Index of crops to detect stress, pests, diseases etc. This is our site: http://zenvus.com/

Farmers that buy our sensors and who can share some data can raise capital, insure farms, etc through our services like zCapital, zInsure, zCrowdfund, etc. We bring transparency in agriculture and validate farms because our systems have in-built GPS to authenticate locations.

We are looking for partners – foundations, intergovernmental institutions, governments, etc. We help farmers reduce waste, improve yields and accelerate productivity. Zenvus was funded through grants from USAID and we’re taking guesswork out of farming.

This is the future of farming; it is data-driven farming at its best.
Regards,
Zenvus Team

Planning a trip to unknown territory- to book online or just wing it?

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Editor’s Note: This was contributed by Tolulope Olaifa

Stepping into the lobby of this “luxury” hotel I’d stopped at, I immediately started congratulating myself on finding such a beautiful hotel at such a great price- little did I know that I’d come to regret my decision. I stayed in this blissful happiness till about 6pm when I was lounging with a drink in hand and the TV remote in the other, the power suddenly tripped off. Thinking it was a routine power changeover, I stayed in semi-darkness for about ten minutes, before heading to the reception to ask what was wrong. See chaos at the reception! Apparently the receptionist was tired of telling guests that the hotel only put on their generator at 10 o’clock in the night, and she lost her cool when a guest came at her hot and angry. Eventually, things calmed down after a few blows, and the hotel manager informed us that we would have to pay extra if we wanted them to run the generator overnight. This experience left me wishing I’d done more research before flying 400km away from home and assuming I could rely on good luck to get me a good hotel.

Generally, Nigerians tend to wait for things to reach the eleventh hour before handling them; unfortunately, this is also the case with arranging for accommodation when going on a trip. Most people think, “What’s the use of booking a hotel online when I can get there and get a room immediately?” This mentality usually leads to booking less-than-standard hotels which can invariably ruin the entire trip. Another strong Nigerian train of thought is that booking online is too stressful. The funniest reason I got for why people don’t book online was that the hotel booking site might be a scam and run with their money.

Now, all these excuses may have been true a few years back, but because everything in the world is becoming digital, it has become extremely easy to book hotels online. Making reservations on hotel booking sites gives you the opportunity to thoroughly review several hotels and their facilities in minutes and make sure the price is within your range. It also gives you the opportunity to choose a hotel that is close to where you want to be, instead of managing one hotel 50km from where you are actually going. Also, booking online entitles you to perks you won’t normally receive when you check into a hotel physically. For example, a hotel booking platform like hotelnownow.com goes beyond the normal ‘pay and stay’ approach- they actually work to get customers some of the deepest personalised discounts, as well as super deals on select hotels and locations. Come on, there’s no plausible excuse for you to take a trip and end up in a “yeye” hotel ever again – go digital and book online today.

How to Merge Videos Together in a Specific Sequence

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Do you have two or more videos that you’d like to join to create a single video file? Merging videos in this fashion is really fairly common and it is used to record scenes separately and then join them to one another later on. In some cases it is also used to remove certain parts of a recording and replace it with video footage that has been re-recorded.

Regardless of whether you plan to merge videos as part of a more extensive series of edits that you’re performing, or if you just want to combine several videos – using Movavi Video Editor will help to make it simple. It has an extremely straightforward process that will help you to use the software as a video joiner with absolutely no hassle:

  1. Click ‘Add Media Files’ and select all the videos that you want to join together.
  2. The videos that you added will all appear in the ‘Timeline’ and you can drag and drop them into place so that they appear in the sequence that you want.
  3. When you’re satisfied, save your video by clicking ‘Export’.

Assuming you’d like to remove certain parts of your video you will be able to cut the video into segments and delete the parts you don’t need. Also, you may want to consider adding stylish animated transitions between certain scenes to liven up your video – if you feel it would be appropriate.

That is really still just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the comprehensive features that are contained in Movavi Video Editor. With a bit of experimentation you’ll see that you’re able to enhance the quality of your videos, add text and customize its appearance, apply various types of artistic special effects and filters, and add audio tracks as background music or voiceovers.

In a nutshell, you could very well choose to create your very own movie by cutting together parts of various recordings that you take and then combining them and polishing the final product using the features provided. On the other hand if your ambitions are more modest then you could simply join several videos together so that they’re saved in a single file.

At the end of the day it’s up to you what you choose to do with Movavi Video Editor – but having the options there can never hurt.

A Diary of Solutions to Common Coding Interview Questions and Programming Puzzles

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Over the past few months, I have tried to form a long-term habit of reading about and writing solutions to programming puzzles and common coding interview questions. In the process, I have implemented quite a number of solutions to many programming puzzles and compiled them into some sort of constantly updated “diary”. This “diary” is maintained and updated as a git repository on Github.

As at the time of this blog post, the repository contains 60 Python solutions to about 55 programming puzzles and common coding interview questions. Find the repository here:https://github.com/davidadamojr/diary_of_programming_puzzles

 

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Ten Business Problems Besides Ecommerce for Nigerian Entrepreneurs To Solve

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Editor’s Note: This was originally published as “Why Nigerian entrepreneurs should solve other problems apart from ecommerce” by Dotun Olowoporoku.

Nigeria is almost a victim of it’s size. It’s almost too easy to have big ambition. The population size makes the country one of the most viable markets to monetise consumer products. It’s quite common to see startup founders creating various versions of ecommerce platforms than anything else.

I get it, size matters. After all, size is a significant factor that drove most of China’s stratospheric growth. It’s easier to build and monetise an online consumer product that provides a slight improvement to what people already do offline, rather than build a deep-tech product that intends to create new habits.

However, I think a lot of Nigerian startup entrepreneurs are getting blindsided by the population size. The reality is, research data on the number of people with access to internet and consumer behaviour in Nigeria is still patchy. Internet is still expensive. It’s not everyone that has a mobile phone, that uses the internet. It’s not everyone that uses the internet that trusts it enough shop online. It’s not everyone that shops online that does so regularly. So the total addressable market for ecommerce in Nigeria could be smaller than what you see on numerous pitch decks and telco-sponsored research reports.

Also, consumer internet business models are relatively easy to validate but expensive to scale. Customer acquisition cost tends to go up as the market matures and more competition enters the fray. The Mexican standoff between Jumia and Konga highlights how tough this could be. Both businesses are burning loads of cash for land grab and market share that is still mainly confined within Lagos. And there is going to be another big boy in the hood – Mara.

The bottom line is, except you have deep-pocket investors with the willingness to fight a long drawn battle for network effects, building an e-commerce  business at scale could be a hard one. So, why do so many Nigerian founders still default to ecommerce solutions? Well, I reckon it has a lot to do with size and solubility. The size of the market is alluring with an obvious demand. And most of the problems with e-commerce have been solved and can be adapted even in relatively immature markets.

So, it’s easier for Nigerian founders to demonstrate traction selling stuff online than trying to build a product that will make car registration in Nigeria more efficient. For the former, rallying your immediate friends and family network around your MVP can generate the first $100 in revenue, but the latter will take months of product development and government buy-in to demonstrate any meaningful traction.

However, technology and innovative business models can be used to solve other problems in Nigeria beyond buying and selling goods online. There are pockets of underserved and untapped markets in other spaces. Significant value and wealth can be created through B2B enterprise solutions that will create efficiencies in specific industries.

Nigerian founders should focus on problems-to-be-solved with technology rather money-to-be-made. Revenue is a reward for solving problems. Here are few that comes to mind.

  1. Nollywood Movie Subtitle Service: Use combination of human and machine learning algorithms to improve (cringe-worthy) subtitles on Nollywood movies.
  2. HR Management – Cloud-based SaaS for managing human resources including hiring, scheduling, payroll, staff evaluation, insurance and incentives.
  3. Expert Consultants On-Demand: Online marketplace for MBA and PhD consultants from world-class universities and companies to provide on-demand consulting services for African SMEs and organisations
  4. Office Building Check-in App: It’s annoying to sign into a tatty notebook at the security post before one is allowed to enter most office buildings in Nigeria. Someone needs to create a ‘foursquare-ish’ app that enables visitors to check-in to an office building via their mobile phone.
  5. Multi-channel Marketing Attribution: I assume millions of dollars is spent by brands to advertise in Lagos. There is an opportunity here for algorithm-based software that helps quantify the impact of marketing across online and offline channels and estimate ROI for these brands.
  6. Back-Office Automation– Lots of companies in Nigeria, including large banks and other financial service companies, still rely on manual/Excel-based processes to manage inventory, qualify leads, generate quotes and sell their products. Building vertical SaaS products to solve these problems will create significant value and increase efficiency
  7. Real Estate Investment Syndicate – Real estate will continue to be a decent investment opportunity in Nigeria. A platform that enables people to purchase equity in private real estate investments for as little as possible through crowdfunded syndicated deals will create value for buyers and sellers.
  8. Software Development Project Management –  match project owners with organised team of software developers, designers, project managers, testers and business analyst.
  9. Customer Review – Make it easier for businesses/brand to collect  and publish customer reviews and NPS survey results from various sources.
  10. Medical Diagnostics Lab –  enable users to discover and book private medical labs based on facilities, availability, expertise and user ratings. Provide subscription-based insurance programme that will guarantee routine medical checkup.

I believe there are many others that a lot of smart entrepreneurs in Nigeria may be working on. I look forward to seeing more ideas that can be added to this.

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Dotun currently works on Starta, a content and data platform that makes it easier to build, discover and track high growth business opportunities in Africa.