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GroupBuyNg Joins QluQlu and DealDey As More Nigerian Companies Juggle Group Buying

By
Tekedia Editors
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5

We wrote this few weeks ago on the social buying companies:

 

When Groupon – the U.S. based web behemoth – purchased Twangoo , a South Africa company, we felt that a new phase of M&A is starting in Africa.  Groupon is the undisputed global leader in the crowd-buying business where group of people get discounts for shopping at stipulated time and place. But after rejecting Google’s $6b acquisition offer, it has come through enormous competitions, from copy-cats. LivingSocial which has received good funding from investors is leading this charge.

 

So, it was not a surprise that Groupon with the massive funds in their disposals were moving global, especially Africa to lock threats. That was when it picked Twangoo – the leader in South Africa in this sector. With South Africa done, it must be Nigeria. That is where Qluqlu and DealDey come into play. Both are still young and expanding. Possibly, if they execute, Groupon or LivingSocial could acquire them. With their offers, you can get a 30-70% discount if you crowd-buy with others!

 

It has been estimated that these two leaders in Nigeria have saved more than N1m to users of their services. Of course with that success, more people will join. That is what a new one, named Group Buy Nigeria is doing.

 

As these services become popular, more players will come. Group Buy Nigeria is just a new one and will be ready this summer. We need to see the innovation they bring into this game. If they have the resources to massively promote their services as DealDey is doing, they will be successful. This business requires enormous investment in advertising.

 

Analysis

It is very important that Nigerian startups become innovative and think of new ways to come with new products and services. While a clone of the foreign ideas is workable, we need to dream locally and see how we can become global game changers. QluQlu, Dealdey and Group Buy Nigeria are all playing games populated by many people and getting separated in this low entry barrier business is critical.

 

Does Nigeria need this model? Can we sustain this business model? Time will tell, but the fact remains that Africans are not thinking innovatively. We are lead by the external world and we just follow. This is very unfortunate.

Maiden FAAMLS Scientific Conference Planned – October 2011

By
Tekedia Editors
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0

The Federation of African Associations of Medical Laboratory Scientists is a non profit organization made up of membership of African countries’ national associations of medical laboratory scientists and individual biomedical scientists / laboratory consultants practicing in Africa.

 

This scientific meeting is geared towards sensitization of laboratory professionals to become proactive change agents towards enhancement of quality in medical laboratory services in Africa.

 

Goal? Improved quality of medical laboratory services in Africa is at the core of the United Nations health related Millennium Development Goals especially in the combating of HIV/AIDS/STIs, TB, Malaria and other tropical diseases through continuing professional development on appropriate diagnostic protocol, capacity building and strengthening of African laboratory professionals aimed at reducing mortality and morbidity especially in mothers and children.


It was inaugurated in Yaounde, Cameroon in March 2005 with the objective of encouraging high professional training and practice standards in medical laboratory services and research. FAAMLS mission is to turn around the present decrepit standard of medical laboratory services across the continent in collaboration with governmental and non governmental organizations.

 

It planned a maiden conference this spring but has to postpone to October. Some Expected Participants:

 

  • Medical Laboratory Scientists
  • Laboratory Physicians & Clinicians
  • Biomedical Scientists / Consultants
  • Other Health Professionals
  • Collaborators’ Representatives

 

Date:  6th to 8th October 2011

 

Venue: Sheraton Hotel and Towers (Abuja?)

 

In an email, the group communicated that they are still accepting abstracts:

 

We would like to use this postponement to perfect every aspect of the
preparation for this  African Great Event and urge you to seize this
opportunity to register online (if you had not registered before the
postponement), make your payment and send your abstract to the Scientific
Committee through abstract@faamls.org

Please, do take note of the following important dates:
1.    The Early Bird Registration closes on 6th September 2011
2.    The dateline for the submission of abstract is the 15th August 2011

 

(contents adapted from faamls webiste)

 

As drug design and development becomes important, this type of conference can improve the quality and and readiness of the continent in moving to the generic drug market. Recently, many MNC drug giants are licensing their drugs so that developing economies can make them cheaply and save lives. We think that Africa must intensify efforts in this regard. A gathering like this will surely help.

The International Monetary Fund Targeted in Cyberattack -A “Sophisticated and Serious” One

By
Tekedia Editors
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0

Yahoo News reports that the International Monetary Fund was investigating a cyber-attack launched in its computer system. According to the news source, the IMF maintained that the organization is fully functional without any indication that any sensitive data has been compromised. Yet, the  “New York Times cited unnamed IMF officials as saying the attack was sophisticated and serious”.

 

Concerns about the IMF attack were great enough that the World Bank cut a computer link that allows the two organizations to share non-sensitive information, according to a bank official. The move was taken out of “an abundance of caution,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the security issues around the incident.

 

The operation of the IMF requires in some cases they maintain data on some countries in financial trouble which are not made available to the general public. So hackers have an incentive to get that kind of data even for investment purposes. For instance, knowing that a country is going to default on its loan based on IMF negotiation can help an investor decide how to trade on that nation’s bond. There are many reasons why hackers can target IMF.

 

It seems that this decade is evolving as the decade of hackers with so many hacks emerging already. Even in the developing nations, we have seen the enormous level of hacker activity in banks, companies and even governments. Many Nigerian federal websites were compromised when a group of hackers launched attacks to protest the nature of  governance in the nation. This means that organizations must be up and doing and work hard to secure their digital assets.

 

In the last few months, we have noted a number of cyber breaches and this all call for a stakeholders discussion about the future of the internet and security. It is important that the world looks at this and sees how we can redesign the web architectures to curtail this trend that is harming the confidence and trust of many in participating in the digital economy.

Technology is redesigning the global structure and in most cases it is changing the ways we do things. As we move from the meatspace to the cyberspace to conduct our businesses, we must not forget that what worked in the old cubicles is still relevant now. Organizations must note that without adequate security, any investment on digital asset is unwise. We must work hard to anticipate that people will like to steal digital assets and mitigate those actions before they happen.

 

Bad guys are not going away and what that implies is that we have to put more efforts to secure and plan for our assets especially now most are moving online. 

 

Tekedia Analyses On RIM Acquisition of Scoreloop – A German Mobile Social Games Platform

By
Tekedia Editors
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2

On their website, they have a very good news for their users. Scoreloop has been acquired by RIM. They noted that the focus is to get Blackberry gaming platform to move to the next level. And they promise that they will see that Blackberry platform is “unparallelled”.

What just happened is an industry consolidation which will continue in the early part of this decade. With RIM buying this German mobile social gaming community, they want to elevate the BB platform and possibly rekindle the old spark in BB they have lost since the arrival of iPhone.

Scoreloop was founded in March 2008 and has raised more than $2.8m. The initial plan was to provide  multiplayer challenge games with a focus on iPhone. But it deviated and then moved into the domain where community of developers could work to add socialgraph and interactions on their games. This include the scoring sheet, messaging, virtual currency, etc. As they made progress, Android evolved as the centerpiece of their strategy as more works seemed to make it the primary operating system. But with time, it supports all the leading mobile OS. Scoreloop supports Windows Phone, iOS, Android, and Bada (Samsung) operating systems. We are not sure if the HP Palm WebOS is supported by Scoreloop. Also,  Symbian has no information.

 

This is the entry on CrunchBase.

Scoreloop focuses on building the best mobile gaming technology to extend any game to the social arena. Scoreloop is neither a game developer nor publisher, and therefore does not compete within their market. Instead, Scoreloop cooperates with all players of the mobile gaming value chain – from game developers and aggregators, to publishers and portals – to maximize their gamers’ experience, improve their community’s cohesiveness, and provide them with additional revenue streams.

 

RIM will bring the Scoreloop technology to the blackberry. This has a potential to make the Blackberry Social Platform better. Scoreloop technology has made it a strong contender for the consolidation wave as more companies are looking for social games in their mobile ecosystems. When DeNA bought Ngmoco in a $400m deal, it made it clear that the industry was not timid on games. Also the Electronic Arts bought Chillingo for $29m while GREE went for OpenFeint in excess of $100m.

 

So, it is very obvious that anyone without a game strategy could be in peril right now. That is why what RIM has done on Scoreloop makes sense. The team will bring expertise to the BB  gaming environment and possibly  help it challenge the competitions that other OS like iOS and Android are mounting. But Rim is in catch up mode now. With the new iOS5, Apple has incorporated iMessage which can compete with BBM which has found followers in the teen market. The Apple Game Center platform is also a huge challenge for Rim to mount against.

 

Though BB is a business focused product, it cannot ignore that the line between business and leisure has blurred. So by moving agreeively into the social climate of games in its products, Tekedia believes they did the right thing. Gaming has never been the catch for business applications, yet, it will not hurt by providing it to wage off competitions to its core market. Apple continues to churn out blockbuster games through the armies of developers, with games leading the Apple Apple store download in recent months. For BB to move from its tepid gaming history and success, Scoreloop seems to be the right move.

 

Our conclusion is that this is a good acquisition and BB users in Nigeria and indeed Africa will get better value when BB service is fully integrated with Scoreloop technology. Nigerian developers that are already working in the Scoreloop community will easily migrate to offering solutions to BB gaming platform. We think that RIM did a good deal.

Facebook Auto-Tagging of Photos – EU Probes Facial Recognition Feature

By
Tekedia Editors
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0

Facebook has begun auto-tagging  of photos so that users do not have to manually select their friends when they upload photos for tagging. As soon as you post the photos, Facebook will automatically know them and immediately tag them accordingly.

 

Every day, people add more than 100 million tags to photos on Facebook. They do it because it’s an easy way to share photos and memories. Unlike photos that get forgotten in a camera or an unshared album, tagged photos help you and your friends relive everything from that life-altering skydiving trip to a birthday dinner where the laughter never stopped. Tags make photos one of the most popular features on Facebook.

 

The goal is that as more users easily tag people, the level of activity in the site will increase. Easy tagging, more photo sharing!

 

In the same vein, European Union regulators said they will investigate the facial recognition technology which Facebook employs to do this auto-tagging and other products in the site. They maintained that users are not asked for permission before they are lumped into the technology.

 

A U.S. privacy group has also asked the United States Federal Trade Commission to investigate the matter as well.

 

What happens is that when users upload photos, Facebook technology, Tag Suggestions, automatically analyzes the photo database and then suggest names for the tagging of the photos. The regulators are insisting that Facebook must seek for prior consent while Facebook noted that anyone can easily opt out.

 

Facebook is a behemoth where 100 million tags are done daily.

 

Analyses

The use of facial recognition technology has been employed in different fields, including security and policing. Facebook is just bringing this to the social media network. Facebook perhaps could be using the iris recognition and the prior names people have given for each person in their database to do this.

 

It is harmless simply on the bases that anyone posting anything online should not have any illusion of privacy. The regulators can do what they want as they need to justify their jobs, but the people using Facebook may not really care for the efforts they are putting.  Technology should not be trumped on the altar of privacy and in this case, this technology can even help law enforcement. Just get a photo of a criminal, put it in Facebook and it could help you develop a footprint especially if the person is working with different names.

 

Our world is such that anything you do outside your home could appear online – it could be satellite images of Google trying to map the world or a neighbor filming  you. All we need to do is simple: do not do anything that seeing online will embarrass you because the world of privacy has since gone.

 

In most parts of the world, there is no information that a simple googling cannot reveal about people. Someone can easily find out your home address, your income level, your phone number, your age, just by knowing your name. It is a new world and Facebook is just participating in this social redesign.

 

 

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