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Spark School Shares What It Takes To Succeed in Startups

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Spark School of Entrepreneurship, founded by Bola Adeboye, is a not – for-profit organization whose objective is offering entrepreneurship training and development for young and aspiring businessmen and women.

Recently, it held some programs on business startups and these are the summaries for aspiring startups:

–          You must be able to analyze and estimate the cost of going into the business in order to be a successful entrepreneur in life

–           for business start-ups to survive, satisfaction, financial gain, stability and enjoyment must be considered as yardsticks before going into the business.

Highlighting other strategies, they said, an individual must not expect to be effective and successful in business unless he or she truly believes in the business and in the good and services that will sell. Others strategies include planning and building habits that every business owner should develop, implement and maintain.

Manage money wisely by promoting and marketing the business to ensure that cash keeps flowing and at all the time. Accordingly, individual must always remember that his or her customers’s priority must be number one at all times, becoming a shameless self-promoter saying that such acts would make an individual to be able to do a proper evaluation on his business.

They said, business owners must go out of their way and make a conscious efforts to always project the most professional business image possible, taking advantage of possible opportunities, seeking an expert’s opinion or business problems, as well as defining the uniqueness in the proposed business.

They also maintained that entrepreneurs must be able ti invest in themselves by buying and reading books of great experts who have succeeded as entrepreneurs.

The Acumen Fund $1.8m Investment in Ghanaian Sproxil Shows Why Innovation Rules

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The news broke, March 22, 2011 that Acumen Fund,  a nonprofit global venture fund addressing poverty in South Asia and East Africa,  invested in Ghanaian Sproxil, Inc., a company that provides a Mobile Product Authentication™ (MPA™) solution that enables consumers to verify that the pharmaceutical product they are buying is genuine. The $1.8 million investment aims to help Sproxil to build its sales teams in the U.S. and Nigeria; to begin Sproxil’s expansion into India and Kenya; and to provide further improvements to the technology.

A press release read in part:

“With a decade of experience, Acumen Fund continues to invest in innovative businesses that have the potential to improve millions of lives and revolutionize emerging industries,” said Jacqueline Novogratz, CEO, Acumen Fund. “Sproxil will help combat the multi-billion dollar counterfeit drug market, empower customers and give them the resources to make informed pharmaceutical purchasing decisions. We will also gain key insights into the dynamics and possibilities of mobile technology, an increasingly critical tool for improving the lives of billions in the developing world, which we can then share with the community at large.”

Sproxil’s MPA solution allows consumers to verify that the product they are buying is genuine by using a mobile phone and a simple, free text message. Sproxil uses a scratch card method, similar to that used for replenishing cellular talk-time, to allow users to reveal a one-time-use code on drugs and text the code to a “911 for fake drugs” number which is identical on all cellular networks within a country. A response is dispatched from Sproxil’s servers, indicating whether the drug is genuine or fake. If a fake product is found, a consumer is given a hotline number to call in order to report the fake product. The hotline is a Sproxil call center that currently reports the fake product to the Nigerian Agency for Food, Drug and Administrative Control (NAFDAC) for further investigation. In other countries, the counterfeit product is reported to the appropriate authorities.

Recently many African startups are receiving funds – Ushahidi, Virtual City and the hosts of other companies. The key thing is that the innovative ones will get more phone calls because their ideas are great. It is about finding a niche and executing to capitalize on that. Africa is at the point in history where the world is looking to trade with it as a balanced partner and anyone that innovates will be rewarded.

Sproxil was founded in 2009, has 12 staff members and offices in Somerville, Mass. and Lagos, Nigeria.

Mobile Monday –Kenya Is Powering Kenya’s Mobility Computing Innovation

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In Kenya, most Mondays, developers gather together to discuss and share ideas on mobile app development. Mobile Monday – Kenya is indeed helping Kenya to become a leader in mobility computing in Africa. This is something other African countries must look into and replicate. Good enough, it did not even start in Kenya – they just adopted it. We know Barcamp, for instance Barcamp Nigeria, but the specificity of Mobile Monday makes it cool. Companies like Nokia, MTN and others are using these events to tap and create partnerships with these local developer communities. African youth is taking over the technology roadmap and they are getting it right.

From Mobile Monday – Kenya

Mobile Monday is a global community of mobile industry visionaries, developers and influentials fostering cooperation and cross-border business development through virtual and live networking events to share ideas, best practices and trends from global markets.

Mobile Monday has the following objectives:

  • To encourage innovation within the mobile sector.
  • To facilitate networking between small and large companies, and between local and foreign.
  • To help local companies effectively participate in international initiatives through the import and export of visions, concepts, technologies, know-how and best practices.
  • To present innovative visions, trends, studies and forecasts from the mobile marketplace.
  • To facilitate and create partnerships.
  • To contribute to the education of the broader public through its publications, online presence and media partnerships.

Mobile Monday is organized by a group of dedicated volunteers from around the world. Originating in Helsinki, Finland, in the year 2000, Mobile Monday has grown into the world’s leading mobile community.

History

The remarkable MobileMonday phenomenon began almost by accident in Helsinki, Finland during the autumn of 2000. A couple of well-known Finnish visionaries, invited the who’s who of the Finnish mobile industry to a pub for an informal get-together and perhaps a warming drink. The only suitable time? Monday evening.

After meeting many new faces and discussing the latest in mobility, the group decided to continue meeting on the first Monday of each month — and thus, MobileMonday was born. Towards the end of 2004, the movement started to spread to other areas of the world and new MoMo chapters were started in Tokyo, Japan, Silicon Valley, UsA as well as Rome and Milan, Italy. Since then, the number of MobileMonday chapters and members has dramatically increased making MobileMonday the world’s leading mobile community.

Eyes on Africa: Developers’ Africa – A Nokia Video

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Nokia Video Link

Nokia is finding time to promote its activities in Africa despite the competition from Apple and other phone makers! In a video titled Eyes on Africa, Nokia highlights some of their works in the contenta and how they are supporting  innovative, locally relevant solutions for the continent.

Eyes on Africa is a series of four films, focusing on the work being done by Nokia in the continent.   Interestingly, Nokia has done very well. It is very important to note that $1m prize won by Kenyan Virtual City. That is a lot of money and it will go along way to expand and hire more people.

The main challenge is that this project must be African-wide and not localized within East Africa.

Kenyan PesaPal Looks to Enterprises For Growth – Paying Schools Fees Via Mobile Phone

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The mobile business dynamics of Africa differs from those of Western Europe and U.S. and Canada. This calls for a radically different approach when it comes to technology and business in an African context. Accordingly,  PesaPal, a payment gateway was developed and has been running successfully over the past few years. The company understood the poor state of credit card penetration in Kenya and is trying to help fill that void in a sector that is already crowded by MPesa (Safaricom), YuCash (Yu), Zap (Airtel) and Orange Money (Orange).

But this company wants to take the strategy to an enterprise level. So, developers and businesses can monetize their applications, by implementing online payments for goods and services. They want to stay in that domain and control it. This is what Pesapal wants to do differently. For instance,  the current strategy is to go after a large untapped market – school fees. PesaPal is currently working with schools to enable parents to remit school fees using mobile payment platforms. This is a safe and convenient method, as opposed to the traditional methods of bank transfers and cheques.

Kenyan has advanced its mobile payment – Nigeria is just starting. But as this technology penetrates, there is going to be more innovations as more players come into it.