olibenu - Tumblr blog

[olibenu]

What do Seun Osewa and Linda Ikeji have in common? Very popular Nigerian online communities? No. There are both fighting to hold on to what isn’t theirs. Or what is no longer just theirs.

[olibenu]

Validating ideas.

Consumer technology can find a mass market when it saves us time, or money. Every person has their own preference for how they spend time and money. While some people would prefer to save time by spending more money (for example paying to avoid a queue at an airport) others prefer to save money by...

[olibenu]

This Jason's post brings to mind Kimbra's Come into my head. They are both around the theme: "But you’re always on the outside looking in".

Every day, Dick Costello gets hundreds of emails from well meaning (and some really horrid folk) regarding the strategy, misdirection or lack of specific feature sets at Twitter. I thought it was just me.

Almost daily, I too get given advice from well meaning people, speculators, bloggers...

[olibenu]

How to win at fisticuffs and business

[olibenu]

Not all that is Nigerian is African.

Once upon a time I believed Lagos, Nigeria was the centre of the [Africa] universe. It’s not [obviously], although I believe the most interesting and largest companies will be built here. I found a refreshing new perspective on a recent tour of East Africa. The continent’s largest economy is...

[olibenu]

The issue with laws: loopholes. A cyber café trying to stop customers from playing loud music. 'Carry along' an earpiece doesn't mean using it.

[olibenu]

* If you don’t know who these people are above, ask somebody.

Last week I was at the residence of the British Deputy High Commission in Ikoyi. Entrepreneur Country held a lovely dinner and round table event to promote the digital economy in Nigeria. To say titans were at the table is an...

[olibenu]

Disruptions: Balancing Nerdy and The Suit

In your quest to take over the world or disrupt a little part of it, there is a possibility you (or your team) will be made up of a kind of Pinky and the Brain combination: the Nerd (techie, geek) and the Suit (administrator, manager, money man). Here are a few tips to make things move a little bit more smoothly.

1. Understanding Mummy economics. (Darbur toothpaste isn't better than CloseUp just because it is bitter).

What has this got to do with disruption? Bear with me. Recall those who think their app, site or feature is the bomb because they wrote it in scala, haskell, erlang, brainfuck (yes, it does exist) or some other exotic ink? They are usually people suffering from the hello world disease.

Forget all that herbal hype. Who told you Dabur was better? Your mummy? Now that you are grown, have you ever wondered why mummy said that? Have you ever stopped to think that it was because you were using too much of the sweet minty CloseUp (even sucking it from the tube), so much so that a tube which had formerly lasted 3 weeks had to be replaced in 2? That a bitter Dabur lasted a month because you finally heeded the instruction and put a pea-sized amount on your brush?

I guess all that shrewd mummy economics was beyond you. Do not make the mistake again and think that because Nairaland was written in python and looks circa 1990, you can implement the same thing but with all the bells, whistles, ruby and rails without finding out what the 1 million plus people really want more out of Nairaland.

You will end up in the same boat as that Google engineer crying right now in front of a comparison of G+ and Facebook user stats. 'But, but, but... I used go! Which is way, way better than php!'.

Examples: Diaspora*, the Facebook killer.

Lesson: Learn the real reason why your users switched toothpastes. 2. Understanding the Average user. (Wake up and smell the Lipton! It's got milk and sugar!) Do you drink coffee? Black? Maybe. Do you take Lipton tea? Know anyone who doesn't add milk or sugar to it? Ever thought for a second such a person was NORMAL? I think not. But does Lipton see that too?

Have you seen their ads? A NORMAL person puts a tea bag into a cup, pours hot water and, sips it, just like that. Why would I do that? Why would a normal person do that? They do not even make an argument about it being good for your health like those aloe products. Hell, even Bournvita writes on their cans to add sugar and milk if required. Of course no one expects them to pay big bucks for advertising and then give a free referral to Peak milk, Cowbell or Dangote sugar so we forgive them. On the other hand, you the disruptor will have no such luxury.

Are you a Nigerian in the UK? No? Ok, so you live in Lagos or Abuja? Ok, Lagos then. Do you use the CCHub? Very good internet, yes? Tested your app there? Nice. Final question. How many Nigerians have that kind of connection? Will your Udacity clone help out students frustrated by ASUU with all those videos they can't stream? Don't even bother with implementing that cool javascript, that blur effect that gives your site pizzazz is going to take 5mb out of someone's hard earned 10mb plan!

I will concede that the internet experience has become better but take your head out of the clouds (and perhaps cloud computing too). Except you want to target a demographic the same percentage as those who take their Lipton tea black. Then that won't be disruption but catering to a niche market.

Examples: Tiketmobile, Hotels.ng and Facebook.

Lesson: You don't know what average is until you ask. One thing about disruptions is that they do the unexpected. Perhaps your Dabur toothpaste is really better than CloseUp just because it is bitter. Or your Lipton tea sells without milk or sugar. Until proven though, be ready to admit there's a chance your target audience really wants a faster horse and not a motor car. But what do I know? Keep doing the same thing we do every night, try to take over the world!

[olibenu]

Metadata could kill you

Not really. But it could put a serious cramp in your plans at evading Big Brother or bring down your credibility.

Recently, the Wendell Smith episode dominated the Nigerian internet scene. What had happened? A a Microsoft Word document's author metadata contained some incriminating information. Dwelling on the technology behind the episode and skipping the politics, what is metadata?

Metadata is data about data. It describes the content, context and other qualities of original data thus increasing the quality and enhancing its understanding. For example, a webpage may include metadata specifying what language it is written in, what tools were used to create it, and where to go for more on the subject, allowing browsers to automatically improve the experience of users.

You may think you are more tech savvy than Wendell Smith and have scrubbed that erring author metadata from that document you want to put out there. But is that all of it? Here are some ways metadata leak out more than you think.

Applications

Not only Microsoft Word tags its files with descriptive data. People creating PDF files tend to forget they also have author and subject metadata fields. Several papers, publications and other media in this form show improperly scrubbed identifying metadata. It is a pity the real Satoshi Nakamoto didn't slip up when publishing the bitcoin paper. Or did he?

Not only desktop applications tag the files they produce, mobiles app do too. Remember Oprah's famous tweet about her love for Microsoft's Surface from an iPad? Mobile apps such as Twitter, and Facebook tag your tweets and posts with metadata such as your phone type and location.

Websites

During the TechCabal Battlefield, before details about the contestants were posted, there was speculation that Callbase was eerily similar to Fonenode. How did we confirm that? A whois lookup on bothdomains. You may have worked around this by using different data when buying domains and forget that they are tools which can tell if two sites gather user stats via the same Google Analytics account.

Pictures

Remember John McAfee? He was on the run from a police investigation and allowed his picture to be taken by a journalist during an interview. What he didn't know was that the camera embedded location data in the picture. Big oops.

Music

A recent article on Torrentfreak was about a music group which made available for its fans, copies of their own music. Small problem though, the tracks seemed to have been downloaded from a pirate site. How was that information gleaned? Metadata in the mp3 files.

There are many more examples which show metadata behaving like Freudian slips. Technology really wants to tell the truth (after all, progressbars don't lie). But before you think you are far beyond these slips and think every identifying information has been scrubbed, remember that the path to that source code you are compiling right now might be embedded somewhere in your compiler's output.

[olibenu]

Have you annoyed your developers this year?

Have you annoyed your developers this year? It's not too late! Here are a few tips. Set up a meeting!

You’ve been preparing that Power Point slide for a while so why shouldn't it be compulsory? The best ones are the meetings you call to decide when to call the next meeting. Very exciting stuff. Or better yet, call a meeting to decide coding standards or to suggest features for the new app planned for next year. Yeah, forget about using tools like Git for stuff like that. At least, until someone raises it at the next meeting.

Fail to ‘get’ their jokes.

Don't even do it in the cute laughable way of a Dilbertan manager. Fumble even the easiest so as to deny them any chance of a boss who at least tries. When next you see one of them inspired and in the zone, interrupt and ask what the following means: There are only 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary, and those who don’t.

  Treat them as regular users.

Why not? Save a little money by having them design your GUIs. Resist all evidence that shows that it is too late to save developers. Forget that any one who has written a ‘hello world’ in any language is not a regular user. Ask them to design something a regular user would use. And when they fail, set up a meeting to tell them it's their fault.

  Always use ‘just’ and ‘only’.

In need of some context? Tell them, the documentation needs ‘just’ one more page. The web team need add ‘only’ multilingual support. Hell, why do they always drag their feet? Damn lazy developers!

Ran out of ideas?

Fiddle with the the internet connection. The server OS too. Or license a new IDE as the year closes. You could ban their toys (especially the duck).

There isn’t really much use giving you the full list. We wouldn't want them to develop a tolerance, would we?

[olibenu]

Call 911! My country’s never heard of it!

I suppose you’ve heard about the dumb blonde. She could not call 911 because she could not find the ‘11' button. Nigerian’s are not blonde

Or dumb. We can’t call 911 though.

The government has spent a lot of money on security. Telecoms too. You would have thought some of of it would trickle into establishing emergency numbers. Try calling 911 in Nigeria. Your not-made-in-Nigeria phone recognizes it as an emergency number or SOS but what does your Nigerian network do?

Nothing.

The Nigerian Police Force gives a long string of numbers for people to call in tips about robberies and the like. Some Police Inspector, in a bid to make us think he is more dedicated, says one of those numbers is his - to reach him day or night. I wonder if he forgets that he could retire someday. What do we do then?

The Federal Road Safety Commission is the same. Have you been involved in an accident? As your vision grows blurry by the minute with pain, take your pick from any one of our five 11 digit phone numbers. Remember to load your phone enough with credit first, we are still working on the toll-free situation.

Is it the fire service? Call our number too. While you’re at it, we will be filling the tank with water.

Not even religion, which unites Nigerians best after football, is any different. Want to report the sighting of the new moon? Call our non-toll-free 11 digit number, your reward is in paradise.

My country has never heard of toll free emergency numbers. What number do I call for this emergency?

[olibenu]

If it ain't broke, don't hurry.

"If it ain't broke, don't fix it" may have worked for Elop's Nokia. Or heeded by Mayer's Yahoo. But is it true in every case?

No, it isn't. If it isn't broke, don't hurry, take your time, but DO fix it! We might not call it crap because it works. As soon as there's an option though, it's hasta la vista, baby. And it's going to cost you too.

When was the last time you used the IM client, 2go? It was the SMS killer of Java based phones. All it needed was a phone that could run java apps and an internet connection. It was a simple concept: get the app, import your phonebook and chat with your contacts. It spread like wild fire. Everyone was on 2go all the time. More so to boost their 2go stars from Novice through Enthusiast to Master, a nice streak of gamification.

How does 2go fare presently? Not too good. They are being eclipsed by Whatsapp. Especially on smartphones. Why? The old 2go was not broke so it wasn't fixed! Now, if their aim is to be the SMS killer, they had better step up or step down for Saya.

What was 'not broke' with the app?

First of all, there were too many boundaries to using the app. Each step presented to a prospective user, is the last straw for another. One, you had to know your phone's model. There was a time when this information was common knowledge. Not anymore. Either make a one-size-fits-all app or determine the user phone model behind the scenes like Whatsapp does. Two, new accounts could not be created on the app, one had to go to their website first. While there, you had to specify a unique username too (effectively ignoring the phonenumber). Three, shortcodes were used if you had to retrieve a forgotten password. It was not free. Finally, users could not get into the app to view old chat conversations when the phone was offline. And so on.

These quirks did not break the app per se. So, they were not fixed. But as they say, it is the little things that give you away.

Secondly, 2go did not press their advantage. How? For a lot of people moving to smartphones, 2go had a lot of potential. Before such people moved on to newer platforms such as Twitter, Whatsapp or BBM, it stands to reason that they would first of all get their old favourite app. 2go did not make this easy. There was no deal with Nokia or Tecno to bundle the 2go app with new handsets. The apps that existed for the new platforms (Android at least) were horrible ports of the same old java app which was definitely no contender with other IM apps. The user was torn between sticking with the old familiar app he knew which now performs abominably on the shiny new device or go for the other smooth, already bundled app which everyone says is the next big thing. Other arrangements such as with a telco to provide the service at a fixed monthly cost like Airtel does with Whatsapp were absent.

All these were little things that could be ignored by 2go Interactive. Why not? The house was not on fire.

If 2go was built on something open (like Whatsapp is on XMPP), perhaps the Open Source community would have helped. They are a brilliant, tireless bunch which help along projects dragging their feet because their products are not broke. They would have polished 2go's dull gems. Such as the fact that it is more social than Whatsapp, encouraging more user interactions (notice how it informs you of new contacts, people who have changed their status from the last time you checked and those who are currently online, a lot of which Whatsapp does not).

I made an effort at an API once. A hacker friend of mine did port the new 2go for Android to the BB10 OS (you may ask how). All these are only hints at what the makers of the app should do.

2go ain't broke, but they are fixing it. The site is looking better and there is a new app in the playstore. There is more to 'fixing it' than attending to technology though. They had better hurry up and do something about the thousands getting new Tecno smartphones by the day.

[olibenu]

My first Medium post

The Pelican Brief: the sneeze that starts the avalanche. Never knew I had an account on Medium did you? It's @olibenu and I just published “The Pelican Brief”. Here is a link to it. Do sneeze after you read it.

[olibenu]

Startups for dummies

A letter from my present self to my future self with a few tips about startups.

Dear future me,  I feel you might forget these few points gleaned from the Tiketmobile saga when we eventually launch our own startup in the future so I'm posting this now so we do not forget. 

1. No one has a monopoly on ideas.

The fact that we have this cool idea is enough to resonate someone else's brain to the same frequency. We have to be much more than an idea before we pitch. Before they walk a mile to criticize us, we will be a mile away and still with our shoes!

2. No one is a vulture... even though they are capitalists. It is a startup eat startup world. No one is going to apologize for cloning our stuff. Why? See point 1. Need more reasons? All is fair in love and war. And make no mistake, business is war!

3. A startup is a business... not a place to brag about our cool hack, impressive backend or cool GUI. Leave that for GitHub. It's profit, profit, profit! The only reason to reject more money is even more money, not even a plan to make more money (because we all know how accurate plans are). See that site nairaland.com? It looked the same way it does now back when I was writing this piece. It's not about the tech, it is about the money. Or will be eventually. 4. There's nothing new under the sun. Any scenario that comes up has most definitely been endured by some startup before. You could take Jessica Livingston's book Founders at Work and see. Ran out of money? The Blogger story is found in chapter 8. VC not giving you more funds? See Hotmail's story in chapter 2. There are other such war stories where lessons can be gleaned from. 5. Power the startup with fufu Or amala, tuwo, akpu or any similar backend. You can then boast that our startup is totally locally brewed, hence scoring a few points in your sphere. No more Ribena quaffing.

I'm sure you learnt other tips and are now raking in the money. If time travel has being invented, do pop back and credit my account will you? Or bring R.R. Martin's final books (we really want to know if the dragon girl got to sit on the iron throne).  Thanks. Present me.

[olibenu]

Is my app worth its salt?

To be worth one's salt is to be effective and efficient therefore deserving of one's pay.

The phrase came from before the invention of canning and refrigeration, when the primary method of food preservation was salt. Also, the word salary derives from Latin for salt.

An app is a reflection of its developer. It can help with the valuation of its creator. Some say developers are a dime a dozen, I wonder if they count script kiddies. The script kiddie, after watching The Lion King, thinks lions are cute. Script kiddies not only watch TV, they also see a snippet of code from some site online, blindly use it and then call themselves developers.

There is always a difference though, between script kiddies and newbies. I was a newbie. I still am in some areas. Like Scott Adams says in his book The Dilbert Principle:

Everyone is an idiot, not just the people with low SAT scores.  The only differences among us is that we're idiots about different things at different times.  No matter how smart you are, you spend much of your day being an idiot.

There are some ways to know if your are a newbie or are fast growing out of it. It is by asking the question: Is my app (or product, design, output, whatever) worth its salt?

First answer to the question is the PC test. Everyone now has a personal computer (PC) or easy access to one so it is common place to write something and hit F5 to debug it. This was not always the case. There were times when you wrote some code and had to wait a while to schedule time on some humongous computer to debug it. Now, F5 or a browser refresh will tell you if a bracket has not being closed or a semicolon is missing on a line. This is the PC test: where the computer answers if your app is worth its salt. There is a more advanced step in this test: unit tests. It might be as complex as scheduling time on a computer at first but it gets better.

So, your app passed the first test? Time for the next: The other user test. Give your creation to some other person to test. You will be amazed with The Dolt Surprise:

When Apple's Mac team designed the dialog boxes for the Lisa, it had two buttons: 'Do It' and 'Cancel'. During user trials, the team was baffled by the user behaviour: users would not click the 'Do It' button to perform the action specified by the dialog. Their frustration increased as each new user shunned what was to them an obvious choice until they asked a user. The user answered:

I'm not a dolt*, why should I click that?

*dolt: a person who is not very bright.

The users were reading 'Do It' as 'dolt', a problem that arose from capital I looking like lower case l in the font they used.

So, you see that what your app does may be crystal clear to you (after all, you are its designer and it has NOT been a while since you looked at its innards) but give just 1 other person free rein of it and you will see it through other eyes.

Is your app worth its salt? The third test is this. Unleash several users on it and you will know. The multiuser test will show you how fast things really are, what you have over looked and other stuff you did not forsee. Here, you will know if it was a good idea to use a small int or if 20 characters is long enough for a person's name. You might begin to read about scaling sharding, parallel processes and the cloud. You will lose a lot of sleep here if you did not do things right.

The fourth and final test is the special case test. Everything now works well. Users understand your app as well as you do, a crowd of users does not break it. But can you handle the special cases? It is like being a baby carriage manufacturer. One baby is the norm, twins are not as common but are not rare. The question is, can you handle triplets?

A good example is when your app is so good that you have users all around the world. You then begin to thinl of translation. Every single label in your app you had thought was constant now becomes a regional variable. Then the crisis climbs another notch: you have to include languages with cyrillic characters or those that read from right to left (and also got a bunch of characters your database has to work with). As is that was not enough trouble, you get the Chinese where you handle characters, dialects and they slam you with another: censorship! You now have to manage mainland China and Taiwan differently. At this point, I am sure you will wish the most excruciating death to any one who values your app below $1 billion.

[olibenu]

Have you ever laid an Easter egg?

It is regular practice to replace the core of Christian themes. Christmas with Santa, Easter with the Easter bunny and Easter eggs.

So, let me just say what Easter really means before I move on.

Easter is when that dude Jesus, you know, the little baby born last December (Christmas, dummy!) died and resurrected. Some buddies of his did not believe he had risen especially the one called Tom. He had to stick his hand into J's wound before he did.

Ok, let's get down to business. Where were we? Ok, easter eggs.

Easter eggs are special eggs that are often given to celebrate Easter or springtime. We have already covered that. The other Easter egg is an intentional hidden message, inside joke, or feature in a work such as a computer program, movie, book, or crossword.

They have been around since 1979 when Atari's Adventure contained the first video game "Easter egg" to be discovered by its players, being the name of the game's programmer, Warren Robinett.

Since then, Easter eggs have been in various products of the tech scene: inside jokes by nerds for nerds. Some of my favourite examples are from desktop applications especially games such as GTA Vice City which is riddled with them. Also, VLC Player has a neat Easter egg I discovered some Christmas past. The VLC cone wears a Santa hat every year, in the month of December from 18th to January 1st.

Like it happens in the Dilbertian universe, the management doesn't just get it. Some have expressed 'security concerns' about Easter eggs, others are not comfortable with some of the subjects of the Easter eggs.

My question is this: do Nigerian developers put easter eggs in their products? Do they have a little time to do something fun like the Google Doodle?

I asked some of the people I follow on twitter: @celestocalculus who is part of the @tiketmobileapp team and @kehers of @proworkapp, a collaboration tool, one of the apps which won the apps4africacompetition.

You could guess the answer. 2/2: NO.

These are fun-loving guys who know (and I'm sure) enjoy a little hacker humour. So why haven't they done something like that in their apps? I guess e no easy to do all the features of a good app and then add a little Easter egg that a lot of people might not find or even understand.

Why is it that well established companies still partake in what some might call tomfoolery? Surely, Google has come a long way from two guys who had an impulse to tinker with the design of their logo to a company which (I think) sets up a Doodle committee, sorry, Doodle team (I had quite forgotten not every one has the Nigerian penchant for committees).

Doodling and other inside jokes seem to me to be a way to boost morale and attract young talent. Whatever the reason you might have for laying an Easter egg, always check that it is approved by the suits (or not found by them at all). We do not want them firing the whole team because they are lucky to understand a less complex Dilbert joke, do we?

[olibenu]

How is running a business different from playing Whac-a-Mole?

I cannot wait to ask the above title as a question in an interview. 

I am going to add it to what I have learnt from Joel Spolsky's book: Smart and Gets Things Done.

I can just imagine the responses.

Is that a trick question? No, it is not.

Are you serious? Yeah, like a heartattack.

What is Whac-a-Mole? Next!

Ok, you got me there. I would not really say 'next'. Expecting everyone to know about the game is like expecting Windows developers to know what a 'diff' means. Or iPhone users to understand freedom. It's a culture thing.

What is Whac-a-Mole? It is a popular arcade game invented in 1976. Typically, it consists of a cabinet with five holes in its top and a large, soft, black mallet. Each hole contains a single plastic mole and the machinery necessary to move it up and down. Once the game starts, the moles will begin to pop up from their holes at random. The object of the game is to force the individual moles back into their holes by hitting them directly on the head with the mallet, thereby adding to the player's score. The quicker this is done the higher the final score will be.

If the player does not strike a mole within a certain time or with enough force, it will eventually sink back into its hole, giving the player no score. Although gameplay starts out slow enough for most people to hit all of the moles that rise, it gradually increases in speed, with each mole spending less time above the hole and with more moles outside of their holes at the same time

Whac-a-Mole has many non-arcade variants today but the principles remain basically the same:

There are a number of moles.

Moles spend less and less time above their holes. And

More and more moles are outside their holes at the same time.

So, what is the answer to the question? It is simple. The difference between running a business and playing Whac-a-Mole is this:

The moles in a business do real damage.

Every other thing is the same.

In some countries of the world, running a business, say, a tech startup gets you started on a Whac-a-Mole with a beginner setting. The fact that you have some moles is acknowledged as normal by most. The second factor of moles spending a lessening time above their holes is also mild as you have those with experience who can predict the moles' actions. More and more moles outside their holes at the same time? No pressure, you are not the only one with a mallet therefore, you do not strike alone.

That might be a little cryptic. It will become clearer, be patient.

Suppose you are in another country (my oga at the top would not let me say which), the Whac-a-Mole is set on expert!

First of all, people ask you why there should be any moles. That is, why should the business have a few hiccups as it starts? Nobody wants to think that this is normally the case for most businesses.

Secondly, the moles are elusive, spending less and less time above their holes. You experience bugs which refuse to be replicated. Some things just decide not to work for no apparent reason (GSM Networks and their crappy internet, watch out for the mallet). Some moles are even bold enough not to retreat into their hole. No amount of clubbing works (that black mole PHCN is a good example).

While these are busy prancing up and down with no one to help you predict which hole one is going to leap up from so that your mallet will be ready, you begin to notice that the third principle is already underway. A lot of moles are outside their holes, daring you to do something. Perhaps someone steals your equipment (what can you do? When it happened to me, they (you know who) wrote it down on a sheet titled Conspiray and Rubbry [sic] and that was it, nothing more).

Or ...

You could just give up. Try whack the moles somewhere else where the setting is lower. A location where the number of uncertainties in the system is much lower. For this dear country of mine, I fear that it looks more and more each day like Pandora (the planet in the Avatar movie). Everything is involved in the conspiracy. Insecurity, corruption, absence of infrastructure, and much more which I cannot hammer down. After all, are they not moles?