Ever since he could remember, Ibrahim Boakye had a knack for understanding how things worked. There were things he could just do that no other kids– let alone adults– could understand. By the time he was five-years-old everyone had stopped questioning it, and neighbors were calling on him to fix their broken toasters, irons, or anything that was the least bit mechanical.
By his early teens, he… → Read More
Earlier today, I wrote about our brush with machetes, the chaotic world of Nigerian filmmaking, and a company called Iroko Partners that’s working on bringing order and YouTube distribution to Nollywood. It’s made stunning progress in the short four months it has been in business, and it’s barely scratched the surface of Nollywood demand.
Below is a video we shot with founder Jason Njoku. He… → Read More
It was when they pulled out the machetes that I started to worry.
I’d seen men with machetes in Africa before, but they were rusty, practical tools used for clearing away brush by the side of the highway. These were long, shiny and housed in decorative sheaths, pulled out ostensibly so the men could sit down more comfortably, but done with a clear, understated flair. They were more like sultan… → Read More
Last week I wrote about Computer Village, where many of the gadget-hounds in Lagos go to get their gadgety fix. But what about new technology being developed in the country? The city’s tech entrepreneur scene is small, but several people are working on changing that.
Oo Nwoye– or @oothenigerian as he’s known on Twitter– is one of the more enthusiastic champions of this nascent scene. (That’s… → Read More
LAGOS, NIGERIA– I’m in Lagos to speak at an event and decided to come a week early to check out the country’s tech and entrepreneurship scene.
Apparently Arrington thought I was kidding when I told him this. But he should know by now, I don’t need a lot of arm twisting to visit a country of 150 million people chaotically surging into modernity. Where there’s that much opportunity, there’s always… → Read More
Whuh oh. There’s something called the Konyin keyboard that basically has a second shift key function which allows its typist to use the different letters and symbols of Latin-based alphabets from around the world. The company that developed the Konyin keyboard, Lagos Analysis of Nigeria, is now claiming that Nicholas Negroponte and the OLPC project bought a pair of the keyboards "with… → Read More
Okay, remember a little over a week ago when the CEO of Mandriva François Bancilhon sent an open j’accuse! letter to Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer saying that Microsoft convinced the Nigerian government to use Windows on its computers instead of Mandriva Linux even though Mandriva and Nigeria already had a deal? Well apparently "the government agency funding 11,000 of… → Read More
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