Google Discontinues Nexus One, Android May Now Lack Hardware Rythm!

This is not a blog about gadgets, phones and the likes. But it is a startup blog and today I am focusing my post on user experience around hand-held gadgets! Specifically Smartphones.

User experience or user interface design is a must learn for any startup in a consumer market.

I am talking about android, nexus one and the user experience around the combination here. Many users reported the nexus one (users that have other smartphones, like Iphone or Blackberry) as the best smartphone they've ever used, and Google stopped the nexus phone. Is android going to end up an orphan in the mobile OS market? Not at all. Android has got Motorolla, HTC and even a tablet called Inye soon to be unveiled in Abuja Nigeria.

Google's main problem is being massively out-sold by Apple's Iphone. The Iphone 4 sales where heading for the million mark while Google had only sold a little above a hundred thousand phones. But is the Nexus one really a better phone than the Iphone? Well. a lot of users that have used both phones say so!

The Nexus one gave android the hardware match it needed. If you doubt this, here is an example for the Blackberry user who use their phone to tweet. Before the Blackberry had its own Twitter app, there was UberTwitter. And when RIM launched its official twitter app, those that switched to the app, would certainly witness a change in performance and experience when the use their blackberry phones to tweet.

For some reasons, I wont say on this blog if the change the Blackberry users witnessed is positive or negative. Nonetheless, it's a good example of software/app and hardware rythm or fit! Same goes with OS and the hand-held device.

The Nexus one is the phone that users had the best experience running android on. Now that its gone, where does the android stand against othe mobile OS!

The facts show surprisingly, android is even gaining ground by beating all the rest smartphone operating systems. Including RIM and Iphone OS who make their own hardware for their OS exclusively!

Android is number one selling mobile OS in the US for the second quater of this year reports the NPD Group. I still believe, Android would have done better with the Nexus, which I believe brings out the best of the OS. I guess its still all good for Google's mobile OS.

Search engine traffic, long-term users and startups.

How many startups rely on organic search engine traffic for the early push? The truth is, very few, if any.

Organic Search engine traffic does not come in quick, while new startups need to make many things happen as quickly as they can.

Majority of startups rely heavily on buzz from press releases, pitching industry bloggers and some social media promotion for the quick take-off traffic. These methods are good for getting quick traffic (they also cost money/time), but I don't believe they offer the best kind of traffic a startup should get.

Some people, especially startup founders may see the idea behind this post as a bit off the line. I am open and ready to hear your views on it right here on this blog. The new/normal belief or advice you get these days is about how/why you shouldn't worry about the search engines and that you can create a buzz or may be even success withous worrying about SEs.

PR can surely take a startup a long way, but that is as far as the startup gets. Beyond the buzz, a few percentage of the actual users the buzz attracted will still be using the startup's product.

With organic search traffic, users, the press and bloggers get to validate the idea and the product for you. The users didn't just discover you in an email or press release, they searched for what you are offering and found you, so as long as your service is good, they won't abandon you that easily. If any bloggers or press write about you without you actually pitching them or paying them (that is they found out about you through the SEs), means you have a great product and you are a great startup.

Traffic from organic search is free. Any buzz that this creates for you would be based on the actual value of your service, so with that in mind you can invest more in your idea (knowing it has value and potential for success).

PR is a great tool, however add organic SEO to your arsenal and may be try it first before spending money and time on PR.

4 reasons why Nigerian startups are not funded

1. Traffic does not hold value. No analytics to specify value of each and every website visitor, advertisers are acting blindly.

2. The issue of online scam or 419. reminds me of my post where I said this lies on the back of the netpreneurs, It's time we start seeing b2b startups in Nigeria that solely address the problem of security.

3. Infastructure. see the post "can we build silicon valley in Nigeria?" well, do we have the infastructure.
http://www.sturvs.com/Science_Tech/Startups_Nigeria_-_Can_We_Build_Silicon_Valley_in_Nigeria/

4. Absense of a developed ecommerce system. Most startups have to run on the ad revenue model. The question is, how many companies want to advertise online in Nigeria? Since no one is buying online.

June so far

This month has been the busiest since we started out online TV startup. I just sent a draft copy of a paper I am supposed to present in a conference in November, and ot looks like we have finally secured a technology partner.

I can't remember the last time I blogged here, it's probably been about 2 months. I am hoping I will post a few things before the month ends including a review of a hot new Nigerian startup.

The month is still not over and I am looking forward to reaching deals with about 5 content owners before the month end or early next month.

I have to go now, I have think and respond to an email.

Why and how you should find a co-founder for your startup.

I have been working on startup ideas for a long time (close to ten years), and I've only seen significant change by working together with a partner (co-founder), someone with equal determination and vision as mine.

The co-founder is there to fill in your weaknesses and having one gets you through the lows as Sep Bishop said to Entrepreneur TV, "if you are looking to start your own business, from my experience, I've always felt that having a partner is a good idea. You tend to find that entrepreneurs usually have big egos and seem to think that they are good at everything and know the answer to everything."

He said " Daniel and I were quick to recognize that we have weaknesses in certain areas, mine was fund raising, Daniel had a huge amount of experience in that area and he particularly didn't have any experience in advertising which I brought."

He continued, " In startups, there will be incredible highs and incredible lows, and having a partner in those times when particularly the lows, you will need somebody to pick you up. At some point a lot of entrepreneurs are willing to give up."
Seb Bishop later sold his ad company Espotting for $186 million.

So many startups were started by 2 or more founders. Yahoo, Google, Myspace, Youtube, Facebook and the list goes on.

Having a co-founder with same passion and some set of skills or chracter that you may lack increases your chances of building a successful startup.

Look for people that are very good at what they are doing, open-minded, ready to learn and who believe in what you are doing.

They don't have to be people you know personally or in the real life. Micheal Cerda founder of Jangl met his co founder Ben Dean on Craigslist.

I met my partner in the Startup I am working on now on Spidgit. I went through some of his posts, I knew he knew what he was doing and he was good at it. I approached him and we exchanged emails.

Today's Startups Type (conclusion)

The 3 startup types we talked about in the just finished series, all signify one thing. the shift to cloud computing and that many large corporations and startups are betting on that.

We see many of the large corporations buy a stake in or aquire these startups. (Newscorp acquired Myspace and Microsoft has a stake in Facebook).

Theses Startups especially the ones in the recent post have been very successful and most Valued in the tens or hundreds of millions and a few like Youtube and Facebook valued into the Billions.

If you are interested in starting a startup or working on your own startup, you should take a serious look at these startup concepts, not the services but the model. They are all about user generated content, sharing, remote hosting (taking your desktop with you) and simplifying everything for the end user.

If your startup idea falls within these criteria, then with some hardwork you will surely realize your dream and you can also in the process create a market for your startup product or service even if the market doesn't already exist.

Now I want you to go back from the beginning of the "Today's Startups" series of articles and read them again till you grab the concept or the big picture behind all those startups combined. And you will surely figure something out for yourself.
Good luck! and don't hesitate to drop your comment.

Today's Startups Type 3: You run the show (and sharing is caring).

Many Startups of today are about you, the user. They are all about the users on the driving seat, running their own show while sharing everything they do with the general public or their firends.

Most of the biggest sites today all rely on user generated content, the content may be text, video, audio, or pictures.

flickr is an online album for user uploaded photos.

Twiiter is a micro-blogging platform where users add and share status updates, twitter asks "What are you doing now?" what ever your answer, it is shared with other twitter user and your followers.

Users upload and share everything from comments, pictures, videos and more.
There are Community built and user generated online encyclopedia like Wikipedia.
Users share their bookmarks on sites like Del.icio.us, simpy, blinklist, technorati and more.

Today's Statrups Type 2: Taking your desktop with you.

Many things you had to keep or save on your desktop to be able to acess them some other time. You also must not forget to carry that computer with you to be able to make that presentation, check that website you saved or show family and friends your vacation pictures.

Thanks to new online services, now you can virtually always remember to carry the desktop with you.

Startups like Del.icio.us help you access your bookmarked web pages from anywhere. you dont really have to carry your computer or a notepad around.

Slideshare hosts your slideshows, and you can easily give your colleagues or clients the link to your presentation.

Flickr holds your pictures for you. You only need a Yahoo account to start using Flickr.

Rapidshare hosts all your files to free up some space from that old desktop of yours, or just to make your uploaded files available wherever you are and there is access to the Internet.

This update of Today's Startups forcussed on web applications that will host your files, bookmarks and so on remotely.

This concept and the latter are all driven by Cloud Computing.

Today's Startups Type 1: Everything for dummies.

This is a series of articles about todays Internet startup ideas, the problem they solve and I hope it will inspire you to do something. Let's begin!

Today, many web startups are all about making one a pro in something only geeks used to know how to do 3 years back.

Startups come up with online apps to make ordinary people like you and me build very professional things. Remember those things you needed to by tons of softwares to be able to do with your computer, sometimes you needed weeks of tutorial to be able to do them, and even you may finally give up and decide to hire a professional or a nerd to do it for you.

A few years back, you needed to learn to code or hire a programmer to be able to have a cool professionally designed site. Not anymore, the African startup Synthasite (It recently closed a $20mm series B funding), Google pages and a couple of more online services are here to rescue you, most of them are free to use.

Just a couple of years back, you needed to learn to use adobe photoshop, Ulead photo express or anyother good picture editing software to be able to do whatever you wanted with your pictures. Then came along picasa, anyone could just upload a picture and edit it online using very simple tools.

Video editing and animation used to be some work you had to pay someone big bucks to do. Well, incase you have an idea for any animation, see Aniboom.

The 2 Internet business types

Right from my first year trying to market or buil a business online, I noticed to types of approaches to Internet business by cyberpreneurs.

1. The idea approach, and 2. the get paid approach.

Some analysis

1), The Idea approach

This is harder to realize as it involves brainstorming on an idea (a product or service) building and branding a business based on the idea and also monetization.

This kind of approach pays bigger dividends to the cyberpreneur and it may take a long time before it pays anything.

2), The Get paid approach

This is more like the web hustler approach.

Anything that will bring in pay quickly.
This includes forex and commodity trading, squeze pages, adsense sites, selling services, blogging (most people are passionate about blogging and don't do it for the money), sales pages, affiliate sites and many many more.

I'm back!

I know I havent blogged for a while. I was consumed with work for my new startup during the past weeks.
We have entered turbo mode ;-) and we are trying to make some good progress before middle of this year. We are presently upgrading the site and hoping to enter into private testing soon.

Guide on Building A Successful Online Business

My first Internet business idea was to share african music and other entertainment with Africans around the world. I thought all I had to do was learn web design and I would build a successful web business. I never thought it would take years of research and testing.


Forget all the hype about new tools, online secrets and so on. I believe all you need to build a successful business online is some sort of understanding. By this, I mean understanding the online market, what works and what doesn’t, combined with hard work and perseverance, you will automatically guarantee your success online. It's simple!
So how do you understand the market and know what works and what doesn’t work? And save all the time you would have wasted following one new marketing secret after the other.

There are two ways you can learn this, the first you go through almost every online lesson through trial and error by yourself, or the second, you learn from someone that has been in and out of the struggle so you save yourself a great deal of time. Please dont get me wrong here. I am not trying to sell you something, nor am I trying to make myself your mentor, I also dont mean you should start following every online guru. That is also another formula for failure.
What I am trying to do is have you relax for a bit, and then have you analyse a few successes online, not the success stories you hear, but the actual story behind the success story. Look at how someone that was once like you achieved success, and I am sure behind that you will see a staright to the point approach combined with persistence.

My time, I chose the first option (trial and error), not because I thought it was the better option, but because it was the only choice I had.

After a lot of hard work, I managed to put up a site on a free server, and that was when I began to learn some Internet marketing lessons.

I didn’t have any idea on how to get people to my site, I was completely new to the Internet and I already had a website. So I found a start page exchange program and I joined it hoping I would be able to get a lot of people to my site, make some sales and in the end realize my new found online dream.

It was never as easy as I thought. Web design became more complicated than I ever expected and I didn't have enough money to hire someone to do it. Getting website visitors became a very hard and time-consuming and making a single sale seemed impossible. Only one thing didn’t disappoint me, myself. I didn’t give up.

I kept trying, learning and getting better. Whenever I fail, I make a list of reasons why I failed and made sure I avoided them the next time I try something out again.

After the failure of my first attempt, the main reason that came at the top of my “reasons why I failed list” was the fact that my site was hosted on a free server. Such sites look very unprofessional, and distract the visitor with too many ads. Who would trust a web business that cannot invest a few dollars for hosting their site?

When surfers want to buy something online, they tend to go to an established online company, so if your site is hosted on a free server like www.yoursite.freehost.com, people wont buy from you. They get annoyed or carried away by too much ads on the site, unless if you are using a free non-ad supported platform like blogspot or wordpress.

So one of the first corrections I made was to invest about $20 for a web hosting account and a domain name, so that I would have my own address for visitors to remember and come back anytime and I would be able to post only what I want on the site, which gives a more established image of the web site and a focussed environment so that my prospects can focus on what I have to say and don’t get distracted by flashing banner ads.

I was still not making sales even though I now have my own hosting account and a domain name for my online business. I knew I had to make another list of possible causes. I needed to ask myself what I thought was going wrong and how to solve it.

I was not getting much traffic to the site, just around 300 visitors and the big problem is the source of my site visitors. I had not been indexed by any search engine, so I was using a startpage exchange program for my traffic which were popular with newbies and marketers then (2002). I soon realized that was part of my problem. I was not targeting any market, I was driving traffic to my site without asking myself if they want my product or not.

My site was a niche web site, but I was not targeting that niche market. The people that actually went to my site were participants of the traffic exchange program I was using. They were all website owners or affiliates, they are not the perfect customers for my site, a music site. An internet marketing and website promotion site would do better in that program because most of the participants were interested in Web business promotion and marketing or just making money online.

When I realized that, I knew I had to change my strategy and target only those that I think would be more interested. So I turned to the search engines to drive more targeted traffic to my site.

After 2 months I got listed in Yahoo and immediately saw an increase of up to 200, then 400 site visitors a month, and a month later I got listed in Google and many other search engines like Alta vista, Hotbot, Askjeeves, Alltheweb, Overture and many more.

My traffic increased steadily. And then I got listed in the ODP (dmoz.com). I started getting hundreds of sign ups and everything got so big that I couldn’t even handle it. And that was just the beginning.
I am planning on writing my complete story so anyone interested would learn a lot from what I have been through. I welcome all comments, also if you have a story of your own you want to share, drop us a comment and we will publish your story as a complete post.

Nigerian Forum

In our first feature we will review Nigeria's no 1 online forum, though it is not a start up, but with a good makeover it will be one of Nigeria's hottest web destinations.

Nairaland.com

Members - About 250,000 members

Type - Nigerian forum


Nairaland is a very busy forum for nigerians to discuss all sorts of topics (including gossip) its been online for a while and is also a good spot for promoting anything targeting Nigerians.

It has subforums for entertainment, politics, business and many more.

Possible Makeover - The forum can be transformed into a social network discussion, features like better profile pages, picture and video sharing can be added to improve the user experience.



If you have a Internet startup in Nigeria or one targeting Nigerians, drop us a comment and we will give it a visit to consider it for review.

Nigeria's Internet Startups

Many Internet Startups and mostly web2.0 startups are emerging in Nigeria. Many are just social networks, some are similar to digg and others are completely original ideas.
The main reason why we see so many Nigerian startups at this time is mainly because of the growth of Internet usage in Nigeria and these Netrepreneurs are hoping to cash in.
We will be reviewing the best of these startups and giving Nigerian Internet users the latest in other Internet and Technology news around the world.