Google just announced the first Nigerian archive on Google Cultural Institute that documents photography of early 20th century Nigeria. The archive is owned by the Pan-Atlantic University, making them one of the nearly 400 partners from 52 countries that make up the Cultural Institute.

The Google Cultural Institute aims to preserve the world’s culture and history online by partnering with museums, cultural institutions, and archives all over the world.

The Pan-Atlantic University currently has two exhibitions up:

Birth of the Nigerian Colony visually displays the birth of the colony that eventually became Nigeria after Lord Fredrick Lugard amalgamated the northern and southern protectorates

Colonial Footprints: Lagos, Then and Now shows pictures of Lagos Island between 1914-2014

I must admit I’m a little homesick now. Hey! Now you have material for #TBT

Recently launched Oveem is an e-commerce store for fresh fruits and vegetables in Nigeria – at least that’s what the description on the site says. Oveem’s website has eight categories of fruits and vegetables to choose from and promises to deliver within 24 hours.

Here’s what the website looks like

The service currently delivers to these areas in Lagos: Apapa, Ikeja, Ikoyi, Isolo, Victoria Island, Lagos Island, Lekki, Surulere and Yaba. We know you’re already thinking about how they intend to preserve fruits over long periods of time. Well, Oveem’s website says they handpick items after you order so you don’t have to worry about eating rotten bananas and oranges.

If you’re into salads and smoothies, you can also get them at Oveem. They say those can be delivered weekly to your home or office.

Oveem isn’t the first attempt at delivering fruits and vegetables. In February 2012, we saw MHQ – an online store that promised to go to the market on your behalf. MHQ sold regular household items as well as pepper, onions and rodo. Yes, Rodo.

What do you think? Would you order from a site like Oveem?

Photo Credit: chany14 via Compfight cc

“The team were really interested in how Konga has been able to stamp its footprint in Nigeria in such a short time with plenty of positive feedback coming from users on Facebook.” As stated from their official blog.

Mendelsohn emphasized their admiration and satisfaction for the successful execution of Konga’s past campaigns while expressing their desire to further strengthen Facebook’s relationship with the Konga brand with mutually beneficial partnerships that would help the brand and Nigerians using Facebook as a whole.

Among the pundits, it has been pointed out that Facebook does not have a Nigerian office. As such it raises a few questions. Like “Why would Facebook send a delegation to Nigeria?”, “Who else will the delegation visit? Seeing as the team is led by an important officer in Facebook.”, “Is Facebook about to set-up shop in Nigeria?” Of course any answers to those questions without an official statement is speculation, but who says that’s a bad thing?

“We already have 220 partners in Lagos, but we are soon expanding to Abuja and beyond. We want to be the universal food service for all Nigerians,” said Managing Director, Joe Falter. “We want to be the first place Nigerians think of when they need food: whether it’s for them at work, for their families at home, or to cater an event.”

To be that “first place Nigerians think of” of course, you’d need to go mobile because that’s where most of us are. So they’ve just launched Android and iPhone apps that bring the already convenient service to you on-the-go.

HelloFood is service from FoodPanda that has similar services in Europe, Asia and countries like Ghana, Kenya and Ivory Coast in Africa.

Now on to the good stuff: Put in “TNTT readers” at checkout and get ₦500 off your order. Again, you’re welcome.

What do you think about the service?

It was Nigeria’s Independence day yesterday and we know you’re in a nostalgic mood of Faaji. This week, we bring you a mix of videos from the first Nigerian independence celebration, a bit of Nigeria’s founding fathers, senators fighting, blowing some hankum crankum grammar and your favorite King Sunny Ade video.

Nigeria’s Founding Fathers – Tafawa Balewa, Ahmadu Bello, Nnamdi Azikiwe and Obafemi Awolowo

Crowds Celebrate Nigeria’s Independence in London in 1960

Nigeria’s 1960 Voting Caught On Camera

Brawl In The Nigerian House of Representatives

Hon. Patrick Obahiagbon Speaks

King Sunny Ade – The Way Forward

Get your groove on this weekend, Seriously

We know Nigeria has problems but hey, we’re able to keep our government running for months after the budget deadline :D.

Sources: The Nigeria History Channel , SaharaTV, Seka Moke, TayoTVvideos

Images: The Nigeria Nostalgia Project

Okadabooks is an app that provides local and international books to you on your phone. With over 7,000 books available in-app, Okadabooks aims to make it easier for people to access books in Nigeria – especially those by local authors.

“What drives Okadabooks is the belief that Nigerians read,” says Ofili. “We are sick and tired of people saying Nigerians don’t read. The thing is that readers have evolved, and the publishers haven’t evolved with the reading culture”

The frustrating book industry

Being an author himself, Ofili experienced first-hand the frustrations of the book industry. Major bookstores in Nigeria owed him over 1.5 Million from book sales, and he didn’t get his money until he voiced his frustrations on social media and major blogs.

“It was frustrating,” he said of the bookstore issue. “I started to think, ‘What about the people that actually need this to survive?”

Ofili decided to take control and approached funmobile – a Value Added Service (like the ones that tell you to text a word to a number to get a ringtone, game, wallpaper etc), to get his books (How Stupidity Changed My Life, How Laziness Changed My Life) directly to people in Nigeria.

What triggered his idea was when he looked around bookstores in Lagos for Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and didn’t find it until he got to the Houston International Airport

“I think its ironic that its easier to find our writers in foreign lands than it is to find them in our land,” he says.

Eliminating the middle man

Funmobile let MTN subscribers SMS “laziness” or “stupidity” to a certain number and they got either book on their phones for N200 (deducted from their credit). The thought of expanding the service to host more books inspired the idea that created Okadabooks as it is available today.

As of a few weeks ago, users could only pay for books with call credit on their phones, but with their most recent update, users can pay for books with Paga, GTB, Zenith Bank Direct Transfer, and PayPal.

“The limitations with with SMS is we only get 20% of the money back.” said Ofili. “Now we get at least 80% so we can give the authors more by doing away with the SMS system”

The new version comes with Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah, and in they hope to add books by classical authors like Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Ben Okri and Cyprian Ekwensi soon.

Upon installing the app, you can read a free sample of most paid books by just creating an account. You only need to pay for certain books as most the books in the app are free anyway – the paid ones can be anywhere up to N300. Books like Americanah have the first 100 pages available for free. 

Available for free in the app are the Bible, Nigerian Constitution, past JAMB and WAEC questions. Regarding the choice to have these books up for free, Ofili says “people can utilize it as an educational resource.”

His proposal to publishers is for them to let Okadabooks digitize their books for free “in exchange for exclusivity to distribute them within the Nigerian market digitally.”

Why the name, “Okadabooks”?

Regarding the name of the app, Ofili says, “Just like Lagos traffic, the book industry is at a bureaucratic deadlock, and the way people get through Lagos traffic is to use okadas to get the from point A to point B.”

“We’re hoping Okadabooks goes past the bureaucracy of our book distribution system and jumps over everything, putting books directly in people’s handsets.”

GIVEAWAY

To celebrate the release of their new version, Okadabooks is giving us N500 in book credit to give to five readers. (Trust me, it’s something) Just let us know if you’re interested in the comments. The first five to comment get in on it

According to Leadership.ng, the NCC already released  “a draft policy on Lawful Interception which is meant to monitor telephony communications such as phone calls, short message services (SMS) and chat messages” a few months ago.

Some of the contracts the NCC intends to reward include, “Review of the Readiness of Social Media Networks and its Implications for Telecommunications Regulation and National Security”, “Development of a Technical Framework for Data Filtering in Telecommunications Networks”, and “Electronic Archiving of Documents”.

I can see why they would want to implement such contracts especially with the issue of national security. However, this is bound to raise a lot of privacy concerns if we’re all going to have our texts, calls IMs and emails monitored by the government. This comes at a time when privacy in the US and UK has become more of an issue than it ever was with the news of the NSA spying on Americans and news from today saying spy agencies from both countries can get past even the most secure encryption.
Apparently, this isn’t even a new thing. During a forum for the review of lawful interception organised by the Joint Action Committee for Information Technology Awareness and Development, Dr. Lanre Ajayi, President of the Association of Telecommunications Companies of Nigeria revealed Nigerian telecommunications companies were already using services like Digivox. Digivox describes themselves as a “manufacturer of specialized security applications such as lawful and tactical interception systems”. The  federal government also received backlash when they revealed they had awarded a $40 million contract to an Israeli company for a  software that would monitor emails of Nigerians online.

“By virtue of NCC Act 2003, operators are under obligation to implement technical capabilities for lawful interception,” said Mr Gbenga Adebayo, Chairman of the Association of Licensed Telecommunications Companies of Nigeria. “It is worrisome, that where operators have provided some information to security agencies, the law enforcement and security agencies have said ‘operators gave us information; operators gave us call data records’. This has often led to attacks of operators’ facilities. It is critical that the National Assembly provides legislative backing on lawful interception.”

Source: Leadership.ng and IT News Africa

AO: Tell me about Sonbim Games?
IDAMS: “Sonbim Games is primarily based in Abuja, Nigeria. We are a team of creative designers and more. We started with just our passion for games, we mostly operate remotely from our homes and offices as of this moment.”

AO: What kind of skillsets do the people have at Sonbim Games?
IDAMS: “Well there’s me, I’m a mashup of a lot of skills; 3D Animation, Graphic Design, Video Production and Programming. Then there’s Geoffery, my childhood friend, he’s also an excellent graphic designer and 3D Whiz. There’s Folarin in Port Harcourt whose specialty is illustration , he does all the sketches before we develop them. He’s also a 3D animator, Visual Effects and Video Production person like me. In the sound department we have my brother Boma and a Lagos-based producer and my very good friend Christopher Ogbuehi a.k.a. Cikk0. They’ve both been brilliant.”

AO: Sounds like a dream team. Is is challenging to work with your people in different locations?
IDAMS: Laughs. “Yes, definitely. Especially with a minimal budget, but first and foremost we are all friends. That is what makes this work.” “I’m sure you’ve noticed but we have no dedicated programmer on our team.”

AO: I was going to ask about that. Does everybody take part in the coding?
IDAMS: “No, just me. We knew our strengths from the beginning and realized coding wasn’t exactly our strong point. Which is why we decided to keep the game mechanics as simple as possible. I’ve been learning as I go along and it’s been challenging but fun.

AO: How long has Sonbim Games been working on this Android based Titi Tilapia?
IDAMS: “We started working on it roughly two months ago. In late June.” 

AO: Why the change of strategy form PC to mobile?
IDAMS: “The honest truth is that, it was because of the Microsoft 9Ja Apps regional contest, we were supposed to build relevant applications for the Windows Phones and Windows 8 (Metro). The direction we were head was only going to allow us to go through PC (Desktop). So we had a meeting about it and said ‘Let’s make a new game.’ and someone said ‘What’s the point? We already have a brand.’ and he was right we had Titi Tilapia. So we made the decision to go mobile from there and bring Titi Tilapia to Android and in the future iOS.”

AO: I see. It was the best of both worlds.
IDAMS: “Exactly, we are taking advantage of our earlier publicity with Titi Tilapia and get even more reach than we had before. It doesn’t end there. We couldn’t submit to the contest because we saw that the Windows Store has some very stringent conditions for an app to be submitted. Especially when the app comes from a developer studio in Nigeria. It took bout three weeks to work on our game and the contest submission ended before we were approved on Windows Store. We decided to focus on Android fully from that point.”

AO: Tell me, how did it feel when popular press started naming Sonbim Games as the first indigenous game developers from Nigeria?
IDAMS: “It felt good. We didn’t set out to get that label  though, we were just having fun back in 2011. The goal was to finish the game as soon as we could. Along the way, people took notice of what we were doing and expectations were raised. They said things like, ‘Oh this is very nice but we would really like if you did this and that and that…’, it’s one of the things that helped us kill the PC game. They were right of course, their suggestions would have made it a better game. Still we had no real programming expert on the team and it would have taken too long to finish it if we continued at our current pace. It’s part of why we switched to mobile.”

AO: It seems like the decision is paying off, am I right?
IDAMS: “Yes it’s paying off. Wider reach and a completion date that is very soon. You can expect the game to be out in November on the Android Market.”

AO: Why the fish?
IDAMS: Laughs. “Back in 2011, I and Jeff (Geoffery) were going through ideas for a game that we could make. Trying out different 3D character models. We wanted to target the casual gamers, so simplicity was a major factor. High-end games were off the table, it’s not like we wanted to make a Call of Duty or anything. Chuckles. We didn’t have the capabilities for that. It needed to be ‘cartoony’, small and appealing to kids. While we were checking out some animal concepts Jeff says, ‘Why is it not about a fish picking eggs?’.

“It stuck, at first we imagined something, Mario-style, but a Mario-fish wasn’t looking so good and a fish swimming in water required less animation. That’s how we went with it.”

AO: You mentioned that the game was to appeal to kids, was the focus educate or entertain?
IDAMS: “The idea was to entertain. We got a few ideas though. We went to Lagos in January to speak at the Global Game Jam, there we got a suggestion that in between levels i.e. the loading screens we should put facts about the fish species and where to find it in Nigeria, little tidbits like that. So we will add that to the game, but it’s still 80 percent entertainment.”

 AO: So we can expect more fun?
IDAMS: “Yes, of course, until November we will be releasing more beta versions of the game with more levels, bug fixes and polished everything.”

AO: You and Geoffery started this company and then you brought your friends on board, and you all share a common goal. What are your goals for Sonbim Games?
IDAMS: “I would love to give the statement that we will be the biggest and the best, that’s a partial goal. I would say that our first goal is to be the success story, that game development in Nigeria can be a viable business venture. We are doing it for the passion but we want to do this as an experiment, check the responses and make decisions from there. I would love the company to grow and expand, but we will need to make sure that it is viable. Titi Tilapia is the test for that.”

AO: Do you consider the other developers like, Kuluya and Maliyo as runners with you in this Nigerian indie developer race?
IDAMS: “We started before them, I don’t really see them as competitors but as collaborators. Mainly because their focus is a bit different, it’s web but we plan to cut across PC, Mac and mobile systems. The way we are developing allows us to deploy on a lot of platforms.”

AO: Of course the difference isn’t lost on me, but it was a way of knowing if Sonbim Games will ever produce web-based games in the future. So Sonbim Games, Maliyo and Kuluya will never cross paths in that regard?
IDAMS: “We probably will, at some point I know they’re going to head to mobile. It’s bound to happen sooner or later.”

AO: Does Sonbim Games plan to be indie in the coming future?
IDAMS: “For as long as I possibly can. I like the spirit and creative control. We can work fast and output small games in months. Rather that facing the bureaucratic procedures that go with setting up a proper game studio under a big name.”

AO: About you, where did you study?
IDAMS: “Studied at Rivers State University of Science and Tech in Port Harcourt.”

AO: You mentioned Call of Duty, do consider yourself a gamer?
IDAMS: “Definitely , my gaming has reduced in the last few years but definitely still one.”

AO: Console, PC, or handheld?
IDAMS: “Mostly PC. I haven’t bought a console since my PS2.”

AO: Do you have anyone who inspires you?
IDAMS: “Lots of Indie Developers do. I may not recall their names now. But I follow a lot of their stories on sites like indiegames.com and indiedb.com. The spirit is awesome, you hear of people who started with zero knowledge (like us) as well as those that worked at big game companies but left to do their own thing and follow their passion. People like Norm (creator of Minecraft) with over 4 Million copies sold. Even before the game was finished.”

AO: What’s your favorite game on PC?
IDAMS: “Funny enough, my favorite game at the moment is Rayman. It feels fresh that some people took time to create that kind of game. In these days of ‘high-end 3D and all’. I’m also playing Batman Arkham City and Need For Speed Most Wanted.”

AO: What’s your message for your fans and those who support you?
IDAMS: To our fans and those who have supported us for far, all I can say is we really appreciate you guys, you’re the reason we keep doing this despite all the challenges. Keep believing and we’ll do our best not to disappoint you.”

Keep it right here on Technesstivity for the future of Nigerian gaming.

“We feel letting a lot more people test and give us feedback will help us produce a much better final product,”   Project Lead Idamiebi says on the games blog.

Titi Tilapia is about a purple fish who discovers that her eggs are missing, the eggs are taken by an octopus called Evil Okoro who is the main antagonist of the story. You’ll help gathering eggs underwater (With the help of her friends like Tonye the Tortoise and Elder Emeka) in order to save them from Okoro the Octopus who intends to control the entire ocean.

The game features simple controls.

Screenshots below. A review of the open beta build will be available soon.

Sunken “Danfo” buses provide an interesting backdrop for collecting eggs

The Gidilounge app is free on the Apple App Store, it is not a large application, so it downloads fairly quickly and installs on the iPhone. When you launch the application, you are presented with a login page in which you can login with your existing credentials or login using Facebook – however, the Facebook option does not seem to be functional at the moment. The option to sign up as a new user is also available. A drawback of the login page is that when entering your password, it is displayed in plain text which does not seem very safe, but I assume this was done with ease for the user in mind.

After logging in to the app, a page titled ‘Global’ is displayed with three categories, ‘Trending’, ‘Weekly Top 10′ and ‘Indie’. You can select any of these categories and listen to songs from them. Once you tap on a song, you get the options to ‘Play’, ‘Star’, ‘Add to Playlist’, ‘Share on Facebook’ and ‘Share on Twitter’ which are all denoted by icons.

There is also a left navigation bar that allows you switch between different Gplayer settings or switch to the Radio feature, and a Social option to select from. In the left navigation bar, you can also search for songs, playlists or users using the Search feature. The app also has a notification that comes up every few days when there is a new song release

My overall experience with the app was not so good. I feel like there are a lot of issues that need to be ironed out. Some examples being the aforementioned Facebook login issue, when listening to tracks in the Gplayer, they cannot be fast forwarded or rewound, the ‘Settings’ icon in the left side navigation bar does not work and a few other minor issues. Other than that, it does a good job at playing music and helping you discover new Nigerian music

In conclusion, I believe this app would most likely be a great addition for already existing Gidilounge users. However, I think that because of the drawbacks the app currently has, it would not excel too well at swaying new users its way.