New week, new hustle, and for digital natives, new apps. Oh okay, maybe not so new, you might have seen some of these guys before, especially if you’re plugged into the local startup frequency. It’s not a really long list, but I’m sure you’ll find useful or interesting. Here’s five mobile and web apps you should check out this week.
Prowork
Prowork is a productivity tool that helps you get organised and manage tasks, from personal to-do lists to collaborative team projects.
While Prowork was created with all the the bells and whistles that you’d expect from a cloud-based productivity app, including file sharing, real-time notifications and chat, the service is designed with the practical realities of the local context in mind and as such was made to scale down to the lowest common denominator of communication with support for SMS notifications. This means that you and your team can continue to keep track of your project even if/where there is no internet access.
With a freemium tier that gives you a taste of what to expect in the more robust paid plans, Prowork is available on Blackberry, Android and feature phones, as well as browser extensions for Google Chrome & Firefox.
TiketMobile
Like the name suggests, TiketMobile is an app that allows you purchase tickets from your mobile phone and ensures you never have to experience the hang ups and delays to are as join long queues. Right now TiketMobile has launched its pilot version with a local road Transport company, but I imagine that in time they’ll expand into other interesting product and service categories like airline bookings, movie and concert tickets, that sorta thing.
In the meantime however, if you’re planning on a long distance bus journey from Jibowu anytime soon, you should consider booking your ticket via TiketMobile. TiketMobile is available for Nokia and Java phones.
Jarapages
Blame it on the BlackBerry, maybe, but it seems like every Nigerian and their brother have a blog these days. But as Nigerians have increasingly become prolific online content creators, much of that content is still not readily discoverable. Even when you find it, it’s hard to sift through all the crud to reach the real quality stuff that you’re interested in. Fortunately, that’s precisely where Jara Pages can help. With it’s blog aggregation, discovery and personalisation technology, Jara Pages allows you discover, curate, read and share your favourite Nigerian blogs and online magazines. Imagine Google Reader, but just for Nigerian content.
The Jara Pages interface allows you to scan headlines from all Nigerian blogs listed on the service. If you don’t want the whole shebang, you can simply subscribe to just the blogs you are interested in to get a curated stream of stories, although this requires registering with the service. Clicking on the headline of a story takes you to the full article on the site where it is hosted, which is of course a boon for publishers, in terms of exposure.
Jara Pages is optimised for desktop and mobile web browsing environments. The service also delivers a scheduled content digest to your email, although you can elect to turn this feature off.
Weather9ja
If you’re going to be out and about this week, or maybe even planning a big event later this weekend, you might be staring anxiously at the skies and hoping that the weather holds fair. Well, I say you should take the guess work out of the equation with Weather9ja.
While not nearly as powerful as your village’s “rain catcher”, Weather9ja can at least help you make informed decisions about how to plan your activities by giving you information on local weather conditions. Some of its features include local weather information for all 36 states of Nigeria, major African cities, as well as a four day weather forecast.
Sporting a clean, minimal user interface that displays only the essentials, sans all the junk terminologies that ship with standard weather apps, Weather9ja simply tells you just what you want to know — whether or not it’ll rain today, tomorrow, or in the next three days. The service is available on desktop and mobile web.
Deezer
If you’re one those who’ve always wanted to enjoy a Spotify-like music experience with access to a global library of music and artistes, but have been frustrated by that annoying “Spotify is not available in your region” message, then I’m pleased to inform you that you can now show them the middle finger. Just last month, a French music streaming service called Deezer became available in over 160 countries, including Nigeria.
While it doesn’t boast of P-Square, TuFace and all the other local flavours you know and love (there’s Spinlet, iRoking, Gbedu.fm and even Gbedumobile for that), Deezer boasts of over 20 million licensed tracks, great pricing plans, availability on practically any smartphone you can think of and a blessedly delicious user experience — altogether a compelling deal for even the most ravenous digital music heads. Oh yeah, there’s a 15 day free trial, so you should check it out, thank me later. I hope this helps your week get started on a jamming note.
If you’ve used or are going to use any of these apps, we’d love your feedback, do let us know how it went. If you’re a developer and you think your app is ready for primetime, I like to hear about those too. I can’t promise that I’ll write, but you’ll find that I’m one of the best sounding boards you can find, so hit me up whenever.
[image via Flickr/Pam Culver]
