First day at the Mobile Web West Africa 2012. Kicked a little late, but Yomi Adegboye (Founder/Publisher) of Mobility Blog was good in managing the first session speakers. The session titled – The Mobile Web and Application Opportunity and Sector Evolution had Isis Nyong’o (Vice President & Managing Director, Africa, InMobi) open the floor with Analysis of the expansion of the sector across the key market in Africa. She talked about how mobile is changing Africa in different ways.
InMobi’s presentation focused on how important the mobile platform is in Africa in terms of high usage as well as high affinity to carry sticky content such as entertainment and sports. Statistic show that 18% of mobile user activity is on social media, closely followed by 17% for both Entertainment content and News (especially sports). And yeah! 15% of consumers multi-task while watching TV in Nigeria.
Nigeria is a football crazy country, where are the football blogs? – Mister Mobility asked before Ehi Binitie of Rancard Solutions, came on to talk about The Next stage for the ecosystem – monetising locally produced content and services. One thing was clear, Africa is the dark continent – both literally and figuratively as we are way behind when it comes to content creation. Once again, social media came up as a means of getting eyeballs on content. Sarkodie – a Ghanian Artist, has over 200,000 followers on Twitter and Facebook and uses these platforms to push his music for free, but builds a crowd who pay for his shows. Now, that’s monetization big time.
Other lessons and questions from Ehi Binite of Rancard Solutions:
- There are many opportunities on the mobile scene. You just have to ask – ‘Whats driving the demand?’
- How do we stimulate demand? How do we get to the stage where there is great content online.
- Mobile phones are used for content consumption as opposed to content creation.
Lelany Sommers (Senior Operations Manager, Research in Motion) came as the last speaker of the session to talk about Blackberry in Nigeria. Some stats from here:
- The impact that RIM has globally.
- Over 77million BlackBerry Subscribers.
- Over 30 petabytes of data traffic passed through the BlackBerry infrastructure each month
And if you wondering what’s next for RIM in Africa, then you should know, it’s going to be opening an office in Nigeria, that’ll serve as the West African hub. Lots will be invested on resource – people, infrastructure and collaboration – starting with the Co-Creation Hub.
