WooCommerce is one of the biggest ecommerce service providers in the world. To that extent, even ecommerce retailers in Nigeria and Africa prefer the solutions that the platform brings to offer their goods and services online. However, the problem of payments for African merchants has persisted for a long time now.
That is the issue that startups like Paystack and Flutterwave, among others, have stepped up to solve over the years. As of the time of this writing, the African space has made an even closer leap towards being on par with the rest of the world in terms of seamlessly offering their products and getting paid without hassles.
WooCommerce partners Paystack.
The WooCommerce platform has officially recognised Paystack as its official payment partner for the whole of Africa. This means that the payment service is naturally integrated into the WooCommerce offering now, allowing seamless setup, management, collections and remittances from the vendors who choose to use it.
Given the solid framework that Paystack has built over the years, it is both laudable and logical that they be the ones to secure such a partnership.
Going forward, Paystack will now be listed alongside Stripe (which acquired the former company last year) as an independent payments provider on the WooCommerce service, all dedicated to the African landscape.
Netflix, since breaking into the Nigerian and African market, has been trying to get more people on the platform with great deals.
Just as they do in India, they are bringing one of the cheapest plans to this market since they know that they can make more from the numbers. Likewise, once they have established a hold it would be easier to raise the prices and still trust the loyalty of users.
In a new move, the company is now rolling out its cheapest plans ever to the Nigerian and other sub-Saharan markets. The only catch here is that the plans will be mobile only. Seeing as this is where most users view their content in the country, that makes sense from a lot of standpoints. It also means that the company can focus on mobile quality outputs without putting too much strain on its servers.
Before the rollout of this new plan, the cheapest plan from the giant streaming service costs just NGN2,900 per month. This new plan sees that price drop to NGN1,200 per month.
For those whom price had been a barrier of entry in the past, we believe this is as good as it is going to get.
Every ten years since 1981, Ghana has sought to conduct a nationwide census which estimates the number of people living within the shores of the country at any one time. As of the last census in 2010, this number was pegged at a modest 24.6 million. Even though the next one would have been in 2020, the coronavirus pandemic made that impossible.
Now that the country is ready to start counting again, they have made giant strides to ensure the count goes smoother, faster and better this time around: deploying a digital model of counting.
The government has been working on using satellite imagery and tablets to map the areas as well as inhabitants better. This plan has long been in the works, so much that it has even been tested on select areas to see how efficient and accurate it might be. The results of those tests must have been very impressive for a larger launch like this to have been sanctioned.
Leveraging data capture tech which will allow the improved understanding of the citizen demographics too, more than 67,000 field agents have already been trained and deployed to carry out the census program.
However, this did not come cheap. Estimated to have cost some $84 million, representing a 50% increase over the figures from the last census, Ghana will be looking to recoup the investment over the next couple of years, and in the speed/ accuracy of the current exercise.
It is not every day that we hear about a major acquisition in the Nigerian space. Thus, when the news hit that Jiji had completed the acquisition of Cars45, it was a welcome one to most of us.
For most of you reading this piece, you already know who both brands are and what they bring to the table.
Jiji has been a top classifieds provider in the Nigerian space for some time now. Connecting buyers and sellers, it has been estimated that the brand has over $10 billion worth of merchandise listed on it. of those, the bulk (more than $7 billion) is from real estate while about $3 billion is from automobiles.
Going by that, it is not too difficult to see why Cars45 is a nice acquisition for Jiji right now.
Likewise, the fact that Jiji has been plagued by a lot of trust and safety issues in the past means that they have to take a proactive approach to things. With this acquisition, they can improve their automobile section, cut out the middlemen and infuse a higher level of trust into the sales of cars on the platform.
Now that Cars45 has also been looking to consolidate its services in Nigeria, Kenya and Ghana, there is no better time for a bigger investor to come in.
In the coming weeks and months, we will start to see the changes that this acquisiton brings with it – and what that holds for the future.
Google has been trying to create an ecosystem around its product for some time now, which is mostly like what Apple has already been able to achieve.
Here, we see how they are working hard to make the Chromebook and Android platform integrate seamlessly. To that end, the search engine giant has partnered up with Unity to improve the gaming models obtainable on the Chromebooks.
The partnership is designed to ensure games from the Android platform can be better ported to Chromebooks.
Given the jump in the sales and purchases of Chromebooks in 2020 alone, moving up to 100% of the year-on-year purchases, it makes sense that Google is trying to boost the user experience this way. Likewise, it is interesting to note that Unity is looking to allow other Android developers code game controls on the platform for an even better experience.
For now, it is only a waiting game to see if this partnership will bear the fruits that both parties want – or it would be one of those experiments that they toss to the trash sometimes later.
Many platforms, like Facebook and Twitter, have moved to combat the flux of fake news for some time now. Google has to be the biggest of such platforms that had not made such a move in the past. Given the new feature that the search engine giant is debuting, all that is soon to change.
According to the reports, this feature will alert users when a search query brings results that ae subject to change in a little amount of time. In other words, news items will be most affected in this new update.
The magnitude of such a huge update is that the Alphabet-owned company is only testing it out with the US region before rolling it out for the rest of the world. This will help users keep track of developing stories and not take anything that they get back from results on the search engine as the gospel.
In a world where blogs can publish anything and get it seen on the news channel – without as much repercussions as traditional news outlets – such a move is bold and necessary from the search engine giant.
It remains to see if it catches on, how well it works, and if there would be a global release or the feature will be tossed to the bin later.
Airtel Nigeria is boosting its services to users, ensuring it is not only their telecoms provider but also a partner for everything else.
That has seen them branch into the mobile money niche and now, they are making it to the insurance section too. By dialling the *987*7# short code on your Airtel SIM, you can now register for AXA Mansard health insurance packages.
AXA Mansard is the best provider for this service since they have access to more than 1,000 hospitals all around the country. They also provide coverage for a lot of different cases, carrying even malaria in their portfolio. Besides that, you also get access to inpatient and outpatient care, family planning, immunisations and ambulance services, among others.
The fact that AXA Mansard is fast growing and keeps adding more services and hospitals to its services is also another fine idea to get started with them. Now, with this initiative, it becomes way easier for people to access healthcare and improved health insurance without worrying about all the restricting paperwork.
It takes a hero to recognize another hero. So just know you aren’t reading this by mistake. We found you, just at the right time.
Remember Clark Kent?
Who we know to be “Superman”; the man who worked two jobs; as a hero and a Journalist. Yeah that man is a representation of everything you are.
You may not be jumping from building to building by night and then switching to a student by day, nor are you flying with a cape around the city. You are doing much more…with your feet on the ground anyways.
We see you working a 9-5 and then performing as an artist under the disco light. Or that friend of yours who works as an art director and a Fashion stylist; the one who is a certified nurse and an actress too. Or the one who trades, is an investor and also works as a software developer.
The truth is; we chase these dual lives because we want to be free financially, but deep down, we know it’s in our DNA; that being Nigerian comes with the zest to do more, be more and earn more.
Regardless of the motive, we just have to commend the tenacity woven into our skins. We’ve been presented with more opportunities to double up on our “hustle” From side gigs to freelance and now forex trading. And, like every other gig that we take on, this one requires mastery; nothing that’s impossible for us.
With a brand like OctaFX committing totally to guiding traders on its platform and ensuring that they achieve their set goals, Nigerians are in for more big wins.
Tipsters—being us the writers—are hinting that OctaFX will be kicking off an empowerment campaign in the coming weeks. We all can only expect the unthinkable from a brand with such lofty goals as facilitating financial freedom for everyone.
So get your zest on. No doubt that adding “Forex trader” to your Dual life automatically makes it a “Triple-Dual Life.”
Check out the #DualLifewithOctafx challenge here and this side too.
New Ultrastar Edge servers, including a rugged MIL-spec version, reduce latency and improve bandwidth, enabling organizations to easily transport, deploy, secure and analyze data in real-time
Providing the foundation for the world’s essential data infrastructure, Western Digital (NASDAQ: WDC) today announced the availability of its new high-performance Ultrastar® Edge server family that brings compute closer to where data is generated for faster processing, lower latency and real-time decision making, even when disconnected.
With the growing adoption of 5G, IoT and the cloud, businesses and consumers expect super-fast performance with their applications. This is creating demand for new, distributed intelligent architectures outside of core data centers to help ingest, analyze and transform data at the edge.
In addition, organizations are running applications in extremely remote locations, such as deserts, seas or jungles, and are driving the need for ruggedized compute and storage where networks can be expensive, intermittent or nonexistent.
Designed for cloud service providers, telcos and system integrators, Western Digital’s Ultrastar Edge servers are easy to transport, deploy and scale in the field, at colocation (colo) facilities, in a factory, or in remote data centers.
The new family includes the Ultrastar Edge-MR, an extremely rugged, stackable and transportable server for military and specialized field teams working in harsh remote environments, and the Ultrastar Edge, a transportable 2U rack-mountable server with a portable case for colos and edge data centers. Both solutions are now sampling and orderable with general availability beginning CQ4 2021.
“More compute capacity is needed at edge locations as latency-sensitive applications are proliferating. We expect server deployments at edge locations to double through 2024, totaling an estimated five million units as they are an essential component in enabling new innovations and products, cloud services, remote campuses, CDNs, and virtually any vertical industry that relies on IoT, sensor or remote data,”
said Manoj Sukumaran, senior analyst, Data Center Compute at Omdia.
“In the world of 5G and IoT, compute must happen at the edge – closer to devices, end-users and the machines that are generating the data – as latency and bandwidth are essential factors for success. We’re glad to see Western Digital enter the market as the industry needs reliable products from vendors they can trust.”
“As a storage technology leader, we’re constantly looking ahead and anticipating how we’ll continue to serve our customers’ needs,”
said Kurt Chan, vice president, data center platforms at Western Digital.
“The growth in data creation at the edge, the opportunities to extract value from that data, and the total available markets and customers innovating and doing work at the edge, gives us a great opportunity for our new Ultrastar Edge server family.”
“From healthcare to intelligence missions, it’s critical for the federal government and its agencies to gather information quickly, and deliver insight when and where it’s needed, including at the network’s edge,”
said Jeff Johnson, co-founder, Aeon Computing.
“We’re thrilled to have the new Ultrastar Edge-MR server in our arsenal, as meeting these stringent military specs is no small feat. We can now deliver a secure, rugged solution that brings the power of the cloud to virtually any edge or tactical environment around the world.”
The core of each Ultrastar Edge solution is a durable, high-speed server that supports up to 40 cores with two 2nd Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors, an NVIDIA® T4 GPU and eight Ultrastar NVMe™ SSDs providing up to 61TB of storage.
This unique combination delivers blazing speeds and capacity for real-time analytics, AI, deep learning, ML training and inference, and video transcoding at the edge. It features two 50Gb or one 100Gb Ethernet connection for sending critical data back to the cloud or data center when connected.
Google is the champion of the Android world so it stands to reason that they will optimise for those users first. That is why we have had the picture in picture mode for the YouTube app – also owned by Google – since the days of the Android Oreo. However, the same mode had been teased but never made its way to iOS users yet.
Right now, the search engine giant has announced that they will commence a global rollout of the mode to iPhone and iPad users in the coming weeks. There is a twist to that piece of news, though.
Only YouTube Premium subscribers on iOS will get the feature for now. Google did confirm that the feature will eventually make it to non-premium subscribers, but we don’t have a timeline on that.
It is worthy of note that you don’t need the premium plan to watch YouTube with PiP on Android. Again, this is another way to favour the Android users since that is the platform which Google supports out of the box.
