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.
The smart wear market has been dominated by Apple and Samsung not because they are the only brands, but because they have an interface that makes their units easy to use.
Another popular platform is the Wear OS and over time, it has not caught up. For something that is the brainchild of Google, we are somehow concerned that they were not able to scale it to work fast as they should have.
That said, though, Google has not been resting on its oars either. It has been said that the poor fate of the Wear OS is also due to the Qualcomm chipsets that these watches come with. When the new sets of Qualcomm 3100 and 4100 chipsets started rolling out, there was surely an improvement to the watches.
But we still needed a snappier interface.
As of the time of this writing, a new, better and unified Wear OS interface has been launched. Although it is yet to make it to any watch, it is believed that this will be the gamechanger for Wear OS watches.
The issue, however, is that Google fails to confirm if this new update will make it to the existing Wear OS watches. Even though Qualcomm has confirmed that most of the recent smartwatches on the OS can run the new platform, Google released a statement that is as vague as it comes.
Posted on XDA Developers forum, Google claims that they have not ‘confirmed eligibility or timeline on whether any Wear OS smartwatch will update to the new unified platform.’
From a business point of view, they might want to keep the tech to new units so users can go for those. It would be great to see what the Android giant comes up with in the coming weeks.
Global platforms like Google might try to do it all, but they cannot get on the same granular level as those in an affected market.
That is the opportunity that Bhala, a start-up rolling out an impressive virtual keyboard, saw before delving into their venture.
While platforms like Google’s Gboard and other virtual keyboards try to get all the languages right, they tend to focus on some languages more than others. African languages are usually some of such that get lesser attention. Thus, Bhala stepped in to correct that oversight.
Via its eponymous virtual keyboard, Africans can now access languages like Sesotho, IsiZulu, Kiswahili, SiSwati and IsiXhosa, among others. Besides offering natural support for testing in these languages, the keyboard is also geared towards autocorrect, autosuggestion and such other powerful features you would expect from a keyboard.
Speaking on the recent rollout, the director of operations at the start-up, Njabulo Sandawana has said that the keyboard is ‘built by Africans, for Africans and for African needs.’
He also stressed the fact that the keyboard does not invade user privacy while embracing top ethical considerations.
Having currently crossed the 10,000-download mark, the self-funded start-up is truly doing well and is on its way to global recognition.
Khazna might have only burst onto the fintech scene in 2019 but the start-up has made giant strides since then.
One of the biggest products from the start-up was their advance loan scheme to employees who are relatively underbanked or would not have qualified from other traditional banking institutions. This allowed such employees to cover expenses till they could access their pay at the end of the month.
Such services have endeared the start-up to many, and they are sure to reach even more unbanked and underbanked Egyptians with their new prepaid card solution.
Backed by strategic partnerships with the Abu Dhabi Islamic Bank of Egypt and Masria Digital Payments, the prepaid card will offer local and international financial services to those who do not have access to a bank account.
The premise of this product launch is based on the fact that of the unbanked population, there are some who have access to smartphones. Thus, they can get the best of these services without ever having to worry about traditional banking.
The prepaid card will also help users access their wages, creating a seamless way for employers to pay their employees who might not have a regular bank account to receive payments. Linked to the Khazna super app, users will now have access to bill payments, instant transfers and purchase options for necessary home equipment from the same place.
Making life easier, and growing while at it, it is little wonder why investors are looking to stake their money in this start-up.
