Category: Infotech

Unsolicited calls and text messages are some of the problems mobile telephone owners contend with in Nigeria. The trend is assuming  a  disturbing dimension, reports LUCAS AJANAKU.   

The operators see nothing wrong with it, but their subscribers are complaining about what they call “unsolicited call and texts”.

Daily susbcribers are inundated with such calls and text messages. Helen Eni, a Lagos-based journalist is a victim. She described the problem as disturbing.

To solve the problem, she blacklisted some of the numbers. “I sat down one day, opened my phone and checked the numbers blacklisted and discovered that they were about 400. As a journalist that needs concentration, this means that I have been distracted from the performance of my job for that number of times. It also means that each time I received calls from those numbers, I have to spend my valuable time to quarantine the numbers so that they stop disturbing me. It is very painful and I don’t think this should be the case,” she said.

According to her, aside these ‘punitive’calls, she also receives short message services (SMS) which, without prompting, automatically subscribe her to one service or the other for which she pays for weekly. “I am a serious-minded person. I do not have the time to be subscribing to those frivolous services they offer, but suprisingly, I find myself paying more than N100 per week for something I never asked for,” Helen added.

For Madam Esther Kokumo, a civil servant and mother of three, it is so very disgusting that her service providers do not stop harassing her with SMS and calls, they even ‘flash’ her number so that she could call and waste her airtime in the process. “When I counted the number of times my operator calls and ‘flashes’ me per day using different telephone numbers, some coded others not, it is a minimum of six. It is so upsetting that my operator would descend so low to be ‘flashing’ me. The Federal Government must do something about this,” she said.

According to her, a particular number which begins with 547 torments her the most. “This number series begin with 547. It is about six or seven digits. Each time these calls come, I leave whatever I am doing and attend to them only to discover that it is from my service provider, advertising one service or the other. They are also fond of ‘flashing’ with these same numbers and of recent, they even call and speak Hausa language to me even when I neither understand nor speak the language,” she added.

With the discovery that many discerning subscribers were no longer swallowing the bait with the three-digit-number or code the operators use, the operators resorted to making calls with the regular 11-digit numbers so that the subscriber would have no choice but to pick the call.

The Chief Executive Officer, Brandsdefinitions, Richard Adeyeye, said the operators don’t respect the subscriber’s right to privacy as they call and send SMS at very odd hours “These calls and SMS became so disturbing that I had to complain to my service provider. I had to pay my way from Baruwa, a Lagos suburb, to Ikeja where it has a customer care shop, to lodge complaints. I was assured that it would stop. It did but it was for a very short while,” he said, adding that the situation has assumed a rather disturbing dimension.

The Director, Public Affairs, Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), agrees with Adeyeye. According to him, the regulator has been inundated with an avalanche of complaints from subscribers over unsolicited SMS and calls. According to him, the escalation in the volume of these intrusive calls cannot be divorced from the imminent implementation of the Mobile Number Portability (MNP) .

“The operators probably want to get across to as many subscribers as possible now that MNP implementation is round the corner,” he said, adding that MNP will take care of all those lapses in the industry.

According to him, telemarketing is a global phenomenon, which has elicited the interest of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) and other world bodies. He said the practice is not limited to the country, adding that it is practiced in matured markets like that of the US and Canada.

The Secretary, National Association of Telecoms Subscribers (NATCOMS), Bayo Omotudora, agrees with Ojobo that it is a global practice. He argues that the exception to the rule in Nigeria is that operators ought to give subscribers the opportunity to choose not to receive these calls and SMS by providing a code that will do that. He said based on complaints received from subscribers, the body had complained to the NCC with assurance from the regulator that it would act, lamenting that nothing has been done ever since.

They argue that most of the SMS that are sent to subscribers are not necessarily from the operators as people now buy bulk SMS which they send to as many people as possible.Ojobo said if a person has the contacts of 1000 persons on his phone, technology has made it easy for him to send messages to all of them ‘just at the press of a button.’

“Most of these things are driven by software. IT-savvy Nigerians are developing software, which they deploy to the network and eke out a living. It is providing employment opportunities for them. Therefore, we must be careful not stifle the growth of that sub-sector,” he said.

While in developed telecoms market where regulation is strong and effective, such as South Africa, telemarketing itself is a source of employment generation as smart young men and women are recruited online and paid handsomely for doing telemarketing jobs. The case is, however, different in Nigeria as it appears to be a punitive measure by the operators to force themselves on their customers.

The Director-General, National Lottery and Regulatory Commission (NLRC), Peter Igho, last year, called on the National Assembly to enact a law that will criminalise telemarketing in the country. He argued that they are ‘cold calls’ that are made to the subscribers at odd hours of the day.

“Telemarketing is marketing conducted over the telephone. Most telemarketing calls are ‘cold calls’ meaning the recipeints of the call has not requested that the telemarketer contact him/her,” he said. He added that apart from the fact that such calls have been associated with various scams and fraud, they are often considered as provocative, especially when they occur during dinner hours, early in the morning during famiy devotion, at the peak of important meetings, late in the evenings or in the middle of the night.

“In some countries, telemarketing is subject to regulatory and legislative controls related to consumers’ privacy and protection. Unfortunately, such legislations are yet to be enacted in Nigeria. The Nigerian parliament should enact a law that criminalises unsolicited and intrusive telemarketing at odd hours,” the DG suggested.

The United States has restricted telemarketing at the federal level through the enactment of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991 while many associations of telemarketers have codes of ethics and standards that members comply with.

He said while some jurisdictions have implemented ‘do not call’ lists through either legislation or industry oganisations, telemarketers are barred from initiating contacts with subscribers. “Legislative versions often provide for heavy penalties on companies, which call individuals on these listings. The US Federal Trade Commission has implemented a National Do Not Call Registry in an attempt to reduce intrusive telemarketing nationwide,” the DG said.

In Canada, telemarketing is under strict regulation and it is being handled by the Canadian Radio-Televison and Telecommunication Commission while in Australia, the practice is restricted by the Australian federal government and poilced by the Austrian Communications and Media Authority. He said the Austrian government restricts calling hours for both research and marketing, urging the National Assembly to take steps to halt the practice in Nigeria.

In Australia, telemarketing is also restricted by the government and enforced strictly by the Australian Communications and Media Authority. There is a law in the country that provides for a restriction in calling hours for both research and marketing calls. Specifically, the law stipulates that “a caller must not make, or cause to make a call that is not a research call, or attempt to make such a call, on weekday before 9 am; or a Saturday after 5 pm; or a Sunday or any of the public holidays.”

The NLRC said in to protect the privacy of the public without necessarily suffocating the business of legitimate lottery operators, the agency has instructed lottery operators in whatever form, as part of the condition of grant of any licence or permit, to avoid what it described as “intrusive telemarketing.”

Ojobo said the Nigerian Communication Act 2003 needed to be amended. According to him, the NCC does not regulate content and a lot of the contents involved are software-driven. He said the issue will be included in the proposed amendment to Act 2003. “We are also looking at convergence which will also hopefully take care of this type of issues too,” he said, adding that the issue consumer rights issue too.

This is where the Consumer Protection Council (CPC) comes in. Observers say the CPC is a paper tiger. But the Head, Lagos Office of the council, Ngozi Obidike, disagrees. She said the agency acts upon complaints from consumers.

“We are partners in the building of education for the consumers. The CPC implores the consumers to complain, to seek redress for the provision of poor goods and services provided by manufacturers and service providers alike,” she stated in an e-mail or electronic mail.

Now that the NCC said it is waiting for the amendment of the NCC Act 2003, subscribers will have to wait. But for how long?

The information technology (IT) industry is the economy driver worldwide. Developed nations latch onto inventions to push their economies.  But in Nigeria, the reverse is the case. Why? The dearth of venture funds is stalling technological advancement, writes LUCAS AJANAKU.

NECESSITY, they say, is the mother of invention. This is why the story of search engine, Google, and social media, Facebook, demonstrates how little beginnings could snowball into something great.

What has become Google Inc., according to Wikipedia, is an American multinational corporation founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were Ph.D. students at Stanford University. They own about 16 per cent of its stake.

They incorporated Google as a private company on September 4, 1998. An initial public offering followed on August 19, 2004. Its mission statement from the outset was “to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” and its unofficial slogan was “Don’t be evil”. Rapid growth since incorporation has triggered a chain of products, acquisitions, and partnerships beyond Google’s core search engine. It offers online productivity software including email, an office suite, and social networking. Desktop products include applications for web browsing, organising and editing photos, and instant messaging. The company leads the development of the Android mobile operating system, and of the browser-only Google Chrome operating system (OS) for a specialised type of netbook known as a Chromebook. It has diversified into communications hardware: it partners major electronics manufacturers in production of its high-end Nexus series of devices, and even acquired Motorola Mobility. A fibre-optic infrastructure was installed in Kansas City to facilitate a Google fiber broadband service.

Estimated to run over one million servers in data centres around the world and process over one billion search requests and about 24 petabytes of user-generated data daily, it is like the proverbial African king when one looks at, one would feel he never sucked his mother’s breasts.

Facebook is another firm that shares a similar history with Google. Said to have 600 million users worldwide, the concept took shape on campus at Harvard University in 2004, after the site’s designer, Mark Zuckerberg, came up with an idea which he had experimented with a simple programme that pitted photographs of two campus students together for members to decide who was “hotter.” According to reports, there was a problem with his initial concept, however, as the photographs he used were snatched from the university database which he hacked to gain illegal access. Harvard quickly shut the website, but the idea lingered for Zuckerberg. He designed a new website that allowed the voluntary posting of real identities, voluntarily this time, and launched the website a month later under the title “thefacebook.com”. He and his three partners, Dustin Moskovitz, Eduardo Saverin, and Chris Hughes soon realised that they had created a phenomenon.

President, Nigeria Internet Group (NIG) Bayo Banjo, said the greatest innovations and inventions of modern times started from the garrage. He added that what needed to be done was to encourage smaller inventors and innovators instead of allowing the big players to trample on them.

President, Nigerian Computer Society (NCS), Sir Demola Aladekomo, said for IT industry in Nigeria to flourish, there is need for venture fund to assist inventors. He added that the decision of the body to establish an IT park in Lagos is a demonstration of the group’s desire to develop the economy by taking a risk.

Said Aladekomo: “The ICT industry is one that can be very uncertain. It is one sector where you always invent and if you study the history of the inventors, a lot of them sometimes die as paupers until recently in developed countries when they started realising that the wealth of any country depends on how fast they invent, how fast they manufacture, how fast they manage information. So, what we are trying to say is that for an inventor, he needs a lot of support because it is like an experiment. You experiment this, it does not work, you can experiment 20 times and you won’t get anything out of it.

“Now if you are developing a software, if that software is not tested by a company which has testing facility (you pay for using the testing facility), if you do not have a factory that can mould this thing for you, then, you test it out, if you go to that factory to mould it, they will charge you, where do you get the money. So, you need venture funds which are funds that say, ok, I have looked at you, you have the ability, but you do not have the resources to carry out the development of this innovation, you do not have the resources to carry out to assemble this computer, you do not have the resources to implement this project, therefore, I am going to take a risk on you, give you the money, not the way a commercial bank gives money. I am going to give you the money, if you succeed, we will share the profit. Sometimes they fail, but the one that succeeds make it big time in the IT industry. For instance, if you are able to write an app for a phone or PC or an iPad, you can become a billionaire overnight but to get that success on your laps, you may be working for the next two years. How do you feed?”

According to him, the orientation of the nation’s money deposit banks (MDBs) is not in the direction of funding intellectual property, such as inventions, adding that there has to be a relationship between the Federal Government and commercial banks to establish a venture fund that will support the development of inventions in the country.

“Our commercial banks are not set up to do that (fund inventions). So, you need a relationship between the government and the commercial banks to set up venture funds or you need what we call white angels or angel funds to be able to do that. People with deep pockets or government with deep pockets that are ready to take risk, 80 per cent risk, and that is how you create venture funds in the market and with that venture funds, the industry can now develop. What NCS is doing is funding the development of IT in this country. We are taking a risk, building an IT park that can create the model that can work and we are saying that when it works, we make use of the service charges of those tenants in the park.

“We don’t have the wherewithal to do it in the large scale and that is why we are starting small and we will now expand. It is a thing we should have been able to go to a bank and say look, the IT industry requires this, give us the facilities, but we know that the bank will not. They definitely will not, so we just going to use our native root because we believe in our members,” he said in an interview with The Nation in Lagos.

Perhaps, in the realisation of the place of venture funds in the IT industry, the Federal Government, through the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) made available N500 million anchor fund for developing the software industry in the country. The N500 million is just the seed fund of $15 million Venture Capital Fund (VCF) earmarked for growing the software economy. The balance is supposed to be mobilised by the VCF manager.

An employee of Microsoft and Project Manager, Information Development Entrepreneurship Accelerator (iDEA), Helen Anatogu, said building a knowledge-based economy is in line with global trend. iDEA is a not-for profit organisation and a special purpose vehicle (SPV) put in place to ensure the success of the software incubation centres to be established across the country.

According to her, no economy grows without ICT, adding that software is critical to the growth of any society because there is hardly anything done these days without an underlying software. She agrees that funding could be a challenge for intangible products, arguing that Nigerians would rather fund oil well, bridges, roads and others for concession because such things will bring immediate returns to them.

Wkipedia defines venture capital as a financial capital provided to early-stage, high-potential, high risk, growth startup companies. The venture capital fund makes money by owning equity in the companies it invests in, which usually have a novel technology or business model in high technology industries, such as biotechnology, IT, software an others. The typical venture capital investment occurs after the seed funding round as growth funding round (also referred to as Series A round) in the interest of generating a return through an eventual realisation event, such as an initial public offer (IPO) or trade sale of the company. Venture capital is a subset of private equity. Therefore, venture capital is private equity, but not all private equity is venture capital.

In addition to angel investing and other seed funding options, venture capital is attractive for new companies with limited operating history that are too small to raise capital in the public markets and have not reached the point where they are able to secure a bank loan or complete a debt offering. In exchange for the high risk that venture capitalists assume by investing in smaller and less mature companies, venture capitalists usually get significant control over company decisions, in addition to a significant portion of the company’s ownership (and consequently value).

Venture capital is also associated with job creation (accounting for two per cent of United States of America’s (USA’s) Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the knowledge economy and used as a proxy measure of innovation within an economic sector or geography. Yearly, there are nearly two million businesses created in the US, and 600–800 get venture capital funding. According to the National Venture Capital Association, 11 per cent of private sector jobs come from venture-backed companies and venture backed revenue accounts for 21 per cent of US GDP.

Venture capital is also a way in which public and private sectors can construct an institution that systematically creates networks for the new firms and industries, so that they can progress. This institution helps in identifying and combining pieces of companies, like finance, technical expertise, know-hows of marketing and business models. Once integrated, these enterprises succeed by becoming nodes in the search networks for designing and building products in their domain.