ICTworks by Inveneo

In a twist of policy that I do not pretend to understand, telecommunications in Nigeria are skewed opposite to what I expect in an African country. International calls are dirt cheap, while Internet bandwidth is almost non-existent.

Send SMS to any phone, cheaply

Dirt cheap international calls

A mobile phone call from Nigeria to the USA is around $0.20 per minute (35 Naira), and cheaper if you subscribe to one of the many prepaid mobile phone calling plans. Text messages from Nigeria to the USA are a few pennies per SMS.

This is a fraction of the $1+ per minute cost to call the USA from other African countries, like Kenya or Uganda, using a mobile phone. Or the comparable $1+ per minute cost to call Nigeria from the USA.

Non-existent Internet bandwidth

Yet using the Internet for even basic tasks, like publishing this post, is an odyssey of endless page loads and connection timeouts. Reading websites is marginally easier, but only because you can open multiple sites at once, go do something else, and come back after 5 minutes to read what you were looking for.

I've found connectivity speeds to be around 10-15 kbps, or about half of the 28.8 kbps speeds of dial-up modems from the mid-1990's. 56K, the old gold standard for dial-up, is but a distant fantasy for Nigerian Internet users.

Answering questions in Uganda

Business opportunity: commercialize the Question Box

Last night, I was lost in Abuja, looking for an Internet cafe that had connectivity. So I called Inveneo staff in California and had them look up the place and its location on Google Maps of Africa for me. As soon as I hung up, I thought of a way to arbitrage this price differential between voice and data rates in Nigeria: commercialize the Question Box.

The Question Box is a phone in a box connected to live operators who look up information for callers. In Uganda, this service is free to a community, as part of an NGO outreach to them. Well in Nigeria, drop the box and just have a phone number that connects to a low-cost-to-call but high-bandwidth country (the USA? UK?).

Users would pay a few Naira over regular mobile phone rates to SMS or call the number and ask the computer operator questions. The operator would look up answers online and reply through the selected medium, and be paid via that slight Naira fee. This service would also be a gold mine of aggregate data and trends for companies looking to expand into the Nigerian market.

Over time, I expect Google's Ugandan SMS service will replace this type of opportunity, but until then, I see a lucrative niche that caters to those who know the power of the Internet and are willing to pay for quick access to it. Like those lost on a random Abuja side street.

I'm very excited to see that Google is taking a serious interest in Africa. From offices in South Africa and Kenya, to an open call for Africans to expand Google Maps across the continent, they're serious about actually testing and rolling out services directly targeted to Africans. And now they've outdone even this level of engagement.

With the explosive growth of mobile phone usage (but not always smart phones), Google is looking at brining the power of the web to SMS users. And they've just rolled out Google SMS for Uganda, a suite of mobile applications which will allow people to access information, via SMS, on a diverse number of topics

• 6001: Google SMS Tips - Health tips, ClinicFinder, Farmer’s Friend (agriculture tips & weather)
• 6006: Google SMS Search - News, sports scores, stock quotes, horoscope, glossary, currency converter, religious texts, translation, flights, Q&A, calculator, and local time
• 6007: Google Trader Buy and sell on your mobile. Use Google Trader to find anything that you need to have, or want to sell or trade

While Google is particularly excited about Google SMS Tips, an SMS-based query-and-answer service, I'm thinking that Google Trader is going to be the killer app. I see a blossoming of person-to-person sales of all manner of products and services, that will quickly also absorb the nascent SMS-based agricultural pricing, becoming something of an African Craigslist.

And while the businessman in me is interested to see what items sell the most and the most profitably, the arm-chair sociologist wonders what search terms said items will be organized around - will they be anything you'd expect or will Ugandans organize their lives on whole other terms.