I am Victoria Arkorful, as an Alumni entrepreneur of Mobile Web Ghana of the second training session which took place which took place in September 2011, I worked on an application with Eliezer Ayertey called IKWERY digital business cards . Thanks a lot Mobile web Ghana, for giving the opportunity to travel to Lagos Nigeria for the Mobile Web West Africa 2012 conference which was of great benefit to me. I realized how important it is to network, I spoke to people about my application in Ghana and they were amazed. Most of them requested that we should lunch in Nigeria because they have a culture of sending sms and they believe strongly that it will work in their environment.
On the first day of the event we arrived the venue late because of the delay at the airport in Ghana due to the bad weather conditions in Nigeria, We arrived at about mid day or half way through the event, we saw the presentation made by the CEO of Iroko Partners, the founder Jason Chukuma Njoko, spoke on the topic “Pushing the growth of usage through the creation of appealing content.” He spoke about how entertainment is giving the Nigerian consumer their first taste of the mobile internet and how they have been able attract a huge number of users to their platform which equates to more advertising revenue.
During the lunch time, I had a conversation with Micheal Ugwu, one of the Iroko Partners, about how much it costs to advertising on their platform and He said it was around about $50,000 for which they ensure real feedback from viewers. I learnt about great opportunity mobile advertising and App markets offer to entrepreneurs. I was also able to analyze the Nigerian mobile ecosystem and I realized it is enormous. About 91% of Nigerians have a mobile phone and are on the internet.
There was a mobile apps competition on the last day of the event and I realized most of the applications were similar like the music apps or entertainment etc. I networked with the Managing Director of iConcepts and was very delighted because his company does mobile aggregation and iKwery will be needing such a service in order to launch in Nigeria.
In conclusion, I want to say thank you very much for such a great opportunity to be a part of Mobile Web West Africa 2012 in Lagos Nigeria. I hope to visit more and more of such events, it was superb, well organized and an open floor to understand and share your ideas. I can never be the same after the event. Thank you.