Saheed Adepoju became popular as the inventor of 'Inye', the first African Tablet PC. Today, 30 year old Saheed is living his dreams as a foremost Technology entrepreneur to come out of the shores of Nigeria. Saheed is also the co-founder of Encipher Group, a Nigerian based technology firm. In this week's edition of the Young and Emerging Leaders Series #YAELS, Saheed tells Dayo Ibitoye about his new start-up called Prossess which he is planning to tansform the nation's transportation sector with. Excerpts:

1. You co-founded Encipher group in 2008, what motivated you to starting an IT firm in Nigeria considering the vast challenges start-ups face in the country?



Entrepreneurship for me is a drive and a passion to do something entirely different from the traditional ways of doing ICT. Encipher was setup to take advantage of any emerging market opportunities. The tablet revolution came along and we decided to ride the wave of that revolution. All markets in the world have peculiar problems and we knew it would be a matter of time before we overcame the obstacles.





2. You have become popularly known as 'the man who invented Africa's first tablet'. What birthed the making of 'Inye' and how successful has it been?


The INYE tablet is our flagship brand for our tablet PC. What we invented is the brand and not the actual components itself. Consumers buy and adopt brands and we were able to successfully create such a brand and generate awareness with it. INYE has successfully helped Encipher as a company to illustrate its persistence and its potential to innovate given tough environment.





3. Your new start-up is called 'Prossess'. What exactly do you hope to achieve with Prossess?


Prossess smart devices Limited is the new startup I have been working on for over 6 months. Its aim is to build smart devices to solve local emerging problems. One of such problems is the lack of credible data/information to make critical decisions. Prossess will build smart devices for various sectors, e.g. Transport, Power, Environment etc and using these devices, generate datasets. These datasets are useful for building third party applications for further processing. Also, with OpenGovernment portals springing up all over the place, these datasets can be placed on these portals for international organizations to have a look and make data-centric decisions.





4. How do you plan to salvage the traffic situation in Nigeria?


One of the first steps involved in salvaging the traffic situation is to get important data about the traffic and this is the first step in the entire process. Our transport smart device provides meaning into the traffic situation via the use of a traffic analytics back-end which analyses the incoming data on the various routes.





5. Have you test-run it to see how well it can work in the country? What are your experiences like in this regard?


Our transport smart device has been tested in Abuja, Kaduna and Lagos. The device is essentially a modified traffic counter, which sends in real-time the speed and classification of vehicles passing over a pneumated tube. The data is transmitted over the internet. The device has performed very well and has a 95% accuracy. We also currently own a patent for the way our device sends datasets(speed and classification data) over the internet.





6. With apps like Gidi traffic which has become a household name in Nigeria, do you think Prossess have a better chance to win the heart of Nigerians?


Prossess and Gidi are on different ends of the spectrum. Gidi focuses on crowdsourced information while Prossess is focused on gathering actual data. Our aim is to give meaning to the data sets and generate relevant information for end users to use. Our data wont be crowdsourced and hence much more reliable to use. We also plan on providing consulting expertise to the transport sector to enable them understand the traffic in various parts of the country based on datasets generated by our smart devices to be placed on various routes.





7. How do you intend to fund prossess?


We are currently funded privately.





8. Do you have any challenge so far? If yes what are they? and how well are you working at overcoming them?


There were challenges with a power source for our smart device which we overcame with a 3-day power source but we are still working hard to have longer power sources.





9. When should we expect the full launch of Prossess into the Nigerian market?


We are currently working to ensure we launch Q1 2014 with a consumer app which helps motorist with information. However at the moment we are working on building datasets for the transport sector to aid in their decisions.


10. What are your future plans for the Encipher group?


Encipher currently is working with a development agency to build relevant local applications on our flagship product iNYE. We are currently employing vertical strategies to sell our devices and services. Thank you.






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The Young and Emerging Leaders Series #YAELS celebrates creativity, hard work and excellence.

Culled from www.dayoibitoye.net