₦airaland Forum

Apple acquires Nigerian tech entrepreneur,HopStop.com

Apple has acquired Chinedu Echeruo’s HopStop.com, The Wall Street Journal’s publication, AllThingsDigital reports. Founded in 2005, HopStop.com makes mobile applications for both iOS and Android that covers over 300 cities and that helps people get directions or find nearby subway stations and bus stops. Terms of the deal have not been disclosed as at the time of this publication.

HopStop has oft been compared to Israel’s Waze which was recently acquired by Google for $1 billion. The move is seen as Apple’s plan to bolster its map offering especially given Google’s recent acquisition of Waze.

A serial entrepreneur, Chinedu Echeruo grew up in Eastern Nigeria and attended Kings College, Lagos. He attended Syracuse University and the Harvard Business School in the United States and founded HopStop.com after working for several years in the Mergers & Acquisitions and Leveraged Finance groups of J.P Morgan Chase where he was involved in a broad range of M&A, Financing and Private Equity transactions. He also worked at AM Investment Partners, a $500 million volatility-driven convertible bond arbitrage hedge fund.

He founded and raised nearly $8 million for his two U.S based internet companies; Hopstop.com and Tripology.com. Tripology.com was acquired in 2010 by American travel and navigation information company, Rand McNally. He was named Black Enterprise Magazine’s Small Business Innovator of the year and listed in the magazine’s Top 40 under 40 and is currently a partner and head of the Principal Investing group at Constant Capital, a West Africa based investment bank.

True to form, Echeruo is working on yet another venture but this time, focused on small businesses in Africa. Check out a video of Chinedu Echeruo below at last year’s TedxIkoyi where he talks about his latest project for small businesses in Africa; “crowd sourced business in a box.”

According to him:

“There is no reason why every entrepreneur should have to reinvent the wheel every single time in all the countries in Africa. My idea is to essentially to have one place where a budding entrepreneur can access a template for starting a business, and then customize it to suit their own situation. Essentially a business-in-a-box
[url]http://www.cp-africa.com/2013/07/20/apple-hopstop-com/
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afoo02: pls what is the full meaning of DVD? Just a question dnt abuse me ooo

Digital Video Disc

Nigerians turn up their noses at everything yet,manufacture nothing. I tire o!

lagerwhenindoubt: I have a colleague who made complaints about the quality of Konga products and made returns a couple of times he lost confidence. he has switched to Jumia.com. I have a problem with Jumia however and it does not bother or bad service or incomplete information, it is the manipulative sales moves they make whenever you make an order.

Example, I order an item on Jumia.com, in a matter of minutes I get a call to confirm my order which I do. The sales person also informs me that their online catalogue is updated with new products and would like me to have a look at this wonderful new shirt from ENZO.. I tell her I will do so later but she refuses to complete my order until i look at it. So I look at it and say, hey it is a fine shirt, she now proceeds to add it to my order WTF did i say i wanted to buy it.. this happened 3 times i made orders which kain ambushing be dis

Funny ish tho

tejpot: Life is short. Accept Christ before it's too late. RIP to d dead.

Do us all a favor & drink a hot glass of SHUT THE FVCK UP!

@Oladeegbu,i understand your fixation with stories like these,but do you honestly believe what you pasted up there?

In as much as on tries to restrain himself from making disparaging comments about the first lady she really needs to curb her excesses & dial back the crazy.Things are really getting out of hand.But one thing's for sure,i'll never deny myself a bit of humour at her expense when she chooses to go ballistic

Nice..pidgin english repping. Na so we dey do am for dis syd

This is an attempt to subject the first lady to the utmost ridicule. It would be grossly unfair to pitch the wife of the president against the literary icon. It's a disaster waiting to happen. I would never allow that!

druid06: How true is this development?

I've been reading it on twitter & some other blogs but nothing official yet

Developing Story

ShyM-X:
The $240 million we wasted on messed up drones should be able to get us about 20 F-16s, or 10 F-15s.

It isn't about budget, we're just to corrupt and we lack foresight and good leadership, that's the honest truth.

Why are you insistent the drones were deficient like you know the inside workings of the Defence Ministry? Here's another version of events from a knowledgeable Nlander. We can't with any degree of certainty say either story is a true reflection of the drone fiasco

naptu2: I just read a report that said that the aerostar and seastar drones are not defective, but that they were grounded as a result of a dispute.

The report claimed that the drones were deployed to monitor pipelines (vandalisation, bunkering, etc), but that the data gotten from the drones is first taken to Israel and analysed there before being given to the Nigerian Government.

The government wasn't happy about this development because it expected that Nigerian technicians would have been trained to analyse the data (they fear that the Isrealis may gain vital intelligence and even edit or modify the data before it is given to the FG). This, the report claims, is one of the reasons that the FG decided to ground the drones and fast-track the development of the amebor series of drones.

I do not know if the report is accurate.

ULSHERLAN: And these people will still go. The health minister should please do something like a quarantine before they get back into the country to avoid further spread of MERS.

If the minister tries that or even suggests it in any shape or form especially taking into consideration he is Igbo & a Christian you'll see the level of hostility that will greet such a suggestion. In fact,such a suggestion is nothing short of a recipe for a religious crisis in the country. Even though it would be the right thing to do

Billionaires: Wole is a nobel laurete in Literature and has written many books but how can such an 'educated' man worships Sango, one of the local illiterate yoruba gods that exists only in mythology. The f00l says in his heart that there is no God, could it be that our Prof is a f00l ? Na question I dey ask oh/

Where this God mata follow enta?I thought you were always keen on some other metaphysical bullshitt.

Would Dynamo also be considered a great man of God considering his awe inspiring,mind boggling,mind bending acts? Nigerians are too fickle

FarmTech: God will punish you. Any m oron can come out one day and say that he found a manuscript. From the way u write, i perceive that u are a se xual addict. U define life by sex that is why u said all that about Jesus. If u don't repent from this blasphemy, I tell you that you'll soon get your full reward. Be expecting it if you don't repent.

Bladi,bladi,bla! Do you honestly think anybody takes the threats of you & your ilk seriously any more? You got jokes.'any mor0n can claim he found a manuscript'. How about 'any mor0n can claim stories written over 2000 years ago by some slave owning men are true'?
Again let me reiterate,your Jesus was never conceived via sexual intercourse,never got married,was surrounded by 12 male friends,wore flowing gowns with no pants. Very telling indeed. But you're right about the sex part though. I do love sexx ,guess that makes me human

martin92: Sleeping on duty

Lol..true

Tontoh is a badass b*#ch,you ain't even know it

gat2so: it was very sad and hard act at Ebonyi state NYSC. oreintation CAMP when 4 boys and 1 girl was unclay in the parade ground this morning and decamped instantly all because they get drank at maameee market last night.....please more corpers in the camp should report more cos i never can snap this corpers but some other have the picture .....pls help us at EBONYI STATE they treat us like slave ....Man o war and civil defence treat us graduate like slave....pls find the fact on facebook and other social networks....

Like seriously,are you a Corper?

Ok so the woman left her husband for her own safety and that is enough reason for the man to sleep with his own daughters?I don't understand how some people are trying to justify the act or shift the buck to the woman.Yes the man might be irresponsible in more ways than one but sleeping with his daughters?C'mon that's unimaginably perverse

Please y'all should cut her some slack.It's all for a good cause

Ada Nri1: Hmmm, I don't want to say what John Inverdale said about Marion Bartoli, but Not what I expected to see sha
Congratulations sha

You can go ahead and say it,it's already in your head.She's not a looker right

Is that not GEJ i see with the Chinese Premier inspecting a Guard of Honour or what is the diatribe about? Who received him at the airport? Protocols on receiving Heads of States differ from state to state. Dayuum! This is just too trivial

What is the INEC policy/constitution on electing/selecting candidates within parties? Are party primaries necessary or would a party be acting within the ambit of the law if they choose to do away with such exercise?

samfibby: Bros, buy the range rover. Forget the marriage thinz, u are too young to rushed into marriage.In-fact, i have a clean orange 2008 range rover going for 7.5m. Very negotiable,mail me pre3p5@yahoo.com if u are interested.

omo no dullin

dadaic: The guy no get sense.. You are reading what someone wrote in 1958? ODE..You believe everything you read from those useless scholars, or from the internet?

Look at how shallow,parochial & hollow your reasoning is. You choose & encourage others to discountenance an incredible find barely 60 years old because it shakes the very foundations of your belief.Yet,hold on tenaciously to stories from a Jewish book of fables written over 2000 years ago!Ha!Stvpidity must have a new definition

lomprico: SATAN!

Gawd bless you

Glorified_Tunde: You don't know how rich and comfortable my God has made me, yet u open your cursed and dirty mouth against my God, your maker. Listen to me, I'm unique on NL and won't take this blasphemy from you.

Therefore, I DECREE THIS MOMENT THAT THE SAME HANDS U USE TO TYPE THESE RUBBISH AGAINST MY GOD BE CHOPPED OFF.

I have commanded it, and according to Isaiah 44:26 it shall come to pass!

The sexuality of Jesus Christ is queried.

 Was Jesus queer? We don't know. But it is a possibility that cannot be ruled out. One version of St. Mark's gospel - which is still the subject of academic dispute - alludes to Jesus having a homosexual relationship with a youth he raised from the dead.According to the US Biblical scholar, Morton Smith, of Columbia University, a fragment of manuscript he found at the Mar Saba monastery near Jerusalem in 1958, showed that the full text of St. Mark chapter 10 (between verses 34 and 35 in the standard version of the Bible) includes the passage:"And the youth, looking upon him (Jesus), loved him and beseeched that he might remain with him. And going out of the tomb, they went into the house of the youth, for he was rich. And after six days, Jesus instructed him and, at evening, the youth came to him wearing a linen cloth over his nak3d body. And he remained with him that night, for Jesus taught him the mystery of the Kingdom of God" .The veracity of this manuscript is hotly contested by other Biblical scholars. This comes as no surprise. The revelation of a gay Jesus would undermine some of the most fundamental tenets of orthodox Christianity, including its rampant homophobia.But even if the text is genuine, does this ambiguous, elliptical passage offer evidence of Jesus's homosexuality? It is hard to say. The precise nature of the relationship between Christ and the youth is not spelled out. Sexual relations are suggested but not explicitly stated.The Morton Smith document is, in fact, irrelevant to the vexed issue of Christ's sexual orientation. What we can say for certain is that the standard, accepted Biblical narrative gives us no information at all about Jesus's sexuality.This absence of firm information does not, of course, mean that we can take it for granted that Christ was heterosexual. Far from it! The lack of information about his erotic inclinations begs more questions than it answers.The truth is that we simply don't know whether Jesus was straight, gay, bisexual or celibate. There is certainly no evidence for the Church's unspoken presumption that he was either heterosexual or devoid of carnal desires. Since nothing in the Bible points to Christ having erotic feelings for women, or relationships with the female sex, the possibility of him being gay cannot be discounted.In the absence of any evidence - [b]let alone proof - that Jesus was heterosexual, the theological basis of Church homophobia is all the more shaky and indefensible. How can established religion dare denounce homosexuality when the founder of its faith was himself a man of mysterious, unknown sexuality who could, for all we know, have been homosexual?The Bible tells us that Jesus was born a man and therefore presumably had male sexual feelings. It would have been more or less impossible, biologically, for him not to have an element of erotic arousal - even if only having the normal male response of waking with an er3ction [/b]

Whilst I have personal reservations about the whole gay furore,i find it difficult to fathom why the anti-gay stance is predicated mainly on the premise of religion. Jesus never got married,walked around with 12 men,wore flowing gowns without underpants. Hmm..Ok,i'll say no more

God,God,God! That's all i've been reading. For the record,Zubby does not believe in God & rightly so. Yet,had the conscience to do the right thing unlike most of you here screaming God who would have driven past (whilst screaming 'blood of Jezzuus!')so they don't turn up late for fellowship or Bible study. Speaks volumes

You can simply boycott shoprite & patronise the indigenous shopping outlets. Nigerians have a penchant for patronising anything foreign & this is the raison d'etre most of these companies are flourishing.make a concious effort today to stick to the indigenous products where possible