₦airaland Forum

What more specific info do you need?
What type of startup business do we invest in: Existing web startups or creative web based ideas.
How do we make profit: It depends on the Web startup's business model brought forward by the owner and the outcome of our meetings with you if the business model may need to be modified.

We will be closing acquisition and partnership offers very soon to re-open it in the third quarter of 2012.
I just posted it here to give opportunity to those who may be limited by funds in their web based projects or ideas.

babaearly:
at what level do you guys come in to develop the start up business? do you invest in blogs?

It depends on the agreement we are able to reach with you.
We wont invest in open source scripts or third party solutions such as blogger or wordpress.

We do not give loan.
We would negotiate a stake in the project and provide funding and other variables and also deploy our existing resources such as team of developers, legal consultants, accounting consultants, customer support staff and other physical and non physical resources.

For some existing projects, we may also offer you a stake in our company as part of acquisition renumeration but this its rather the exception.

We bought stake in two web startups in 2011 and so far, we have grown the startups to points where the founders never imagined

If you have a web or mobile based solution or an idea that needs investment, acquisition or development, Afrisoft Interactive will bank roll you, buy it or work on it for you.
We are growing very fast and expanding our reach in 2012 and are looking for projects that need funding, acquisition or partnership to invest in.

Please contact ceo[at]afrisoft[dot]net to schedule an appointment. Opportunities are available if you intend to sell your existing portals.

Don't bother to contact us if what you have is an implementation of an open source script (e.g most forums) or if your project is not web or mobile based.

If you have a web or mobile based solution or an idea that needs investment, acquisition or development, Afrisoft Interactive will bank roll you, buy it or work on it for you.
We are growing very fast and expanding our reach in 2012 and are looking for projects that need funding, acquisition or partnership to invest in.

Please contact ceo[at]afrisoft[dot]net to schedule an appointment. Opportunities are available if you intend to sell your existing portals.

Don't bother to contact us if what you have is an implementation of an open source script (e.g most forums) or if your project is not web or mobile based.

When did SMPP become a technology that made you coin the phrase "good SMPP person"?

All you need is a good programmer. Most SMPP is just simple xml on a standard rest API via HTTP POST and any good programmer should be able to implement that.

Get a programmer, tell him what you wanna do and he becomes your "Good SMPP person".

"rules of business in Nigeria"? I never heard of that one.

No need for shortcode.
Choose a friendly mobile phone OS like windows mobile or android.

On windows phone, you can use message-Interceptor to catch all incoming sms messages and submit them to your web page url, then use php or other serverside scripts to process the submission on your web page.

I did exactly what you need on Afrisoft SMS Server
and it is being used on www.longcode247.com and a couple of other sms-to-web portals.

Afrisoft Interactive Limited is a functional software company with track records based in Lagos and we need PHP developers for immediate employment.
Only skilled php developers need apply. What you get:

Very flexible working time (If u r very good, you may be allowed to work from home)
Official laptop or Windows 7 tablet PC (Afrisoft Elite tab series)
Official Samsung Galaxy Android Phone
247 internet connection for phone and laptop/tablet
Very conducive and staff friendly working environment
Report directly to the CEO/Lead software developer
There's continuous training for our staff especially programmers
Good salary

No degree or certificates is required! Only adequate skills in PHP, Javascript, CSS, MySQL and ability to learn fast. Being self taught is an added advantage.

I.T students, youth corpers, trainee programmers and freelance programmers are not needed. Only full time programmers.

Indicate your interest to leke.ojikutu [at] afrisoft [dot] net or ceo [at] afrisoft [dot] net

Be part of a fast growing company with a great vision. Apply now!

@dhtml*:
I coded a single domain SSO and now, i need it to work cross-domain. I want to know if urs is open-source LGPL or any commercial friendly license so that i can just adopt it and save myself some coding time.
I've been trying to track u online in the last 48 hrs. U no get skype or whatsapp or viber?

@dhtml,
I have been busy coding seriously for my 2012 projects. Will wait for your buzz today.

You have to be more than a programmer, you need to be an entrepreneur!

examples:
My app on www.smsportalcreator.com has sold over 1000 licenses in 4 continents within the last 12 months (Innitial price was N60,000 but present price is N5,000).
I developed and own 50% of www.estoresms.com and so far, my dividends for 2011 is in good 7 digits.
I developed and own 50% of the immensely profitable www.longcode247.com amongst a few others.

As a programmer, i recognised that people like zuckerberg, gates, larry page, sergey brin, David Filo, Jerry Yang e.t.c would not have made so much money and fame if they did not have their own products/portals.

Now, i prefer a long term N1 per second per project than your N450k per project.

I already have people begging me with millions to buy part of my company www.afrisoft.net . This is a big deal if you consider that i only resigned as a government worker in 2009.

12M is no big deal if you have the business skills. 2012 is gonna be a very profitable year, don't miss out.
See you at the top!

i have a database of about 4.5 million categorized Nigerian numbers.
You can query by location and other categories e.g lagos, ikeja, youths, christians, muslims, job seekers, blackberry users e.t.c.
The database is assembled from several sources which created the possibility of categorization.

The whole database is not for sale but if you need numbers from a particular category, you can request on www.estoresms.com

Speaking form experience of a business owner:
1. Staffing/HR: The fastest way to kill a business is to work with the wrong team or a drastically demotivated team.
2. CSR: Customers expect that all their questions, requests and problems should be resolved immediately. They actually expect to be worshiped and your customer support has a role to play in making sure they are satisfied.
3. Cash flow: Cash, cash, cash. If you run out of cash, you're half dead or perhaps dead but not buried.

@danyl
Can we hook up on fb or linkedin or google+?
Might be a good idea. u can contact me on my personal site to get my IDs.

Using PHP as a point of reference,
You may not necessarily have your own framework but it is good to adopt a proven open source framework.

Some info about php frameworks here:
http://www.noupe.com/php/discussing-php-frameworks.html

When a programmer joins my company, the first thing he learns after induction is our framework. I always teach the framework myself because without proper understanding of our framework and conventions, you are not useful to us no matter your programming skills.

PHP is our language of choice for web applications that's why my discussion tends towards much of php. For other types of applications (desktop, mobile e.t.c) we don't use frameworks but we have lots of existing classes that simplify and speed up development depending on the language.

No matter what we are coding, we have our conventions for file systems, class/object naming conventions, database conventions e.t.c.

NB: If you plan to use open source *anything*, please read and understand the license properly. Being open-source does not mean the same as "Free to use for commercial purpose".
There are several licenses for open source projects which prohibit usage in commercial programs e.g GPL an some Creative Commons Attribution License.

talk2hb1:
You can always outsource the production while concentrating your effort on the marketing and administration of your business. Nigeria Computer Society too must be put into consideration,

A software company should have software competence, have its own framework, classes and conventions. If you just do marketing and don't do software, then you are a software marketing company.

Outsourcing software development is a bad idea for a software company in Nigeria where freelance programmers get employed elsewhere later on and don't av time for you again and software business die like chickens every year.

How will you cope with maintaining 10 different software that you outsourced to 10 different freelance programmers who have all gotten employment in banks now and don't freelance again?
That means you will be maintaining 10 different frameworks, 10 different programming styles, 10 different conventions e.t.c? Na die be that.

In the long run, its costlier to outsource if you are doing commercial software like us. Development is very faster if you have standard framework, convention and classes for your projects. If you must outsource, then the contractor must stick to your coding practices so that it works just as if you did it yourself. Even if contractor dies, you can easily continue from where he stopped.

We've outsourced projects only to uncover errors such as:
application is not extensible, no db objects, application is not secure, no naming conventions, absolutely no classes, every page is a standalone php program, database is not really relational, application does not follow MVC architecture, application is not optimized for speed, unintelligent use of tables instead of divs, javascript is not cross browser compatible, validation has too many loopholes, some forms are susceptible to sql injection, mailing process is done with php mail function, foolish usage of iframes, included files are directly accessible, use of deprecated functions, errors being outputed to browser and not caught or suppressed and so many un-mentionable problems.

How will you know all these if you don't have software competence?

@2buff,
Thanks for that. I didn't know this when i registered the domain some years ago. ".com" and ".net" were already taken and i didn't like ".ng" because it localizes my business in the global space.
Don't want to prefix or suffix the name AFRISOFT so its difficult to drop it now that we have international clients and lots of online and offline products with the present domain on them.
You got any suggestions?

Building a software company goes beyond learning programming skills and marketing. Just like any real company, you need a lot of factors to make it work. You may decide to start as a software developer and grow your skills into a software company. However, some advice if you choose to start with a company:

-You need a vision (You cant set out on a road if you don't have a destination in mind).
-You need programming/software skills (Its difficult to get good programmers to work with you if you are crap ).
-You need short term, medium term and long term goals/projects (You can not survive in the software industry if your company does not have products or projects of its own)
-You need management skills (Managing people is a tougher than programming and poor management is like a business virus in Nigeria it kills a lot of companies)
-You need a few good developers. Just one or two to start with (I.T students and trainees will do the coding, the developers handle the development)
-You need support staff (Nothing attracts complains and support requests like software and your customers will not come back if you don't support them)
-You need a lawyer (I learnt the hard way after our fast selling product got pirated.)
-You need an accountant (Since you will be dealing with money and employee tax:PAYE and company tax too )
-You need an office (Most people won't pay you if you don't have an address and people will not pay you big money if they don't first come to your office)
-You need advert and marketing (People wont buy your stuff if they don't know about it)
-You need creativity, innovation or exceptional copying skills.
-You need capital and if you ain't got plenty of it, u might wanna get investors or freelance a little to raise money before you start (The freelancing thingy worked for me).

Most of what you need may not be a requirement for starting up but they are a requirement for staying up. you must have them in your plan and always work towards them. You may outsource or contract a whole lot of them but never outsource software development. Experience has taught me better.

My software company is Afrisoft Interactive ( http://www.afrisoft.org ). We are still growing and still learning so this is just my opinion not a fundamental law.

I just developed a javascript chart using html5 canvas. I believe it will be useful for developers looking to include charts in their application now or in the future.

Please check it, download or review at:
http://www.lekeojikutu.com/my-blog/108-free-javascript-html5-bar-chart-script

I used to face this problem when i was developing my db wrapper class. What i did was to optimize my codes so that only one connection is open per page load no matter how many files were included. I kept the first connection alive and made sure i did not reconnect to mysql throughout a page.

It worked for me because there were too many connection calls while processing a page. This error was in my class though, not that 150 people were visiting my page simultaneously.

If you are using a framework and including so many files to generate a page, make sure you are not starting a new connection on every included file.

sweet-pawn:
Well, to me this is more like asking:
"What is the difference between soccer and football?"

No, its more like asking:
Whats the difference between soccer and first half.

You can write a line of code but you cant write a line of program.
You may have to code for weeks and compile before you come up with a program.


In a program, there are several lines of sql codes and vb.net codes.

I can write a code here:

xyz = document.getElementById('abc').innerHTML;

but i cant write a program here.
I can develop a program by writing several lines of codes. The end user sees and uses the program but cannot see the codes.

Seun, if only you can shed more light, some of us may learn a thing or two.

Bitter lesson learnt the hard way.

This devaluation of the Naira will further kill small and medium scale enterprises thereby tremendously[b] increasing unemployment rate[/b].
Subsidy removal from fuel will increase the cost of running business in this country that has epileptic power supply, this will kill more startups and increase unemployment rate.
The removal of ban on certain imported goods has discouraged and killed the little local production and inturn caused more unemployment.

This country is gradually chewing up itself. Goodluck, what foolishness is this? Are you absolutely unintelligent?

@Seun,
The advantage we have over that generation is the internet. We can make in 5 years what they made over 30 years.
We can and will be millionaires in our generation. This is possible with the power of information, the power of cyberspace.
Whoever wrote that piece was looking back, its time to look forward. This is not just "Hope", we have started already!

We're married till death do us part so if the toothbrush is good enuf for her to re-use tomorrow morning, then its good enuf for me. We just use anyone and replace both at the same time without writing names on them.

Moreover, her teeth are very sexy!

From the point of view of an applicant, d pay is small. However, if you look at the situation from d point of view of an entrepreneur in a poor economy, its understandable.

In a country where a startup has to:
pay marketers,
pay customer support staff,
pay for retainership (lawyer),
pay consulting accountant,
pay Corporate affairs,
pay FIRS,
pay State IRS,
pay rent,
pay phcn,
pay LASAA for signage,
Pay LAWMA,
Pay Local govts for several permits,
Keep pre-funded company phone lines,
pay service charge for cleaners, security, e.t.c
spend thousands on generator fuel,
pay broadband internet in your office,
buy laptops/desktop for marketers, cusomer care and programmers,
get printers, projector, dispenser, furniture and other fittings.

How much will u be able to pay developers?
Nigeria is not easy for small businesses and we need to face it, we can't pay more than we earn.
No be me get that advert but i think i know how it feels in this part of the world.

Company is in Agege

Adobe air requires the adobe air runtime to be installed on the client's system b4 ur application can work.
I use zinc. it has so many features and can package for windows, mac and linux. Its very cool and does not require any runtime.

See Zinc at http://www.multidmedia.com