₦airaland Forum

4. Web App Idea Number 4: A web app or converter that allows electronics to run on internet data, when there is no electricity.

3. Web App Idea Number 3: Web app that allows you to make an app with basic building blocks in your native language.

3. Web App Idea Number 3: Web app that allows you to make an app with basic building blocks in your native language.

2. Web App Idea Number 2: A website where you can pay for things with your skillz, rather than with your money

ps3o:
that's a very easy task!

If it is so easy, y hasn't been there one like that yet for Africans?

2. Web App Idea Number 2: A website where you can pay for things with your skillz, rather than with your money

Check this out ~> https://www.nairaland.com/2211833/what-best-web-based-businesses-start

What about I post some ideas and you guys upvote or downvote. Here is my first idea

1. A web app that curates news in different native languages for those who don't understand English.

ps3o:
people get betrayed by other people. so, ideas become rare to get. there are so many web businesses that earn big cash for you.
you just to have define where your channel of activities will move towards.
for consultancy or enquiry on web business, whatsapp or call 07031175291

I understand and feel where you are coming from. What about I post some ideas and you guys upvote or downvote. Here is my first idea

1. A web app that curates news in different native languages for those who don't understand English.

There are over 70 Million internet users in Nigeria, and about 300 million internet users in Africa. What are web based businesses that can make 70 million from Nigeria or 300 million in the whole Africa come to my website at least once a day, or what will make all of them pay about $0.50 - $0.99 for just 1 app. Im looking for ideas and problems that we can turn into opportunities so that one can make money from. From there we can hire more people and it will be a win-win situation for everyone.

There are over 70 Million internet users in Nigeria, and about 300 million internet users in Africa. What are web based businesses that can make 70 million from Nigeria or 300 million in the whole Africa come to my website at least once a day, or what will make all of them pay about $0.50 - $0.99 for just 1 app. Im looking for ideas and problems that we can turn into opportunities so that one can make money from. From there we can hire more people and it will be a win-win situation for everyone.

Abdulhakeem1:
Many IT People Can Do Dat but We need to Replace Oil Revenue. THAT'S Where Exporting Comes In. Even if Oil Isnt Falling in World Market, Govt. should contribute to the Software Industry, it Will surely yield good. All of your Suggestions are good, but d revenue of startup will one way or the other be trickle down from oil

Many IT people can do what? If many IT people can do it, y dont we have more million/billion dollar startups in Nigeria or Africa? Like what is going on?

digitalembrace:
My bad. I thought you were staying on topic, i.e referring to the title of the thread.

I completely agree with you. The are many ideas that can make you millions in the Nigerian tech space. You don't need to innovate. It's enough to copy. Naija is behind the curve.

I think we need to innovate. Copying and Cloning has not done much good for us, because we don't have the same type of economies, opportunities or problems that 1st and 2nd World Countries have. I believe that what makes Nairaland so important and special is because it is dedicated to Nigerians at home and Nigeria Diaspora. If we can do what Nairaland did to other areas, we will be good.

digitalembrace:
To replace oil you need an export market. What you suggest only redistributes money trickled down from oil.

Im not interested in replacing oil. Did Mr. Seun replace oil in order to become a millionaire? Do internet entrepeneurs need to replace oil in order to make it? Im saying what are the problems/opportunities in Nigeria that developers/programmers can make money from? There are many problems (opportunities) in Nigeria that can be solved and make people some money. 1 is that not everybody can afford smartphones. Another is no electricity. There are so many ways to make money from these problems. Look at it this way. There are over 70 Million Internet Users in Nigeria. Can't somebody make an app that will cost $1 and get these 70 million to buy it? Or can't somebody make a website that have 70 Million Nigerians click on the website at least once per day?

But there are many problems (opportunities) in Nigeria that can be solved and make people some money. Alot. 1 is that not everybody can afford smartphones. Another is no electricity. There are so many ways to make money from these problems. Look at it this way. There are over 70 Million Internet Users in Nigeria. Can't somebody make an app that will cost $1 and get these 70 million to buy it? Or can't somebody make a website that have 70 Million Nigerians click on the website at least once per day?

So if all these problems are in Nigeria how was Mr. Seun able to create the best internet social forum for Africans in Africa? How was Naij.com able to have millions of visitors per day? How was Linda Ikeji able to make millions off of something simple as a blog? Like what did they do different? What did they know? Are u sure that the problem is not lack of ideas or innovations?

Here are some Nigerian startups that I see. Are any owners of them on Nairaland:

http://www.startupranking.com/top/nigeria
http://nigeria.startups-list.com/

Abdulhakeem1:
Nigerian Software Developers are having hard time with the process of developing softwares.

What process?
Is it that we lack ideas?
Is it that we lack innovation?
Nigerian is full of challenges n problems that we can turn into solutions and make money from?
The problem is what are these problems? Is it money? Should we make more offline apps than online apps? Should we focus on helping people become more literate? Should we focus on people becoming more tolerant?

Are there any more problems? I mean I feel as if Nigeria has potential but it's like Im missing something. It's like half of the media says that Nigeria startups are the next big thing, but when I talk to other half of Nigerian developers/programmer, they tell me something else...something like the media is lying. Like even the startups that come out from Nigeria, none of them seem 2 me 2 be solving real challenges/problems. They seem like clones n copycats that will never succeed. Like there is gotta 2 b more opportunities than Social Networking, E-Commerce and blogging. What about the crime sector. Y isn't an app that can stop child trafficking/kidnaps/robberies in cars. What about an app/software that can help the illiterate read/learn? Or an app/software that can expose corrupt policemen at checkpoints? Like what am I not seeing?

Even Rocket Internet companies, are not making things different. They just cloning things Is it dat people can't afford internet? Is it dat people can afford internet but we lack innovation? Like what is the main problem with us?

Instead of arguing back and forth, lets just post right here or better yet make a thread of problems that many internet entrepreneurs face in Nigeria and solutions/opportunies on how to solve them. So far we have

1. Not enough stable power supply
2. Bad internet reputation for Nigerians
3. Any more?

franklyneo:
i don't hv a team bro,just wanna do it as a project for school

If that is the case, use a Baas and save yourself time, money, energy and stress. Its not easy to build a chat app from scratch. Baas (with a free account) can help u out. Then maybe when u finish school or when u are on holiday or have more time, u can build 1 from scratch.

franklyneo:
Pls can someone help me on the major steps to take when creating a chat app.what and what comes 1st,followed by what eg where d API,GUI,SERVER,DATABASE CONNECTION etc,which one comes before others

If u are trying 2 do it alone, I suggest u use a Baas, bcuz its hard 1 for person 2 do. Do u have a team?

Link ~> http://php.net/manual/en/pdo.connections.php

Connections and Connection management ¶

Connections are established by creating instances of the PDO base class. It doesn't matter which driver you want to use; you always use the PDO class name. The constructor accepts parameters for specifying the database source (known as the DSN) and optionally for the username and password (if any).

Example #1 Connecting to MySQL

<?php
$dbh = new PDO('mysql:host=localhost;dbname=test', $user, $pass);
?>
If there are any connection errors, a PDOException object will be thrown. You may catch the exception if you want to handle the error condition, or you may opt to leave it for an application global exception handler that you set up via set_exception_handler().

Example #2 Handling connection errors

<?php
try {
$dbh = new PDO('mysql:host=localhost;dbname=test', $user, $pass);
foreach($dbh->query('SELECT * from FOO') as $row) {
print_r($row);
}
$dbh = null;
} catch (PDOException $e) {
print "Error!: " . $e->getMessage() . "<br/>";
die();
}
?>
Warning
If your application does not catch the exception thrown from the PDO constructor, the default action taken by the zend engine is to terminate the script and display a back trace. This back trace will likely reveal the full database connection details, including the username and password. It is your responsibility to catch this exception, either explicitly (via a catch statement) or implicitly via set_exception_handler().
Upon successful connection to the database, an instance of the PDO class is returned to your script. The connection remains active for the lifetime of that PDO object. To close the connection, you need to destroy the object by ensuring that all remaining references to it are deleted--you do this by assigning NULL to the variable that holds the object. If you don't do this explicitly, PHP will automatically close the connection when your script ends.

Example #3 Closing a connection

<?php
$dbh = new PDO('mysql:host=localhost;dbname=test', $user, $pass);
// use the connection here


// and now we're done; close it
$dbh = null;
?>
Many web applications will benefit from making persistent connections to database servers. Persistent connections are not closed at the end of the script, but are cached and re-used when another script requests a connection using the same credentials. The persistent connection cache allows you to avoid the overhead of establishing a new connection every time a script needs to talk to a database, resulting in a faster web application.

Example #4 Persistent connections

<?php
$dbh = new PDO('mysql:host=localhost;dbname=test', $user, $pass, array(
PDO::ATTR_PERSISTENT => true
));
?>
Note:
If you wish to use persistent connections, you must set PDO::ATTR_PERSISTENT in the array of driver options passed to the PDO constructor. If setting this attribute with PDO::setAttribute() after instantiation of the object, the driver will not use persistent connections.
Note:
If you're using the PDO ODBC driver and your ODBC libraries support ODBC Connection Pooling (unixODBC and Windows are two that do; there may be more), then it's recommended that you don't use persistent PDO connections, and instead leave the connection caching to the ODBC Connection Pooling layer. The ODBC Connection Pool is shared with other modules in the process; if PDO is told to cache the connection, then that connection would never be returned to the ODBC connection pool, resulting in additional connections being created to service those other modules.
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User Contributed Notes 9 notes

up
down
64 cappytoi at yahoo dot com ¶11 months ago
Using PHP 5.4.26, pdo_pgsql with libpg 9.2.8 (self compiled). As usual PHP never explains some critical stuff in documentation. You shouldn't expect that your connection is closed when you set $dbh = null unless all you do is just instantiating PDO class. Try following:

<?php
$pdo = new PDO('pgsql:host=192.168.137.1;port=5432;dbname=anydb', 'anyuser', 'pw');
sleep(5);
$stmt = $pdo->prepare('SELECT * FROM sometable');
$stmt->execute();
$pdo = null;
sleep(60);
?>

Now check your database. And what a surprise! Your connection hangs for another 60 seconds. Now that might be expectable because you haven't cleared the resultset.

<?php
$pdo = new PDO('pgsql:host=192.168.137.160;port=5432;dbname=platin', 'cappytoi', '1111');
sleep(5);
$stmt = $pdo->prepare('SELECT * FROM admin');
$stmt->execute();
$stmt->closeCursor();
$pdo = null;
sleep(60);
?>

What teh heck you say at this point? Still same? Here is what you need to do to close that connection:

<?php
$pdo = new PDO('pgsql:host=192.168.137.160;port=5432;dbname=platin', 'cappytoi', '1111');
sleep(5);
$stmt = $pdo->prepare('SELECT * FROM admin');
$stmt->execute();
$stmt->closeCursor(); // this is not even required
$stmt = null; // doing this is mandatory for connection to get closed
$pdo = null;
sleep(60);
?>

PDO is just one of a kind because it saves you to depend on 3rd party abstraction layers. But it becomes annoying to see there is no implementation of a "disconnect" method even though there is a request for it for 2 years. Developers underestimate the requirement of such a method. First of all, doing $stmt = null everywhere is annoying and what is most annoying is you cannot forcibly disconnect even when you set $pdo = null. It might get cleared on script's termination but this is not always possible because script termination may delayed due to slow client connection etc.

Anyway here is how to disconnect forcibly using postgresql:

<?php
$pdo = new PDO('pgsql:host=192.168.137.160;port=5432;dbname=platin', 'cappytoi', '1111');
sleep(5);
$stmt = $pdo->prepare('SELECT * FROM admin');
$stmt->execute();
$pdo->query('SELECT pg_terminate_backend(pg_backend_pid());');
$pdo = null;
sleep(60);
?>

Following may be used for MYSQL: (not guaranteed)
KILL CONNECTION_ID()

Link ~> http://php.net/manual/en/pdo.connections.php

Connections and Connection management ¶

Connections are established by creating instances of the PDO base class. It doesn't matter which driver you want to use; you always use the PDO class name. The constructor accepts parameters for specifying the database source (known as the DSN) and optionally for the username and password (if any).

Example #1 Connecting to MySQL

<?php
$dbh = new PDO('mysql:host=localhost;dbname=test', $user, $pass);
?>
If there are any connection errors, a PDOException object will be thrown. You may catch the exception if you want to handle the error condition, or you may opt to leave it for an application global exception handler that you set up via set_exception_handler().

Example #2 Handling connection errors

<?php
try {
$dbh = new PDO('mysql:host=localhost;dbname=test', $user, $pass);
foreach($dbh->query('SELECT * from FOO') as $row) {
print_r($row);
}
$dbh = null;
} catch (PDOException $e) {
print "Error!: " . $e->getMessage() . "<br/>";
die();
}
?>
Warning
If your application does not catch the exception thrown from the PDO constructor, the default action taken by the zend engine is to terminate the script and display a back trace. This back trace will likely reveal the full database connection details, including the username and password. It is your responsibility to catch this exception, either explicitly (via a catch statement) or implicitly via set_exception_handler().
Upon successful connection to the database, an instance of the PDO class is returned to your script. The connection remains active for the lifetime of that PDO object. To close the connection, you need to destroy the object by ensuring that all remaining references to it are deleted--you do this by assigning NULL to the variable that holds the object. If you don't do this explicitly, PHP will automatically close the connection when your script ends.

Example #3 Closing a connection

<?php
$dbh = new PDO('mysql:host=localhost;dbname=test', $user, $pass);
// use the connection here


// and now we're done; close it
$dbh = null;
?>
Many web applications will benefit from making persistent connections to database servers. Persistent connections are not closed at the end of the script, but are cached and re-used when another script requests a connection using the same credentials. The persistent connection cache allows you to avoid the overhead of establishing a new connection every time a script needs to talk to a database, resulting in a faster web application.

Example #4 Persistent connections

<?php
$dbh = new PDO('mysql:host=localhost;dbname=test', $user, $pass, array(
PDO::ATTR_PERSISTENT => true
));
?>
Note:
If you wish to use persistent connections, you must set PDO::ATTR_PERSISTENT in the array of driver options passed to the PDO constructor. If setting this attribute with PDO::setAttribute() after instantiation of the object, the driver will not use persistent connections.
Note:
If you're using the PDO ODBC driver and your ODBC libraries support ODBC Connection Pooling (unixODBC and Windows are two that do; there may be more), then it's recommended that you don't use persistent PDO connections, and instead leave the connection caching to the ODBC Connection Pooling layer. The ODBC Connection Pool is shared with other modules in the process; if PDO is told to cache the connection, then that connection would never be returned to the ODBC connection pool, resulting in additional connections being created to service those other modules.
add a note add a note
User Contributed Notes 9 notes

up
down
64 cappytoi at yahoo dot com ¶11 months ago
Using PHP 5.4.26, pdo_pgsql with libpg 9.2.8 (self compiled). As usual PHP never explains some critical stuff in documentation. You shouldn't expect that your connection is closed when you set $dbh = null unless all you do is just instantiating PDO class. Try following:

<?php
$pdo = new PDO('pgsql:host=192.168.137.1;port=5432;dbname=anydb', 'anyuser', 'pw');
sleep(5);
$stmt = $pdo->prepare('SELECT * FROM sometable');
$stmt->execute();
$pdo = null;
sleep(60);
?>

Now check your database. And what a surprise! Your connection hangs for another 60 seconds. Now that might be expectable because you haven't cleared the resultset.

<?php
$pdo = new PDO('pgsql:host=192.168.137.160;port=5432;dbname=platin', 'cappytoi', '1111');
sleep(5);
$stmt = $pdo->prepare('SELECT * FROM admin');
$stmt->execute();
$stmt->closeCursor();
$pdo = null;
sleep(60);
?>

What teh heck you say at this point? Still same? Here is what you need to do to close that connection:

<?php
$pdo = new PDO('pgsql:host=192.168.137.160;port=5432;dbname=platin', 'cappytoi', '1111');
sleep(5);
$stmt = $pdo->prepare('SELECT * FROM admin');
$stmt->execute();
$stmt->closeCursor(); // this is not even required
$stmt = null; // doing this is mandatory for connection to get closed
$pdo = null;
sleep(60);
?>

PDO is just one of a kind because it saves you to depend on 3rd party abstraction layers. But it becomes annoying to see there is no implementation of a "disconnect" method even though there is a request for it for 2 years. Developers underestimate the requirement of such a method. First of all, doing $stmt = null everywhere is annoying and what is most annoying is you cannot forcibly disconnect even when you set $pdo = null. It might get cleared on script's termination but this is not always possible because script termination may delayed due to slow client connection etc.

Anyway here is how to disconnect forcibly using postgresql:

<?php
$pdo = new PDO('pgsql:host=192.168.137.160;port=5432;dbname=platin', 'cappytoi', '1111');
sleep(5);
$stmt = $pdo->prepare('SELECT * FROM admin');
$stmt->execute();
$pdo->query('SELECT pg_terminate_backend(pg_backend_pid());');
$pdo = null;
sleep(60);
?>

Following may be used for MYSQL: (not guaranteed)
KILL CONNECTION_ID()

Emeka71:
Poor Me, so I can't screen-shot with My phone.

We can create an app for that, if you are interested.

Emeka71:
Is there any screen-shot that works for NOKIA X2-01?

I personally don't think so.

Ask any question and the health search engine will give you answers. Who is interested?

cbrass:
thanks bro. I really appreciate it

Do u have an app for it on Android or J2ME?

cbrass:
would love you guys to feel the radio station by listening here www.mrlm.org.ng streaming is on now.

click the alternative link if you cant listen to it with the player

I love this please keep up the good work.

247Musics:
Dear Readers this website is own by person in nigeria Having All the websites in Nigeria In One website

Such a Technology and Easy To Use Click to see http://donald360.com/latestupdates

I think it's a great website.

As you all know election is coming up. What if we had an app/website that could compare President GEJ and Buhari as well as Senators, Governors, and etc. We could look at their past deeds, accomplishments and etc.

You will find ideas here ~> https://www.nairaland.com/2151159/lets-post-ideas-here-4

For the 100th Post what about a weather app that can tell us when it will rain, be dry, be very hot or be very cold and let us know how it will affect the country agriculturally and economically. If possible, we can tell the app to stop the rain. (Just Kidding). This can help increase our exports of goods and products and decrease our imports of them.