₦airaland Forum

Nigeria has finally launched the first software incubation centre in Lagos.

It is known as the Information Technology Developers Entrepreneurship Accelerator (iDEA) Software Incubation Centre.
iDEA is a not-for-profit special purpose vehicle (SPV) constituted to ensure the successful implementation of the programme across the country.

Speaking at the event, Minister of Communications Technology, Mrs Omobola Johnson, said the official launch of the project marks a significant milestone in the country’s quest to grow the software development industry and grow young entrepreneurs too.

The software incubation centre is located in the popular Herbert Macaulay Street, Yaba, a middle class business and residential area on the mainland of metropolitan Lagos.

She recalled that the idea of the centre came shortly after she was appointed minister of the new ministry, adding that every consultation she had with stakeholders in the industry all pointed to the fact that the software industry has huge potential to support ongoing efforts at job and wealth creation for the youths of the country
The consultation led to setting up of a committee to provide a working template since it will be impossible to import wholesale what has been done in places like China and India.

The committee worked assiduously to produce what has led to the establishment of the incubation centres.
“There is a lot of work to be done. We will bring all the multinationals to this initiative,” she said.
Mrs Johnson said the launch of the other incubation centres, first in Tinapa Knowledge City, Calabar, Cross Rivers State, and others will follow suit.

Chairman, Governing Board of iDEA, Adedotun Suleiman, said the centre will offer all the technical and financial assistance needed by students, developers and start-ups to grow their ideas, adding that with the funding from the Federal Government, the coast was clear for youngsters with promising business plan to make them a reality.
Project Manager, Helen Anatogu, said the centres will provide developers the opportunity to develop their skills and market it.

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Uyo – Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is to visit Akwa Ibom in next month, the Niger Delta Young Professionals, a non governmental group, has said.

Facebook is a social networking service launched in February, 2004, with over one billion active users.

The Chairman of the Niger Delta Young Professional, Mr Moses Siasia, made the announcement when he paid a courtesy visit on Gov. Godswill Akpabio of Akwa Ibom on Friday.

Siasia said that Zuckerberg had been invited as one of the guest speakers during his groups youth economic summit, scheduled to hold in Uyo from May 28 to May 29.

The chairman said that young professionals from the Niger Delta were coming together to promote entrepreneurship, looking at economic challenges in the area.

Siasia commended Akpabio for transforming the state through infrastructure such as good roads, healthcare and education.

Responding, Akpabio told the group to put in their best in their chosen professions, adding that success could only come with hard work.

The governor pledged his support towards the hosting of the summit, commending the youths for not engaging in militancy. (NAN)

Facebook is a place where you can share pictures of cute animals and fun activities. Now there’s a browser extension that lets you encode those images with secret, hard-to-detect messages.

That’s the idea behind Secretbook, a browser extension released this week by 21-year-old Oxford University computer science student and former Google intern Owen-Campbell Moore. With the extension, anyone — you, your sister, a terrorist — could share messages hidden in JPEG images uploaded to Facebook without the prying eyes of the company, the government or anyone else noticing or figuring out what the messages say. The only way to unlock them is through a password you create.

“The goal of this research was to demonstrate that JPEG steganography can be performed on social media where it has previously been impossible,” Campbell-Moore tells Danger Room. He says he spent about two months spread out over the last year working on the extension as a research project for the university.

The extension is only available for the Google Chrome browser — Campbell-Moore cites its developer tools and popularity — and the messages are restricted to 140 characters. Less certain is what Facebook thinks; a spokesman declined to comment. But it’s still the first time anyone’s managed to figure out how to automate digital steganography — the practice of concealing messages inside computer files — through Facebook, the world’s biggest social media platform. Unlike cryptography, which uses ciphertext to encrypt messages, steganographic messages are simply hidden where no one would think to look.

For an image, that could be a bunch of pixels or electronic 1s and 0s. In Facebook’s case, they can be hidden among the tons of images uploaded to the site daily.

It wasn’t easy developing the extension. “Many tools for steganography in JPEGs have existed in the past although they have always required that the images are transmitted exactly as they are,” Campbell-Moore says.