Nigerian web start-ups to watch

In hindsight, it's obvious that a country famous for internet scammers would have enough savvy people with access to the internet to have its own startups as well. Nice to see the positive side of Nigerian internet access for once.

Ha, good to see my friend Oo linked to on there (he's a Nigerian who studies at the University of Warwick, where he's been trying to build a startup community). According to him, in Nigeria, everyone knows that internet fraud (and politics) is the way to get rich, but there aren't the same role-models for entrepeneurs as there are in Western countries. Interesting stuff.

Most of them look like Nigerian versions of existing sites. Nothing particularly new.

I think it would be cool to see some kind of google maps mashup showing various startups around to world. There would obviously be a lot on the US West Coast, but I'd like to see how distributed around the world they are.

So this is why they started 419 scams; they couldn't get any funding from VCs for their startups.

Nairalist.com and nairalists.com are waging an interesting battle, the sites look exactly the same, even the categories seem to be the same. For now nairalist seems to be winning based on amount of classifieds posted, which is probably the only thing that users really care about.

something else to watch... your wallet. Nigerian startups have to overcome the hurdle of the assumption that any packets crossing their border are intent on defrauding you.