DJN

You should try to solve local problems first. A popular solution in foreign countries may not have good crossover appeal in Nigeria.

Fortunately or unfortunately, Nigeria has several problems looking for solutions. Examples include helping people travel around more securely, finding affordable healthcare, enabling MSMEs to find more customers.

Office 365?

Excuse the pedanticism but I assume what you meant was "YC portfolio companies showing HN what they have built"

This is a deeply patronising and offensive statement. The ancient Benin kingdom from which these artifacts were stolen still remains till today and despite corruption in the country, they have managed to keep all their remaining artifacts safe through the centuries.

Nigeria’s corruption problem is orthogonal to its ability to keep its sacred cultural artifacts safe. In fact due to deep cultural and religious reasons, the chances that Nigerians would rob the Oba (King) of Benin’s palace is near zero.

I say this with the full authority of being a native of said country and culture.

It’s because where the money goes is where it circulates, which ultimately affects the GDP.

Every dollar that leaves India, Nigeria or any other developing country is one less dollar that can pay for jobs (plumbers, electricians, doctors etc) in the local market.

South Africa used to have very restrictive currency export controls partly due to apartheid-era sanctions, and one consequence is that it stimulated domestic production and innovation, perhaps far more than any other African country. They’ve now relaxed those controls but it is arguable that they were necessary at that stage of their economic development.

Real-time payment platforms that interconnect all the banks in the country are not new.

Heck, Nigeria rolled out a very advanced one about 7 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16374597

From the article: “NIBSS Instant Payment is so far, the most innovative and revolutionary e-payment solution designed by NIBSS to service the banking industry. NIP is the first and only point to point funds transfer service that guarantees instant value to the beneficiary. Nigeria is the only country in Africa and essentially, the world to have deployed such a solution.”

From first hand use, the platform delivers sub 30 second Interbank transfers, serves over 180 million people across Nigeria, complete with 2-factor security, and SMS notifications to both parties. The transaction cost is N100 (USD 0.33) and it has been operational since 2011.

It makes you wonder if the $15-$30 wire transfer fees in the US is a severe case of regulatory capture.

I wish I could upvote this twice. Distribution is the biggest problem in mobile.

I'll add that even after acquiring a user, engagement, apathy, and not being a 24-hour uninstall statistic are close seconds.

I'm working on a solution that's currently in private beta but it should be in public beta in a few weeks.

Well chosen name.

Two questions:

1. How does this square up with the efforts within the Serverless community? https://github.com/serverless/serverless

2. Does OpenFaas assume that the smallest unit of work for each function or domain of functions is always a unique container? In other words, does it support scenarios where one needs to deploy a new function into an existing/running container?

My team and I are working on solving the 3 biggest problems in mobile app management - distribution, monetization, and enterprise mobility.

Our idea is to build a platform for discovering, managing, and monetizing apps. Kinda like a Spotify for Apps.

So essentially, we've built a mobile app that lets you run embeddable apps (applets) in containers (i.e. webviews with native hooks), and developers can hook the applets up to a mobile backend-as-a-service similar to Firebase.

Businesses can also use it to manage and setup shared workspaces that contain private, work-related apps, and get all the benefits of enterprise mobility (BYOD, security, etc) without all the complexity.

We've just finished a successful private beta and are gearing up for a limited public beta. Check it out - https://formelo.com

If anyone is interested in participating in our beta run, shoot me an email - niyi @ formelo . com

I'm not sure why you are being downvoted. @watter's comment was in extremely bad taste.

Frankly, i expected him/her to apologise because the comment

1) Sought to impugn kangpe's achievements,

2) maligned an entire country whose official language is English, and

3) went against HN's guidelines on civility.

New tech (including dev tools) will get simpler over time and adapt to the needs of the market.

Take web pages as an example. Circa 1995, only a relatively few technical people could weave the HTML magic to create them. Fast-forward 10 years, and 5 year old kids were creating them for fun. The demand for web pages continued to increase and eventually the tools to help the majority of people create them emerged naturally.

IMO, the same will apply to app development tools.

Long but worth the read.

I'm working on a startup that has built a PaaS that helps people with beginner or intermediate tech skills build apps quickly, and I agree that building the platform is like a guiding a mountaineer to Camp IV on Everest. Using the same platform to build a bunch of ready-made apps (that can be easily customized if required) is like helping them reach the Summit.

There is still a ton of value in building the platform because it helps us create a whole bunch of these ready-made apps that address different use cases very quickly. The cherry on top is that customizations are very easy and where the non-technical user has the problem-solver mindset, they can make those changes without us.

>> This is a classic trap for technology entrepreneurs, right up there with 'building tools that makes it easier for non-technical people to build apps'.

Can you kindly expatiate on why building dev tools for non-technical people requires a web of trust?

For any given individual, evaluating whether such tools work for you should be a pretty quick exercise similar to test-driving a car. Why would you need a web of trust?

If something is in the public's interest, it generally makes sense to disclose it to the public.

For example, if a car manufacturer (or bank) makes public claims that their system is secure, yet they use 56-bit DES keys to encrypt data, then I think the public should know.

Your "account number" analogy was off because it's is generally not in the public interest to reveal a private citizen's account number.

However, if an account number (email address or ip address) was being used frequently to commit crime, say in an advance fee fraud, then it makes sense to blow the lid on the said account number. That's what I meant by "in the public interest".

A poor analogy but in general terms, if it is in the public's interest, yes.

Security by obscurity is flawed.

That sounds really interesting. Can you provide a link to an example or source of additional info.

Thanks

Drawing realistic fine art is a rare skill, which like many skills can learned with sufficient devotion. 10000 hours, I think.

That said, contempory artists like Kelvin Okafor whose renditions of Heath Ledger, Rihanna, Princess Diana still amaze me.

Do enjoy - http://www.flickr.com/photos/kelvinokaforart

His blog also contains tutorials of sorts - http://kelvinokaforart.blogspot.com

The jury is still out on this one. Unless you can show some numbers, it's hard to see this as anything but a subjective extrapolation of the facts.

Nonetheless, Sift Science's claim is at best poorly worded because it gives armor to the false and unfair interpretation that the majority of regular Nigerians folks are fraudulent, which by itself begs the question.

That's it. I'm puzzled.

Both photos are in a public folder on Flickr called "Costa Rica".

At Trafficspaces, we include a coupon code called LUCKYDAY right there on the payment page of all our plans. Saves the Google search and increase conversion rates to over 30%.

http://www.trafficspaces.com/plans/

If I was a CTO of a large company that was subscribing to a small startup's useful SaaS service, I'll much prefer the startup to have solid financial backing than having access to their code.

The hassle of getting engineers to manage the code and keep it up to date isn't worth it (with all the legal gray areas surrounding IP). That's what I was trying to avoid by going the SaaS route in the first place.

From the undertone of your post, I assume you are not funded. This may be a good time to talk to some angels and get the financial and professional backing that'll put the minds of enterprise customers at ease with your service.

If you don't want to go through that route, and your software can run in a private cloud, then I suggest you offer them a non-hosted version. Giving them your source code is a no no unless you are planning to open-source everything.

In addition, let them know that they'll have to pay for upgrades. Having said that, make sure you price it properly to make the extra hassle worth it.

Writing numbers as words is a legal norm in many countries.

Whilst Nigeria is one of such countries, it doesn't follow that all documents with alphabetised numbers are illegit.

There's a contradiction in terms in what you've just written.

There will never be "millions of legit e-commerce consumers" from Nigeria if the main e-commerce gateways such as PayPal continue to block the entire country.

They've already been excluded before they've started.

* McKinsey, a consultancy, will share management expertise. *

Noooo..you've got to be kidding me. What, in a startup?

I didn't know Quantcast operated an ad network. Interesting. In quantitative terms, how accurate is your inference based data?

On a different note, I have mixed feelings about exchanges cus I feel they overly commoditize inventory. Whilst that may be okay for large sites, it's disastrous for small sites. IMHO, the better strategy is to either join a vertical ad network or sell directly to niche advertisers.

We get a lot of enquiries about that so yes, it's definitely going to be available shortly.

We'll probably start off with an index because that's easier to do considering that each social network/dating site/news portal integrates their database in different ways.