Today, I officially accepted my appointment as IT columnist for Africa’s leading IT and Telecoms news website, ITNewsAfrica.com.

The announcement was published on the site since September 19 after a selection process that appointed two other industry experts, namely, David Paulding and Suzanne Olivier.

ITNewsAfrica.com is an independent media portal fully dedicated to ICT affairs with an original business model, based on five elements (corporate sponsoring, press offices, advertising, events, and content syndication). ITNewsAfrica.com aggregates technology and telecoms news relevant to Africa’s development.

The Online Editor for ITNewsAfrica.com, Samuel Mungadze, said the appointment of the three will go a long way in achieving the company’s objectives of changing perceptions and exposing opportunities.

“We are honored to have a team of experts contributing to our publication. This is a definite sign of good things to come from us,” said Mungadze.

I’ll be publishing news and reviews of Nigeria’s telecoms/mobile 2.0 applications as well as the Web 2.0 market as it relates to Africa. I am highly honored to be recognized by ITNewsAfrica.com as Nigeria’s Web 2.0 Industry Expert.

Google (I call them the Big G) has been one of the leading lions of the Internet jungle always looking out for preys to capture. Could you believe that Google bought 19 start-ups in 2007?

Google’s most recent start-up acquisitions were Begun (online advertising) from Russia for $140 million; Omnisio (Online video) from the US for $15 million; and TNC, a weblog software from South Korea for an undisclosed amount. Google’s largest acquisition as of March 2008 is the purchase of DoubleClick, an online advertising company, for US$3.1 billion.

Most Internet startups and their founders always dream of a multimillion-dollar buyout or the lucrative initial public offers. While it may seem impossible, we’d all love to think that Internet giants such as Google, Yahoo! or Microsoft would soon be acquiring web startups out of Africa. The search company has footprints in Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Finland, Germany, Russia, Spain, Switzerland, Sweden, South Korea and of course the United States.

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Today, I am asking a similar question I recieved via email recently from someone who wanted advice on how to migrate a Nigerian online jobs forum into a Web 2.0 site. I am hoping that readers would provide different perspectives to this question.

Personally, I think that an online jobs forum that wants to adopt web 2.0 tools and technologies should critically access and determine the web needs of its target audience. For example, if the target audience are people who just click to find job announcements and hardly spend time on the site, then you may not need to bother about Web 2.0.

On the otherhand, if your audience are web-savvy (i.e they understand what is means to interact, discuss and network within an online forum), then you should consider investing some time and money in Web 2.0 for your site.

Here, I am suggesting a few web applications that may fit into the framework of a typical online job forum and thus building a Web 2.0 forum.

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I reported on this blog, sometime in April that Nigeria is ranked No. 1 amongst African countries for Internet usage with over 8 million users. In a recent survey by the Internet World Stats, Nigeria still leads Africa’s Internet user base with 10 million users.

In the current Internet stats as at June 2008, Egypt holds a 2nd position (formerly 3rd) with 8.6 million users, then Morocco dropped to 3rd position with 7.3 million users.

However, South Africa has maintained the 4th position with an Internet user base of 5.1 million (same as previous stats). Interestingly, Uganda moved from 10th position to 7th position, while Sudan dropped from 5th postion to 9th position and Zimbabwe on the 10 position.

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Google has announced a project called Project 10¹⁰⁰ (pronounced “Project 10 to the 100th”), which is a call for ideas to change the world by helping as many people as possible. There will be ten winners competing for 10 million dollars in funding to launch their social entrepreneurial idea.

This is perhaps a special competition to celebrate Google’s 10-year anniversary?

Why this project?

Google answers…

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