Let me announce to you that from November 25th, I’ll not be available to blog here on StartupsNigeria. The reason is because, I’ll be away for a 3-week training program and orientation camp as part of a para-military service to Nigeria popularly known as NYSC. Yes, I’m deciding to participate in the National Youth Service Corps (N.Y.S.C).

The programme is a voluntary youth service that allows Nigerian graduates to contribute to the development of communities across Nigeria through educational and project management initiatives. Thus, I’m inviting anyone interested in writing posts for StartupsNigeria for the period of November 25th to December 15th to participate.

Who Can Participate?

Generally, I would expect people who have experience in blogging, social media, etc and perhaps consider themselves an expert in their field or industry. Thus, if you have advice and tips on blogging, entrepreneurship, social media, advertising, web startups, technology apps, online business, SEO, domain, servers, blog tools, web hosting, web design, etc and think you can add value to the community here, I’d be glad to discuss with you further.

In addition, if you know of any Nigerian social networking site or any startup that deserves a review and analysis, you can also write about them. Also, if you find any news article related to web startups, tech/mobile products and services, events, etc with relevance to the Nigerian web market, you can write about these.

What Will You Benefit?

Since this is a voluntary service (may not attract any monetary benefits to you), I believe it is a great opportunity for you to reach out to the StartupsNigeria community and loyal readers with your experience and expertise.

Besides, you’ll be promoting your blog or business via links to your site, products or services. And one more thing, you’ll be getting recommendations from me to your site and services from time to time over the next months. That’s how I can say ‘Thank You’;-)

Note: The blog currently has over 1000 feed readers and gets a weekly average of 400 unique visitors per day. It is read by a large community of bloggers, social media players, those interested in startups as well as potential investors. Thus, you can picture the audience before deciding what posts would fit into the whole picture.

How Can You Participate?

If you are interested to participate and would like to support this blog, please send me an email via: loy at startupsnigeria dot com and I’ll let you know how we can make things happen. My hope is that we will all benefit from an array of knowledge and expertise and further build quality relationships for our businesses.

I’ve been evaluating the african social bookmarking space for some time now and think that an analysis of the two leading social bookmarking sites in Africa would be a great idea. The two sites in question are South Africa’s Muti.co.za and Nigeria’s Sturvs.com

What Are They?

Muti is a social bookmarking site inspired by Reddit and Digg but dedicated to content of interest to Africans or those interested in Africa. The site was founded by Neville Newey and Dave Duarte.

Sturvs is a web 2.0 sharing and voting website where users can share music, videos, articles, web resources and also promote events and services. The site was founded by Temi Kolawole and Bode Ojo.

Registration

Registration is fast and easy for both sites by filling in a simple form. Once you are a registered member, you can start submitting items and other members can vote for them.

Submission

Submitting items in Muti is easier than in Sturvs. All you need to do is copy the Url of the page and the title and add tags if you like and your item is up on the page. This takes only 10 - 15 seconds. On the other hand, submitting items in Sturvs is similar to Digg where you add the Url and are taken to another page that requires you to give a summary of the article and add categories, tags, logos, etc. This process takes about 30 seconds for an item.

Voting

For Muti, voting is usually done by clicking on the up arrow which appears to the left of all submitted Urls which automatically increases its ranking on the “Hot” view. Voting also determines the “kudus” of a user. Kudus are earned (or lost) by other users voting for a submission. Thus if you submit an article and ten people vote it up whilst three vote it down, you will earn seven kudus for that article.

For Sturvs, users are given the ability to vote on stories submitted by other users, and the “sturvs” with the highest votes make it to the front page. This means control is given to you, the user, to decide what makes it to the front page.

Tags

Tags in muti are similar to those found in del.icio.us but differ in a few fundamental ways. Muti uses co-operative tagging, meaning that any registered user may tag any item. You do not have to be the submitter of that item and nor do you have to save a copy of that item to tag it. All tags by all members are shown below each item.

On the other hand, Sturvs doesn’t have a tag system, rather the site allows only the content submitter to add a category (business, blog, music, news & politics, etc) to the article.

Design

Both sites have a nice interface, but built under different web applications. Muti is entirely built from scratch in Python, while Sturvs is built with pligg and might be considered less innovative from a technical perspective, but more innovative from a marketing angle.

Features

Sturvs has interesting web features such as Sturvs Search, Facebook Application, Sturvs Toolbar, Sturvs Blog , and Sturvs Store. Check out Sturvs tools. I’m yet to see any Muti add ons and web applications. If there are any, please let us know.

Update: For Muti there are two different Facebook applications, there are also Twitter, Jaiku, Plurk and Tumblr streams. There is also a mobile muti site which is a mashup using the api (m.muti.co.za).
For simple bookmarking from any browser there is the Muti bookmarklet available that is compatible with most known browsers.

Traffic & Reach

Muti’s traffic seems to be unstable over the last few months, while that of Sturvs has been relatively stable. Though Muti seems to be doing well with its traffic, I think that Sturvs traffic has seen an exponential growth considering the fact that most stuffs on sturvs are mostly Nigerian content. Muti, on the other hand, generates content from other African countries other than South Africa.

Technically, Muti’s reach and content should be an advantage to boost its traffic, but rather Sturvs seems to have a better traffic, even though it has lesser African audience reach compared to Muti. From the Alexa graph, Muti gets more traffic from South Africa, while Sturvs gets more traffic from the U.S and Nigeria.

My Final Thoughts

Although I use both sites to drive traffic to this blog, I’d say that Muti’s simplicity and scalability is quite unique. Perhaps this is because the site is entirely built from scratch in Python. In terms of page loads, Sturvs takes more time than Muti, and is not so user-friendly as compared to Muti.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Sturvs (some people feel I’ve given the site too much credit here on StartupsNigeria), but Muti’s Pan-African nature coupled with its simplicity and user-friendly nature seems to be giving the site more attention around Africa. In fact, when I add items to Muti, especially when they have an African concern, they get more attention than when I add them on Sturvs.

I’m recommending both sites to drive traffic to your blog or site. You can also add their bookmarklets to your site to enable your users to Muti this or Sturv that.

Do you use these African social bookmarking sites? What are your thoughts about them?

StartupsNigeria has set the goal of breaking through the Alexa Top 100 000 websites in the world by December 31, 2008. The site which has witnessed a surge in its traffic within the past two months attributes this increase to its new features including interviews, advice, community on Facebook and LinkedIn as well as social media sites.

StartupsNigeria is a tech news blog for startups, mobile apps and web technologies that are making a buzz around the new media space, with a special focus on Nigeria. The blog which was launched about 6 months ago has gotten the attention of several social media players and blogs and has also been reviewed by a few sites. Some of them are: White African, StartupAfrica, Sturvs, Kabissa, African Trade Hub, Notjustok, TechMASAI, Naijagal. The site also appears on the blogroll of several sites around Africa.

We hope to break through Alexa Top 100 000 websites by December 31, 2008, and are asking for your support to achieve this goal.  We are poised to become a world-class tech/media blog that covers technology and innovation out of Nigeria. You can subscibe to our feeds.

Update: StartupsNigeria’s Alexa traffic rank is at 180,429. View latest here

Join our Facebook Social Group for Entrepreneurs

For some time now, we created a social group for web entrepreneurs on Facebook, the most popular social networking site in the world. The group currently has about 25 members who benefit from an online community of social entrepreneurs.

Our hope is to build a web community of people interested in start-ups and ideas and give them an opportunity to network using a well-known social utility such as Facebook. If you are yet to join this community, we encourage you to do so. That way, you can meet web entrepreneurs, generate business ideas and develop innovative start-ups.

In the future, we shall create a business networking space here on StartupsNigeria, where users can interact with other business-minded people and thus build a web community of entrepreneurs. You can join the StartupsNigeria Group on Facebook here. It’s FREE.

Join our LinkedIn Business Group for Entrepreneurs

Since we know that more business-like people prefer to use LinkedIn, we decided to create a business group for entrepreneurs. The group has a growing number of 20+ members who engage in discussions around innovation and entrepreneurship.

As with the Facebook group, this initiative is young and has potentials for growth, so we urge you to join, meet and network with other like-minded people. Our hope is to build a web network of business-minded and professional individuals who are interested about innovation and entrepreneurial ideas. You can join the StartupsNigeria Group on LinkedIn here. It’s FREE!

P.S: When you join, we’ll need to approve your request, and this may take between 12-24 hours, as the case may be.

We Welcome and Value Your Suggestions

We are delighted that this blog - StartupsNigeria is gradually becoming an online community of web entrepreneurs and start-up founders. We appreciate all your comments, recommendations and support.

Since we believe in adding value to our audience, we welcome our readers’ suggestions on how we can become better at what we are currently doing. We love improvements and are thinking of adding some interesting features to this blog. But we also need your inputs in order to give you value.

• Are there any site improvements (design, layout, widgets, etc) we need to make?
• Can you suggest some features we can add to this site?
• What other areas around technology and innovation should we cover?
• Would you support an online community of web entrepreneurs?
• Should we include a jobs board for outsourcing, freelance jobs in IT/software, design, etc?

If you have ideas you want us to consider, please send them via email to startupsnigeria (at) gmail.com

You can also leave your suggestions on the comment box. Thanks.

This is a quick post to announced that StartupsNigeria was profiled on TechMASAI, an African blog that monitors and criticizes web 2.0 sites and start-ups with special emphasis on Africa.

The blog has been covering african tech scene and has also reviewed sites and services such as Zoopy, Mpesa, Myvideo, Blueworld amongst others.

We appreciate your support!

Early this year, the Innerveil Business Institute and the MicroFinance banks in Nigeria organised a meeting in Lagos, Nigeria with the aim to increase the capital available to high-growth Small and Medium-Scale Entreprises (SMEs) by tackling some of the root causes that limit their growth prospects.

The result was “The Adopt a Small Business Project Endorsement”, meant to spark hope, to inspire action and to help the small and medium sized enterprises grow. The meeting found out that the lower-income segments of Nigeria benefit when SMEs have better access to finances because they alleviate poverty by creating more jobs and better wages.

There’s no doubt that, small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are critical for economic growth in the developing world, since they broaden opportunity, increase productivity, create jobs, and help alleviate poverty. In developed countries, SMEs represent more than half of GDP and account for nearly 2/3 of employment.

However, SMEs in Nigeria are hardly funded. They lack access to the tools, technologies and finances necessary for rapid expansion. Thus, the SMEfunds through ‘Adopt a Small Business Project’ aims to increase the capital available to high-growth SMEs by tackling some of the root causes that limit their growth prospects.

SMEfunds.com aspires to combine innovation, partnership, collaboration, information, and technology in an effort to transform the way SMEs are linked to sources of finance. The idea is to have every big business in Nigeria loan a small fund to kick-start a small business.

My take on this

I personally think that a bi-lateral approach should be adopted whereby the SMEFunds provide a platform for Nigerian entrepreneurs to meet with potential investors and help them gain an insight into the available investment options. At the same time, the SMEFunds should invest in the SME market themselves, instead of sitting back as watchdogs.
 
The Endorsement has already been signed by hundreds of Traders, Sole-Proprietors, Banks, Investors, Business Owners, Business Academics, Retailers, Television Stations, Unions, Professional Societies, Policy Makers, Governments, NGO & Foundations and other Stakeholders of SME development initiatives across the country.

These Nigerian signatories have committed to developing further strategies, especially around micro-entrepreneurs and teaching practices. You can sign the endorement here.