Alarena.com is a community of people that are seriously looking for a life partner or true love. The site serves as a great go-between for finding your ideal match and allows you to reach millions of potential marriage partners.

Alarena is a Nigerian yoruba word for ‘matchmaker’. The idea is taken from an age-old concept that is common to all African societies; enhanced and modernized by technology in order to help you find true love.

With Alarena, you can:

• Create your member profile
• Receive expressions of interests and messages from Alarena.com members
• Upgrade to premium membership to enjoy the full benefits of Alarena.com
• Use the advanced search engine to find your ideal match
• Receive recommendations of potential matches
• Express interest in Alarena.com members
• Select members that you want to continue to communicate with or decline interest
• Contact and be contacted via email, phone and online chat
• Reply to messages from Alarena.com members

The site also offers couples who met and got married through Alarena.com an opportunity to spend their honeymoon in Africa’s most beautiful city, South Africa. You will simply tell your success story of how you met and married on Alarena.com and be entered to win an incredible honeymoon in Cape Town, South Africa.

The romantic trip will include round trip air fares for the new couple, hotel stay and US$800 in spending money courtesy of Alarena.com. Site seeing and attractions include Climb Table Mountain, Visit the Vineyards of Constantia, Drive along scenic Chapman’s Peak and have a romantic dinner at the Harbour.

Alarena.com is owned and operated by Afro Interactive which has offices in Abuja – Nigeria, Johannesburg, South Africa and Washington, DC.

My take on this site

First, I love the name and concept. It reflects the true nature of dating and finding love through matchmaking. The concept is unique and would reach millions of people across Africa and beyond.

The site’s design and interface is exceptional and professional, offering you great opportunities to meet and match with Africa’s people and share your success story with others.

The best and biggest business event in Nigeria, the Lagos International Trade Fair 2008 kicks off today, Friday 7th to Sunday 16th of November, 2008. The fair will welcome hundreds of indigenous and multi-national business organisations, trade missions, Government agencies, financial institutions and SME’s.

The event which commands international and local patronage and attention for businesses is organised by the Lagos Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

Recently, I’ve been discussing with some angel investors, incubators and venture capitalists and its obvious that people are watching the Nigerian web space to identify innovations and entrepreneurial ideas that could be incubated or funded. In the coming months, I’ll be working with these individuals and companies to identify and develop entrepreneurs from Nigeria.

While there are a few challenges with VC funding in Nigeria, considering the fact that foreign investors need to be educated first about the trends and prospects in a given investment area, I’m also interested in seeing every big business in Nigeria loan a small fund to kick-start a small business start-up. Is this possible?

Apart from start-up funding, young entrepreneurs in Nigeria need some help in learning how to set up and grow a real online business start-up. Thus, there is a need for training ofsoftware enthusiasts in Nigeria on the newest web applications.

John Balen of Canaan Partners said, “It’s hard for large VC funds to invest in small enterprises.” If that is true for global start-ups, how much more for African start-ups or even Nigerian start-ups? Erik Hersman of White African suggests that Africa should figure out a way to foster earlier stage investments as a community of smaller investors. Jonathan Gosier of Appfrica suggested a few ideas for ventures which includes Micro-Angel Investor/VC (i.e African-owned Angel Investors) and provided an example of Martin Fisher’s Kickstart.org, a trend which I believe will spread to other African countries in the future.

Some social entrepreneurs in Africa have developed Y-Combinator style venture funding groups or communities, which makes me wonder if this can work in Nigeria? An example is Appfrica.org founded and personally funded by Jon Gosier. It facilitates, mentors and incubates software entrepreneurs in East Africa. Their goal is to offer a physical space with a solid internet connection, servers, software and computers that will allow students and recent graduates a place to develop their ideas in a constructive environment outside of school.

Personally, I’m keen to see how this can be done in Nigeria. For me, it will be interesting to be involved with sourcing for home-grown talents in IT/software and web developers with an understanding of open source and wikis as well as other web applications. Then, we can develop these talents and showcase their start-ups and applications to the world.

If you are an individual, group, community or organisation and are interested in developing local software developers from Nigeria, I’ll be happy to discuss with you further.

Etisalat has launched its GSM operations in Nigeria (with the 0809 digit) in a telecoms war region that could mean the start of another major war with Nigeria’s telecoms operators - Glo Mobile, MTN, Zain and CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) operators such as Multilinks, Starcomms, etc.

The company hopes to compete for the 52 million subscribers in Nigeria that are using other networks by offering its subscribers free calls. Yeah, Etisalat Nigeria will soon be offering subscribers free network-to-network calls for no less than six months to win over mobile subscribers using other networks.

Etisalat Nigeria is the first mobile operator in Nigeria that introduced mobile number system (0809uchoose) that allows subscribers to choose and reserve their own mobile numbers themselves. The network has announced that subscribers should start retrieving their mobile numbers at designated offices (selected Oceanic Banks, Sweet Sensation, Big Treat, etc) in seven states across Nigeria including Abuja, Lagos, Ibadan, Kaduna, Port Harcourt, Kano and Ogbomoso.

One of the features of Etisalat Nigeria is Homezone for subscribers with the Easy Starter pack. Homezone allows subscribers to make discounted calls from their predefined/set location. What this means is that, you can choose a particular location, whether your home, office, marketplace, school to enjoy subsidized calls. Calls from within the selected homezone to Etisalat and all other networks 0.40 Naira/second.

What could this mean for other GSM operators?

The free network-to-network calling for six months or more could cause mass dumping of other networks’ GSM SIM cards in preference for the new network. If this actually happens, I think that it would force other networks to make similar offers, which might open up the strongest competition ever in the telecoms sector.

Etisalat is taking a cue from Sierra Leone’s second-leading mobile operator, Comium, which offered free network-to-network calling when it entered the market over four years ago. While Etisalat may capture more subscribers, another issue that should be taken into consideration is how reliable the network would be in Nigeria.

I’m not sure if the Nigeria Communications Commission (NCC) would like to see the telecoms market become anti-competitive with this move by Etisalat, although they might have approved this market penetration strategy being introduced for the first time in Nigeria.

Telecoms analysts have said that this marketing approach would not augue well for the telecoms sector, but it seems that Etisalat Nigeria cares less as they hope to build the largest subscriber base and become a telecoms brand in Nigeria by 2010.

What do you think about this?

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?