Interview with Saheed Adepoju on a new project, Prossess

Saheed Adepoju: I had a meeting with a DFID consultant on a transport project and i found out they had recruited 300 people to count traffic manually. I felt it was rather absurd. I decided to initially build a traffic counter and then incrementally added a GSM module which sends each captured data in real-time over the internet.

InnovationVillage: You say you have identified Transport as a major issue in the country. What are the specific issues you think will be provided to enable organizations and government make decisions?

Saheed Adepoju: There are different organizations (both local and foreign) who work within the transport sector. They require data to do such analysis. One of the huge problems they have is data gathering. They typically would use humans to sit down for hours on different routes to record cars by hand in forms. Prossess gathers these data in real-time and stores it. Different applications can then make use of the data to build transport models. Prossess will ensure that their decisions are made on actual gathered data rather than speculative data gathering..

InnovationVillage: How do you hope to get these bodies and government to buy into Prossess? As you do know, it is always about the ideas but people seeing the need for the idea and willing to pay for it.

Saheed Adepoju: Our business model at the moment isn’t to sell to government agencies. Although in the end, we will. Our current strategy involves actually building a service where end consumers can benefit from such a service. So, we have built a web portal where current traffic will be displayed in real-time. We monetize via the use of ads on the web portal. We also would have a mobile app. In the end, we can then take the results of the consumer adoption and make a case why government should buy into Prossess and use it in making decisions. One of such decision could naturally be, how long should we make a traffic light count down knowing how many cars pass there at different times? Currently, no service can handle this. But with data from Prossess available via APIs, we surely can make this data available to them. Also it can help Lagos Traffic radio, FRSC, LASTMA in deploying resources efficiently.

InnovationVillage: You mentioned smart devices. Do you think the smart device penetration in Nigeria is deep enough to appeal to a large base?

Saheed Adepoju: We aren’t in the quest to build smart devices for people to actually buy. We would own the devices and build relevant consumer applications and gather data to monetize. One of the huge drawbacks within the emerging continent of Africa is lack of credible data. We want to change that with the different types of smart devices we would build

InnovationVillage: What is the current status of the Prossess project and when would it be ready?

Saheed Adepoju: We are currently doing a test in Yaba, Lagos. We have a site which shows current traffic (beta.prossess.com). The test will end 10th Oct 2013. It will run from10am – 4pm.  We are currently measuring the impact of this initiative and thereafter start speaking with some investors. We want to deploy in 8 locations in Lagos and will want authorization to do so.

InnovationVillage: Please what do you mean by authorization?