So Mark Zuckerberg was in Lagos, for a while it seemed Nigeria’s weight as an African tech giant made this happened. It was no small buzz, all the blogs were alight with the visit of Facebook boss, we almost had a tech holiday declared. Sure with 170 million people and the most populous black Nation, that’s a heavy weight. Funny there is 140 million mobile subscribers, 82 million Internet users (connected device) but only 5 million daily users. Still there’s on going DEBATE about this numbers that it could be much smaller in reality.
A case in point will be my new found love for VIRTUAL and AUGMENTED reality to narrow it down to the experience, and show Nigeria has few data footprint and Internet presence.
It’s been three months (July 6th, 2016) since Nintendo released the augmented reality game Pokémon Go, it is still not available in Nigeria. I did download it, but found out the experience is more rewarding in other countries. For example lack of data about public places translate to fewer places marked as a Pokéstop and Gym, meaning few places to experience the fun part of the game. Also there was the “who to experience it with” gap. I try to explain the game to a friend but stop midway when he said: “so you have been walking around town looking for digital creatures”. The idea was strange to him.
That may be strange now, same way it was strange back then to speak to our phone: “call Femi”. Technology is fast changing the way we interact with things around us and Pokémon Go is just a start. There are new ways the Internet is being used and it is more than selling shoes or bags on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. We cam do more Nigerians. Lenovo push the boundaries of the way we interact with technology releasing the Phab 2 Pro, an augmented reality phone in collaboration with Google (project) Tango.
Delivering the keynote address at the lunch of the AR phone, Yang Yuanqing CEO of LENOVO mentioned five pivotal types of connectivity required to fully harness the potential of IoT
To connect:
1. Device with people
2. Device and other devices
3. Device to existing network
4. Device to personal data (cloud)
5. Device to Apps and services.
None of the above will be attainable without data footprint (that is for more the 5 million daily Internet users), CONNECTIVITY between things is next level technology and it is here one step at a time with Pokémon Go.
