Flygerian: Nigerian that flies

The pace of activity in Nigeria’s online travel sector just went a notch higher with the official launch of Travelstart, an online travel agency that offers cheap flights on major local and international airlines, hotel bookings and car rentals.

In the launch event, which was co-sponsored by Arik, Delta, and Rwand Air, the Nigerian version of the service was formally presented to the public at the Lagos Oriental Hotel. Travelstart CEO, Stephan Ekbergh, took the opportunity to outline their vision and unique value propositions for the travel industry.

“When we started out, the travel industry’s biggest problems were lack of choice, high travel fares, and extremely poor service”, he said. “We wanted to change that and we knew the internet would be the catalyst”.

Since 1998 when Travelstart started in Sweden (pun intended), Stephan’s vision has come a long way, expanding into Scandinavia, relocating to South Africa, and now expanding its reach in Africa with presence in Tanzania, Kenya and Turkey.

Four African countries later, Travelstart finally comes to Nigeria in a joint venture with GHI Assets Limited, the only ISO certified travel management company in Nigeria, according to its Chairman, Olufemi Adefope. With 30 years of travel industry experience under its belt, as well as intimate familiarity with the peculiar aspects of Nigerian business, GHI Assets Limited’s involvement is an essential part of Travelstart’s bid to penetrate the Nigerian market, which many like to describe as “unique”.

No doubt, each market is unique, but everyone knows that it takes entrepreneurs and investors with extra large cojones to take on the giant of Africa. For the ones that survive the initial hurdles however, the rewards for conquering the continent’s most populous nation are usually well worth the effort — Travelstart reports that their booking sales value in Nigeria surpassed other Travelstart markets just 6 weeks after their soft launch.

The general impression I get from Stephan is the quiet enthusiasm of the seasoned entrepreneur who knows he is on to something. He believes that Travelstart is coming to Nigeria at a time when the country is just ripe for e-commerce, and quoting World Bank 2010 stats, he is optimistic that the country’s 45 million online users, which translates to 30% internet penetration, will prove to be a high value market. If their numbers are anything to go by, it would seem that his optimism is well founded. So far, the company is reporting a steady week-on-week increase in bookings, with 10 percent repeat customers who have used their service twice or more, and 60 percent of travelers booking international flights.

For those familiar with Nigeria’s emerging online travel industry, they will of course realise that Travelstart is in direct competition with Wakanow, Nigeria’s first online travel service which started last year and seems to be doing quite well. Wakanow certainly has the first mover advantage going for it, but Travelstart boasts of friends and deep industry connections all over the world, valuable leverage with the airlines, hotels, and car hire services that enable them provide premium service at very competitive rates.

With its existing presence in key African markets, and hints of expansion into Rwanda, Benin Republic and Cameroun, Travelstart might soon prove to be a formidable competitor for the pioneering Wakanow, first mover or no. It certainly won’t be the first time a South African company has come into Nigeria to dominate an industry.

It’s still early days however, and there’s still a great deal of room for growth within this emerging space, even as more and more Nigerians begin to get used to the idea of electronic transactions and commerce. The entry of another player into the online travel business will no doubt raise the competitive bar, which always results in wins for the customers. I expect that Travelstart’s arrival  on the scene will herald good times for flygerians in the days to come.

If you have tried Travelstart, we’d love to hear what your experience was like, please tell us in the comments.

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Have you always wanted to stay connected to your fellow corp members in your state or region? Or you served a while back and looking to reconnect with people you met?

Joowaya, a new social network has been launched to help you stay connected during and after youth service in Nigeria.

The site allows site members to share NYSC stories and photos, discuss publicly, plan events, find accommodation and do lots more together.

The platform’s advanced search functionality allows you to narrow your search down by state/year/batch of service and even CDs (Community Development Service Group) to find other youth corp members.

While most people would prefer to use Facebook to connect and reconnect with their friends, I think that Joowaya offers an interest-based and more reliable platform for Youth Service corp members in Nigeria.

However, I’m wondering why Joowaya is not available via mobile, as most corp members during their youth service would find this very useful.

It would be interesting to see more interest-based social networks come out of Nigeria.

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We can now confirm that Rocket Internet’s Amazon for Nigeria will be called Kasuwa and allow users to buy items such as electronics, books, cameras, DVDs and games, as we earlier reported.

By the way, Kasuwa is a Hausa word that means ‘market’, so it makes sense for it to be used for an e-commerce platform.

Earlier today, we got a tip-off from another source that the company’s Amazon-clone for Nigeria would be called Abokai, which was initially planned to be used for the service, but has been phased out.

In the meantime, Rocket Internet would be launching an clothing/fashion store called Sabunta, as Technesstivity earlier reported. However, our sources told us that the company is really aggressive and may launch other e-commerce platforms in Nigeria in the future.

Rocket Internet would be looking to replicate the success of Amazon and its online clothing store, Zappos as well as the business models for the Nigerian market.

The Internet giant has a track record of cloning existing high-growth web companies across the Middle East, Europe, Asia, South America and Africa.

We’ll keep you informed with more developments as we know more.

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We’ve learned that Bandeka co-founder, Tunde Kehinde has joined the team at Rocket Internet Nigeria that is building Nigeria’s Amazon clone.

Tunde was previously at Diageo where he worked on Business Development for the company. He is an MBA from Harvard Business School and co-founded Bandeka.com, an invitation-only dating site for Africans around the world.

Formerly based in Washington D.C, Tunde is now working out of Lagos, Nigeria for Rocket Internet. I’m guessing that his role at Rocket Internet would be around business development as the company looks to grow and scale its e-commerce offering in Nigeria.

I’ve contacted him for his comment and will update this post.

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Nigeria’s largest and hottest online home of Nollywood movies, iROKOtv has teamed up with Rancard Solutions to launch what appears to be the first Nollywood/celebrity news distribution service via SMS.

The service which is expected to launch tomorrow (May 15) in Nigeria, allows users in Nigeria to text Irokotv to 33300 in order to get twice daily Nollywood related gossip. The service costs N50 weekly and you can unsubscribe from the service by texting STOP IROKOTV to 33300.

I tested the service on the MTN Nigeria network and it works almost instantly. It sends you a celebrity news-related item from iROKOtv, although it doesn’t add a link for more details on the story.

Already, the service has been launched in Ghana on the TIGO and MTN Ghana mobile networks and we gathered that it has attracted over 30,000 subscribers across both networks in Ghana within Q1 2012 where it was first piloted.

iROKOtv which was launched in December 2011 allows its members to watch Nollywood movies for free online.

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The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) has fined the four largest telecommunications companies in Nigeria – MTN, Globacom, Airtel and Etisalat – the combined sum of N1.17 billion for failure to meet the minimum standard of Quality of Service (QoS).

This news comes days after ThisDay reported that the Commission had issued MTN a query to explain why the Commission would not visit it with appropriate sanctions for the poor quality of service on its network.

In separate letters to the Chief Executive Officer’s of the respective telecommunication companies made available to TechLoy, the mobile operators were directed to pay the fines to the commission on or before May 25, 2012.

According to the letter dated May 10, 2012 and signed by U. A. S. MASKA, the regulatory body’s head of Compliance Monitoring and Enforcement and Josephine Amuwa, Director, Legal & Regulatory Services, MTN was fined N360 million, Globacom was fined N180 million, Airtel fined N270 million and Etisalat was fined N360 million.

The Commission further stated that failure to settle the said penalties by any of the defaulters within the stipulated period, “shall attract a further sum of N2, 500, 000 (two million five hundred thousand naira only) per day for as long as the contravention persists.”

The Commission has been empowered to establish minimum Quality of Service (QoS) standards in service delivery for the telecommunications industry which are to ensure that consumers continue to have access to high quality telecommunications service.

According to the Commission, “these standards define the lower and upper bounds of acceptability of such technical issues as transmission rates, error rates, call completion rates, etc. and commercial consumer issues such as access to customer care centres, billing integrity and other characteristics that can be measured and improved.”

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Earlier this week, we broke the news here on TechLoy that the Samwer Brothers’ Rocket Internet have made their way into Nigeria, but we couldn’t say what they were about to launch.

A reliable source has confirmed to TechLoy that the Internet giant will be launching an Amazon-clone in Nigeria later this month. This is contrary to a report by our friends at Technesstivity that it was launching an online clothing brand store called Sabunta.

In case you don’t know, Rocket Internet has a track record of cloning existing high-growth web companies such as Airbnb, Zappos and Amazon across the Middle East, Europe, Asia, South America and Africa.

Rocket Internet recently launched an Amazon-clone called Lazada in Indonesia, Egypt, the Philippines and Thailand. For now, we can’t say what the soon-to-be-launched Amazon-clone would be called in Nigeria, but we know that it will allow users to buy items such as electronics, books, cameras, DVDs and games.

We also learned that Rocket Internet is aggressively recruiting local staff to firm up its operations in Lagos, Nigeria and it is likely to have hired some ex-employees of Kalahari Nigeria, which was shut down by its parent company, MIH Internet Africa last October.

As concerns continue to grow over the challenges of running successful e-commerce sites in Nigeria, one wonders what Rocket Internet would be doing differently in Nigeria.

As Wired Magazine points out, “they [Rocket Internet] make a great business of finding concepts that are working in the US or Asia and replicating those business models for new markets with high barriers to entry.”

It would be interesting to see what business models Rocket Internet would be adopting in Nigeria and, of course, time will tell how successful they’ll become.

We’ll update you as we know more.

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As the Blackberry continues to be the most popular smart phone brand in Nigeria, latest statistics from InMobi has revealed that the smart phone has witnessed the fastest growth in ad impressions within the last quarter.

The report showed that approximately 10% of all mobile advertising impressions recorded on the InMobi ad network from Nigeria were from smartphones, and Blackberry phones only accounted for 2% of the total mobile advertising impressions on the InMobi network, representing a 0.4% growth on the previous quarter.

However, Nokia continues to dominate the Nigerian market, accounting for 77% of all impressions, a decrease from the 79% of all impressions of the previous quarter. Its closest rivals, Samsung delivered 9% of total impressions followed by LG phones at 5%.

Overall, with a quarter-on-quarter growth of 42% in smartphone use in the country, the report further shows evidence of the growing popularity of smartphone technology amongst Nigerian consumers.

[via: InMobi]

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According to latest statistics revealed today by InMobi, the largest independent mobile advertising network, Nigeria remains the largest and fastest growing mobile ad market in Africa.

The report revealed growth of 37% in mobile advertising impressions on its Nigeria mobile network for the first three months of 2012, with more than 8 billion mobile advertising impressions.

“The stellar increase in impressions from 5.8 billion in the last quarter of 2011 to over 8 billion in the first three months of 2012 is clear proof of the rising popularity of the medium amongst Nigerian consumers,” said Isis Nyong’o, Vice President  & Managing Director for InMobi Africa.

It is expected that this would increase as mobile media consumption continues to grow exponentially in Nigeria.

[via: InMobi]

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Vantium Tablet PC The Vantium android tablet device is now available in Nigeria. Pre-order now! www.myvantium.com

Advertise for free Buy and sell variety of products & services on Nigeria's online marketplace www.shopkolo.com

Need Product Information? Find thousands of technology and mobile products in our growing information directory www.techloy.com

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Just a month ago, we projected Brazil to become the 2nd most populous country on Facebook by April 2012, and latest statistics from SocialBakers has revealed this trend.

Brazil, formerly an Orkut-liking country has now become a Facebook-loving country, thanks to the way brands are building high social awareness as well as a proactive and creative approach in gaining more fans.

The social networking behemoth earlier opened an ad sales office in São Paulo, Brazil which serves as its headquarters for Latin America.

Currently with over 46 million Facebook users, Brazil has added over 8 milllion Facebook users over the past three months, with a 22% user growth.

Brazil is now 2nd most populous Facebook country in the world, only after the United States with 157 million + users and followed in 3rd position by India with 45.7 million users.

But whether Brazil’s Facebook users would get ahead of the United States remains to be seen.

[Via: SocialBakers]

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Vantium Tablet PC The Vantium android tablet device is now available in Nigeria. Pre-order now! www.myvantium.com

Advertise for free Buy and sell variety of products & services on Nigeria's online marketplace www.shopkolo.com

Need Product Information? Find thousands of technology and mobile products in our growing information directory www.techloy.com

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