The Managing Director, New Horizons Nigeria and current Vice-Chairman, United States-based WiniGroup Incorporated, Mr. Tim Akano, in this interview with DAYO OKETOLA, makes predictions for the global Information and Communications Technology industry.
How do you see the future of smartphones?
There are already in the market today over 1,000 brands of smartphones and tablets across the globe. The market will witness many more new smartphones and tablets joining the already saturated segment, and then, the current ‘blue smartphone ocean’ will turn red and become a dog-eat-dog market. Nonetheless, the ‘new money’ is not in oil and gas, not in telecommunications companies selling of air-time and also not in selling hardware like tablets and smartphones. The ‘new money’ is in mobile apps development. As such, tablets and smartphones will become increasingly commoditised and this is good news for consumers as prices will continue their downward journey in 2013. There will be heavy causalities in this market this year.
For corporate organisations, this is a year they will need to evolve viable, practicable Bring Your Own Device strategies. Corporate data is gold and with every employee using an average of three mobile devices, organisations without veritable BYOD strategies are in danger of losing their data to competition.
We are in a year of mobility and our lives in schools, organisations, churches, homes, cars, and all over will revolve around mobile devices. Mobile devices will come with amazing new features this year. Things hitherto impossible will happen such as using mobile phone as a car key, or as a door key to the house, or using mobile phones to start and put off air conditioners or to control the refrigerator temperature, among others. It is my prediction that Nigeria will play a more central role in mobility evolution this year beyond its current role as a consumer. Smartphone will become a commodity and it will sell for N15,000 before the end of this year. Therefore, the current players that are selling for N100,000 and above will lose market share to ‘economy smartphones’ if they do not change their strategies.
Where does Nigeria stand in all this? Or how does this benefit Nigerians?
I predict the emergence of new apps software developer millionaires in Nigeria in the next five years. Their wealth will be unprecedented. Hitherto, richest Nigerians have always emerged from trading and manufacturing such as the Aliko Dangotes of this world, or oil and telecoms like the Mike Adenugas of this world; or banking and finance such as the Jim Ovias of this world. The new Nigerian millionaires will make wealth at the speed of light and they will be young smart boys under the age of 25 who have excelled as mobile apps software developers. After all, the founders of Facebook, Google, Twitter and Groupon were already far richer than any man in Africa before they celebrated their 21st birthdays. I see new millionaires emerging from Nigeria soonest. I challenge the Ministry of Information Technology to create an enabling platform to achieve this.
And how will mobile and cloud solutions fare?
The line between mobile and cloud solutions will become thinner in 2013; the concept of a personal computer will be replaced by the new concept of a private cloud. Most individual and commercial services, including storage sync across devices will be hosted on private cloud, going forward. Life will move more virtual in 2013. The concept of ‘Virtual Alien’ is very critical for Nigerian youths as they can tap into the opportunity to work for foreign companies and get paid in dollars without travelling abroad. Offices of the future will migrate virtual. More people will begin to work from home as against having physical office. About six million Americans worked from home in 2012. This new development will become a global phenomenon in 2013. With the improvement in Internet and broadband, it becomes easier to go virtual, even in education, church, and the media. Virtual education is growing like a wild fire now globally.
Many now see their computers as their offices, what will become of physical offices?
For the past three years, the question: ‘who needs an office’ has been posed globally several times at conferences and seminars. From 2013, what I call ‘brief case offices’ will gradually begin to replace the traditional brick and mortar space. In the US alone, the Census Bureau estimated that six million Americans work from home. With the improvement in Internet bandwidth supply in Nigeria, cloud computing will make data backups and real-time collaboration, and idea sharing become much easier, while removing the need for physical walls. Video conferencing with better picture and sound quality at cheaper prices will become possible. Government’s role is that of an enabler.
Therefore, if the Nigerian government is desirous of creating small and medium businesses that will thrive without incurring the huge cost of physical office, it will need to provide ‘hot spots’ all over Nigeria and make the access fees like N50.00 per day. Agencies in charge of small and medium business like SMEDAN, SURE-P, National Directorate of Employment and even CBN can take over this responsibility. There is need for fresh, new thinking in government approach to job and wealth creation. There is too much ‘old thinking’, which technology has rendered obsolete. For instance – if SURE-P had invested just 10 per cent of oil subsidy money in what I call ‘job enabling technologies’, by now, it would have created over one million jobs using technology.
Will virtual universities take over?
Nigerians will not go to virtual universities, someone once said. We, however, found out that this is not true. This was the same thinking on the eve of Nigeria joining the league of GSM countries. One of the bidders who later regretted his decision said openly that Nigerians were too poor to afford GSM telephone in a way that would make the successful bidders recovered their $150m investment in five years. There is a global wave of change across the educational industry currently. The educational system today is too expensive and ‘wall-off’ so many brilliant young minds because of space constraints and limited infrastructure in the traditional universities. There is unanimity of opinion with regards to education for all. The vehicle to achieve this has been built already and it is ready to zoom off. This will be achieved through online education.
For instance, a small startup company that hosts classes for 30 universities in the US trained 1.7 million students in its online courses last year. These were 1.7 million people that the tradition brick and mortar universities would have fenced out. This is a wake-up call on the National University Commission to, as Ronald Regan shouted at the Berlin Wall in the 1980’s bring down the Berlin Wall of traditional university. The issue of quality of virtual university should not be used as a factor to sustain the Berlin Wall of traditional university. No. After all, even the quality of the graduates in the present system is being questioned every day. Water will always find its level.
Those who go to virtual or traditional universities will have to compete for limited jobs at the end of the day; so, let the employers be the best judge. At any rate, thousands of Nigerians are undergoing courses like money management, Information Technology, sales and marketing to complex ones like artificial intelligence and engineering at IMT, Harvard and Stanford, among others. If the Berlin Wall of traditional university is brought down, the foreign exchange our youths spend in these foreign universities will be retained in Nigeria. It was reported that Ghana earned $1bn from Nigerian students in one year alone. This is my point: $1bn retained in Nigeria will create one million jobs in the education sector. The answer is in virtual universities.
IT security is already a major concern globally. IT security threat will become more serious in 2013 and beyond. The recent news about the hacking of the Federal Reserves, Wall Street Journal and Twitter’s accounts in the US was a tip of the iceberg as to what will come this year. In Nigeria, where IT security is usually handled with levity, with more young people acquiring IT skills and with little opportunity to earn a decent income due to poor infrastructure that will make them transit to technoprenures, these youths will turn to vulnerable banks, universities, government agencies and other corporate organisations to ‘earn huge income’ by hacking into their database and selling it for handsome fees in the booming online black market. The way out of this impending hacking earthquake is for organisations to embrace encryption. Organisations that will go unhurt and stand protected this year and beyond will need what ’seven-layer IT security sweater’ for cover. Fortunately, the ‘seven-layer IT security sweater’ already exists in Nigeria.