BarCamp Ghana 2009 took off to a great start here at MEST in Accra with Patrick Awuah delivering the keynote address. He cited examples from his experience at Microsoft and his current experience with Ashesi University, to drive home the importance of key values like honesty, integrity, trust etc. The theme of this year’s event [...]

Google Inc. yesterday announced the launch of their new URL shortener service: This morning, we launched updated versions of the Google Toolbar and FeedBurner that offer a new URL shortening service from Google called the Google URL Shortener. We mentioned our URL shortener as a feature in both announcements, so we wanted to say a [...]

I was interviewed by Wayan Vota of ICTworks.org during the recent Maker Faire Africa 2009 in Accra Ghana and we discussed the present e-payment challenges in West Africa. A challenge that presents an opportunity since Paypal is ignoring Africa. The interview has just been published in a post titled: “Google & Paypal Leaving Cash on [...]

I have just noticed a new service from Google. It is called Google Sites and it enables an average individual to build a website through a simple web interface. This is their pitch: “Google Sites makes creating and sharing a group website easy. Google Sites is powerful enough for a company Intranet, yet simple enough [...]

I discovered a Google Maps beta feature that had been on my PDA for several months now, just last night. I had only been using my I-Mate JAQ3 as a digital assistant, without using the phone functionality – no thanks to Tigo’s network access expiry. Tigo Ghana has a way of disabling one’s access to [...]

A new search engine that is poised to offer a serious competition to search engine giant Google has been unveiled today. It is called Cuil (pronounced [ku?l], “cool”). It was founded by some former Google employees including a married couple: Anna Patterson and Tom Patterson. Other members of the founding team are: Russell Power and [...]

I got an email from Google Adsense this dawn: Hello, Thank you for participating in the AdSense Referrals programme. We will be retiring the AdSense Referrals programme during the last week of August. After that time, AdSense Referrals code will no longer display ads. The rest of the email gave instructions on how to remove [...]

Making money online with Google Adsense. Will I earn less if I reside in Africa?

Google Ghana: Google now has a version for Ghana.

The web was ablaze (still is) yesterday with news about Microsoft’s latest unsolicited offer to buy web portal giant Yahoo! for a whopping $44.6 billion in cash and shares. According to BBC News, the offer, contained in a letter to Yahoo’s board, is 62% above Yahoo’s closing share price on Thursday. I am not entirely [...]

Not long after Google announced and launched their Google Checkout offering that Paypal increased the speed at which they introduced innovations. I dealt more with the Google/Paypal comparison in an earlier post. The essence of this post however, is to highlight the fact that some online shoppers would by far prefer using the checkout services, [...]

I came across an article at NigeriaGalleria.com just now, that not only highlights some of the challenges of doing business online from Nigeria, but also offers some solid advice on going around the challenges. It’s titled: “Obstacles to Conducting Internet Business in Nigeria“. These obstacles vary from the poor electricity supply in Nigeria, to the [...]

In case you missed the news just like I did, be informed that e-gold Ltd, operators of the e-gold digital currency, now have an official blog at http://blog.e-gold.com and its blogger so far is their Chairman/Founder: Dr. Douglas Jackson. The closing text of the very first blog entry, read: Anyone remotely familiar with e-gold knows [...]

Google Adsense has now enabled a referral (pay-per-lead) system whereby website publishers have the opportunity to earn from ads on their websites based on a referral system. Ads displayed can either be in image or text format and the publisher can specify the country and category ads to be displayed. Earnings are based on how [...]

It is commonplace for the different tiers of government and their institutions in Nigeria, to be using generic top-level domains, especially .com, .net and .org I find this completely un-acceptable. I am of the opinion that there should be a legislation, forcing the Presidency and all other government institutions, to use .ng domains. Note that [...]