A dear friend and I decided to run together on one of the recent mornings while I was in town. While I was heading to bed the previous night, I proposed to her we start at 6.50am and I put my phone to do not disturb. At 6.30 am the following morning, I received a message from her saying if we don’t leave to run…
Keep your customer surveys short
A crucial job that must be done. Today, I was all pumped to give Transavia a 5-star rating for their excellent service among all low cost airlines I have flown lately (especially compared to Air Baltic’s terrible airport service in Finland). Then I abandoned it because it’s 10 pages longs. Here’s what they should have done to keep that precious 5-star rating Make it multi-step….
“1,7 billion Facebook users” is a terrible target customer segment
Why designing a product for billions of Facebook users at the same time will not lead anywhere. I recently asked a team of designers the ultimate design question. “Who are we designing for?”. To which I received the response: “Anyone who has used Facebook before”. “But there are over 1,7 billion users on Facebook today. From the entire world, across different age groups, interests, motivations,…
Is online content marketing right for your small business?
Every company is a technology and media company in the digital age we live in. If you are not leveraging technology and media to distribute your product and acquire customers, you are bound for digital distribution disruption. I am constantly working with traditional small businesses who struggle with obtaining certainty on the benefits of online content marketing. For this reason, most continue to dig up…
Making education more affordable in “less than $30 a day” communities
Getting quality education is expensive. The cost of sending a child to a private school from grade R to grade 12 in South-Africa is roughly R3.7 million which is approximately a quarter of a million Euro. But when you compare this amount to approximately 80,000€ reported to be spent on a child in Finland per year, which is mainly a public education system and consistently one…
Navigating the difficult early days in a new country with a good friendship
When you move to a new country, especially as a fresh migrant and to a country where you have no close relations, the early days could be inevitably rough. In 2008, I arrived to cold Kuopio, a city in Eastern Finland to study from Nigeria. As a rule of thumb, Finnish language was on my list of survival strategy. So I attended a language course…
Let’s talk about water. Quick water, good water
Let’s talk about Water. I wish water will be available for all. We can easily take water for granted especially when you live in a country with over 180,000 lakes, clean and efficient distribution systems. I have been to a few places in the world and very few can dispense warm and cold water in milliseconds as in Finland. Why am I talking about water?…
How “On-demand” everything kept me in college as a 17-year old
Before such terms as “collaborative economy”, “collaborative sharing” or “sharing economy” were coined, someone like me had benefitted from offering micro-services and renting out assets in exchange for money to survive in college in my country of origin, Nigeria. The services I rendered then ranged from repairing mobile phones of the neighbor next door to offering telephone airtime in return for some cash and to…
Mobile Powered Collaborative Economy: An Opportunity for Emerging Markets to Flourish
Last year, during a trip to Nigeria – Africa’s largest economy and one of the fastest growing economies in the world – I saw an opportunity to bring technology to businesses in underserved sectors and remote locations. My sister – who just had a baby at that time – needed someone to fix her broken power generator (As we all know, power problem is endemic…