Tim Akinbo's Blog

Why I blog

Tim — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 10:44:28 +0000

I thought about a more critical title for this post but decided to take a different approach. Instead of inquiring to know why other software developers and entrepreneurs in Nigeria do not blog, I decided to share my reason for blogging. IMO blogs are pretty much an avenue for self expression, inquiry and note taking [...]

Is Technology a male thing?

Tim — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 16:42:04 +0000

I read this post at Techcrunch this morning and I didn’t fail to recognize that this is actually a global phenomenon and I couldn’t help asking myself: is entrepreneurship and technology a male thing? I see this at play when I attend hackfests, tech meetups and Barcamps. The population of males in relation to females [...]

A Faster Mobile Web – SpeedyFox

Tim — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 10:43:27 +0000

I’m obsessed with making the mobile web as fast as it can be – why? Because people hate slow-loading web sites. With a lot of people getting online via mobile devices, it’s imperative that web developers understand these issues and create web sites and applications that load quickly. One other issue of major concern (especially [...]

mobiFEST 2010 Takeaways

Tim — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 10:11:46 +0000

After getting lots of requests to blog about the event that took place last week Tuesday, I decided to write a few words on my takeaways from the event. It was great to meet with people who were in the mobile devices/mobile applications industry and even though I may not be able to blog about [...]

The Bell Boy

Tim — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 10:10:08 +0000

Trae has written a wonderful piece on customer service in Nigeria on his blog and I got wind of it when I got tagged on the note on Facebook. I rarely read posts that are long. You either get my attention or lose it within the first two or three paragraphs but after reading the [...]

What mobile application platform?

Tim — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 02:54:42 +0000

In conversations with other developers, I often hear all sorts with regards to what platforms to develop mobile applications for in Nigeria. I’ve always advocated development for the Nokia (Symbian) and BlackBerry platforms (if you are targeting feature phones, J2ME is your best bet). Now I have proof: According to this Google trends report, Nokia [...]

Ubuntu 10.04 Installation Caveats

Tim — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 17:04:54 +0000

After the Python Africa Tour that held in Abuja about two months ago, I decided to return to running Linux full time on my workstation. Up until that time, I’d been doing my development on a virtual machine running Debian Lenny. So I shrunk my primary partition and created another partition to give Ubuntu 10.04 [...]

How it was done – Nigerian postcode data extraction

Tim — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 09:26:46 +0000

In my previous post, I talked about open data and how making the Nigerian postcode data open and more accessible has a wide potential for powering several applications. I’ve received several comments on Facebook with even more examples on how that data could be useful. In this post, I would share how this extraction was [...]

Nigerian postcodes – a case for open data

Tim — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 07:53:11 +0000

For quite a while, the Nigerian postcode system has been operational but when you ask people to fill forms, they fill in 234 or something similar for their postcode. There’s very little information available for postcodes and very little projects even use them. I will attribute it majorly to ignorance. Why is a postcode system [...]

Just how buzz-worthy?

Tim — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 22:16:49 +0000

Well I’ll say a lot and only time will really tell and if you’re wondering what I’m talking about, it’s the recently launched Google Buzz. Google Buzz is an application that allows you to share web links, photos, videos etc with people who are important to you but that’s only half the story. Google Buzz [...]