All Amber Moves to Spread Mobile Web Apps Across Africa

The need to harness the potential of the internet and applications on mobile devices across African countries, Nigeria inclusive, was the reason for the gathering of over 150 stakeholders and entrepreneurs in the Information and Communications Research sector in Lagos last week.

All Amber, a United Kingdom-based conference company in other words leading an initiative focussing on the development of mobile web in Africa, organised a two-day inaugural Mobile Web West Africa conference in Lagos, designed to facilitate learning, relationship building, experience sharing, targeted at harnessing mobile internet and mobile applications in Nigeria.

The mobile phone

"We have begun to see the mobile phone, in particular, as a device for change, a tool for closing the digital divide, an ultimate closer of the gap between the rich and the poor, and between the rural and the urban," Omo-Ettu said, during stressing the role of legislation, regulation, and the link between government and the private sector in harnessing mobile web applications in Nigeria.

To Omo-Ettu, building the rapidly expanding mobile system to generate more business makes good sense, since millions of SIM cards exist in the Nigerian telecom market and are supposed to be doing quite a lot beyond voice. He conclusively said content creation was key and that he was particularly concerned about how much of it could be locally targeted and locally produced in Nigeria.

He said mobile web applications, if then harnessed, would support cloud computing, which he explained remained a shift from 'main frame' to 'client server' in delivering software solutions as a service over the internet.

Value Added Service Manager for Glomobile, Mr. Bankole Ojuntolayo, in his presentation, stressed the need for mobile web application, which he said, would increase internet penetration in the country. Mobile Web internet, he added, meant so much to Africans in the area of freedom, privacy, convenience, exposure to the rest of the world, and enabler of diversified opportunities.