Social Innovation Camp Nigeria + University of Lagos

What a great way to start 2011: the Opera Developer Relations team finally set foot on African soil! It was also my first trip to Africa and the reason for it was Social Innovation Camp Nigeria. The event was organized by Bosun Tijani and Femi Longe. Its objective is to give Nigerians an outlet to develop their entrepreneurship and code for a social benefit. This event, the first of its kind, helped to create 6 innovative ideas in a sort of hackathon, in which participants coded and created prototypes over the course of three days, with Opera participating as a sponsor.

The winner of the competition ended up being I Watch Live (previously e-Mandators), which is a performance tracking systems for governance responsibility. With it, Nigerians will be able to keep track of published targets set by the government on their manifesto. The 2nd prize winner My123Health promised to make life healthier, and mWanted, which ended up 3rd, gives people a chance to monitor and report crimes in their neighborhood.

Let's talk numbers: PPK's recent article on mobile browser stats for instance shows that Nigerians depend heavily on mobile, and one out of four website visits come from a mobile browser. Given its size of 150 million people, it is the biggest African country. People have adopted mobile internet in a big way, Opera Mini pageviews have grown over 400% Y2Y, and so is the number of unique users, which has grown over 300%. All these have put Nigeria as the 8th biggest user of Opera Mini. Based on Statcounter's numbers, Opera has about 80% of the Nigerian mobile browser share. Designing for the mobile web is a natural thing to do for Nigerian web developers. I shared my views on approaches to designing for the mobile web, using viewport and media queries, among other things.

Talking to university students is always fun, we had the opportunity to discuss some exciting technologies taking shape in the web standards world. About 200 students from the University of Lagos turned up for the event.

Below are my slides on Mobile Web design approaches and Nigeria's state of the Mobile Web.