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Private Media Mart To Host Second Cyber Café Survival Expo

Published by Private Media Mart Limited on Tagged Uncategorized

In a continuation of its mandate to improve the lot of the cyber cafés currently existing in the country, all plans have been concluded to host yet another edition of the Cyber Café Survival Event and Mini-exhibition in Lagos come the 10th of August 2009. Private Media Mart Limited, a leading business-to-business ICT consultancy firm, is organizing the event, which is in its second edition, with official institutional backing from the Nigerian Internet Group (NIG) and the NCC.

As a one-day affair, the Cyber Café Survival Event Series aims at finding realistic solutions that will lead to reducing the high mortality rate amongst cyber cafes across the country so as to accelerate the pace of universal access to information and communication technology (ICT) in Nigeria. The annual workshop is an idea to keep providing cyber operators and prospective investors as well as other SMEs with information on ways to sustain their businesses and also to afford related technologies and solution providers a veritable opportunity of interfacing directly with cyber café operators and prospective investors. This year’s edition with the main theme: “Scarcity Versus Cost – Tackling the Broadband Challenges”, will be held in Lagos at the K&G Events Centre, in Oregun – Ikeja Lagos. 
Speaking recently, the Managing Partner and Chief Executive Officer of the firm, Mr. Ejiofor Agada disclosed that what led to the conceptualization of the workshop is a bid to find out the problems faced by cyber café operators and the reasons behind the high mortality rate of cyber cafes in Nigeria. “To help in identifying their challenges, we strive to inform them on what they are doing wrong, how to do it right and the best way to run a cyber café business. The event creates an avenue where cyber café operators and potential investors following the progress of the workshop would have a perfect plan on how to start and sustain cyber café business in Nigeria”.
Mr. Agada explained that the Internet is still one of the fastest and cost-effective means of interpersonal and corporate communications in the world and the ability to successfully sustain a cyber café business today has its own problems. He identified the issues of hardware, software, networking, security, bandwidth, power supply and the law as the major problems faced by cyber operators today.  He also noted the issue of fraudulent practices by some Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in the provision of bandwidth capacities to cyber operators as another challenge. It is to this end that this edition of the event will be showcasing select Internet Broadband service providers in the country with repute and verifiable, honest business practices.
Furthermore, he explained that broadband is expensive for Nigerians due to the undeveloped infrastructures we have when compared with other countries of the world.  He therefore urged the government to make the market better through the provision of broadband services; situate a well regulated body to handle complaints from the cyber operators and investors and pay more focus on the providers of bandwidths. “The government should make the market better. The business of providing broadband services in Nigeria is not well indicated at all. Government gives so much attention to telecommunications, the end users of bandwidth utilization more than the providers of bandwidth. The regulation is not there, if it is there, it is not well stated”.
The first edition of the workshop focused on hardware and software challenges of cyber café business in Nigeria with participation from Omatek, Beta Computers, Wazobia Linux, Amsco, Jidaw, and Microsoft.  In this edition, good players in broadband services as well as government agencies would be there to promote bandwidth accessibility in Nigeria and talk to potential investors and of cyber café operators in the country on what is currently available in the market to make their business profitable.

July 15th, 2009



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