Social Media- Sowanbe Awards 2011

Think you are social media savvy? Then the Sowanbe Awards might just be for you. Sowambe, the pan-African social media lifestyle brand will recognize and celebrate the best social media adopters, talents, celebs, brands, professionals as well as social web platforms in Nigeria. The Awards has about 25 categories and will allow participants to nominate and vote online for a period of one month for their favourites, based on a clear understanding and good judgment on activities in the social web.

Categories

Best Social Media Personality

Best Social Media Celebrity

Best Social Media Blogger

Best Social Media Politician

Best Social Media Site

Best Social Media Activist

Best Social Media Designer

Best Social Media Thinker

Best Use of Twitter

Best Use of Facebook

Best Use of YouTube

Best Social Media Community

Best Social Media On-Air Personality (TV/Radio)

Best Social Media Newspaper

Best Social Media Startup

Best Social Media Jobs Platform

Best Social Networking Site

Best Social Media TV/Radio Station

Best Micro-Blogging Platform

Best Social Aggregation Tool

Best Ad Campaign on YouTube

Best Ad Campaign on Facebook

Timelines: Nomination Period: February 1 to February 10.

Voting Period: February 15 to February 28.

Winners will be announced on March 1.

For interested sponsors and partners, kindly email info (at)

sowambe.com or visit www.sowambe.com/sponsors.

You can follow @sowambe on Twitter.

For more details, please visit www.sowambe.com

Contact:

Loy Okezie

loy.okezie@gmail.com

07030851462

Tolu Iroye: The Kid With The Magic Box

Tolu Iroye, 27, dropped out of school after his O’Levels due to his family’s inability to continue paying his fees. The electronic designer did not allow his lack of further schooling to limit his future. He has created what he calls the Magic Box, a device that allows its user to switch off electrical appliances in their home or office from a mobile phone. A video demonstration of this technology at the magazine’s premises recently struck one with awe.

Tolu Iroye receiving his award for best use of technology at The Future Awards

The Magic Box began as an idea to create a non-line of sight remote control that would work for his TV set without him being in the room. “I’m motivated by the need to create solutions to problems,” Iroye said. And so he began work with components that he sourced from the Alaba Electronics Market. It took about one year to complete the Magic Box, an equipment that allows one to switch off any electronic device in the home or office with a phone call from anywhere in the world. The user makes a phone call to a sim card located in the Box which gives a voice prompt that offers options to the caller on how to switch on or off their TV, power generator and light metre through a micro-controller. 

Iroye’s recent victory in The Future Award’s best use of technology category brought out the life story of the brilliant techie which began many years ago. As a child, Iroye’s curiosity got the better of him and the quiet albeit stubborn kid loved to look at pictures in science books. Even though he could not read them, his older siblings took out time to explain the concepts to him. At age six years old, Iroye built his first invention, a cell battery using ground charcoal, a disposed carbon rod, a tin of milk, lime water, grass and herbs all picked from the neighbourhood rubbish mound.

Amused by his resourcefulness and sometimes-destructive streak - Iroye would tear apart the family’s transistor radio looking for the magical voice that came out of it - but his parents left him to explore.  He left many an electronic gadget in their Festac, Lagos apartment in tatters. From out of these he built new stuff. It was the beginning of his inventor’s journey. 

At age 10, he built a battery-powered toy car from his heap of scrap. At 12 Tolu began purchasing scraps from friends with his pocket money. While the other boys at school spent their lunch money on hiring bicycles, he used his to purchase equipment for constructing homemade antennas that neighbours bought  to enable them unscramble signals from the Cabletel satellite channel. “I still don’t know how to ride a bicycle,” Iroye joked.

More was to follow. He created a land telephone network that enabled him to communicate free with friends in their apartment block. An audio transmitter followed and then a voltage stabiliser to help the family adjust the low voltage they were supplied by the power company when they moved to Badagry. This was all before he turned 14.

Iroye's Magic Box

Constrained by an environment that stifles creativity, Iroye has taken to selling his inventions across the border in Cotonou, Benin Republic where he is hoping to gain a foothold soon enough. “This is the least of my inventions,” he says of the Magic Box. “There’s more to come in the future.”

The Future Awards Journalist of the Year Is Tolu Ogunlesi

Next's Tolu Ogunlesi emerged as the journalist of the year at the Future Awards on Sunday night.

The Future Awards journalist of the year winner Tolu Ogunlesi. Photo by Lolade Adewuyi

It crowned an eventful year for Tolu who has been a shining light for young people in the profession.
For the ten of us who were all nominated in that category, it was a recognition of our efforts. In an industry that doesn't usually celebrate its own, being celebrated by young peers is a really good thing.

Tolu was the winner on the night but journalism was the big winner because the work of all the nominees means that the future of our trade is brighter than what many detractors would admit.

I have known Tolu for more than two years and I've been an admirer of his wit. He has become synonymous with the power of youth, the voice of a new generation, the future of Nigeria.

Our industry shall not die with young men and women like Tolu Ogunlesi, Toyosi Ogunseye, Yinka Ibukun, Lolade Adewuyi, Kemi Ajumobi, Segun Adeoye, Nicholas Ibekwe, Latasha Ngwube, Arukaino Umukoro, Chilee Agunanna etc, young people who are in the forefront of credible and intelligent journalism in Nigeria.

They are the future.

L-r: The Future Awards journalist of the year nominees Arukaino Umukoro, Yinka Ibukun, Lolade Adewuyi, Kemi Ajumobi and Chilee Agunanna at the Nominees Party

The Social Media Revolution

The fall of the Tunisian government is the first in a long list of tyrannical regimes waiting to be toppled by frustrated citizens and social media-inspired activists.

It took the death of an unemployed 26 year-old graduate in Tunisia for the country’s repressed population to stand up to evict old tyrant Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali from the country. The frustrated youth of Tunisia were, however, helped in their anger by social media tools as they organised and massed while evading the watchful eye of the regime’s secret police. In those hot times, Facebook, Twitter and Youtube came in handy. The #Sidibouzid hashtag was all that one needed to follow the revolution in Tunis when all the king’s cookies came crumbling down. And like a dog beaten in a fight, Ben Ali took flight. The first successful revolution by social media to topple an Arab regime was solidified.

Apparently taking note, Egyptians, Algerians, Yemenis and other sit tight Arab leaders have begun to receive a bashing from their own citizens who have taken to the streets in protest. In Cairo last week, Egyptians massed on the streets protesting against the three decades old government of President Hosni Mubarak. Protesters chanted and marched as police fired tear gas into their midst. Even as the Egyptian authorities tried in vain to stifle the use of social media tools like the Tunisians did, demonstrators were able to find a way round it to organise groups to meet. The world as we know it is changing and the impact of social media more than ever before will be felt in countries around the world, for good or for bad. 

Goodluck Jonathan Is PDP Winner But Sarah Jubril The International Star

President Goodluck Jonathan emerged the winner of the presidential primaries of the Peoples Democratic Party held in Abuja, Nigeria last night.

He defeated his main opponent former vice president Atiku Abubakar by a whopping 2,736 votes to Atiku’s 805. 

However, it was the lone vote scored by Sarah Jubril that became a hot internet topic projecting the four-time aspirant into fame on Twitter. Since yesterday, Jubril has become a trending topic on the social networking site.

Figure out how tough it is to be a trending topic that is mainly something a few music stars, footballers and celebrity types achieve in their lifetime. 

But the politician who has failed for the umpteenth time in her bid to become president of the world’s largest Black nation has now found success online. Talk about greatness coming out of misfortune, Sarah Jubril has become one of the most famous Nigerians on the net. No longer will people exclaim Sarah who? 

Sarah Jubril has become a celebrity and is the biggest winner on the night not Goodluck Jonathan who has another battle to fight in April. 

Can we get an autograph Sarah?

How the Nigerian church is plotting to hijack 2011 from politicians

Half a million voices raised in supplication at The Experience 2010

The Experience concert was all it was billed to be. It was the largest Gospel music concert in the World. Over 500,000 people gathered at the Tafawa Balewa Square on the night of December 3 to praise and pray for Nigeria. Artist bands came from as far as the United States and Jamaica to usher the huge gathering into the spiritual presence of the Most High. Sweet music was rendered by popular Christian acts like Don Moen, Ron Kenoly, Fred Hammond, Israel Houghton, Phil Driscoll, Mary Mary, Chevele Franklyn, Sammie Okposo and Mike Aremu.

The arena was packed to the rafters and many like myself (attending for only the second time) had to endure a nine-hour vigil on our feet. What this fifth edition of The Experience showed is that the Nigerian church is finally waking up to its political strength. For it was clear that night that this was more than a concert, it was turning into a political movement as church leaders, one after the other, led prayers for the nation. Guest preachers prayed for the Niger Delta, constant power supply, better roads, better leaders, peace in the religious troubled North, and above all credible elections in 2011. (See my 2006 article How the church got her groove back)

But instead of just prescribing more prayers like they are wont to do, the clergy went further by encouraging all Christians to register to vote when the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, commences its voter registration in January. Through a video slide, leaders of the Christian Association of Nigeria, CAN, headed by the irrepressible Ayo Oritsejafor urged Christians to become more involved in the choice of who leads them next year.

"The church has the responsibility to make Nigeria one. We are one and we will remain one. The troublers of Nigeria will be troubled," Oritsejafor told the crowd who echoed a big amen in the open night air that echoed all around the Lagos Island and environs. "Go and register, you will vote, there are right people to vote for. Nigeria will not break," he concluded.

And it wasn't just a night for the men of cloth. President Goodluck Jonathan addressed the gathering via a recorded video message where he praised the ingenuity of the organizers House on The Rock church led by Paul Adefarasin. Jonathan said it is a great achievement in the life of Nigeria that the world's biggest Gospel music concert is being held in Lagos in the country's fiftieth anniversary year.

As part of the high political profile given the event, Lagos governor Babatunde Fashola as the crowd to begin creating a change in their own domains.

"If we leave here tonight with the mindset to become a part of the solution and not part of the problem I'm sure we will begin to have 24 hour electricity in our nation," said Fashola. And in reference to the various industrial disputes he's been locked into with labour groups in the state he said, "We need the value of sacrifice to put an end to any form of strikes so as to enjoy the best years of our nation".

Above all, it was a show of political force by the Nigerian Christian community which had been content to stay on the sidelines on political issues in the past. Christians had always believed that politics was a dirty game that believers ought not get entangled with. However, cases in other countries have shown how revolutions have been led from the pulpit onto the streets. Churches led by Martin Luther King, Jr among many other clergy championed the Civil Rights movement in America. Even in Nigeria Pastor Tunde Bakare has become a leading voice in constitutional rule through the Save Nigeria Group.

Is the church finally rising up to its potential after all these years of sitting on the fence with arms folded as political jobbers took the country for a ride?

Adefarasin offered an answer that will make 2011 a very interesting period in Nigeria's political experiment with its over sixty million members. "The sleeping giant, the church, is about to wake up and take its rightful place in the nation," said Adefarasin.

We Need Peace In Ivory Coast - A Personal Account

I saw on CNN this morning images of looming chaos in Ivory Coast. The army has shut all land, air and sea borders and the citizens are all scampering for safety. No one really knows what havoc is happening in the country that fought a civil war not long ago.

You may think that it is a far away country but it's not when you realise that it is human beings like you and I that inhabit that country.

After posting a prayer for peace in the country on Facebook this morning, and pondering on what next to do, I got into a chat with a friend who expressed shock at the events in Abidjan.

That conversation with Tony brought to fore the urgent need to create awareness about the looming crisis that is an outcome of the presidential elections.

In our chat, Tony, a Nigerian photojournalist who has lived and worked in Abidjan and whose wife hails from that country told me a few things that I have reproduced here by permission.

"Ha, when I thought peace will come back to Cote d`Ivoire. My pastor still lives there and I have been trying to reach him on phone" Tony said.

"Is the phone working" I asked.

"No," he responded. "God please intervene."

"It's serious," I said.

"I have not gotten through," said Tony. "I am still trying. My brother in law is there too. My wife has refused to eat".

"Ol boy you have people there o, I feel ur pains bro".

After a long pause.

"His phone is not going. All the phone calls I am making no one is to be going through. That`s my second home Lolade. I'm confused may God help me", he said.

And so this is the dilemma we face in an increasingly shrinking world.

You may think that Abidjan is far from you and do not care about what may be going on but remember that every human being is family and we need to care about the fate of the world.

For my friends reggae singer Ayouba Karamoko and journalists Kingsley Kobo and Rhokia Kone who live in Abidjan, my prayers are with you and I hope that your country will find peace.

Please sign up for a petition here .