University of Buea says YES !!!!

Its a closed deal, Dr Nalova Lyonga, Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Teaching, Professionalization and Development of ICT at the University of Buea gave us the official go ahead for her lecturers to start using Pulse to communicate with their students as part of our 3 months pilot phase, starting December 1^st.

It had been long day yesterday at the UB campus, we had intensive presentations with the school administration, starting with the Vice Chancellor Prof Titanji then down to Dr Nalova and to the Head of IT Dr Nkweteyim (who disclosed to us that they had migrated over to Google apps, which comes in handy because of the possible integration we will have with the google app engine). So why did we have to talk to all these people just to get approved, well because these are the stakeholders who need to give their stamp of approval, and all of this just took us a Day. I love Cameroon.

Though Nara recounts it was really tiring (the campus is huge), administrative procedures like these are kinds of things usePULSE aims to ameliorate, by providing alternative communication channels for the administration and students.

We now have 6 months to signup the entire Student population of more than 12,000 17,000 students and 300 lecturers, the task that lies ahead is humongous “c’est pas le lait”, but we going at it surely and strategically, one department at the time. This is another major milestone for our project, now lets see as our tractions builds up. Thanks again to Horace, Nara, Jean-luc and Quincy for the wonderful work.

And whats funny is we are just getting started.

Want to learn more about Pulse check this -> http://wasa.me/6JBf

Steve Jobs asked me to be CEO of Apple.

It’s funny how the world goes, you never know when your good fortune may come, and mine came in exactly 2 days ago, infact nearly came. so for the history, I’m called Leslie Tita, The first black employee at Apple, and fervent fan boy of Steve Jobs, whom I call him Stevo.

So here we are this particular Tuesday night after a long session of coding, debugging and developing the Beta version of the iOS release called iPulse,. I decided to take a break, and joined my coworkers for a short iWalk and ahead of us was no one but the only Stevo, looking very frail and tired, So I summoned my sharingan (Naruto) and went up to him and asked why he insisted to work while he was on medical leave, funny enough he told me “I’ve got a lot of work to do young man and by the way I’ve been looking forward to meet you, Leslie” and my heart stop beating for 2 secs, Stevo wants to meet me, Leslie.

I followed him to his office, the bureau space, a fantastic piece of art, it looked very much like the future apple campus, we sat down, had a cup of iCoffee (everything in his office is prefixed “i”) and he started talking, “Leslie I founded this company before your mom had time to give your dad a chance, and when I made my first million dollars, you weren’t even born yet, but all this time, I’d been praying one day, I will meet someone who will be the iPerson I will want to take over Apple,” so my brain started calculating, does Steve Jobs want my input on who he needs to choose to lead Apple, so I confidently said “Tom Cooks” aka Tommy and he shouted “Nooo !!!!, Tommy is too….infact he doesn’t understand the Fruit”…and he gasped for air and said “Leslie, I want you to be the CEO of APPLE.” …then I poured the iCoffee I was drinking and this time my heart stopped for 5 secs.  You got know I had been speaking with Stevo for about 15 mins, and there he is proposing me to be CEO of the most valuable company in the world, but I told him, “With all due respect Stevo sorry Steve, I know, you know what you want, and definitely have thought out this decision, but Tommy has been there for you when you were sick, even though he is not as charismatic as you, I believe he is the iONE”.

Stevo stared at me in astonishment for a sec and whispered some inaudible words, basically it seemed to me he was chanting, and all I heard was “iPhone …iTommy…iApple…this cant iWorks ” then he said well Leslie, I have a better offer for you, which you can’t refuse,” I thought to myself this old dude surely wants to donate all his money, since he doesn’t need it any longer, and looking around his office, I could already see myself resigning from Apple (the dream job) to launch my own company iusePulse.

I could feel my hair strands lift and excitement as blood gushed throughout my veins, so he excused himself left the room and seconds later I heard his iPhone ring…it started ringing so loud I could barely hear myself breathe, so I turned over to silence it, and Bam…my eyes opened, it was 6.00am, I was in my bed and my alarm clock was busy buzzing around, it was time to get up and go to my job, my real job this time, “Computer lab assistant at Franklin University”.

I definitely would not know what Stevo had to tell me but one thing is sure, Tom Cooks can thank me for letting him have the job, after all Steve Jobs asked me to be CEO of Apple and I said “iNo”

Disclaimer : This story is Pureful Fictional, nothing in this is true.

Diane's Blog: Reimagine African higher education

Link: Diane's Blog: Reimagine African higher education

dianebarbara:

According to the UNESCO institute of statistics there are about 4.5 million students in Sub-Sahara Africa; the demand for higher education in Africa has almost doubled over the past 5 years and the proportion of people attending universities has increased from 1% to 6%. Great! you might think but…

How Social Media & Game Mechanics Can Motivate Students

Link: How Social Media & Game Mechanics Can Motivate Students

Patrick Supanc is the President of College and Career Readiness at Pearson, where he focuses on new market development, digital innovation and product strategy. He has been a teacher in Indonesia, an education policy adviser at the World Bank and UN, and led K-12 market development at Blackboard….

Break the Digital Divide the African Way

Cameroonian android developers would love this one, a great way to start a post right…well a lot of thinking has been going on in the pulse team on ideas that will bring a real change to African education, and this particular idea which we expect to roll during the Pilot phase of Pulse was pitched in by one of our advisers.

University Professors who are to enroll in our pilot program will each receive an Android tablet PC, and this lands well as Cameroon prepares the Android Developer Challenge,

this will therefore be an opportunity for the developers to distribute their app and even monetize , Crazy idea or not, you may think, but we expect to introduce this feature later to all university students through university partnerships. We are so excited at the prospect of this feature and we hope the African and especially Cameroonian developers will find methods make extreme use of this. The reason why we are doing this is because we constantly question the status quo of higher education. Books , textbooks and pens though still valuable resources of our education,have had their time, today we starting a lil revolution, aiming digitize our educational resources, notes, textbooks, provide them to students. it will take time, money and effort to get this done, but we are going to start now.

Where will we take money to do this and are Tablets Pc not supposed to be expensive, well you are right, though we are still bootstrapped, we should be able to pull this over, so the team members Nara, Quincy, James, Horace and William are really putting all what they can to make this come life and yes tablets are expensive the average $300, but we are eying entry level devices (~$50 - ~$100) and we plan to start with the university of Buea, and will progressively extend to other universities. So if you are a developer and you are thinking, “Why come to Pulse, I can submit directly to the android market,” well you are 100% right, but think about your app coming pre-installed and potentially available to over 100,000 students.

• Will Pulse be selling Tablets ? No.


• Will these Tablet PC’s, be crucial for our platform to work ? No.

The Pulse platform will first and foremost work on the web and mobile,this feature just adds to break the digital divide the African way , we don’t even expect universities to get on board yet, but that shouldn’t stop us.

Now back to reality, do you think when we say we expect to give androids tablets to the professors who are to enroll in our pilot program, we may be joking or just trying to foster hype ? Well guys, No, as I speak write this post, I have ordered a my tablet and it should be arriving the US in a week or so, and later, all things being equal we expect to get our first shipment to Cameroon by the June-July.
Update : september -october 

If you are a developer and you are interested in looking into this, please drop us a note at android@pulse.cm #LesWaysFort my friend @izanefg will say, but we are strong believers of the pulse project and we shall continue provide news way to make things easier for the users.

I shall be explaining in later post,what we expect do with this Tablets, but right now, we just had to share this.

What is the Pulse Project ?

For sometime now,we’ve been secretly working on the #pulseproject, untill now!!!.So what is pulse ? and how did start ?

We started Pulse with  the idea to create a social network for the university of Buea, but after realizing a vast majority of African universities had no form of online student services, and how students depended solely on notice boards, in-class announcements and mouth to mouth communication, we decided it was time we did something about it.

Pulse is a social/geo-location platform aimed at connecting African universities, professors to their students. In order words, we trying to make African education look cool, Pulse will provide a platform where any university can own and operate its own high-end online students services at a low cost, without having to deploy any technical infrastructure, it will permit lecturers to communicate faster and cheaper to their students and lastly it will enable students to receive updates from their teachers and classmates through sms, web and email. We are building only for these category of universities and of course we taking into consideration the realities of African users, that means for us, that our platform will be centered around the mobile experience.

When will Pulse be ready? well follow us on twitter to know @dynastypulse

We made it to the Finals of MIT100k Competition

We are so happy to announced that our project was selected to be one of the finalists at the MIT100K YouPitch Competition. we also wish to congratulate the other applicants who made it to the finals e.g Investours (Havard) , NeuroPal (JohnHopkins), Ear(MIT). MIT100K entrepreneurship competition seeks to support entrepreneurs from all around the world who have great ideas and who give them the opportunity for top notch Investors listen to their pitch. For us  at Pulse, we sought to democratize education through the use of basic ICT tools in cheap and affordable way throughout Africa. We know this change can’t be done alone and thus the challenges that lay ahead are really enourmous, but so far we have alot of great feedback, encouraging us to continue in our project and this competition will allow us to meet great people, investors and mentors who may shape and advice us on different paths to take.

Well what is next step you may ask, we should be receiving the finals results tonight after the Judge and Renown entrepreneur Brad Feld has passed his decision.

Also this is a video explaining the purpose of the Pulse project.

Please also vote for us in MIT $100K competition on both Facebook and Youtube as each vote counts separately.

How to vote/support us:
1. Facebook voters:Simply ‘Like’ this page then go to our post (video) and ‘Like’ our post as well. Please note that the second ‘Like’ is important!
2. YouTube voters:Go to this video, login to your account and click the like button.
3. Have your name on our Thank you page forever.

Cameroon & Corruption - Still killing us

I found this interesting , thought I should share

afrographique Infographic depicting the top 10 mobile subscription countries in Africa.

We going public yay.....

Well we have finally decided to go public. We’ve been have working for several months in the shadows and now we will be sharing more details with you on this project over the next days.