Mercyvill

Michael Akindele Michael Akindele, a 30 year-old Nigerian, is a director and a co-founder of SOLO Phone , an experience-driven digital content and smartphone company focused on delivering the best content and services on the mobile platform to African consumers. SOLO Phone, which was established in Nigeria in 2012, is an experience-driven mobile device manufacturer which aims to provide the best content and services to the African consumer at an affordable price. The company manufactures smartphones priced at $150, bundled with free music of up to 20 million songs licensed from Sony, Universal and Warner. SOLO also recently launched a Video-On-Demand App available to all Android devices in Nigeria which offers the latest Nollywood and Hollywood movies from global movie studios. I recently had a chat with Akindele where he recounted his entrepreneurial journey and explained why he feels SOLO phones will give other smartphones

Latest polls gives Yitzhak Herzog’s Zionist Union narrow lead over sitting PM’s Likud party with only days to go. Israelis pass a campaign billboard showing Benjamin Netanyahu, prime minister and leader of the Likud party, in Jerusalem. Photograph: Jim Hollander/EPA Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu , has launched a last-minute media blitz to convince voters he should stay in office as he continues to lose ground to his main challenger – the Zionist Union – led by Yitzhak Herzog. The last polls in the election campaign, published on Friday, suggested Herzog’s party was continuing to creep ahead of Netanyahu’s Likud, with its two-seat lead a week ago doubling to four. Under Israeli election rules no polls can published in the last four days of the campaign until exit polls are released at 10pm on Tuesday night.

The Naira and dollar The external reserves have started dropping at a faster pace due to low demand for the nation’s crude oil and its falling prices globally. Nigeria derives 70 per cent of its revenue and 90 per cent of its foreign exchange from crude oil. According to the latest statistics from the Central Bank of Nigeria’s website, external reserves lost a cumulative amount of $3bn in the last four weeks. Specifically, the foreign reserves tumbled from $33.8bn on February 5 to 30.8bn on March 5. This indicates a 9.7 per cent fall month-on-month. The central bank has been using the reserves to support the ailing naira, which has been hammered by the falling global oil prices and uncertainty over the delayed presidential elections now fixed for March 28. Economic and financial analysts linked the huge drop in the stock of external reserves to political spending, falling oil prices which have put pressure on the local currency, and speculative demand f

(Josh Pulman) Wander the city in 2015 and all you’ll see is people staring at screens or talking on handsets. Is it changing who we are? Tom Chatfield weighs up the arguments. A group of people wait by a monument, unaware of each other’s existence. A woman strides open-mouthed down a busy street, holding one hand across her heart. Two young men – brothers? – stand behind a white fence, both their heads bowed at the same angle. These are some of the moments captured in photographer Josh Pulman’s ongoing series called Somewhere Else, which documents people using mobile phones in public places (see pictures). Almost every street in every city across the world is packed with people doing this – something that didn’t exist a few decades ago. We have grown accustomed to the fact that shared physical space no longer means shared experience. Everywhere we go, we carry with us options far more enticing than the place and m