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Bulk SMS is Unexploited Gold-Mine -Akintayo

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Stephen Akintayo, chief executive officer of Gileadbalm Group, is an inspirational speaker, youth leader, entrepreneur, a digital marketing consultant with account of 10 of multi-nationals in Nigeria.
His company’s product and services span from Information Technology, Telecom, Marketing Consulting, Real Estate, Oil and Gas and Agriculture.
Akintayo also has a Vision of helping in the establishment and growth of 20,000 businesses by the year 2025 with his CEOProtege project.
In this interview with peter ugwu, he listed Bulk Short Message System as a platform yet to be fully exploited in the Nigerian telecom sector.

Gileadbalm’s Areas of Interest
We are focusing majorly on online and Mobile Services because it is not just viable but even develop countries see it as the future.
It is through online that you can start a company and in 6 years you are a Billionaire given facebook as a case study.
Africa is not there yet but soon we will be and that is why a smart entrepreneur will take position now.

Why?
It is easier to build online business than off line business and its cost effective. In the 70’s and 80’s when US economy had several challenges, online related was businesses were such that people like Bill Gate, Micheal Dell, Steve Jobs and other tech giants delved into’ surprisingly, that helped increase the GDP of the United States.
In a country like ours, where unemployment is over 40%, we need people who will build software instead of CV, business plans instead of profiles. I want to influence the establishment and strengthening of 20,000 businesses between now and 2025.

Technpreneurs Motivating Factors
To succeed as a Techprenenur, be ready to celebrate your small beginning. Life is in phases, Men are in sizes, live your size per time.
Like I often say that Techpreneurs are not big boys rather those who have monthly salary that are big boys because ego sells, “eno” sells, salary must be paid.
But as an entrepreneur, you must work hard else your business will not stand five years talk more of 50 years. In simple words, be patient, consistent and determine never to quit.

Potentials of Bulk SMS Sector
Bulk Short Message System (SMS) is an area Gileadbalm has been doing very great. Some people have asked why should a company, for instance, use that medium to reach out to its customers hence there are many channels available today.
Yes, text messaging is over 5billion naira industry that is far more valuable for small entrepreneurs than any other aspect of Telecom industry.
With just N35,000 you can start a bulk SMS business and if you are a skillful marketer you can grow that to multi-million business in less than three years.
It is a gold mine smart individuals should start their techpreneur from bulk SMS but don’t stay there. Any business that brings money on a daily bases is a business you cannot under-estimate.

Bulk SMS and Technological Know-How
Bulk SMS is not that technical. I studied microbiology and earn from online today. The challenge is that some get reseller website with a wrong company that uses Indian gateways that don’t deliver text message sent on their platform on time.
Under 30 seconds when you send message on our platform, it delivers hence we are indispensable. We are not cheap but reliable and the best. That is our goal and that should be the goal of anyone going into this industry.

Adoption Rate
The adoption rate is high. The same way every aspect of digital marketing is being embarrassed, is how bulk SMS thrives, because conventional Media is no longer at the reach of some companies, particularly those looking for measurable and effective platform for marketing. 98% of bulk SMS is open.
That is a massive rate. What is the issue however is getting accurate data to send advert SMS to and that is why we deal with sales of targeted GSM and email data.

Regulation
Some have suggested that bulk SMS should be regulated as NCC regulates the telecom SMS, but I think otherwise.
At least not really, because it is a saturated market and price is not the issue. Bulk SMS is lesser than N4 which is the normal price for sending through your telecom provider.
Still Bulk SMS can be customized, you can send to hundreds of thousands of people at the same time. Regulation should come in the form of enforcing quality service, checkmating fraudsters who use bulk SMS for scam purposes as well as other social devices.

Difference between Bulk SMS & eMail
First of all, note that not all the SMS you receive from MTN or GLO or Airtel is directly from them. We call some short code business, where you partner with the provider to provide services like quotes, sport scores and updates, health tips and people subscribe with N30 or N50.
That is another business under messaging. Targeted Bulk SMS is to send messages to your existing clients or potential clients to buy your products and services. We offer both services.

Increasing Unsolicited eMails and Privacy
There are two types. There are the fraudulent ones from people claiming to be your bank or that you have containers or won a gift etc.
The second type is now the legal ones and its rented email campaign whereby you send email to email ID that you bought from those whom the owner of such ID subscribe. For example, I can start a campaign online as I give certain services and ask people to subscribe and I may choose to sell those emails to a client so that he or she sends campaign of his or her services to such individuals. However, you can always unsubscribe from such mail.
eMail marketing is new to Nigeria but it is proving to be a very effective form of marketing since the advent of smartphone, where people now, instantly, get alert.
The best form however is to build your own list which we help companies build and we train cooperate bodies on this.
The bottom-line is that marketing techniques have change from online and conventional media to digital media and everyone must come on board or be left behind.

 

 


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Our 2023 Ads Safety Report

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By Duncan Lennox, VP & GM of Ads Privacy and Safety

Billions of people around the world rely on Google products to provide relevant and trustworthy information, including ads. That’s why we have thousands of people working around the clock to safeguard the digital advertising ecosystem. Today, we are releasing our annual Ads Safety Report to share the progress we’ve made in enforcing our advertiser and publisher policies and to hold ourselves accountable in our work of maintaining a healthy ad-supported internet.

The key trend in 2023 was the impact of generative AI. This new technology introduced significant and exciting changes to the digital advertising industry, from performance optimization to image editing. Of course, generative AI also presents new challenges. We take these challenges seriously and will outline the work we are doing to address them head-on.

Just as importantly, generative AI presents a unique opportunity to improve our enforcement efforts significantly. Our teams are embracing this transformative technology, specifically Large Language Models (LLMs), so that we can better keep people safe online.

Gen AI Bolsters Enforcement 

Our safety teams have long used AI-driven machine learning systems to enforce our policies at scale. It’s how, for years, we’ve been able to detect and block billions of bad ads before a person ever sees them. But, while still highly sophisticated, these machine learning models have historically needed to be trained extensively – they often rely on hundreds of thousands, if not millions of examples of violative content.

LLMs, on the other hand, are able to rapidly review and interpret content at a high volume, while also capturing important nuances within that content. These advanced reasoning capabilities have already resulted in larger-scale and more precise enforcement decisions on some of our more complex policies. Take, for example, our policy against Unreliable Financial Claims which includes ads promoting get-rich-quick schemes. The bad actors behind these types of ads have grown more sophisticated. They  adjust their tactics and tailor ads around new financial services or products, such as investment advice or digital currencies, to scam users.

To be sure, traditional machine learning models are trained to detect these policy violations. Yet, the fast-paced and ever-changing nature of financial trends make it, at times, harder to differentiate between legitimate and fake services and quickly scale our automated enforcement systems to combat scams. LLMs are more capable of quickly recognizing new trends in financial services, identifying the patterns of bad actors who are abusing those trends and distinguishing a legitimate business from a get-rich-quick scam. This has helped our teams become even more nimble in confronting emerging threats of all kinds.

We’ve only just begun to leverage the power of LLMs for ads safety. Gemini, launched publicly last year, is Google’s most capable AI modeI. We’re excited to have started bringing its sophisticated reasoning capabilities into our ads safety and enforcement efforts.

Our Work to Prevent Fraud and Scams

In 2023, scams and fraud across all online platforms were on the rise. Bad actors are constantly evolving their tactics to manipulate digital advertising in order to scam people and legitimate businesses alike. To counter these ever-shifting threats, we quickly updated policies, deployed rapid-response enforcement teams and sharpened our detection techniques.

  • In November, we launched our Limited Ads Serving policy, which is designed to protect users by limiting the reach of advertisers with whom we are less familiar. Under this policy, we’ve implemented a “get-to-know-you” period for advertisers who don’t yet have an established track record of good behavior, during which impressions for their ads might be limited in certain circumstances–for example, when there is an unclear relationship between the advertiser and a brand they are referencing. Ultimately, Limited Ads Serving, which is still in its early stages, will help ensure well-intentioned advertisers are able to build up trust with users, while limiting the reach of bad actors and reducing the risk of scams and misleading ads.

  • A critical part of protecting people from online harm hinges on our ability to respond to new abuse trends quickly. Toward the end of 2023 and into 2024, we faced a targeted campaign of ads featuring the likeness of public figures to scam users, often through the use of deepfakes. When we detected this threat, we created a dedicated team to respond immediately. We pinpointed patterns in the bad actors’ behavior, trained our automated enforcement models to detect similar ads and began removing them at scale. We also updated our misrepresentation policy to better enable us to rapidly suspend the accounts of bad actors.

Overall, we blocked or removed 206.5 million advertisements for violating our misrepresentation policy, which includes many scam tactics and 273.4 million advertisements for violating our financial services policy. We also blocked or removed over 1 billion advertisements for violating our policy against abusing the ad network, which includes promoting malware.

The fight against scam ads is an ongoing effort, as we see bad actors operating with more sophistication, at a greater scale, using new tactics such as deepfakes to deceive people. We’ll continue to dedicate extensive resources, making significant investments in detection technology and partnering with organizations like the Global Anti-Scam Alliance and Stop Scams UK to facilitate information sharing and protect consumers worldwide.

Investing in Election Integrity

Political ads are an important part of democratic elections. Candidates and parties use ads to raise awareness, share information and engage potential voters. In a year with several major elections around the world, we want to make sure voters continue to trust the election ads they may see on our platforms. That’s why we have long-standing identity verification and transparency requirements for election advertisers, as well as restrictions on how these advertisers can target their election ads. All election ads must also include a “paid for by” disclosure and are compiled in our publicly available transparency report. In 2023, we verified more than 5,000 new election advertisers and removed more than 7.3M election ads that came from advertisers who did not complete verification.

Last year, we were the first tech company to launch a new disclosure requirement for election ads containing synthetic content. As more advertisers leverage the power and opportunity of AI, we want to make sure we continue to provide people with the greater transparency and the information they need to make informed decisions.

Additionally, we’ve continued to enforce our policies against ads that promote demonstrably false election claims that could undermine trust or participation in democratic processes.

Overall 2023 Numbers

Our goal is to catch bad ads and suspend fraudulent accounts before they make it onto our platforms or remove them immediately once detected. AI is improving our enforcement on all these fronts. In 2023, we blocked or removed over 5.5 billion ads, slightly up from the prior year, and 12.7 million advertiser accounts, nearly double from the previous year. Similarly, we work to protect advertisers and people by removing our ads from publisher pages and sites that violate our policies, such as sexually explicit content or dangerous products. In 2023, we blocked or restricted ads from serving on more than 2.1 billion publisher pages, up slightly from 2022. We are also getting better at tackling pervasive or egregious violations. We took broader site-level enforcement action on more than 395,000 publisher sites, up markedly from 2022.

To put the impact of AI on this work into perspective: last year more than 90% of our publisher page level enforcement started with the use of machine learning models, including our latest LLMs. Of course, any advertiser or publisher can still appeal an enforcement action if they think we got it wrong. Our teams will review it and, in the cases where we find errors, use it to improve our systems.

Staying Nimble and Looking Ahead

When it comes to ads safety, a lot can change over the course of a year: the introduction of new technology such as generative AI to novel abuse trends and global conflicts. And the digital advertising space has to be nimble and ready to react. That’s why we are continuously developing new policies, strengthening our enforcement systems, deepening cross-industry collaboration and offering more control to people, publishers and advertisers.

In 2023, for example, we launched the Ads Transparency Center, a searchable hub of all ads from verified advertisers, which helps people quickly and easily learn more about the ads they see on Search, YouTube and Display. We also updated our suitability controls to make it simpler and quicker for advertisers to exclude topics that they wish to avoid across YouTube and Display inventory. Overall, we made 31 updates to our Ads and Publisher policies.

Though we don’t yet know what the rest of 2024 has in store for us, we are confident that our investments in policy, detection and enforcement will prepare us for any challenges ahead.


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InDrive Upgrades App, Announces New Safety Details

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InDrive, an e-hailing firm, announced app upgrades as well as new safety details for riders and drivers.

InDrive’s updated Safety Centre now allows its support team to contact a user’s trusted contacts in emergencies and the number of trusted contacts has been increased from one to five. InDrive says that it is also easier for its support team to share information with emergency services, among other things.

Also, the company said by clicking on the app’s SOS-button, users can see all the information needed when requesting help or reporting an incident – along with a button to call police or ambulance services.

InDrive’s app design has also been updated to improve user experience, making the Safety Centre more visible, it said.

Further, the company said: “inDrive is also testing photo sharing and automatic translation of chat messages, which have been added to the in-app chat function. These make it easier for the driver and rider to clarify the pickup point, and communicate in the same language while traveling.

“Passengers and drivers stay within the application when using these features, so there’s no need to use across other platforms, thereby protecting personal information. For now the feature is currently being tested by a limited number of users to improve its functionality before it is rolled out to everyone.”

The announcement today comes after the company recently revealed it had expanded its financing arrangement with General Catalyst to $146 million, allowing the company to engage in product upgrades, extend its service offerings, and enter new markets in Africa.


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NIN-SIM Linkage: Telcos to Bar More Phones Lines from March 29

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Telecommunications operators in the country are gearing up for another round of disconnections of phone lines for subscribers who have failed to link their National Identification Numbers (NIN) with their SIM cards.

NIN-SIM Linkage: Telcos to Bar More Phones Lines from March 29

The disconnection which will happen Friday, March 29, following a directive from the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) requiring all registered SIMs lacking proper NIN linkage to be either corrected or completely disconnected from networks.

The ongoing process, which commenced on February 28, 2024, is part of the government’s efforts to curb criminal activities like banditry and kidnapping, contributing to enhancing national security.

There are indications of a potential third phase in April 2024.

Operators have reportedly cooperated with the NCC in executing the directive, affirming their commitment to national security objectives and assuring full compliance by the specified deadlines.

The second phase will target subscribers with five or more SIMs from a single operator lacking verified NIN-SIM linkages.

The third phase, set to commence on April 15, will focus on subscribers with four SIMs or fewer and unverified NINs.

While telecom companies seek a review and extension of the April deadline for the third phase, indications from the NCC suggest a steadfast adherence to the established timelines.

The first phase saw the barring of 40 million lines, comprising around 17 million active SIMs without NIN submissions and 23 million inactive SIMs lacking NINs over the past year.

 

 

 

 


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