IPO48: We Just Witnessed Another Circus of an Innovation Challenge

So IPO48 is expected to  announce the winners of the Ksh 3 Million funding in Nairobi. The business incubation has been going on since Friday and we have seen campaigns being run online for virtual pledges. m-Order now tops the list with the highest amount of pledge at Ksh 51,975,000 while others don’t even come close to that.

You can view all the pledges here.

But lots of questions are being raised by bloggers and the general tech community. I was not aware of many of the inside details of the IPO48 event before the Thursday press conference at iHub. These events cannot be run by us because of many of my stand on such events. So they were running the event through other bloggers, I hear.

The winners are suppose to be announced on Sunday 14th August at the iHub. Some of the questions being raise are;

• How are the pledging (voting being done)? Is it ok to reward an idea just because the founders have better influence on social media? You see the voting for m-order and you see a crooked system there. When we asked why popular ideas are not being funded by Human IPO (guys behind IPO48) instead of looking for green ideas, we were told that popular ideas not making money have a problem. Should we also say the same on ideas whose founders have greater influence on social media but are not widely accepted?
• Why charge for the event? When we asked about the charging of Pivot25 event, we were told that the innovators were going to present their ideas before a crowd of investors. They ended up presenting their ideas before a bunch of iHub layabouts, cyber idlers, government bureaucrats and just nobodies. The winners at the Pivot25 ended up being the mongrel who barked loudest on behalf of the cons behind the idea.
• Why was Human IPO claiming that they managed to secure more than 400,000 euros of funding for the whole event from 88mph and then go ahead and charge for the event. Again the whole idea of gate charges for the vent has been hidden from the prying eyes. Nobody put it clearly on the website nor on any of the promotional posts that anyone was going to be charge for the event. A blogger who asked where he could get the early birds tickets was taken round with the sellers of the early bird tickets thinking that he was trying to lure them into some trap.
• And you find that iHub readily gives the cons space for free to launch their fraudulent initiatives without much questions because after that the same bunch of people will get to win and the innovation fallacy will continue.

But Nairobi and especially the team around iHub are turning the whole innovation landscape into a very questionable venture where it is not the best who wins but who-knows-who. The guys now topping the IPO48 pledges are from Nailab and you can see some of them running promotions for IPO48 during the 2010 event at Strathmore in the video below;

[youtube width=”620″ height=”450″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9AXpaepObY[/youtube]

Nobody with a great idea and not licking any …………..at iHub, Nailab and soon mLab will be able to win any award and that is the circus you will be trapped in. It is reward for the friends of the organisers and not for the best innovation. Even the IPO48 had to be won by some Akirachiks whose members reside at iHub while we got even better pitches from many others.

It is a circus and the fraud continue. The likes of Facebook, Google, Quora, Mixit did not win innovation challenges before they were accepted by the mass. And how can you be mentored by anyone who has not developed an app even for his family? SMH!!

Which is next? Lets wait and see. OK!! You can hate me some more.

UPDATE

And just like we indicated, Tusqee systems which was able to garner the most social media noise and some virtual pledges won. That is what you need to do to win any challenge organised by the group around iHub. They don’t have people who can judge any app fairly or if they have they have always to rig their cronies.

Tusqee got the highest amount of virtual pledges at Ksh 90,600,000 while the second (m-Order) got Ksh 81,575,000 in virtual pledges. Sorry state of affairs but now you will see PR articles being authored left right and center without the actual truth of the whole fiasco being addressed.

No issues with any of the particular apps but the truth is that virtual pledges from cronies alone cannot make you a great app developer. This is not Tusker Project Fame where the loudest mouth gets a prize.