Software
Giants, Microsoft has partnered with Kagiso Media to officially unveil the MSN Nigeria Portal
in Lagos. The launch had a line-up of different activities including a
media conference and editorial roundtable session.
Microsoft’s Acting
Country Manager, Awawu Olumide-Sojinrin said that MSN Nigeria portal
features the trademark MSN homepage dedicated to Nigerian news,
sports, lifestyle, entertainment and weather as well as links to other
Microsoft-related services such as Bing, Outlook and Skype.
According to Justin Dewhirst, Area Executive Producer, CEE &
MEA, Apps Media & Publishing Microsoft, “MSN is about bringing
contents together in one portal and Kagiso has built the expertise for great
experiences on the Windows operating system”.
He added that “MSN is accessible on
personal computers (PC), smartphones and feature phones. He reiterated that MSN Nigeria is
a way to synchronize great people with great technology in the process of
building a greater content experience.
The
deal with Kagsio also sees Ad Dynamo providing contextual advertising on
Microsoft’s network of sites, including Windows Live Hotmail with over 800,000
users in Nigeria and Windows Messenger with over 820,000 active users
in Nigeria.”
During the demonstration
of the portal, Dele Akinsade, Director Developer Platform Evangelist, West East
and Central Africa Microsoft said that already, MSN Nigeria syndicates
local news in Nigeria from the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN),
as well as publishers such as BangShowbiz. “It also features dedicated pages
for news (national, African and world news), sport (local and world sport
news), entertainment (local and global celebrity entertainment news) and
lifestyle (including fashion, travel, tech & gadgets, motoring).”
Also speaking, Marcus
Stephens, General Manager- Publishing, Kagiso Media said Kagiso Media has been
partnering with Microsoft since 2010 to share the vision for building
communities with local talent content providers. “There is a growing hunger for
localised content across Africa as undersea cables, mobile broadband and
falling Internet access costs bring more people online. We aim to address this
need with the same formula of locally relevant, easy to digest content that we
offer our audience in South Africa,” he said.
At the interactive editorial roundtable, Microsoft and Kagiso
Media rubbed minds with some of Nigeria’s finest bloggers sharing ideas on
trends in blogging in Nigeria, local content, content consumption,
messaging amongst others.
The bloggers lauded the initiative and expressed their desire for
content in Pidgin English which according to them is a unifying language spoken
by all. They also called for the incorporation of local expressions and
other trends into the writing styles to spice up the portal with the Nigerian flavour.
Nice going there….
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