Garage48 African Journey will start in Lagos!

Garage48 Lagos – IT idea into a working service in 48 hours!

For the first time in its existence, the Garage48 event series is coming to Lagos. Together with two world companies, Google and Nokia, it will take place from the 6th to the 8th of May 2011 at the Lagos Resource Centre, Victoria Island. Originally developed in Europe, Estonia and expanded to other countries, the purpose of the event is to build new web and mobile services in one single weekend – 48 hours.
I am very excited to organize our first African event, especially in Lagos, Nigeria. This is biggest country in Africa, with more then 150 million people with rapidly increasing demand for different IT and mobile services, as there is now more then 40 million internet users, said Garage48 founder Ragnar Sass.

We have superb local organizing team who are supporting us in many ways. The interest from local tech-community is noticeable, as a great number of people have already registered for the event. Our goal as Garage48, is to connect talented tech people with successful European, American and African entrepreneurs. Together with our partners, Google and Nokia, we will help best teams to develop their product even after the event.

This event is mainly for tech people: graphic designers, Front-end, Back-End software and mobile developers. But we need also people with business skills – project managers, visionaries and marketing specialist. Everybody with great skills can apply to our event, but we will choose only around 100 best applicants to the event, explained Ragnar Sass.

“I am sure, this is going to be an awesome event, possibly the best tech event for a long time to come,” said Garage48 Lagos organizer Francis Onwumere. “The greatest weakness, today, of the Nigerian Tech Startup community is collaboration, team building and viable business models. I hope that Garage48 will change this,” he added.

“Because of the size of the population and the appetite for technology, entrepreneurs in Nigeria have a huge advantage over neighboring countries; there is a sizable market for local content and technology solutions. As Google, we are supportive of Garage48 to serve as a catalyst toward the tech community building those solutions, especially if it can be done in 48 hours!” said Google Africa programm manager Bridgette Sexton.

The event starts at 12pm on Friday with the presentation of various product ideas. The teams are formed and derived organically. By the end of weekend, the teams will have a working products or prototypes. On Sunday evening, starting at 5:00pm, every team will showcase their product with live demo on stage in front of other participants and big audience. The jury and the audience will choose their favorite team or service.

We have a big Garage48 community all over the world, who are following all services which were launched in our events. Therefore this will be great place to start new stuff.

All Garage48 events are organized by Garage48 Foundation and supported by local volunteers.
Garage is a non-profit organization started by 6 Estonian IT entrepreneurs. All our founders are active IT and mobile entrepreneurs, who have great experience on how to launch new successful startup. Two of our founders helped to build up the world famous Skype, what is unique success story in Europe. It is worth mentioning the mobile payment service Fortumo as well, which has expanded into 50 countries and a promising startup company named Pipedrive, which is developing sales management service.

For more info:
Garage48 Lagos: http://garage48.org/lagos

Ragnar Sass
Garage48 Africa project manager
[email protected]

Francis Onwumere
Garage48 Lagos organizer
[email protected]
+234 807 665 2206