Nigeria: Who Wants to Be a Millionaire Gets Internet Version - AllAfrica.com

James EmejoLagos

Subscribers to the MTN web can now take part in the popular television world game show, Who Wants to be a Millionaire? through the internet.

Speaking at the launch of the online version tagged Millionaire Online in Lagos , Mr. Femi Ayeni, CEO, Ultima Limited, manufacturers of the programme described it as an invention which is aimed at rejuvenating the educational and recreational online wonts of Nigerians everywhere.

"Millionaire Online is an exciting new game cast of characters in the formatting of the most popular television game show in the human race and which have go the most watched shows of its sort in Federal Republic Of Nigeria consistently over the last four years", he said.

The cyberspace version is a replication of the television experience and yet, have its alone features: Participants could take whatever clip or time period they wish to play, anywhere and from their comfortableness using their mobile phones, computing machines or other cyberspace enabled-hand held devices.

Players of the online game who hit the peak point each hebdomad would be rewarded every week. While the peak scorer travels away with N20,000, the adjacent two high scoring participants would also win N10,000 each. In addition, the participant with the peak cumulative

monthly mark wins N50,000 with two other high scoring participants also walking away with N20,000.

Moreover, victors of both the weekly and monthly awards on the cyberspace may also measure up to play for N10million on the hot place in the existent television version.

According Adunola Ajunwon, Ultima Limted, all that participants necessitate to take part in the online experience is to textual matter the word pin to

345 from their mobile phone. Immediate, 3 different Numbers are given with which people could then log on to the game's website at www.millionairenigeria/onlinegame.com.

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Mr Frank Edoho, the presenter of the telecasting version in an interview with THISDAY said Millionaire Online would function as a platform to set up participants for the existent game show on television as they would have got gotten a feel of what it is like to be on the hot seat.

Also Mr. Elvis Daniel, MTN Selling Department said the invention is one of the assorted ways through which MTN seeks to please its teeming subscribers.

Online participant would undergo the same nerve-pulsating sense experience of actually seating in the hot place and answering 15 inquiries with the same attendant sound and even light effects, according to the producers.

Kenya: Help in Sight for the Blind - AllAfrica.com

Bernard MuindiNairobi

The hereafter of unsighted people is visibly brighter followers the launch of an advanced device that enables them to utilize ordinary computer science machines as opposing to the system traditionally used.

The Dolphinfish Pen is the modern solution to the computing necessitates of the blind. Unlike other silver screen entree solutions such as as the Occupation Entree With Address (JAWS), which they have got been using, the Dolphinfish Pen is not installed on the PC, but instead runs from a Universal Joint Consecutive Bus (USB) Pen Drive - a little portable device, just a few centimeters long, which stoppers consecutive into the USB port of a computer.

The convenient size intends that a user can transport his or her Dolphinfish Pen in the pocketbook or pocket, and tally the entree software system on any computer, without the demand to configure scenes each time, as all user constellations are saved back to the Dolphinfish Pen.

The Dolphinfish Pen is simple to utilize on any computer. It takes a couple of proceedings to do a computing machine Dolphinfish Pen-friendly. Once this is done, to run the software, simply infix the pen into a USB slot.

This engineering is enabling 100s of unsighted pupils at assorted acquisition establishments in the state to curved shape a rival border with their colleagues.

The programme loaded into a flash disc installs itself automatically into the computing machine for the user. A USB memory device lets a user to run Dolphinfish silver silver screen reading and screen magnification software system on any computer. It stoppers into a USB port and installs software system on the machine. When the Dolphinfish Pen is removed, the software system is uninstalled. The software system is compatible with Windows 2000, Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows NT, Windows View and Windows XP Home, Windows XP Pro operating systems.

It necessitates pattern with the keyboard to derive proficiency. Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) is used to magnify textual stuff in books and newspapers in a manner that a unsighted pupil can read comfortably.

David Waithaka Wanyoike, 24, a First Year pupil at Kenyatta University is a totally unsighted pupil studying History and Kiswahili in Education. He is among 38 others in the university who were introduced to the engineering last month. They were trained on Dolphinfish Pen by the university. Mister Wanyoike, a alumnus of Thika School for the Blind, compares the electric switch from jaw to Dolphinfish Pen with shifting from manual or automatic gear wheel in vehicles.

"This engineering is very convenient for me. My life have got been turned around and now I have all grounds to stand out in my career. It was hard using JAWS, and Louis Braille is expensive," he says. Multiple Sclerosis Dame Ellen Terry Mugambi, also a First Year Bachelor of Education student, states Dolphinfish Pen have got simplified her study.

"Now I can utilize any computing machine at the cyber café, the library - where we also have the CCTV- computing machine lab, any where!" Compared to the Braille, the computer-based system is cheaper. The Standard Perkins Brailler cost Sh24,000 while a reconditioned computing machine and the Dolphinfish assistive engineering costs less than Sh18,000. The initial donees of the engineering are pupils from Kenyatta University, Asumbi, Mosoriot and Machakos Teachers Training Colleges. Others are Bungoma, Moi, Capital Of Kenya Girls, Kericho Tea and Kipsigis Girls' high schools.

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This engineering is offered in concurrence with United Nations Development Program (UNDP), Sight Savers International, Sense International, The Republic Of Republic Of Kenya Union of Blind, Kenya Institute of Education (KIE) and the Ministry of Education. The programme enables normal computing machines to "speak" and magnify textual matter as well as alteration coloring material backgrounds, thus helping the unsighted to set according to their needs.

Speaking during the launch of the technology, the president of the Particular Education section at Kenyatta University Dr Francisca Wamucho termed it the unsighted student's companion.

"The section wishings to renew its course of study content and include many topics for the visually impaired pupils so that they can be empowered to do the right calling choices," she said.

UN teams up with Google and Cisco Systems to track global efforts to fight poverty

: The United Nations have teamed up with engineering giants Google Inc. and Lake Herring Systems, Inc. to establish a new Web land site that volition supply information and a bird's oculus position of planetary attempts to struggle poorness and ran into U.N. development goals.

The land site will track attempts by states around the Earth to accomplish the Millennium Development Goals for 2015, which human race leadership approved at a U.N. acme in 2000, by providing the up-to-the-minute statistics on health, education, malnutrition, women's equality and other measurements that lend to poverty.

On one part of the site, a Web surfboarder can also utilize Google Earth's map and artificial satellite imagination to wing anywhere on the planet and research from above the topographic points where work is being done.

The ends include cutting utmost poorness by half, ensuring cosmopolitan primary school education, reducing kid mortality by two-thirds, halting and starting to change by reversal the HIV/AIDS pandemic and cutting in one-half the proportionality of people without entree to safe imbibing water.

U.N. Secretary-General Prohibition Ki-moon called Thursday's launch "crucial" because for the first clip all information on the U.N. goals, known as the MDGs, will be available in one topographic point "for all who seek it, with a few simple chinks of the mouse." Today on IHT.com

Ban lamented that almost 1 billion people still dwell on less than US$1 a day; that billions of children decease every twelvemonth before their 5th birthday from causes associated with malnutrition; that infective diseases including acquired immune deficiency syndrome and malaria "are taking their worst toll on states that tin least afford it;" and that billions of people are living in slums.

"Clearly, we are facing a development exigency — and we necessitate exigency action," he said.

"For the first clip in history, the human race have at its disposal the agency to cut poorness in one-half in the span of a generation," the secretary-general said. "But ultimately, achieving the MDGs is a substance of political will. There is no Ag bullet, but the resources, cognition and tools for achieving the ends make exist."

The new MDG Monitor is one of those tools because it will harness the powerfulness of the Internet to supply information for policymakers and development experts who can larn from each other's successes and setbacks, and it will increase public entree and attending to achieving the U.N. goals, Prohibition said.

At the end of his speech, Prohibition set his manus on the mouse of a laptop computing machine computer together with Lake Herring Senior Frailty President Carlos Dominguez, Google's Michael Mother Jones who is main engineer for Google World and Maps, and U.N. Development Program Administrator Kemal Dervis.

A user who chinks the Google World logotype can wing anywhere in the human race and see all the undertakings and measure the advancement toward meeting the MDGs, Mother Jones said.

"They can see successes and detect those, and observe failures or deficits ... and redouble their country's committedness to prosecute those efforts. So it's very exciting for us," he said.

Dominguez said Lake Herring believes that engineering and human inventiveness "can effectively steer expertness and resources to those in demand while highlighting the success of others in reaching these of import goals."

The budget for the undertaking is US$200,000 (€139,000), and it received US$150,000 (€104,000) from corporate donors, according to the U.N. Development Program, which is facilitating the new Web land site for the U.N.

UNDP's Dervis said information on the MDG Monitor come ups from a assortment of U.N. agencies, the World Depository Financial Institution and governments, but he noted that statistics are sometimes hard to obtain, and can differ.

"We trust to gradually defeat these failings and unfastened the land site to all organisations who garner statistics to offer their information," he said.

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