network/news aggregator for Nigerians.
Spartan Arinze is pursuing the American
dream, in China. He's created a social
network for Nigerians and Nigerians living
in China called Gbooza! It's part Facebook,
part Huffington Post and completely devoted
to Nigerians. It's not a run-away success yet,
but Arinze is confident.
When Spartan Arinze landed at the
Guangzhou airport in southern China more
than a decade ago he had $300 in his
pocket and he didn’t speak a word of
Chinese but he felt destined to do
something big.
“I came to China with the hope of looking
for the American dream. You must have read
that on my profile,” Arinze said.
The online profile he’s talking about is on
gbooza.com — the website Arinze launched
two years ago. As for his dream, Gbooza is
it.
“Some people dream of business, my dream
was media,” he said.
The connection between Nigeria and China
is built on trade. Arinze remembers
watching as more and more Chinese goods
flooded the marketplace near his home in
Nigeria’s Anambra State. At the time, visas to
China were relatively easy for Nigerians to
get. So Arinze decided to take his chances
and go to the source of all those goods,
where he hoped to make enough money to
start his own social networking website.
“That was the biggest risk in my life," he
remembered.
Arinze spent his first few years in
Guangzhou doing whatever odd job would
keep him there – teaching English, exporting
purses to Nigeria – all the while researching
and planning for the launch of his own
social network. He studied sites like
Facebook and Yahoo. They weren’t quite like
the site that he hoped to create. But then
one day he was searching the Internet and
he accidentally came across a new website:
The Huffington Post.
“I said, ‘Wow, this is the kind of thing I want
to create,’ ” he said.
Gbooza! launched in 2010. The name
Gbooza, like Yahoo ends with an
exclamation point. It’s a Nigerian expression
meaning surprise or astonishment.
“It can mean a bang, explosion, something
like that,” Arinze explained.
The site is part social network, part news
aggregator and all focused on the Nigerian
community in China.
“I cannot create a news website for
Americans,” Arinze said. “I am Nigerian so I
have to create something for my people.
And being in China here, I want to create
something that will benefit my people and
benefit China. We feature Chinese news and
we feature events of Nigerians in China too.
Gbooza is no Facebook yet. The site has
about 2,000 members and gets around
5,000 pageviews a day. But Arinze is still
dreaming big. His next plan: making
gbooza.com the number one social news
network in Africa.
No comments:
Post a Comment