Microsoft has launched the Nigerian portal of MSN in Lagos, expanding into the West African country to deliver local news for Nigerians at home and abroad.
Awawu Olumide-Sojinrin, Microsoft Nigeria country manager, said with the new portal the MSN home page will feature Nigerian content especially news, politics, entertainment and weather.
He added that MSN Nigeria will also be linked to other Microsoft products and services including Skype, Outlook and Bing.
The MSN Nigeria portal is a partnership involving Microsoft and Kagiso Media.
Ad Dynamo will deliver contextual advertising on Windows Live Hotmail and Windows Messenger, which currently have around 800,000 and 820,000 users respectively in Nigeria.
Dele Akinsade, director and developer platform evangelist for West, East and Central Africa at Microsoft, said the portal has been syndicated to display contents from the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN).
“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 and gadgets, motoring),” Akinsade said.
Marcus Stephens, general manager for publishing at Kagiso Media, said his company is partnering with Microsoft to achieve its goal of community development via local contents as achieved in South Africa.
“There is a growing hunger for localised content across Africa as undersea cables, mobile broadband and falling Internet access costs bring more people online,” Stephens said.
“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.”
