Nigeria's leading bank, First Bank in partnership with 3AL Limited, have moved to revolutionize the way consumers and merchants facilitate payment for goods and services via social and new media.

Lagos State Government has signed a pact with technology giant Microsoft on information and communication technologies in its bid to drive service delivery to the state.

Medessy Enterprises Limited, owner of www.gidimall.com, has raised the bar in customer service delivery with the introduction of the Nigeria’s first Facebook store.

Nigeria is gradually gaining fame as an innovator of online businesses and tech start-ups, according to reports.

StartupRanking.com, a global web ranking service that ranks every startup in the world recently listed the leading 100 online startups in Nigeria.

An assessment of Nigeria's software industry landscape shows that dual points of innovation process and companies - not codes - are the core aspects to focus in order to tap into the potentials.

This was according to Omobola Johnson, minister of Communication Technology at the ISPON 2013 National Software Conference and Competition which held recently in Calabar, Cross River State.

Johnson regretted the billions of Naira that leave the shores of country on yearly basis as licenses and other fees to foreign software companies.

She said, "This doesn’t have to be. Software strategies for us as a country must be not only about improving productivity because it also provides an avenue for transforming the economy, creating jobs and creating wealth.

"So we need to tackle the broader challenge of how we take our promising software developers and software engineers and help them to become entrepreneurs that can take advantage of this opportunity."

The minister maintained that with a well-documented failure rate of 90 percent in the software entrepreneurship space, stakeholders must scale up the innovation process.

"Silicon Valley and Israel (a country that has earned the appellation of ‘startup nation’) have literally thousands of companies in the ideation or start up stage at any point in time, the outcome of which is tens of companies that are either acquired by the bigger players or go on to become big players themselves," according to the minister.

She however noted that the ministry was opened to ideas as to what solutions should be tackled next, even as it believes that software solutions that come out of our [Nigeria] industry should be designed to meet particular needs, commercial, social as well as being exportable to other countries.

Nigeria’s online mall, Konga.com has unveiled in Lagos what is believed to be one of Africa’s biggest and technologically sophisticated e-commerce warehouses.

The Beni American University - an Online University founded by the 24-year old Gossy Ukanwoke is one Startup that needs mentioning. Ideas like the iPolice, iConnect, BudgIT, Enough is Enough Nigeria, social media platforms and bloggers are many of such driving social changes in Nigeria and have received global recognitions. The Maliyo games, Kuluya games, Danfo Driver games are all driving Nigerian content into relevance.

The effort of the duo- Bosun Tijani and Femi Longe, Founders of Co-creation Hub (CcHub) is worthy of mentioning. The CcHub which is at the centre of tech innovation amongst young people in Nigeria is Nigeria’s first open living lab and pre-incubation space designed to be a multi-functional, multi-purpose space where work to catalyze creative social tech ventures take place. It is a place for technologists, social entrepreneurs, government, tech companies, impact investors and hackers in and around Lagos to co-create new solutions to the many social problems in Nigeria. The organizers of Mobile Monday are doing their bit too.

The Women in Technology in Nigeria organization is at the heart of grooming and mentoring Young Girls in becoming Techpreneurs. Recently, they organized a Mobile Application Development Competition for young girls in secondary schools in Nigeria where I saw many mobile apps developed by these young girls. One of such apps is a Traffic Monitoring App developed by the Princeton Girls for ICT; their project was showcased in the US at the Technnovation competition in May 2013. Software Nigeria Challenge for Higher Education Community in Nigeria powered by the Institute of Software Practitioners of Nigeria (ISPON) has seen many Applications being developed by young people.

It is also important to mention the role of tech bloggers like Loy Okezie of Techloy, the Otekbits team, TechTrends Nigeria, the Nigeria ICT journalists and other bloggers who are constantly following these developments and bringing them to lime light.

Seeing the great potentials in these young Nigerians, several Multi -national Companies like Qualcomm, Google, Microsoft, Nokia, Blackberry, and Tecno are harnessing the potentials of these young app developers in building their platform and also supporting the growth of the ecosystem.

And then the critical question is – what is our Government doing to facilitate the growth of Youth Tech Entrepreneurship in Nigeria? Over the years our Government has not played their role in creating the enabling environment for these young Tech entrepreneurs to thrive; but right now it seems government is beginning to appreciate the importance as seen by the recent effort of the newly created Ministry of Communications Technology focused at driving technology innovation in Nigeria. The ministry has set up Software Venture Fund, commissioned two software incubation centers in Lagos and Calabar, inaugurated a Technology Innovation Committee, these are all steps in the right direction which are commendable but a whole lot needs to be done by government to support technology entrepreneurs in Nigeria. One of the major tasks of our government is to help structure, facilitate and promote the growth of the ecosystem in Nigeria where Venture capitals, Accelerators, Incubators, Angel investors, the Private Public Partners, Multinational Companies (MNCs) can invest in these young Nigerian techpreneurs’ businesses.

The National Identity Management Commission (NIMC) should ensure that all eligible Nigerians are registered on the National Identity Database by December 31st, 2014, according to Nigeria’s President, Goodluck Jonathan.