By Sumaila Ogbaje

An Abuja-based telecommunications firm, Lets Talk I.T and Telecommunications Company, says it is working on launching Nigeria’s first instant messaging application, ‘Lets Talk’ before the end of the third quarter of 2022.

The Chief Operating Officer of the company, Ms Folashade Ayeni made this known while speaking with newsmen on Sunday in Abuja.

Ayeni said the application was designed by a team of Nigerian software engineers in line with the vision of the National Information Technology Development Agency ( NITDA) for indigenous companies to come into the social media space.

She said: “Lets Talk was created out of a need that Nigerians and Africans have.

” If you look at it, sometime last year in October, October 4 To be precise, WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram crashed. No one was able to use those applications because of one thing or the other.

“Many people lost money, several people were not able to reach families, friends, relatives and do business normally, because a whole lot of people have taken business and relationship to the social media.

“It crashed for about six hours or so and the reality dawned on us that really, whether it was intentional or not on purpose that we could lose everything.

” So we thought about owning our social media platform where people can have guaranteed communications and security and privacy is also guaranteed which is Nigerian owned and indigenous for us in Africa.”

Ayeni said the company was aiming to collaborate with NITDA, the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) and other relevant agencies to ensure the success of the application and acceptability by Nigerians.

On the unique features of the app, she said it is end-to-encrypted, allows users to listen and share music, video and audio call, 5,000 member group chat, seven person conference calls and file exchange up to 2GB.

According to her, it also allows for device and cloud caching as well as sharing moments and trends which will give users very pleasant experiences.

She said the application could be downloaded on Google Play and App Store for both android and Apple phones.

Ayeni also explained that the application would be in two parts, Lets Talk Basic which would be a free social media platform while there would be a secondary phase that would be on subscription basis.

“Now, there will be Lets Talk social which is the basic one that everybody knows.
You chat, you speak to people, you do video calls do video conference for free, but there’s a secondary part of it.

“And the secondary part of it is to provide enterprise resource management. So there are people who want to subscribe to that package.

“We are talking about ministries, parastatal agencies, businesses, banks and other sectors that can utilise the platform to improve their businesses and services and that is where value comes in,” she said. (NAN)