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Maneta moves to Upville! Julio, Hilda and Teclar unfortunately have made their exit from the Big Brother StarGame house forever!

Tonight, Big Brother StarGame (BBA7) Downville house has lost four housemates, and now Liberia and Sierra Leone have been randomly selected for eviction next week!

The Nominations are in for Sierra Leone Duo: Zainab and Dalphin, and Liberian Duo: Yadel and Luke. Who will be leaving the house next? Make your prediction right here and cast your vote to keep your favorite in the Big Brother StarGame show!

After a week of endless gossip, Big Brother house was finally put  off tension as 4 housemates left Downville; 3 leaving for their homes and 1 went to the posh Upville house.

Zimbabwe’s Princess of Zamunda – ‘Teclar’ – was unable to use her ‘royal powers’ to save herself from getting evicted. From Tanzania, Julio and the cheerful Hilda were evicted to catch the first plane to TZ, after only a week in the Stargame, so sad!

As Downille housemates gathered in the lounge, Maneta and Teclar were the first to be told to leave the Big Brother House.

Maneta simply made a dramatic beeline for the Eviction doors, telling Julio not to touch her, as he reached for a hug. Maneta knew nothing that she was about to upgrade to posh Upville.

Teclar was evicted leaving her fellow Zimbabwean not sure of her fate. A few minutes later, Maneta was gratified to know that she had been promoted to Upville.

Maneta, welcome to your new home!

With the Tanzania Duo evicted this leave Big Brother Stargame house with 2 East African duos from Uganda and Kenya.

Every aspect of your environment stimulates your brain, for better or worse. The sights, sounds, textures, aromas, tastes, and other sensations that you experience daily serve as nourishment for your mind and spirit.

Providentially, one of the simplest and most amusing things you can do to improve your mind as you age is to create a beautiful, positive, brain-enhancing environment. You don’t need to first see a doctor to get your brain perfect in shape, become your own doctor starting from now.

Key facts to note;

Frequent learning and reading help to keep your memory up to date.

Exercise and diet are key for more brain power

Always create a free brain enhancing environment and start up healthy relationships

Sleep, Naps and Meditation: Always have time to sleep as this helps to repair your memory capacity

Here’s a four-Great ideas plan to get you started:

1. Make Good Sound and Light as part of your daily living

With no doubt, Noise has a detrimental effect on your mind and body, but always pleasant sounds affect you in a positive way. Make effort as much as possible to eliminate pollutant, unnecessary and unpleasant sound. Equip yourself with good music that always carries great meaning, this will help you think more and better whenever you listen to that music.

Don’t just dance to beats that don’t make you think or feel any different. This will help you keep your brain in shape.

Light has a very great effect on Human body and mind. Bad/mutant light can not only change your body colour but also affect the way you think. Don’t sit in an office working or house watching TV 7 days a week.

At the least, take atleast 30 minutes of your time daily and stay on the sunlight, or natural light. Natural sunlight is the healthiest source of light. It contains a rainbow of wavelengths that influence your hormone production, metabolism and biological clock.

Without enough sunlight, the immune system is weakened, and many people experience depression.

2. Reconnect with Nature

Because you were born from IHK, it doesn’t mean that forests, the trees and general environment were not created to be part of you. Take some time away from those tall buildings in town, the gassy and noisy cars. You can even walk in bush as long as it is not dangerous. Get refreshed with the natural air and the beautiful natural scent from green plants. Human brains get refreshed this way and keep in good working condition as you get of age.

3. Enliven your Mind with Fresh Air

Along with harmonious sound and natural light, fresh air is another essential element for the long-term health of your body and mind. We may not be able to determine that quality of outdoor air given the fact that a lot of pollution goes on every minute by different individuals, but we can have a hand on the indoor air.

You can consider indoor air purification by setting up air purification systems or planting healthy house plants to keep you fresh in your house.

Bad/contaminated air does not only affect your digestive system but also affects your mind and weakens your memory capacity.

4. Cultivate Healthy Relationships and Stay Sexy!

Keep socially interactive, with friends and all those people around you. Have some time to read some news on HiPipo.com, Chat with Friends on Facebook and Make video call on Skype, just for laughs.

Stress has never been good for your brain in the long run. Well as some people believe that they get to work better and achieve faster because of the influence of stress, these people end up losing so much mentally.

Start great relationships that make you smile deep from your heart. A Friend that never makes you happy is not a good one for your brain. Also mind the stories each of those friends are interested in. Don’t get your mind contaminated with failure and hate. Always have some love as this is a health way to keep you smiling and hence keep your brain in good working capacity as you get of age.

If you are socially interactive, then you will always keep younger and fresh in mind. “If you are socially engaged, you are at lower risk of dementia.” Said Valerie Crooks, D.S.W.

You need to have healthy romantic relationships. Live with people who touch you and make an impact on your body and mind. And if social interaction and touching are good for the aging brain, then sex must be golden! “Sex can extend your life.” Said Walter M. Bortz, M.D.

Till next time, keep at HiPipo 5Star for more great and inspirational expert advice.

Mother’s Day is a celebration that honors mothers and motherhood, maternal bonds, and the influence of mothers in society. It is celebrated on various days in many parts of the world, most commonly in March, April, or May. In Uganda, Mother’s day is celebrated in May.

You lived for months in her womb, knowing nothing that you would be become that great person you are today. You look so beautiful/handsome and very many people want to at least say hi too you thanks to the fact the she bore all the pain to have you.

Every one of us has a different kind of mother by character, appearance, understanding and love, so, your mother is your mom.

Your mother took time to raise you and she definitely played the biggest part in your making, you are now a star. What have you done to say thanks to that one of the kind lady?

Make Mother’s Day Count

There are plenty of ways to take care of your mom on this Mother’s Day, but there are a lot of the common suggestions, like buying flowers, don’t necessarily apply to all moms.  It’s up to you to think of how the make your mother’s day special and recognizable.

For instance, if your mom is an outdoorsy person who would love an all-day hike in beautiful weather, feel free to skip all the traditional advice and spend the whole day that way. Use your imagination. Take her to a pottery class, go for a concert, watch a mother’s movie away from home, visit the aviary, go to a musical you’d otherwise never be able to tolerate — any big gesture that shows you’re a considerate, attentive son/daughter who actually knows her interests. That said, here are some general rules that apply to pretty much all mothers for you to follow.

1) Make Something Personalized

What does your mom like most, shoes, clothes, jewelry, what could it be, you can spend very little cash but make so much sense to her. Think of something that is not commonly given out as a gift, you can move to a craft shop and make order for a branded bag, or pair of shoes.  Just be creative, think of something specially for her, you don’t need to explain its uniqueness, as she will see it with her eyes.

2) Cook Her A Meal

Whether you are male or female, staying with your mom or not, especially for this annual mothers’ day, take some time and prepare her a meal. Take away that pride and busy schedule you have, you can only do this when you still have your mother. So get to the kitchen, prepare the best meal you would wish for someone you love by heart. She will be so happy to receive that delicious meal. Remember you are doing this at no extra budget.

3) Plan Something For The Future

Ask your mom about where she would want to go and have fun. This must be asked on mother’s day. Whether she wants to go and watch the Ebonies, Bakayimbira, Afrigo Band, go to the museum, anything she may suggest. Don’t just suggest that you will go sometime, commit and make a clear date for that outing. She will be glad to accept; after all it’s her to suggest the place.

4) Treat Mom To Something Original

Most importantly, make sure you do something in your means. You might be very far by distance or far by the fact that you don’t really make up, but take the initiative to send her a message, call her and tell her something. Remember you a doing this for your mother, so you ought to be real and pure.

I am most sure this will work out for you this mothers’ day. Keep right on HiPipo 5Star for more amazing tips, expert analysis and social business and tech news.

In this day and age, data customers are searching for an enriched experience from the telecom providers. HiPipo.com as a leader in delivering Uganda content would love to see our visitors and fans have the best internet services in order to access all our services. The Uganda telecom operators such as Orange, Warid, Airtel, MTN and UTL are largely advertising enhanced data networks with some stating that they are offering 3.75G+. Essentially we would expect users of these services to have very fast data services, browsing & searching & reading email will happen in very few seconds, streaming of video would be to notch fast.

Despite the recent trends of the said improved networks, Quality of Service (QoS) that determines the degree of satisfaction of a user of the service is still said to derail Uganda operators.  Using a quarterly survey, HiPipo intends to measure the subjective satisfaction of you our visitor (you the telecom customer) from which we can base to recommend to our fans the better internet service to access HiPipo.com Services. We invite you to complete the survey below to express your satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the data service you are currently using.   This survey is for the second quarter of 2012, April to June

1.       Which Operator’s Data Service are you using?

2.       Are you using a Data Bundle e.g 500MB, 1GB, 10GB or are you using UNLIMITED Package?

3.       How fast is Browsing & searching (e,g Google, News websites, HiPipo.com)

4.       How fast is Reading/sending e-Mails (e.g Yahoo, Gmail)

5.       How fast is Downloading music/photos (e.g from Facebook, HiPipo.com)

6.       How fast is Downloading and/or Streaming videos (e.g YouTube, HiPipo.com)

7.       How fast is Uploading music & photos

8.       How fast is Playing online games

9.       How fast is Audio and Video Chat e.g Skype

10.   Do you consider the service you get is worth the price you pay?

11.   Which Operator do you consider to offer the best internet data services? 

Big Brother Africa StarGame is amazing as it has always been.

Recently, Uganda’s own Janette Nalutaaya confessed to the friends that she is actually a virgin!

Contrary to this, she evens looks more of Kyle’s girl friend. Does he look like that guy who can spare her for even a day? Janette confessed to Ola and Chris that she is still a virgin.

DKB and Goldie are thinking of how to make the big money.  DKB talked to Goldie about the enormous opportunity they have to make money from this show.

Downville men are complaining about the supplies in the House. They had a long discussion of what they should do to have better supplies.

Meanwhile, Junia plans to kiss Malonza again. While having a chat with Jesica she told her that she actually enjoyed last time moment, let’s wait and see what she will do.

Remember that Tanzania’s Julio and Hilda plus Zimbabwe’s Teclar and Maneta were nominated and either of the pairs might be evicted soon.

Keep right here for more updates.

Two of the world’s top universities Harvard and MIT announced collaboration with each contributing $30 million into a nonprofit partnership edX, which they hope will make the top-notch faculties and courses of their schools available for free to millions of people around the world — free for anyone with an Internet connection.

This is very good news for all people around the world that have an interest in quality education. Education at the world top universities in the UK (Oxford, Cambridge, LSE) or in the US can cost someone over 50,000 USD for a single year.  This amount is not affordable for many people from the developing world. The cost aside, the traditional education model has limits on the number of people that can enroll for a program or course. Embracing online distance learning comes with an advantage that more interested people will have a chance to tap into the knowledge base of the world’s top elite universities.

Even as the online students will be able to attain certificates of mastery but not traditional degrees, it is worth investment of one’s time and we hope Ugandans and all Africans with interest to grow their knowledge and/or dreams to reach Harvard or MIT will tap into this new opportunity. 

According to comScore January 2012, report Microsoft’s Bing’s share of the U.S. search was 15.2%, while Google’s share was 66.2%. Globally, Microsoft’s search market share was much lower at just 4.4% in 2011. 

Since time, when Bing was launched we at HiPipo found little love for Bing since it hardly had relevant results for HiPipo content. Its crawlers were always behind Google and seemed not to pick most of the recent content from our African/Ugandan Market. This appears to have significantly improved as of our last search.  A current may 2012, search of the term “HiPipo” on Bing shows about 32,300 RESULTS. Even as this figure is lower than Google’s over 128.000 results for the search of the same term, it is a significant improvement. Also the Bing search interface has become much cleaner and presenting sitelinks in a clear way.  Is Bing simply getting better on its own innovation or is it simply copying Google? Could be both! 

In 2004 during my first degree in computer science, at Makerere University, I happen to have offered a course on e-commerce during which my lecturer offered a wealth of knowledge about this subject. Many undergraduate and graduate students in computing over the last decade have had similar training but e-commerce realization has long been a mystery for Uganda and other African economies. This has largely been due to infrastructure challenges (Internet was still seen as luxury by some back then) and majorly poor banking penetration among other factors.

First track to 2012, many banks are offering VISA debit cards with ability to conduct online payments whereas some few banks are even offering credit cards.  Even as this is good progress, the rise of mobile money is phenomenal and the rising penetration of mobile internet and smartphones is a big catalyst. The talk about e-commerce now will hence be largely focused on mCommerce.

Electronic commerce (Ecommerce) refers to the buying and selling of products or services over electronic systems such as the Internet and other computer networks. Mobile Commerce (Mcommerce) is any transaction, involving the transfer of ownership or rights to use goods and services, which is initiated and/or completed by using mobile access to computer-mediated networks with the help of an electronic device.

In Uganda, it is estimated that 5 million people are using the internet as of 2012 whereas over 15 million have access to mobile phones of which an increasing number is embracing mobile money.  Payment intermediary services such as Yo Payments from Uganda(https://payments.yo.co.ug/), JPesa(jpesa.com) PesaPal from Kenya come with  API which enables integration with websites(mobile web/apps).  These developments mean that there is a growing big market and the broken e-commerce payments system is being fixed.  The next natural process should be for businesses to realize the opportunity there is and to get started on embracing e-commerce and more particularly mCommerce.

Businesses in Uganda now need to rethink their distribution models and figure out how they integrate e-commerce/mCommerce in their sales and distribution models.   This will require businesses to set up websites with keen consideration for mobile web and apps.  The good news is that the cost of websites has gone down. Though this does not mean that good e-commerce websites come on the cheap, they are much more affordable compared to how it was several years back. There is still shortage of skills in the mobile space hence it may still be a little expensive to develop mobile applications but the opportunity that comes with tapping into this market will offset what may seemingly be  a big cost to join the e-commerce/mCommerce scope.  

As we hope to see more Ugandan and African business embrace mCommerce, for consultation in this space and for services to get your business online, HiPipo Digital Agency arm will be glad to work with you to push your business to the next level online.  Contact US Today.

BBA Stargame opens up on Sunday May 6th 2012 with a USD 300 000 winner prize on the table and a new format that sees contestants doubling up to play, in addition to introduction of celebrity housemates. The opening ceremony will be broadcast live online and will feature among others J. Cole.

The celebrity housemate revealed are

•Stylish entertainer, stand-up comedian and television pro DKB from Ghana (26 yrs)

•Tough, talented rap icon Prezzo from Kenya (32 yrs)

•Award-winning songstress Lady May from Namibia (25 yrs)
 
•Boldly dramatic pop music sensation Goldie from Nigeria (28 yrs)

•Famed socialite, model and businesswoman Barbz from South Africa (34 yrs)

•Unforgettable, highly successful R&B diva Mampi from Zambia (25 yrs)

•Unique and hugely popular, soulful musician Roki from Zimbabwe (27 yrs)
 

Flavia Tumusiime, Channel O VJ and Capital FM DJ is set to be the  first Ugandan and  East African to co-host   BIGBROTHER AFRICA Opening Ceremony.  It is expected that Flavia will be co-host with IK this Sunday, May 6, 2012 as the Stargame opens!

Big Brother Africa StarGame will see pairs of entrants in addition to the 7 celebrity housemates that BBA announced earlier this week.  The cash prize for this season is 300,000 USD. 

We cannot wait for the 91 days of BBA to start.