Cyril Ramaphosa’s stimulus package gets social media talking

Duncan Mcleod of Fm Tech pointed me to this funny interview between Guy Kawasaki and Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft. It's worth a watch, especially when Ballmer gets on his hands and knees during the interview, searching for the DVD drive on the Mac Book air. Ballmer also fields some tough questions about Vista. var vglnk={key:"cc324b6567a9637aa0ff15bc9564b2a5"};!function(e,a){var t=e.createElement(a);t.type="text/javascript",t.async=!0,t.src="//cdn.viglink.com/api/vglnk.js";var n=e.getElementsByTagName(a);n.parentNode.insertBefore(t,n)}(document,"script");

Congratulations to the SA Blog Award organisers for pulling in some big judges on the local awards this year. Getting in Marshall Kirkpatrick from Read Write Web as a judge is certainly a coup. Read Write Web is a world-famous blog that focuses on social media, web 2.0, and web technology news and analysis. The local judges which include Cape Talk host John Maythem aren't too bad either. The awards came in for some stick last year as there was a conflict of interest between some judges who were nominees too, but thankfully this seems to have been addressed this...

I had breakfast with internet guru Arthur Goldstuck this morning and, together with Avusa's Colin Daniels, we got into a fascinating debate about the future of the mobile web and internet. Eventually calls will be over the internet as opposed to the traditional cellular networks, and perhaps we may even see the end of the SMS, to be replaced with IM. Coupled with this, you could expect mobile call costs to plummet. You can also expect that mobile internet useage will far exceed that of desktop computers. This is happening in Japan already where their present is the rest...

A newly formed website umbrella body, Website Association of South Africa (WASA), has launched a brand-new web metrics and rankings system for the country. So far it consists of 97 sites and about 20 publishers. At first glance, WASA's stats appear to be overwhelmingly taken from the Online Publishers Association (OPA) Nielsen//Netratings rankings and a few other sites in the country, namely MyAdsl and Bidorbuy, who are using Google Analytics. Google analytics seems to be the benchmark currency for the new system. The main analytics system up till now has been that of the OPA, which is a non-profit...

Google this morning held their first ever local press briefing, from their new headquarters at Dimension Data's Campus. They brought out a heavy-hitter from Mountain View, Vice President of Engineering Douglas Merrill, to talk about the Google mission here and on the continent. Both Merrill and country head Stafford Maisie spoke passionately about the role of mobile and search and what it means for this country. It's not the first Google event we have had here. There was one last year, at the same venue which was a networking session aimed perhaps at more of a tech crowd. This one...

IBM Chairman Thomas Watson famously predicted in 1943: "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." In the same decade the magazine Popular Mechanics also weighed in, predicting that "Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons." Even Microsoft founder Bill Gates predicted in 1981 that for computer memory,"640K ought to be enough for anybody." Computers now come standard with more than 3000 times that. And even that’s not enough. Such is the pace of the digital revolution that looking into the future is a daunting task. But daunting as it may...

Redesigning the M&G Online, the country's oldest news website. Pics below of the first meeting with myself, Vincent Maher (Strategist), Riaan Wolmarans (Editor) and Matthew Burbidge (news editor). Absent at this particular meeting is Bryan Khumalo (Online Sales Manager). We're essentially rebuilding the site and bringing the dev inhouse (previously outsourced) and we're also changing over from .NET to PHP. We've decided to host the site at Internet Solutions. After quite a bit of research we've also decided that we are building our own CMS from scratch. We didn't feel that the open source options we investigated such as Drupal,...

Vodacom, best known as a cellphone service provider, is set to become one of the country’s most influential media players, trumping many big, traditional media players. The numbers are certainly impressive. Some would say Vodacom is already an influential media player, with a claimed monthly audience of 1,4-million unique users and 16-million page impressions that consume its content on the small screen. These numbers put the company in the same league as some of the country’s biggest, established newspapers and radio stations. It’s also not particularly bad going for a company where media is still a very small part of its...

Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun provides a glimpse of mobile media in the future.... Japanese media are the undisputed world leaders in mobile media. When many places on the planet weren’t even using their cellphones for SMS, the Japanese had mastered delivering content on the mobile platform, and making a solid business from it. Japan’s Asahi Shimbun is a big media player in world terms. The newspaper has a massive circulation of around 12-million (8-million for morning edition, 4-million for evening edition). Despite these outrageous figures, Asahi is only the second biggest newspaper in Japan. I’d just hate to see how big...

Now this is the true iPhone killer we have all been waiting for. Sorry for all you guys that spent your $$$ buying the iPhone. This is the baby you: var vglnk={key:"cc324b6567a9637aa0ff15bc9564b2a5"};!function(e,a){var t=e.createElement(a);t.type="text/javascript",t.async=!0,t.src="//cdn.viglink.com/api/vglnk.js";var n=e.getElementsByTagName(a);n.parentNode.insertBefore(t,n)}(document,"script");

It's been a cool year for the Web in South Africa. Year of the blog? We saw the arrival of two blog aggregators Afrigator and amatomu.com, and there was talk of a third. The former was recognised by CNN as a major web startup outside the US and also received mentions on the famous Read/Write Web. Amatomu got covered locally in FinWeek, Maverick, Intelligence and Financial Mail. Arthur Goldstuck did an anecdotal study that gave us the first rough picture of the local blogosphere. His study showed it was smaller than many of us thought. We also saw the truly brilliant Bolton...

Web entrepreneur Vinny Lingham will be my local web 2.0 story to watch for 2008. Despite his early critics, Vinny has put his money where his mouth is and secured some useful venture capital for his new baby, Synthasite. Earlier this year, Synthasite raised US$5-million in investment from a Richemont subsidiary, Swiss-based Columbus Venture Capital. It's not a huge amount by world standards, but certainly useful and easily enough to take the project, a typically inexpensive web 2.0 creation, to the next level. When I first blogged about Synthasite a while back, I hadn't used it much and admittedly was...

Spotted this interesting Google video on Stafford Masie's blog (the new local Google head). It's a relaxed, informal talk at TED on Google's philosophies around running their business and their various labs projects, with some mention of Orkut, Google News and other projects. (South Africa also gets a mention in it). It's worth a watch... var vglnk={key:"cc324b6567a9637aa0ff15bc9564b2a5"};!function(e,a){var t=e.createElement(a);t.type="text/javascript",t.async=!0,t.src="//cdn.viglink.com/api/vglnk.js";var n=e.getElementsByTagName(a);n.parentNode.insertBefore(t,n)}(document,"script");

From Wired: In the 10 years since the first site known as a "weblog" went online, the blog has matured from a geek niche to the internet's dominant publishing paradigm. Blogs have come a long way since Dec. 17, 1997, when Jorn Barger coined the term "weblog" to describe the list of links on his Robot Wisdom website that "logged" his internet wanderings. In the decade hence, blogs have come to dominate the net, from 100 million personal diaries to the breaking news sections of the august The New York Times.... read onvar vglnk={key:"cc324b6567a9637aa0ff15bc9564b2a5"};!function(e,a){var t=e.createElement(a);t.type="text/javascript",t.async=!0,t.src="//cdn.viglink.com/api/vglnk.js";var n=e.getElementsByTagName(a);n.parentNode.insertBefore(t,n)}(document,"script");

Of all the news reports I've read on the African National Congress (ANC) Polokwane conference so far, the live coverage from our blogger Ndumiso Ngcobo, who is at the event, has honestly been the most interesting. The ANC conference is a major event for South Africa, set to determine the next leader of the country's ruling party and perhaps the political future of the country. Ndumiso was a natural choice to be our blogger at the conference. His brilliant writing on our Thought Leader platform has had us in stitches constantly for the past three months. We were keen to...