Africa

Why a streaming TV service should be Google’s next African play

Inspired by the recent successful launch of the Television White Spaces pilot in South Africa, I am once again tempted to engage in providing…

Mxit launches latest J2ME app, includes improved images, profile building

African mobile social networking giant Mxit has launched the latest version of it J2ME app, which it says draws heavily, when it comes to…

Samsung to roll out mobile health centres across Africa

Samsung recently launched its solar powered health centre model in Cape Town, marking the start of what it says will be a large-scale medical…

From Ushahidi to Al Jazeera: the role of mobile in Kenya’s elections

The people of Kenya will today start voting in a presidential election. Things have been tense in the lead up to polling day and…

Another Naspers company bites the dust: Mocality calling it quits

Kenyan small business directory Mocality is calling it quits after four years of operation, saying “all good things must come to an end”. The…

Cloud to be worth $462.3-million in Middle East & North Africa this year

Yes we know there was a time when a cloud was something that floated through the sky and tablets were something you swallowed when…

Gartner: expect the $50 smartphone to hit emerging markets this year

A few years ago, there was a lot of hype in emerging markets technology was around the US$100 laptop. Getting laptops down to that…

SA aggregator cracks CNN mention

This is killer. CNN.com mentioned Afrigator as a hot web 2.0 startup. Afrigator is the Africa-focused blog aggregator by Justin Hartman and Mike Stopforth….

Demise of the newspaper greatly exaggerated

At the World Association of Newspaper’s conference in Cape Town, Anton Harber on journalism.co.za writes that it is “Not all doom and gloom from…

Digital media, freedom of the press & the youth

Harnessing the power of digital media — “There have been developments in the citizen media forum, which are posing real competition to traditional media”….

'Newspapers are partners not enemies'

Trevor Ncube, President of the Newspaper Association of South Africa and CEO of Mail & Guardian in South Africa, delivered an impassioned and brilliant…

De Lille answers bloggers, clarifies position

Good on Patricia De Lille and the ID. This is democracy in action. De Lille most likely noticed comments on the blogosphere and reports…

Upwardly mobile: Content on cellphones is the killer app

Since the ugly days of wap, phones have got a lot smarter and more efficient at accessing the web. Cellphone screens are getting bigger…

'Beware the power of social media'

This popped into my inbox this afternoon. I know Jovan Regasek well and have big respect for the man, ITWeb and the other publications…

24.com & Yahoo!

I wandered over to Yahoo! for the first time in a long time and was struck by the similarity of the site with our…

Moneyweb relaunch

One of my favourite websites, Moneyweb, has relaunched, featuring a wide-format design. Their site used to be run by iafrica.com, who lost the contract…

SA's online newspapers set to grow

Francois Nel from the For the Media blog pointed me towards his blog recently (pretty good, I must say). This post in particular caught…

Website consumption patterns are changing. Remember when the main way to surf a website was via its homepage? Well, that was the old days. The rise of super-fast, super-efficient search engines mean that users are increasingly accessing websites via deep links that bypass their homepages directly to a website’s articles. It’s essentially a backdoor into your website. Search engines aren’t the only ones to blame. Bloggers generally link directly to the articles they are writing about, ignoring homepages. RSS feeds, which allow users to subscribe directly to article feeds, are also responsible for the decline of the homepage. So what does this mean? Paradoxically it is both a problem and an opportunity for publishers.

Why can’t we all just get along?

The media world is undergoing profound change. We know the great catalyst for these changes has been the onward march of the digital age and the arrival of the internet.

This changing mediascape is often incorrectly portrayed as a battlefield, with two main skirmishes on the go. In the first “battle”, the soldiers have grown weary or just rather bored. This battle involves traditional media (newspapers, radio, TV) versus online media. The second “battle” is a much more interesting to look at. This skirmish involves mainstream media (which in this instance includes online publishers as they mostly practise traditional journalism) versus citizen media, which includes bloggers, vloggers and podcasters….

Battle of the business sites

Websites that report on financial news and information were always going to crack it online. The web is the perfect medium for delivering up-to-the-minute financial news and data. Moreover, the LSM of the average business news reader matches that of the online reader: Both are high. The five biggest consumer-focused business sites, reporting on general financial news in South Africa, are engaged in a tussle to capture a bigger share of this lucrative reader and advertising market….

Jacaranda FM’s Good Morning Angels assists with R150,000 donation

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