According to a report on Reuters last year, world wide mobile phone subscriptions reached 3.3-billion users or half the world’s population. Compare this to television usage (about 1,5-billion users) or desktop internet usage (about 1,1-billion users), and it is not hard to see why there is so much excitement about the potential of the mobile web. In Japan more than 70% of internet access is via mobile phones as opposed to desktop internet...
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...
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...
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");
The new Google country head Stafford Masie held an informal get together and networking session for about 60 or so local internet players on Monday afternoon. He said the briefing was off the record, but later made exceptions for bloggers. It was a good session -- the first ever held by the new Google South Africa. It was a marathon of presentations from Googlers Frederick Leuschner, Carmel Doherty, and Ryan Kitching (a South...
South Africa has a new Google boss. Stafford Masie, the former head of Novell South Africa and a relative unknown outside IT circles, has been appointed the new South Africa Google head, reports ITWeb and Mail & Guardian Online. It's taken them a while to find the person. The job has been advertised for over two years via the Google website. I know quite a few people -- mainly in the online media sector...
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