2008 is coming to an end...

As this is my first year of blogging I'm still getting use to all the norms and from the blogs I follow I see quite a few people summarising their year and making predictions for the next year. I don't think I'm going to quite do that but will outline a couple of things.

First of all something I just read on TechCrunch is the logo that MobileAge is using for their iPhone icon, take a look and see if you can see what it really is:
Pretty funny stuff, wonder if the designer could see it or just had a case of looking at it too long he couldn't actually see it.

Interesting video below on a new book 'The toilet paper entrepreneur', I might place an order soon.






Otherwise have a good Christmas and New Years, I'm off for a couple of days - can't wait. But in the mean time there are plenty of things to look forward to in 2009.

1) Launch of Allthingsmobile - my new site
2) My mate finishing the Cairo to Cape Town cycle race for charity - go donate now
3) The new SEACOM underwater cable coming online in June which will hopefully decrease prices
4) Telkom coming into the wireless broadband scene and possibly as a new mobile operator
5) The 2009 elections in SA

The best commercial ever

Warning there is some nudity in this advert (topless ladies)...

Recently posted on TechCrunch.com a Danish advert advertising a washing machine directed viewers to their 'actual' advert which was posted on the internet as clearly is wouldn't have been allowed on TV.

Watch it here:

Link:

Sex always sells and its one way of insuring your advert spreading itself virally across the internet. Whether you would want your company associated with this type of advertising is up to you though... I think I would like a great viral campaign but I would have kept the bikini tops on.

Google Friend Connect vs Facebook's Connect

Wow, talk about timing - both were released yesterday almost at the same time even. For once I think Google was out done a bit as Facebook was a bit more organised having allowed some big websites to implement and test the features way before its release so that on the day sites like TechCrunch had already implemented Facebook Connect.

I've been playing around with a both and here is a quick early summary:

Google Friend Connect is very very easy to implement and adds nice structure to quickly have a login system that works pretty well and allow users to write on a wall or make reviews but it stops about there. For it to be so simple its gone and created widgets to just implement and so for me even though it only took me 30min to implement it is not enough...

Facebook Connect now here is something powerful... just go look at TechCrunch and see how nicely it works! The 2 things that make this the better option for me are:
1) the posting to your Facebook wall of your activities outside of Facebook
2) the ability to see what your friends have done on the website when browsing it, makes it a lot more trustworthy when you see your friends have been using it.

I will be following this up some more after I've used both a bit more.

Is Facebook a phishing scam site?

This morning when logging into Facebook via Google Chrome I received a warning notice indicating that the social network site maybe a phishing site.



I was a bit sceptical at first and tried to login again but received the message again, I then clicked 'proceed' and was logged in. I get no error message when I use Firefox but according to an article on Techcrunch the problem also occurs in Firefox. The domain name that is causing the problem is 'http://fbcdn.net' which is registered by Facebook.

Have been a few reports of it happening in Safari also, seems like it may be something to do with the roll out of Facebook connect.


Twitter is a buzz with this

Viruses now on Google Mail

Wow, they certainly are keeping me on the run. I first encountered viruses coming via MSN Chat earlier in the year and because of that I had a lovely little spam bot on my pc sending out thousands of mails all the time (sometimes a gig in a day). Eventually I got rid of that and left MSN mail and chat alone and moved over to Google cause there would never be any chance of viruses there...

Then along comes Facebook and Facebook Chat and Facebook messages and millions of users so the little people who make viruses focus their attention their and presto - viruses on facebook in the forms of messages sent to your entire friends list and posts on your friends walls with links etc... I still use Facebook how ever.

Now to my horror people have cracked GMAIL and are sending spam/viruses to all your contacts - I got a mail from a good mate of mine the other day and this was the subject line
'Dear Sir/Lady: Sorry to disturb you. We are a wholesale company in China. We mainly sell...'

Obviously I knew my mate hadn't moved to China suddenly and started a wholesale company so I ignored it. Sure enough later that day another one came...

Seems that no-one is safe once the hacker community turns their eyes onto you.

The future of mobile internet

The advantages of mobile internet and how its the next big thing for websites to target has been talked up for years. One of the main reasons for talking it up is the sheer numbers of people with cellphone handsets as opposed to people who just use the internet. Everyone said it was just a matter of time...

In South Africa it is said that there are some 5million internet users and that our cellphone user base is around 30million. I agree with all the figures here but I am still some what skeptical about the use of cellphones and people browsing the internet.

Matthew Buckland recently blogged about it, read here, and there were quite a few post comments regarding his article. I would like to mention 2 of them:

The first about Soccer Laduma's new mobile website and how it already has twice as many people using it than its website.

The second is a post by 'biobot' that purely stated that web surfing sucks in pure user-experience except for on an iPhone.

In terms of user-experience and mobile websites for now that doesn't quite go, unless a reader out there knows of some websites done really well (let me know). For now its going to be more text-based and very basic sites that will be easy to use and quick to load.

I know that I've often been in the shops and wanted direct access to my website, but I have not yet set up a mobile site for it yet (on my to do list)... So I think the benefits and advantages of mobile websites definitely outweigh the cons.

Windows 3.1 comes to an end...

Wow, what an end of an era - on the 1st November 2008 Microsoft officially stopped issuing licenses for the software that made its debut in 1990.

I remember first using it in the early '90s and I like the graphical interface but still preferred MS DOS as I felt I had more control over the system I think people using PC's for the first time would have preffered the graphical user interface just because of the ease of use compared to using MS DOS.

I actually (bit embarrassing) used to think that they were competing companies... MS DOS vs MS Windows, it took me a while to realise they were the same company. Bare in mind I was only about 10 or 11 at the time.

Microsoft maintained support for Windows 3.x until the end of 2001 and since then it has lived on as en embedded operating system used mostly on some of the Virgin Atlantic and Quantas long haul flights to power the in-flight entertainment systems. I wonder why they used that to power their systems? Will have to look into it.

The Old specs on Windows 3.1 was the following

8086/8088 processor or better

with a clock speed of up to 10MHz

at least 640kb of RAM and 7 megabytes of hard drive space

and a graphics card that supported CGA, EGA and VGA

My first computer was defintely had a CGA graphics card and was something along the lines of a 8086... wow, my little cellphone kicks that computers but!

Yahoo shares sore...

Jerry Yang has or is stepping down as CEO of Yahoo! and today the shares of Yahoo! rose by 11.19% to a whopping $11.82...

My how the shareholders must still dream about Microsoft offering them £33 per share... I wonder if their was some conspiracy between Google and Microsoft to wipe Yahoo out a bit as they have both dropped Yahoo in the last couple of months.

Cairo to Cape Town on a bicycle!

From January 2009 to May 2009 a good mate of mine, Tim Gane and his pal will by cycling from Cairo to Cape Town. They will be covering a distance of 12,000 km's and averaging 120km's per day, each of them has put in lots of money to cover their own personal costs as its an expensive event to enter and organise. Click here to view their website and donate.

So, what are they looking for? Just R180,000 to help out a school in the Eastern Cape and build 2 more classrooms for the kids who really need it. Now, this is only (in today's rates) £11,486.91 or $17,928.86.

Which really isn't that much - for those of you who are from the UK/USA, you can definitely contribute a healthy contribution.

My pal, Tim and his mate only need to get 1800 people to contribute R100 (£6.38) - to the people in the UK/USA I think you could def contribute a lot more than that and I'd like to hear from you if you do.

Its time we stop living in our own small secluded worlds and open our eyes to see how the greater majority of the world really lives, we need to stop been selfish and just give a little back. A little is a good way to start!

I'm going to be helping out in terms of marketing, helping them manage their site, financially and hopefully even cycle one of the stages. Click here to go to their official website and donate!

Crunch Time: Obama vs McCain

So in my last blog I spoke about the world wide support for Obama and that I would most probably vote for Obama.

My blog posts get posted on Facebook and one of my friends in the USA commented on my post disagreeing with me, I asked him why and the 2 main reasons he came up with were:

1) Experience (age and time in office)
2) Lack of understanding as to what is required to steady the American ship

Now from my side and the rest of the world we just read bits and pieces that gets put on the web, from all the news I've been reading I initially wanted Hilary Clinton to win and since Obama won I've been generally 'supporting' his nomination.

BUT is this what the world needs, is this the right decision based on what we read from the news... The reason I bring this up is because if this is my opinion from here all the way in South Africa what are the people's opinions like in the USA/rest of the world and how easily is it swayed?

For me, I just want the republicans out of the Bush mess but who is better - McCain or Obama? I guess we'll see in a couple of hours.

But I can definitely see its quite a heated matter as I just made a few comments on Facebook and got quite a few replies quickly from my American friends.

If the world could vote (US Elections)

A friend of mine just sent me this website link, check it out. Basically what it is allowing people to do around the world is vote in the US elections and its limited to one vote per computer - the results are interesting.

So far nearly 500,000 people have voted and there is a definite winner. Check it out and lets hope the same results come out of the US in a couple of days.

I heard that Obama released an iPhone Application that will let you know which of your contacts are in 'swing' states and urges you to call them to make sure they vote.

I wonder if anyone here in South Africa will be this creative in their marketing, not that we have 'swing' states... but still, time they get aboard.

The petrol farce...

I read this morning that the price of petrol is going to drop by 35cents a litre, whoopi!

Reason for the decline is the drastic decline in the price per barrel of oil currently around $60 which is the lowest its been since Feb 2007, but we aren't getting the full decrease in the price due to the drop in the value of the Rand.

But, looking back at previous prices in March 2007 the price of petrol at the coast was R6.43/lt (data from this page) The Rand/US Dollar exchange rate was only at R7.38 to the dollar and the price of crude oil was $65 per barrel.

So why does our price only decrease to just under R9.00 a litre, you could talk about inflation and the cost of delivery etc but in just 18months inflation has caused the price to increase by R3 a litre?

The current rand / US Dollar exchange rate is at R11 to the dollar which in some way does explain the small decline but how things have changed in just a couple of months considering the crude oil price went from $65 to $150 and then back down to $60 - somewhere someone is making a ton of money buying and selling the oil...

The world we live in...

The other day while I was driving back from a meeting out towards Bellville I drove passed a chap hitch-hiking and I almost stopped to give him a lift.

The reason - cause it sucks when you are hitch-hiking and people just drive right by you without even noticing you. How do i know this? Cause when I did a ski season in Colorado, USA, I sometimes had to hitch a ride. Now there my ex-girlfriend and I had to catch the work bus at around 6:30am to get to the resort to start work and in Colorado in winter it is freakin freezing!

It would easily by -10degrees and sometimes even -20degrees and when you miss the bus you have to try hitch a ride in, and trust me the wind just goes straight through you and its cold. There it would only take longest 10minutes to get a ride, normally.

So, back to my story now. I had driven past this chap and was on my way home and was coming up to the Rondebosch common and at a red light when this elderly chap on crutches came to my window. I thought he was going to ask for some cash so was about to give him some when instead he asked for a lift, so I said 'sure, get in'.

Now I know South Africa has crime and that people are very aware of it and that people do moan and complain a lot about it, also that most of us know someone who has been robbed, raped or worse. And, because of this people don't really like to help people especially because if you give someone a ride you don't really know if they just want a ride or if they want to hijack your car or kill you.

So the chap got in my car and we drove off, think I got quite a few stares from the other drives - they were probably like 'What the hell is he doing!!!?'
After about 30seconds the poor chap was basically in tears, he couldn't believe that someone had finally given him a lift as he had been trying for almost 2 hours.

I was quite taken aback by this and continued to drive not quite knowing what to say, so he started to talk in between his tears about what had been happening and what he needs to do. Basically he was so torn down by the way people had been treating him, he was around 60 years old and had to walk on a crutch because of a car that had crashed into him a few years back and people wouldn't ever give him a lift. He said sometimes cars with 3 young guys in would drive by and not bother to give him a ride and he couldn't understand why they wouldn't as he couldn't be a threat to them physically as they could break him in half.

He was on his way to the Wynberg hospital to get some medicine for his wife, the day before he had walked for 5 hours to get to the waterfront to try get a job. The job was driving people from the hotel to the airport and they couldn't give him his job because he didn't have his driving license on him. The license had been stolen from him and to get a new one he needed almost R200 for the new license and ID photos.

His words were

Its not my fault I don't have a license anymore why should I have to now pay... I almost prefer the old regime...

While obviously I don't agree we should go back to the 'old regime' I do sympathise with the chap that he is stuck a bad circle. He doesn't have money and is trying to get a job but to get the job he needs money...

So, I drove passed the ATM on the way and withdrew some bucks for him to help on his way a bit. He couldn't stop crying the whole way and the scariest thing for me was that he mentioned he had been thinking about taking his life as he had nothing to show for it and was so tired of not been able to put food on the table for his wife and child to eat, so with my vast psychology knowledge (psyc 101 at Rhodes) I told him that that's crazy - if he took his life his wife and child would now have no-one helping them instead of him at least trying and been there.

He did seem to agree a bit here. SO I hope that where ever Jonathan is now more people are helping him like I tried to do. He even tried to get a job making tea or something but was told he couldn't get it because he wasn't female, he said 'its so degrading when you can't even get a job making tea'

Now, my real worry comes in when people just live in their own little world and just drive by people like Jonathan on the road and are very happy to go on a night out and spend R500 plus.

Something has to change, we can't carry on like this where a very small minority keep getting richer and ignore the majority and not care about their plight. I don't know what the answer is but we all need to try and help others around us who are in need, I think that is a good start.

And, please don't go giving everyone lifts now - be careful about who you let in because there are people who would try hijack you or worse...

The internet gives us small people a BIG voice

Yesterday while trying to do some work I was listening to 5fm Radio and DJ Fresh's show which I do enjoy. During they show they started talking about the old Simba packet design and how Simba just changed it back in the early '90s. Fresh was complaining about the fact that Simba did not consult him in their change and their design choice.... Now a major company like Simba back then was not going to go out and consult the average Joe as Fresh would have been back in the '90s.

They also spoke about products that were discontinued for some unknown reason back then and how they would like it back.

Now, we fast forward to the present day and look at major companies changing things and what happens when they do:

1) Facebook changes their profile design and has millions of people join groups complaining about the change

2) Yahoo makes changes and adds in a centralised profile page and has countless complaints pouring in while they are still only testing it.

3) Google makes changes to the iGoogle page and thousands of people start complaining, one chap was even quoted as saying:

How can I be rid of this ugly piece of crap?" asked one forum user about the iGoogle overhaul. "Google has decided to unilaterally change the layout of my page. If I can't find a hack or a Greasemonkey script to undo this, good-bye Google, hello Yahoo!

Will Google, Yahoo or Facebook bring back the old designs? I don't think so, the only difference now from 15 years ago is that we can make our voices heard. It now depends if the big boys decide to listen to us or not...

Google does more evil...

So Google continues to buck the trend in my eyes against their 'Do no evil' motto!

Recently reported on TechCrunch.com that one of their readers who currently spends $100,000 a month on Google Adwords was contacted by a lawyer from Google, the lawyer said he represented Google in their Yahoo advertising deal.

Here is a copy of the voicemail left by the lawyer:

Hi Darren my name is Donald Burke. I’m calling on behalf of Google to talk with Adwords advertisers about the new proposed Google/Yahoo Advertising Agreement. If you have a couple of minutes to talk with me, my number is…Thanks very much. Take care.

The reader phoned the lawyer back immediately and was asked to make a public testimonial in support of the deal:

I received a voicemail from an attorney representing Google yesterday so of course I called back (voicemail attached). We spend about 100K a month on AdWords so we’d apparently been targeted because of that. He was looking for large advertisers who use both Google and Yahoo (we do) who would be willing to provide public testimonials in support of outsourcing Yahoo’s search ads to Google. I told him I’m a free-market competition kind of guy so he tried to address my concerns for about 15 minutes and then called it quits.

According to the reader the lawyer was looking for people who advertised on both the Google and Yahoo networks, now either the Google lawyer was just guessing that the reader just advertised considering the amount they spend on Google. The problem would be if Yahoo provided Google with a list of companies that advertise on their network.

This is a deal that if Google wants to keep their heads above the water and not go against their 'do no evil' motto they should just walk away!

From $33 to $13 per share, poor Yahoo

Yahoo stock has fallen below $14 per share, the first time in 5 years and a couple of months ago Microsoft was offering them $33 per share - if I had 1000 shares I would have lost $20,000 roughly, OUCH!

Yahoo was unavailable for comments as they were waiting for their earnings report on the 21st October, that day could see their shares dip below $10 a share.

But, Yahoo was not the only website to decline - Amazon and Google both saw drastic decreases in their share prices.

Facebook SA about to reach 1million users

So recently some stats was released on the numbers of people on Facebook and the fastest growing countries etc, SA is very close to crossing the 1 million mark and I reckon if you had to include the Saffas living in London and elsewhere we would easily be over the 1million mark.

It was quite strange to see that in the 3rd quarter Facebook's traffic decreased by 1% in SA.... strange. I've been working with Facebook Apps quite a bit and have a wishlist app out now that works off the MyKindaPrices database and allows users to create a wishlist and their friends to view it and book items to buy. Now, people often talk about Facebook been the next Operating System but in order for it to work they would need servers in every country cause at the moment the way it works is as follows:

1) You're logged into Facebook
2) You click onto the MyKindaPrices App
3) Request is sent from your pc to Facebook servers in the US, they in turn send request to our servers in Joburg which starts returning the data via the Facebook servers in the USA which in turn the relays it to your PC here in SA.

That is quite a bit of a round about and it not the quickest way to do things, Facebook obviously needs to make it secure and this is the only way.

Microsoft just launched Microsoft Live Search on Facebook, now as Facebook has 135million users this could improve their search market share if everyone runs 10 searches a month on it... but I would still prefer localised search results, maybe they should use Google for that!

Just to update everyone in case you didn't know - Google and Yahoo have put their deal on hold while they wait for the authorities to OK the deal. They were planning to just go ahead with things.

Ask.com relaunches a challenge to Google

Ask.com or previously Ask Jeeves recently relaunched with a redesign that is supposed to be faster and provide more relevant results through its upgraded search technology and increased database size.

Ask.com's sponsored results are how ever powered by Google as Yahoo's will also be soon.

People are continually talking about how competitors to Google are looking for ways to set themselves apart from Google and be slightly different or better. Ask.com is going back to its way of been able to answer any question instead of searching for something. It also claims to have the biggest database of recipes available.

The question though, are people trying to beat a dead horse?. I'm not to sure they are based on the money they earn from such a small percentage share of the market. In August 46million searches were conducted on Ask in the UK which accounted for one in five people using the search engine.

I think that Ask.com and Yahoo are both missing the picture... Google has created a very sophisticated affiliate network which places millions and millions of its adverts on websites around the globe, they also have setup local servers and search results for many individual countries (like SA) - Competing search engines should maintain their 2% in the USA/UK but also be seeking to compete in local scenes where they could have more opportunity to compete against Google on the same playing ground and not be David vs Goliath any more!

Yahoo + Google = cracks in Google's motto of 'Do no evil'

Today it was announced that Yahoo had been granted permission by the Securities and Exchange Commission to keep certain parts of its Google ad deal out of the public eye and make it confidential.

Now, why would they do this when there is so much focus on this deal already and people like Microsoft and many companies looking to get the deal stopped. For me it makes Google and Yahoo look really bad!

In its quarterly filing with the SEC Aug. 8, Yahoo redacted multiple details about its search advertising deal with Google. Simply put, it was a festival of asterisks that looked like this:

One of the main reasons I feel this deal is bad besides a huge monoply coming out of it is the fact that the prices of keywords will increase drastically. Its already dodgy the way Google manages the prices and placings of the adverts.

If a company could provide decent results like Google does and provide better ad placing technology together with a great affiliate network they could challenge Google. Now, just to put all of that in place...

US Gov rejects $700bn rescue plan

Thank goodness, the US Gov today rejected a plan laid out to rescue the financial system in the US and supposedly link through to helping out the rest of the world. You can always rely on the Americans to first cause the problem and then have the 'plan' to fix everything - just throw money at it, always works.

Now, I'm not going to go into details of the credit crunch and who to blame and what America should do - I do think that the banks need to close down if they can't keep going, in turn the US Gov should instead look after the people who have money/loans with that bank and protect them.

The BIG reason I don't have much sympathy for these big banks is because of this

(Just Google or Live search this - 'record annual bonus payout for Goldman Sachs') and immediately you'll find evidence going back just 2 years ago to record profits and amazing bonuses paid out to staff members.
link to article regarding Goldman Sachs and the article for City Bank in the UK.

Now these state that for Goldman there was an average of, and I quote,

The bank is paying $16.5 billion in compensation this year, an average of roughly $623,418 per employee

$623,418 per employee... Now I know some people who worked for Goldman Sachs at that time and they definitely did not get such a huge bonus so the guys at the top must have been bringing in the big bucks!

Another quote from the UK Papers:

The high rewards on offer in the exclusive world of Britain's boardrooms and City dealing rooms were exposed yesterday by figures showing a jump of 16% in bonus payments this year to a record £19bn.

That is equivalent to the country's entire annual transport budget. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) released its annual estimate of the scale of bonuses showing they rose by £2.5bn this year, following a £1.5bn rise last year, meaning they have leapt by a quarter in two years.

Now again this is ridiculous when the bonuses paid out are equivalent to the entire countries annual transport budget!

I was in the UK at the time and questioned how could the profits be soo good, why everyone wasn't getting into that business. Now I question - did the banks know what could eventually happen and just think 'stuff it, if its going to happen we might as well do it with a bang!'

Another article here
on Goldman Sachs 'predicting the recession' in Jan 2008. And here another article on Goldman's 70% decrease in profits Sep 2008.

I hope the people that are affected by this crunch are helped out by their Gov and that the banks learn a BIG lesson and something gets done to drastically curb their 'MASSIVE' annual bonuses!

Interesting Interview by Vinny Lingham on SABC

I like how the interviewer comments on Google Chrome as the 'video browser'...
Also it was nice to hear Synthasite's plans on monetising their position.

Vodacom to release iPhone tonight

I just received a text on my phone with the following text:

I keep you entertained! I keep u informed! Surf! I react to your touch! Join us from 9pm tonight 25 Sept at Vodaworld. I make my appearance @ midnight!

For those of us lucky enough to be in Cape Town we won't be able to attend... Is Vodacom trying to be like Apple and have some hype and 'fans' avidly waiting for it to arrive?

We'll soon see how succussful their launch of the Apple iPhone is...

National Heritage Day

Opening up my iGoogle this morning it was nice to see Google recognising the day and changing their logo. I then went and checked on Live.co.za (Microsoft's Search Engine) and Yahoo.co.za but unfortunately neither of them have offices in SA let alone servers or the South African domain setup yet.

Now it seems I comment lots about Google but when Microsoft and Yahoo can't even do the little things like Google does I see why they do struggle against

Google has also finally released Google Android on a HTC Phone, it looks pretty good and at the moment I couldn't say which phone or mobile operating system would be best. Going to be a good battle between Google, Microsoft and Nokia.

Watch a review of the phone here done by Sergey Brin:

New Microsoft Ads... I'm a PC

The 3 new Microsft ads now without Seinfeld, starting to get a lot better responses from the public.







The advert Apple have run on the NYTimes website: (also pretty good)

The internet in 5 years time

Google has teamed up with HTC to launch the HTC Dream powered by Google Android, this will be launched next week. This comes just after Google released Google Chrome beta to the public.

Now there has always been big talk that Google will eventually challenge Microsoft in terms of their operating system and with the launch of Google Chrome this is starting to become a reality.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the Dream will have a large touch screen, a swivel-out keypad and a trackball for navigation. The Dream will also feature a built-in 3 mega pixel camera, a music player and purpose-built access to Google services like Gmail, Maps, and Search.

In the late '90s Microsoft was the dominant operating system and the browser wars were just starting. So been the dominant player and already controlling the operating system on the greater majority of PCs they made Internet Explorer the default browser on all the Windows PCs. So now users would have to go and specifically find and download Netscape if they wanted a different option...

Microsoft was eventually taken to court and fined millions and millions of dollars for this anti-competitive behaviour.

When Google first started it was just a search engine and relied on operating systems and browsers to bring it to the masses. But now they have launched their own web browser and mobile operating system, will Android be adapted to run a PC? We will wait and see.

In the mean time I see history repeating itself as it always does - Google will be operating on all mobile devices (PC and mobile) and having the default search engine as Google, email as GMAIL, instant messenger as GTALK etc etc. Google how ever has already learnt a bit from looking back at history and with Google Chrome you get to select your default browser...

Will they get fined like Microsoft did? I think it depends on how anti-competitive it becomes, if they keep making APIs like they currently do and allow some greater flexibility then maybe it will be ok.

The one factor that is now also becoming a reality is Facebook with many people saying that they will also become the operating system of the future. Now many people may look at Facebook now and not think its possible, but it definitely is not a grasp at thin air.

In 2 years time - Open source operating systems like Linux could be the norm (depending on how secure they are from viruses as the hacking community is still focused on creating viruses for Microsoft PCs and not open source) with Firefox or Chrome as your browser, MS Office as your Word and Spreadsheet software and Facebook your main focus point when going online with all websites and software interacting with it. The internet in 5 years time is too much to try predict right now but its defintely going to have a merging of all devices, and expect internet on your TV very soon.

Bill Gates & Jerry Seinfeld - Advert #2

Since going live yesterday and been posted on YouTube it has already received 120,000 views and that was just this video I've embedded below and not the shortened edition...

Take a quick look




Now as you can see its sort of following on from what Hollywood have been doing with reality TV and putting people like Paris Hilton with odd families for awhile and seeing how they cope. As you can see in the family its an odd family with a crazy Grandmother.

I think they are trying to bring across the fact that Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld are as normal as you and me (besides their billions of dollars they have). The review on TechCrunch was of still been confused but the comments afterwards were pretty good and people seem to be warming up to it.

One item pointed out is that this ad is over 4minutes long, if you are watching your daily show like 'The Office' and this ad comes on - people who are fans of Jerry Seinfeld will watch the whole 4minutes of it. At least its better than soap/cleaning adverts on TV.

Steven made the following comment on TechCrunch

the “billions” of people watching the ads aren’t tech bloggers and admitted apple fans trying to analyze the ad to figure out why they should be buy ms products.

the ads are what they are, a funny attempt to connect to the public and brand microsoft using one of the most popular comics of all time. microsoft isn’t trying to reach any of the people who read this or any other tech blog with any kind of frequency. we know about the major software companies and be you an apple, open-source or m$ft fan-boy, you are not the audience. joe six-pack, the average american who uses their computer at home an hour or two a day is the audience. how is this complicated?

personally, i thought the first ad was okay, this second ad was pretty funny with the exception of the last :10. and i’d wager that most of middle america probably will find these ads funny and bring the brand microsoft back to their conversations. i mean, look at the conversation it’s creating here. job done in my opinion.

I am starting to agree, you can't look at it as one commercial but rather a whole story line with a number of commercials.

Viral Marketing on Blogs

In my perusing of the Internet I have come across a number of blogs been hijacked by a company trying to market itself. This hijacking is voluntary as the blogger normally has the following agenda:

they could get entered into a competition

readers could generate some affiliate sales for them

they could have directly received something in the post

or they could have been paid to write an 'editorial' on the company

Now from what I see if
a) a blogger comments on a company to get entered into a competition or to generate some sales they are generally in the beginning stages of blogging and just appreciate the response and recognition (or they just enjoy helping a company now and then and like seeing what response their blog causes)

b) a blogger receives something in the post then their blog is definitely more recognised and official as a blog that matters (recent example on the Ideate blog
(I'm not saying Andrew's blog is or isn't on the 'A-List' now) This is good if the gift is inline with the blog, not sure Andrew would have enjoyed receiving a pretty table cloth from Virgin instead of the flash disk...

c) a blogger gets paid and writes an editorial - I know quite a few people who do this and get away with it, look at gaming review sites. The question comes in when the blogger reports back negatively on the company (this couldn't really happen if the blogger was getting paid as there would be no point for the company to see it through)

So the trick is to do it and do it well. If you are going to get paid for writing an article then great just make sure its what your readers want to read about. If you are entering a competition (Berocca are running one in the UK now, example on Grant's blog)

Grant just pointed out the fact thay Berocca are running a promotion aimed at bloggers which was in line with content on his blog.

So be careful your blog doesn't become a nasty advert plastered site that is terrible to look at and read. The best way is for the company to create/establish an online community/fan base

Google causes United Airlines stock to plummet

United Airlines stock price plummeted more than 75% on Monday (8th Sep 2008) after a six year old bankruptcy story surfaced on Google News.

To get to how this whole thing started we have to back track 2 days to Saturday when Google News indexed a bankruptcy piece published by the Chicago Tribune way back in 2002. United filed for chapter 11 (bankruptcy) that December, but emerged from bankruptcy four years later.

Google is insisting that it isn't their fault and that its the South Florida Sun-Sentinel paper republished the story at 10:30pm on Saturday. The paper is insisting that Google Bots must have pulled the piece from the online archive. I tend to believe the paper here as I know that Google's bots can be pretty thorough and if a website was republishing articles at 10:30pm on a Saturday night there would be other older articles resurfacing...

This article that was pulled by the Bots didn't have a time stamp so Google just time stamped it with the current date - September 6, 2008. Not a wise thing to automate!
On Monday morning a reporter within a Florida investment research firm searched for 'bankruptcy 2008' in Google and this six year old story appeared in the results with the new time stamp on it.

Now this firm is one of Bloomberg's third-party content providers and the story was soon displayed onto the Wall Street monitors as nothing more than a headline, which read:

United Airlines files for Ch. 11 to cut costs

On Monday morning when Nasdaq opened the stock price sat at $12.30 but at 11am when the headline appeared the price dropped to $3 within the hour. Eventually UAL trading had to be halted and after the headline was explained the stock price rebounded and ended the day off at $10.92.

Its quite ridiculous how reliant everyone is becoming of Google and what effect it can have when it doesn't operate properly...

Advertisers standing together against the Google/Yahoo Deal

So, for those of you who don't know about the partnership between Google and Yahoo read the next few lines. If you know about it then skip to the next paragraph.
Basically - Yahoo and Google entered into a partnership in which Google will provide advertising placed alongside search results on the Yahoo site. This is been reviewed by the Justice Department in the USA and they have yet to reveal any results into any anti-competitive behaviour. Google announced confidence in the legality of the deal last month and stated that they were planning to move forward in October regardless.


Individual companies have not been prepared to stand up against the partnership and complain but rather have kept quiet. The biggest complaint so far has of course been from Microsoft until now. The Association of National Advertisers (ANA) came out yesterday against the partnership.

The ANA, a trade group that represents companies including Procter & Gamble Co., Wal-Mart Stores Inc., and General Motors Corp., sent a letter to Assistant Attorney General Thomas O. Barnett yesterday recommending that the deal be blocked.

The letter claims that “a Google-Yahoo partnership will control 90 per cent of search advertising inventory," and argues that the merger would be bad for advertisers.
The partnership "will likely diminish competition, increase concentration of market power, limit choices currently available and potentially raise prices to advertisers for high quality, affordable search advertising," the letter continued.

Google voluntarily submitted to a Congressional investigation when the deal was completed in June as a courtesy, but the company has said that it was not legally necessary.

While competitor Microsoft has already voiced displeasure with the plan, the Wall Street Journal thinks this complaint may hold more weight:

“As they weigh comments from outsiders, regulators often discount the views of competitors who complain about a deal, as Microsoft has done. They are likely, however, to listen closely to customers, in this case major advertisers, so the association's letter could be a significant hurdle.”

Yahoo responded to the letter on Sunday:

"We are disappointed with the ANA board's position regarding Yahoo's non-exclusive search marketing agreement with Google... Yahoo remains steadfast in its belief that this deal -– in which prices are determined by advertiser demand-driven auctions, and not by collaboration between Yahoo and Google -– will strengthen Yahoo's competitive position in online advertising and will help to drive a more robust, higher quality Yahoo marketplace for our advertisers."

I myself don't think the deal is a good one and would prefer Microsoft to eventually buy out Yahoo - reasoning is that Google needs some competition and its going to be harder and harder for Microsoft to compete without some acquisitions.

Photo: Flickr/dannysullivan

Seinfeld & Gates - their first ad...

The long-awaited $300 million ad campaign that Microsoft launched to counter Apple’s successful “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” campaign aired on Thursday night in the US and I managed to find it on YouTube this morning.

Its pretty darn random and I'm not too sure what the punchline is, the only thing what was quite funny was seeing Bill Gates do a little ass shake... Not many people are getting it and the only thing I could hope they're trying to do is to confuse everyone and draw them in and then follow up with some better ads.

Take a look and let me know what you think, I'd say its 90 seconds of old men trying on shoes and been stupid. It was quite funny seeing Bill Gates trying on shoes and displaying his discount card. Take a look and see for yourself...




Bloggers are saying that this has nothing to do with Microsoft and Apple but it does hint at what the future of Microsoft could be and according to the ad its going to be 'delicious'. If Jerry Seinfeld gets $10 million for that then that is just ridiculous, some of the comments on YouTube were even saying they'd lost their respect for Jerry.

Microsoft is trying to spread the advert virally and put it up on YouTube - that must have really got the hairs on their back going! They're trying to rebrand their image but have to use their rivals website to promote it, ha ha.

What are your thoughts on the matter?

Beware, viruses on Facebook

I've now been on Facebook for nearly 2 years and as all things with the internet, when it draws vast numbers it also draws the hackers and guys who like making viruses.

My first experience of it was using MSN's Messenger, it was earlier this year and up popped a message from one of my friends saying 'hi' and that he had some photo's of me or something. It had a link with it to view the photo's, I didn't hesitate and just clicked on the link - BAM, instantly the little bugger was downloaded onto my PC and also to make things worse all my contacts on Messenger received the same message from me.

I had to quickly try inform them and it resulted eventually in me having to format my PC - my PC became a spam machine and in one day it used 1GB of data!

So now on Facebook be wary when you get messages from your friends (like in this picture) make sure you don't click on the link.

I've found that I get random messages from some of my friends like this and they haven't sent it. Facebook generally catches it after 24hours and takes the message off, but it can't do anything if you clicked on the link.

In the last 2 weeks I've now received about 4 messages like this.

Another hats off to Facebook, apparently there little 'Gifts' you can send to a friend priced at $1 has generated $34million in annual revenue. Not too bad.

The Battle of the Web Browsers begins...

So, just a couple of hours ago Google released the first version of their internet browser, Chrome. And like many other bloggers I've just had my first attempt at using it.

A couple of posts ago I wrote about the new IE 8 (read here) and then I wrote about the new release of a great program for Firefox, Ubiquity, and then followed it up on an article regarding the renewal of the contract between Google and Firefox.

Now Google Chrome is launched... and with such great timing. The whole new Microsoft IE 8 was supposed to be about increased security, increase in loading time and tabbing. This was just after Firefox 3 had been released and was downloaded over 8million times in 24hours. I wonder what the stats will be on Chrome.

A lot of bloggers are giving their views on Chrome, I'm not going to mimick them but I'm rather going to say that I think IE 8 is going to be under a serious amount of pressure. In my mind its definitely now between Firefox and Chrome, my first like of a browser is one that quickly opens up a new tab and allows you to browse between them. The security that Google goes on about sounds good and the fact that it is going to be very open for developers is great.

Matthew Buckland mentioned the fact in his review that there aren't enough goodies with it, I say give it time let people check it out and within a week you'll start seeing the new apps coming.

Google and Mozilla in bed together for another 3 years

Recently Mozilla announced that it just renewed an agreement with Google that it will be assigning Google's search engine as Firefox's default. This agreement has been extended until November 2011.

Now if you are wondering how dependent Mozilla is on Firefox just look at the financial records for Mozilla from the 2006 tax year - around 85% or $57million came from Google.

Now their formal CEO has committed Mozilla to remaining independent and that if their relationship with Google threatens this in any way they will walk away from the millions it collects. Read more here.

Mozilla has come under some criticism from users with some names like 'Googzilla or GoogleFox' been thrown around but Baker still defends the position and claims that the community will always come first for Mozilla and that there are other ways to generate money.

From my perspective I don't see this as a bad thing or something that threatens Mozilla, if Google started to dictate conditions to Mozilla then it could be different. In the 2 years since the first deal with Google, Mozilla's market share has increased from 11.8% to 19.2% (article here)

So now on something slightly different, Microsoft has bought out the shopping comparison site Ciao for a sum of $486million. This is a mainly UK shopping comparison and review site that receives 26million people a month. This move has received some criticism and people are wondering why Microsoft did this? Ballmer has set aside $1.2billion per year to play catch up on Google, wouldn't this money have been better spent replacing the Google Search Engine on Mozilla's Firefox with Live Search?

If Firefox has almost 20% of the market share I would definitely think that getting that contract would have been far beneficial. I'm not sure what the anti-competitive people in the USA would have thought about that move though...

In case you wondering or you just don't know - users can change the default search engine on Firefox to a rival site if they wish too.

The internet simplified...

Wow, is all I can say the new Firefox add-on 'Ubiquity' is simply incredible and will surely change the way everyone accesses the internet.

Quite simply if you are using Firefox as your web browser you need to add this add-on to it. To access it all you need to do is hit 'ctr - space' and up pops the little window. With this you now use typed commands to run searches on various search engines, translate words, look up definitions, email your friends (currently only with gmail) and the ability to quickly interact with Google's street maps.

I'm supposed to be having drinks tonight at Fat Cactus in Cape Town but I don't know where it is, so all I need to do is highlight '' and hit 'ctr space' in the little pop up I'll type 'map this' and by using ajax it will inform me below my command that it is mapping 'Fat Cactus in Cape Town'.

If I leave it for a bit a little map will display that I can interact with or I can simply hit the enter button and a new tab will open with the google street map there. This map can easily then be added into your email to your friends etc.

The best thing is that its open for developers to add their own commands, can't wait to create some of my own.

My one concern was the little warning message at the end of the 'introduction to Ubiquity'. To combat this they say there'll be a 'trust network' so all I'm saying for now is just to use what comes with the package and my command line that I'll soon be releasing!

Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 'beta' is released

And the prognosis... well my first impression was that not much was different except its got this cool panel view (ie takes all your tabs and shows them to you on the same page and this works pretty quickly between the pages). Aside from that I'm still sticking to firefox and the major reason why - when I open up a new tab in firefox it happens in less than a second while IE takes a good couple of seconds to 'connect' and then open - DRIVES ME CRAZY!

The word going around the blogging world is that it could hit Google's advertising model as it can hide the audit trail of websites that you have been visited and thus not deliver appropriate advertising.

Now, don't be alarmed this is not affecting Google's adsense program but its display advertising (the reason it paid more than $3billion for Doubleclick) model. There has been no news from Google as yet and I'm still testing. There is some speculation that Google uses other means to collect your history and doesn't rely on cookies but this 'option' that IE gives its uses will be causing headaches.

Any why you may ask because of the famous 'click-through tracking'! All of us who have made some bucks from it will have a bit more to worry about now as we may start loosing out on lots of sales.

Quick count of my lucky stars, out of all this Yahoo revealed that it had to pass on some 'information' to the Chinese government about its users. This information happened to include an email sent and an IP address, the poor journalist was tracked down and jailed for 10years!

Christian the lion dominates YouTube

And I can see why... What amazing footage, take a look.




Brief run down these two chaps (John Rendall and Anthony Bourke) were shopping in Harolds where they found a lion cub for sale (1959). In those days you were somehow allowed to sell exotic animals like that. But the lion cub was enclosed in a tiny cage and they took pity on the animal and bought it.

They then started to raise the animal in their flat and take it to their local church to exercise in the grounds there, quite quickly they realised they wouldn't be able to keep it too long in London (even pictures of them driving in a convertable with the lion in the back seat) and that they would need to take it back to Africa.

They did this and some years later went to visit Christian, the footage is of the reunion. So far the footage has received over 10million views, a must watch!

An update on scrabulous

So after my initial posts Facebook has begun removing Scrabulous from Facebook in most countries except for India where it is still pending a court case.

Facebook received a complaint from Mattel (the company that owns the rights to Scrabble outside of the USA) last month which forced its hand to pull the plug.

For the time being Wordscraper is still available on Facebook which is the replacement App created by the Indian brothers. On the ZA Tech Show one of the champs mentioned something interested and related to this - what happens if somehow the chap who invented chess suddenly slapped a copyright law and forced everyone either stop what they're doing or pay royalties. Think of all the beautifully carved boards you can buy along some of the roads here in SA... Imagine trying to police that.

Finally a chance to make a difference!

So over the weekend a friend sent me a link to a website and a message urging all of us to try help, so I went over and checked it out and was impressed. Take a look here.

This is a website idea that I have thought about for awhile and I'm glad to see that someone else has tackled it and has done a great job, Greater Good SA is an online social marketplace. So basically a charity organisation will register and list services or work they need doing and then people like ourselves can come along and indicate we'll help out with the project. Great idea I think.

So far the site has helped generate R9.5million and 21,000 hours of volunteer work.

I'm going to try get all my mates to help out with 'Do it Day' on the 19th Sep, hope you will too!

The future of television

Today there was an interesting article on the IOL website regarding Intel and Yahoo coming together to make television more interactive with online capabilities (read article here).

They are aiming at developing widgets for the television (mini computer program for those of you who don't know) that will be interactive and could either depending on the advert or what you want keep track of stock prices, display an 'order now' button, message friends or access videos etc.

Now if you are reading your blog you should have read this book, if you haven't read it then get it. 'The Search' by John Bartelle descibes what the future could be like and how computers and your television will interact. The example they used is pretty good, say you go onto Google and search for 'baby products' and you browse through a couple of sites then later that day you sit down in front of the TV to watch the latest 'Greys Anatomy' episode. During that show the advertising slots and Google/Search engine will interact, they will know that you searched earlier for baby products so based on your history they will display relevant adverts. So at the first ad break you may get adverts for diapers, baby food etc.

Some people may feel that this is invading your personal space too much... I'm not sure, I think the television and computer will one day be very close to pretty much the same thing.

Just imagine, wake up in the morning and while eating your breakfast you can watch the morning news (which will be outdated) while the little widget checks your emails, and then you could chat to your friends or order some flowers for your loved one. Maybe the lazy humans depicted in the movie 'Wall-E' aren't too far away!

Earn whilst using your cellphone...

Sounds nice doesn't it, well this is quite a fitting post after my last one regarding cellphones and advertising. I came across a new website today www.eyeballs.co.za which is a website that downloads a program onto your cellphone and then every time you make or receive a phone call/sms you earn bucks back on their payback scheme. At the moment this is limited to possibly buying back prepaid airtime or MXit moola also this will only be available from the 1st of November.

So while this is limited really to people who are on prepaid it may just be perfect for most of South Africa. I think a good target market for them would be MXit, but come to think about it... if you only earn for sms's or phonecalls MXit might not be the ideal target market.

I have not tested this out yet myself, I may wait for November to give it a bash but its certainly a good step forward for South Africa in terms of spreading some of that advertising cash around to the customers.

Good on ya Eyeballs.

Free television on your cellphone?

Free TV shows on your cellphone or a monthly paid subscription?

That is the question that people around the world are trying to decide, in Asia the free television model is working very well with advertising covering the cost of the shows but in the USA its still pretty open.

I personally hate adverts and try my best to avoid them, even if it means skipping through all the channels DSTV has to offer to find something else I can watch for the 5 minutes. Thank goodness for PVR and the fast forward button, now I simply schedule all my fav programs and not worry about watching TV until a lazy Sunday morning comes along and I settle in to catch up on the shows.

All this is very good and all and it becoming to be what most people are doing, the one question that still irks me is 'when are the advertising companies and the big companies who run the adverts realise that their TV adverts aren't working as well as they used too?'

Something that is probably even beating the great invention of the PVR is the amount of pirate movies and TV series available. At a couple of very well known universities I know that on the res networks there are thousands and thousands of movies and TV series's been copied and swopped around. You can even now buy a little portable HD drive that sits nicely next to your TV and plugs in via an AV cable. This neat little device then via a remote allows you to select your TV series/movie and away you go - NO ADVERTS!

Only problem is that its illegal. So what is the solution? On the mobile side companies are trying to get adverts to sponsor the shows and thus enable it to be displayed for free as long as a couple of adverts get shown. I know that if I watch something on my phone and there is a 2min advert before the series starts I'll put the phone down, drink my coffee a bit and then pick it up once its done. And there you go, lots of money wasted on the advert and a zero return on investment.

As a consumer I think this is a great option and one that should be taken as it will allow some money to get back to the copyright holders but been on the other side and thinking up a way to market my company on TV... I think I'd be clutching at straws!

Flight comparison sites in the UK penalised

So Ryanair is starting to lay down the law on flight comparison sites gather the data by doing whats called 'screen-scraping'.

But instead of punishing the sites its also punishing the customers that use the sites and who booked their tickets via the site - Ryanair has cancelled all tickets purchased through these sites and is not honouring the bookings, only tickets bought via www.ryanair.com will be allowed.

Legal action has also been taken against Bravofly Ltd and V-tours to prevent them from harvesting the information.

Customers were being charged handling fees, higher fares and getting inaccurate information from these flight comparison sites. Now I agree with Ryanair that action needs to be taken against these sites, but punishing the customers who had already bought tickets is a bit harsh.

I wonder if this will give low cost flying airlines here in SA a thought to follow the same lines with a site that is doing the same scraping (prefer not to give the name as they are in competition with me) - although this site here in SA only scrapes the data for now I have found it to be incorrect at times, luckily they aren't handling the payments and/or charging the customers higher prices.

We will have to wait and see.

Yahoo, Online battle in SA heats up and Stellies Wine Fest...

Last weekend I took part in my first mountain bike race with some mates, see you the right here as we cross the finish line - I just loose out to Dave, but I must admit my friend has lent me his bike and during the race the back breaks failed, I was limited to about 3 gears and the front wheel almost fell off on a downhill. So I luckily finished the race in one piece and had some good banter from Dave.

Our aim was to not let any under 10year olds finish before us as we were doing the mighty distance of 15km. Now this is deemed as the fun ride for families and younger members it is not to be approached lightly. After that we shared one or two glasses wine at the Stellies Wine Fest, what a day it was revisting past memories of jolling in Stellies as a student.

Meanwhile, aside from the weekend spent outdoors there were some other things happening in the world, namely:

A recent vote of the Yahoo shareholders initially yielded support for poor Jerry Yang and his board but after an audit was held of the results it was discovered that there was an error... Read the full story here
I feel sorry here for Yang after been one of the founders of Yahoo to be receiving all this from their shareholders, I would be pretty pissed in his position. But on the other hand if I owned 10,000 yahoo shares at just under $20 a share and I could have received $33 a share that equates to almost a gain of $130,000.


Apparently the battle of the online websites are heating up with a new job portal website and computer retailer website opening their doors so to speak. The new jobs site is jobs.co.za and the new computer retailer site is click2buyIT.co.za.
With all these job sites it must be a pain for the retailer/agency to have to go to each different site and post the job ad 4-5 times or more and pay a fair bit for that. Why don't the job portal sites get together and make one front-end that they all access, agencies only need to register their job once and presto its on all the sites. In terms of splitting the cake then thats something for the job portal sites to work out.

Keep it classy, South Africa, Keep it classy.

New Facebook design...

About a week ago Facebook started given its users the option to switch over to the new Facebook design, now I had already seen it and used as I'm a developer on Facebook and had to test out how my applications were working or not working on the new design.

So I happily switched across last week and was enjoying the new design and the use of AJAX throughout most of the site when I started to notice quite a few irritating bugs!

The first irritating bug was that if someone sent me a message I couldn't read it, I could get into my inbox but no further (thought that Facebook would have defintely tested this one before releasing live!)

Secondly if someone added me as their friend (I had 4 requests, popular I know) I couldn't view who the requests were from thus couldn't accept.

So 2 very irritating problems I have since switched back to the old design and am hesitant now to switch back across.

Scrabulous taken off...

So, after my last post regarding the lawsuit filed against the Indian brothers by Hasbro has resulted in Scrabulous been taken off Facebook.

But, it only seems to be off in the US and Canadian Facebook Pages.

Its a pity Hasbro couldn't buy it from them or just work with them to make it legit as Scrabulous has 500,000 users.

Scrabble and scrabulous...

So, Hasbro (which is the parent or company that owns Scrabble in the USA) has filed a lawsuit against Scrabulous and sent notice to Facebook that the game be removed from Facebook.

Now, just some background info - Scrabulous is a Facebook App version of the famous game, Scrabble, and was started by 2 brothers in India (Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla). This application quickly rocketed to popularity with more than 500,000 people - read article here on MyADSL.

So now we have a Facebook App that has been made in India and is earning the 2 brothers some money from the ads been displayed and Hasbro in the USA wants it off. Hasbro has filed a lawsuit against it but as the brothers are in India something can only be done if the Indian courts agree/work with the US Courts.

This is bringing up quite an important issue here - international copyrights and the global market that is been created by the internet. Do I agree that the App should be removed, no I don't but they do need to work something out with Hasbro.

Facebook has indicated that they don't want to get involved or be dragged into it, they said they have notified Scrabulous of the problem and hope to rectify it. The Indian brothers have said that they expect their fans to remain loyal to the App. This also comes a week after the big games giant, EA, released a new Facebook App with Hasbro's permission of a free online Scrabble game.

We'll wait and see what happens.

Facebook Connect

Finally, a new breakthrough with something that could be quite useful if used the right way.

View this report here from Mark Roff at the F8 announcement by Mark Zuckerberg.

The summary of the change here is that if the user gives the website permission a 3rd Party website, like MyKindaPrices.com can work with info coming from the users Facebook profile and display it on the website.

Another example is a website that does restaurant reviews, if you view that website there could be a 'Friends Fav' tab on the side with reviews on restaurants from your friends on Facebook which should hopefully be trustworthy.

This is a development that I see could really make Facebook the only player in the social web, I don't see major websites having 3/4 different tabs on the side to account for every Social website... Then again if Facebook adopted Google's OpenSocial it could work very well. We'll see.

For now its amazing to see that Facebook has reached 90million users after only having 24million 14months ago. WOW, is all I can say.

Possible breakthrough in the online music world

The UK Government is proposing or mulling over the idea of imposing an annual fee/license/tax on internet users.
This will allow them to download free music with no problem caused in obtaining illegal music as you'll be paying this annual amount.

I think I'd be very happy to only pay R300-R500 a year to get free music and not worry about the rights of the music etc. The musicians will get their money back through a system working out the most popular/downloaded songs and pay out appropriately. This annual fee could be extended then to cover TV shows and movies, wonder what DSTV will think about this.

Something else that they are doing which might cause a bit of a fright - working with the ISP's the UK gov is sending out around 12,000 letters to internet users warning them to stop downloading illegal music.

I reckon this annual fee could work, just will be a nightmare trying to monitor country to country. Read the full article here.

Whats up with YouTube

Now, maybe other bloggers will laugh but what is happening to the quality coming out of YouTube? Or am I just missing the plot...

I listen to the ZA Tech show quite regularly, and in their 19th podcast they interviewed Stafford Massie, CEO of Google SA. This was a pretty interesting podcast, always good to hear from someone who've knows some of the most influential people in the world today.

Anyway, he spoke about the improvements they were doing for us fellow internet users in South Africa and one item he mentioned was that we should be experiencing faster usage of Google programs like Youtube... but I think with all the lawsuits Youtube has been receiving they have to take down a lot of video's because most video's I try watch now don't seem to work and come up with the annoying message - 'We're sorry, this video is no longer available'.

So now because of that I couldn't watch the interview between Jake White And Stafford Massie which was listed on Jake's new blog.

Could they have an automated system that checks video's descriptions/names and automatically removes them if it contains anything that could contain copyright information? We'll have to wait and see.

First time for everything

Well I've huffed and puffed and I finally started a blog, what I'm going to write about you may ask? Well, it will generally be about online/internet related issues but I will diddle daddle into other areas of interest be it sport or life in Cape Town.

A bit about myself, after been schooled in Port Elizabeth at Grey High School I managed to read myself a Bachelors in Commerce from Rhodes University. This took me 4 years, but they were 4 good years with many a party and good times (the councilor in my 1st year recommended I do it over 4 years due to the fact that I was rowing...)

I then had a quick stint at UCT to complete my post-graduate certificate in education (as I thought I wanted to be a teacher, main reason was to coach rowing and rugby as that was one of my passions) - this year turned out to be a great year (was newly single and Cape Town was a jol!)

SACS tried to lure me into a teaching post after that year and I was very tempted as they offered 1st team rowing coach which would have been great but I needed more experience! So I went to London as lots of saffas do.

From 2005 - 2007 I was in London for almost 3 incredible years, I made a good choice of joining the London Rowing Club and continueing my rowing career. This was pretty hard as it would involve waking up at 5:40am to be on the water by 6am (freakin freazin in winter!) and off by 7am to then make the trek to work. Work was ok, it paid the bills - worked in the Department of Health managing a database/website.

During this time I started my first proper website - www.mykindaprices.com which was great and I loved getting it going - eventually it took up too much of my time and I had to return to SA (Sep 2007). This is something I again have loved been back, though I do miss London now and then and rowing on the Thames. See pic of rowing there!


This picture was taking in 2006 while racing at the Royal Henley Regatta - I'm the one with the head band on.

So now I'm back in Cape Town and will blog now and then about things happening that I feel are important, now if I don't mention something political that is important please don't be concerned - I'll will assume that you know about that already and don't need to know more about it.