Category archives: Tech

The Content Con

by Bob Hoffman (@adcontrarian), San Francisco Bay It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to recognize that this year’s online magical marketing word is “content.”

All the hustlers who were selling us “the conversation” a few years ago and “social media marketing” for the past two years have suddenly all become “content” experts. The great thing about content is, it’s anything you want it to be. If you can upload it to the web, it’s content.

It may be “content” in the digital world. In the real world it’s mostly garbage. 99% of it will go unnoticed and will live and die anonymously.

Like all the online wonder drugs, there will be a few winners. They will be the same really smart people and the really smart agencies who know how to do things right. They will be a tiny, tiny minority.

Samsung sales figures for Africa shows strong appetite for top-of-the-range phones

by Arthur Goldstuck (@art2gee) Thursday night will see one of the biggest product launches in the history of the technology. Samsung’s new flagship phone, expected to be called the Samsung Galaxy S4, has already been declared the new all-things-to-all-people smartphone, further dethroning the faltering Apple iPhone 5 even before the S4 is unveiled.

It’s easy to see why so much is expected of it: the current top-of-the-pile, the Galaxy S III, was declared by many (including this column) the 2012 phone of the year. Its successor, due out as much as six months before the next iPhone, will rule the roost by default.

As a result, many will see the phone market as a war between the S4 and the iPhone 5, with the Sony Xperia Z and BlackBerry Z10 scrapping with each other for the number three position, the Nokia Lumia 920 fighting for the scraps, and the Huawei Ascend P2 as the dark horse.

But that is only the top end of the market, where the flagship phones play. While these phones also represent the highest profits on phones, and shape market perceptions, to take them as the whole would be a massive misreading of the cellphone market.

For one thing, the Galaxy S III remains, for now, the most popular high-end phone in the world, as well as in South Africa. By mid-January, it had sold 40-million units, making it Samsung’s best-selling phone yet. Now, for the first time, sales figures for South Africa and the rest of Africa have been revealed.

The real cost of SA’s most expensive website

by Arthur Goldstuck (@art2gee) More was spent on the planning of the Free State government web site than most South African corporates have ever spent on the full development and implementation of their web sites.

The tender was awarded by the Free State Province on 24 February 2012 for the “Redesign/Relaunch of a comprehensive and integrated website” to the “Cherry Ikamva-Jugganaut Joint Venture”. It includes four phases prior to implementation, followed by implementation, maintenance and “content generation and management”.

The tender award document, supplied yesterday to Radio 702 by the Office of the Director General of the Free State Provincial Government, makes for startling reading.

Design Indaba 2013: Daan Roosegaarde – hacking technology to personalise our environments

by Herman Manson (@marklives) Well before Daan Roosegaarde ever set foot in this country South Africans were already lining up to see if there might be opportunities to collaborate with the Dutch born artist and innovator.

Roosegaarde is known for exploring the relationships between technology, architecture and people, as with his Smart Highway project, which aims to create interactive and sustainable roads as part of our future landscapes.

Vehicles generating light through wind technology, dynamic lanes, using photoluminescent paint (that charges with sunlight) to create glow in the dark traffic lanes without the need for street lighting, induction priority lanes that charges electric cars as they drive. Roosegaarde wants roads to be more interactive and poetic as they form an essential aspect of our physical environment but has seen little innovation in the past century.

Design Indaba 2013: John Maeda on the dissipating disconnect between art and technology

by Herman Manson (@marklives) John Maeda (@johnmaeda) describes himself as a “humanist technologist.” Through his love for art and technology, and his belief that together they can advance technology that acknowledges our humanity, Maeda has emerged as an important thinker in our approach to both.

Currently president of Rhode Island School of Design, Maeda is a leading proponent for expanding our focus from STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) to STEAM (by adding Art).

Formerly a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology he has published five books including The Laws of Simplicity (2006) and is an acknowledged artist and graphic designer. Maeda also sits on the board of ad agency Wieden+Kennedy amongst others.

Maeda is visiting South Africa as a speaker at the annual Design Indaba conference taking place Feb 27 – March 1. MarkLives spoke to him prior to his arrival in South Africa.

Tech Law: Your Oscar Pistorius conjecture could get you sued

by Paul Jacobson (@pauljacobson) The Oscar Pistorius case has enthralled South Africans who are torn between supporting their hero and their disappointment at seemingly being let down by a South African icon. The discussion has practically overwhelmed my Twitter stream and people have expressed opinions on Pistorius’ guilt and innocence well before a court has reached any conclusions of its own.

Blogger Math Takes On Facebook

by Bob Hoffman (@adcontrarian), San Francisco Bay I saw some numbers last week on how the top 10 retail brands are doing on Facebook.

The numbers came from the 4th quarter of 2012 — the Christmas selling season which is by far the best season for most retailers and, presumably, the season at which Facebook activity would be highest for retailers.

The numbers are startling.

We know that ads on Facebook are alarmingly invisible, with click through rates somewhere around 5 in 10,000. But we’ve been told that the real value in Facebook is not in display ads but in engagement on brand pages.

From what I can tell, these things are just as ineffectual as display ads. Let’s do some blogger math (full disclosure: blogger math is known to be unreliable and is not to be confused with real math.)

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