South Africa cleaned up the awards at the Cannes advertising festival last month, but it failed miserably in the digital category. There are lessons to be learned, writes Arthur Goldstuck.
Category archives: Tech
SA races for RICA deadline; 3.6m still outside net
Around 3.6-million South African mobile accounts have not yet been registered as the RICA deadline arrives. ARTHUR GOLDSTUCK sums up the state of play.
Give them heart – David Moffatt & Mark Tomlinson
David Moffatt doesn’t get called a rock star just because be designed a Wordpress theme. The guy actually rocks as lead guitarist of indie rock band The Dirty Skirts when he isn’t running his digital agency HelloComputer alongside business partner Mark Tomlinson. Together they have created what quite a few people refer to as one of the hottest indie digital specialists around.
Is Branko bonkers or brilliant? By Andrew Trench
I was fascinated to read earlier this week about Daily Maverick’s irrepressable entrepeneur Branko Brkic’s plan to launch SA’s first iPad daily “newspaper” under the Maverick brand. It’s a concept that I’ve been keen on ever since laying my hands on an iPad and I too have spent many hours doing sums on the back of knapkins wondering if they can be made to work.
Jason Xenopoulos wants to win the advertising war
Jason Xenopoulos recently re-emerged as an important player in the SA digital arena through his role in facilitating and leading the merger of Brandsh, Stonewall+ and Cambrient,to launch Native.
App where we belong
With 500 000 apps in the Apple App Store, 250 000 in the Android Market, and the rest in the tens of thousands, how do you choose from among so many apps? Does size count? Does popularity count? ARTHUR GOLDSTUCK sums up the state of play, and a few of his favourite apps.
A very civilised CityMob
A series of Facebook pages, started several years ago, has been so successful that its creator has teamed up with two friends to start a group-buying business called CityMob off the back of it. Daniel Solomon started the I Like Cape Town fan page on Facebook on a whim and has seen it grow to a group with over 30 000 members.
Solomon and his partners also run I Like Durban (with over 40 000 fans), I Like Johannesburg (more than 5000 fans), I like PE (over 8000 fans) and I Like South Africa (over 36 000 fans).
The people want to overthrow the ad tracker
You have every reason to be paranoid about your privacy in a digital world, says Dominic White, a security consultant at SensePost and self-proclaimed ‘argumentative Catholic hacker geek’, known under the pseudonym ‘Singe’ online. White was a speaker at ITWeb’s Security Summit recently held in Sandton, where he discussed the politics and technology around online privacy.
[Netprophet 2011] African ecommerce market has a long way to go
A billion Africans and 50 million bank accounts. In South Africa, credit cards are used by only 16.5% of the population (2008). No African country comes close to 1% of total retail spend spent online – the magic figure which constitutes the tipping point for digital retail growth (in SA, ecommerce has a 0.4% share of the retail market, while in countries such as Egypt and Nigeria, the figure stands at 0.01%). No wonder, then, that the ecommerce market in Africa hasn’t bloomed.
Looking at these numbers, many international ecommerce plays have shifted investment in the African market 5-10 years down the line. But where others fear to tread Oliver Rippel, CEO ecommerce Africa & Middle East at MIH, sees opportunity and first-mover advantage.
For youth market mobile access to information and communication is the answer
Mobility no longer simply refers to motion, it has also come to describe the untethered use of technology on devices like smart phones, both of which seems to have come together in a perfect storm to enable the revolutions currently sweeping the Middle East and North Africa. Setting these revolutions in motion, is the youth, who organise and spread their message using social networks primarily accessed through mobile devices. These platforms are not only changing how young consumers engage with politics but also with commerce and one another.