by Arthur Goldstuck (@art2gee) Telkom Mobile plans to roll out 4 000 Wi-Fi hotspots across South Africa – with free access to customers. The move may well ignite a Wi-Fi war. Telkom Mobile announced yesterday that it will offer free Wi-Fi access to all South Africans at more than 1 500 Wi-Fi hotspots for the …
Tag archives: arthur goldstuck
Media Future: LG is back
LG has long lagged behind Samsung in the smartphone market, but the new G Pro marks a convincing return, writes Arthur Goldstuck (@art2gee)
Do you remember LG? If you do, it’s possibly because you have a TV set, washing machine or air conditioning unit carrying that brand. And then you’d know that it goes hand in hand with the slogan, “Life’s good”.
That’s not really what LG stands for, of course; it began life as a merger of the Lucky and GoldStar brands, and the Life’s Good handle is what’s known as a backronym.
Now LG wants to go back to the future it had envisaged for itself before its Korean compatriot at Samsung became the behemoth of cellphones.
Thorsten Heins interview Pt 2: Secrets of BlackBerry 10
In the second part of this interview, RIM CEO Thorsten Heins tells Arthur Goldstuck about competing with Apple, how the BlackBerry’s notorious freezes have been overcome, and reveals the company’s secret weapon.
Thorsten Heins interview Pt 1: BlackBerry in Africa
In this interview RIM CEO Thorsten Heins tells us why BlackBerry 10 will restore faith among both consumers and investors and what makes the African market special..
Thorsten Heins, Chief Executive Officer of BlackBerry makers Research in Motion, was in Johannesburg last month to meet with mobile [GoldstuckHeins] network operators and introduce them to the BlackBerry 10 devices that will be launched in the first quarter of 2013. In the only interview he gave in South Africa, he spoke frankly with MarkLives columnist and Gadget editor-in-chief Arthur Goldstuck (@art2gee) about the challenges facing RIM.
Arthur Goldstuck: South Africans right now are still very loyal to BlackBerry and brand momentum is still growing. But at the same time, a lot of people are saying, ‘What is going to happen to us BlackBerry users?’ It comes down to the American market, where Blackberry has imploded. The feeling is that, what happens in America, will ultimately happen here. How does Blackberry plan to recapture the American market and therefore re-instill confidence in markets like South Africa and the rest of the developing markets?
Thorsten Heins: First and foremost, we appreciate the strong commitment of our customers to us in South Africa. This is a very, very successful market. It is a clear number one market for us, but not the only one. We have Indonesia where we are number one in smartphones. In the Philippines, I don’t know how many quarters consecutively we have been number one in smartphones. So there’s a broader business base than just in South Africa that we can appreciate. This is a customer base that carries us through to the transition to BlackBerry 10 right now.
The United States is very different. The US was very much driven by a tectonic shift to full touch screens devices among consumers and to LTE (4G connectivity) in a very short time frame in the enterprise space. All the marketing money from the carriers is going to 4G. All the major promotions: all the bus stops have a 4G sign on it. That is why we have lost and are still losing market share. But it is slowing down.
There are two routes to recapturing that market. Firstly, we are working on our installed user base. So far the upgrade ratio from BB 5 and BB 6 devices to BlackBerry 7 has increased from 8% BB 7 enterprise penetration to 22% in the last two quarters, which is really very significant.
The second thing is to get Blackberry 10 into the market and make sure it fulfills all users’ requirements, such as the full LTE experience. And there will be a touch version of it. But then we must also set BlackBerry 10 apart in terms of the user experience. So it’s not just competing on spec terms, not just competing on radio technology terms. We will go back to the market and we will, on top of that, compete on a new user paradigm that we are introducing with BlackBerry 10.
AG: Do you have a launch date yet?
TH: Last week, when we met with Verizon, they publicly stated, so its not a secret, that they will be launching Blackberry 10 in the first quarter of 2013. I would be very, very optimistic that other US carriers will follow suit.
We have a firm date when we will hit their labs for lab testing. As with every carrier, they have different cycle times for the testing cycle to get ready for first customer shipments. We’re working with the carriers on these launch dates, but it for sure will be in the first quarter 2013.
Social secrets of the digital divide
by Arthur Goldstuck (@art2gee) Our society is held back by many digital divides. Those who have computers and those who don’t. Those who have Internet access and those who don’t. Those who create mobile apps in their spare time and those who are over 21.
Seriously, though, the digital divide is real, it’s a drag on the economy, and it exacerbates the gap between the haves and have-nots.
The one digital divide that has been crossed, however, is the gap between those who could afford a communications device called a phone, and those who could not. Today, 80% of South Africans have a phone. That’s the good news. The better news is that, as the average phone becomes more advanced, it becomes a tool to help users cross several other digital divides.
The findings of the South African Social Media Landscape 2012 study, released by World Wide Worx and Fuseware, reveals startling secrets of social South Africa.
The key findings of the research were that, at the end of August, 5.33-million South Africans were using Facebook on the Web, 4,6-million were on WhatsApp ,2,43-million on Twitter, 1,9-million on LinkedIn. A huge 9,35-million were active on Mxit.
Because Facebook does not measure mobile-only usage among those who have registered via their cellphones, however, the full extent of its penetration is significantly understated: primary research by World Wide Worx shows that 6.8-million people were accessing Facebook on their phones in mid-2012.
Simfy Africa & the day the music arrived
by Arthur Goldstuck (@art2gee) A decade after iTunes demolished the traditional music industry the arrival of Simfy Africa finally gives South Africans a legal equivalent.
The music industry, for all its culture of revolution, has always resisted change, and almost always to its enormous cost. When a program called Napster arrived at the end of the 1990s to allow online sharing of digital music files between individuals, the industry took to the courts to shut it down.
The music industry succeeded, giving it the confidence to resist any attempt to embrace the concept of digital, or to find new ways to add value to a disenchanted public. It insisted on sticking to a business model that was decades old: selling an album of about 10 songs to give fans access to the one song they wanted to hear.
Then came iTunes, an online music service integrated with Apple’s iPod, a digital alternative to the Sony Walkman. Apple’s charismatic CEO Steve Jobs was able to convince most major American music labels to allow digital tracks to be sold on iTunes, and also played on computers.
Overnight, the album died.
Individual tracks at a dollar a time made so much more sense to consumers. But it also meant that the music industry imploded – from a $33-billion business in the 1990s to $16.2bn in 2011. In the USA in 2011, digital sales overtook physical for the first time, taking 50,3% of the market. Ironically, along with that landmark, album sales grew for the first time since 2004, as new artists like Adele gave the mass market a more compelling reason to buy a full set of songs.
High cost of cheap tablets
This story was reprinted from online magazine Gadget with which MarkLives has a content partnership. As copyright holder Gadget has requested the story be withdrawn pending resolution of factual discrepancies. We will keep readers updated on the resolution of these discrepancies as they become available.
Brand reinvention: Oral B and the new word of mouth
by Arthur Goldstuck (@art2gee). The most personal mass-market gadget of all, the toothbrush, is being reinvented at the high and low end of the market.
We all imagine that there can be no gadget that is more personal or intrusive than a cellphone. But move your focus ever so slightly and you come across an even more invasive device – and one that is not usually regarded as a gadget at all: the toothbrush. But ever since the first electric toothbrush was invented by the Swiss in 1954, this household object has become ever more closely associated with gadgetry.
Now, just as phones have given way to smartphones, electric toothbrushes have been taken to a new level, with the “smart toothbrush”. Oral B may not be as cool a brand as Samsung or Apple, and certainly won’t appear in as many headlines, but it also has a shot at revolutionising a routine task.
It has produced a toothbrush that costs more than R1700, which is a huge mouthful in its own right. But then, the Oral B Triumph 5000 is not your common or bathroom toothbrush.
E-retail: Local brand activity marks a shift in how clothes are sold online
by Arthur Goldstuck (@art2gee). The arrival of a Mr Price shopping cart on both Web and mobile sites, and new initiatives by Edcon and eBucks, mark a shift in how clothes are sold online.
For much of the past decade, online clothing retail in South Africa has seemed like the toddler party that the big kids avoided. Start-ups, newcomers and unknowns dominated, while the established brands either stayed away or made only a grudging appearance.
Edgars had a web site with a shopping cart, but it was more of an apology than a serious online store. The likes of Stuttafords, Truworths, Jet, Foschini and Mr Price were entirely absent from e-commerce.
Recently, in one week, three major brands have come to the party, and getting dressed will never be the same again.
The biggest splash was made by the chain that is increasingly positioning itself as cool and go-ahead: Mr Price. Even their new web site address reflects that image: MrP.co.za. It claims 18 000 items in its catalogue, and allows customers to choose by size, colour, brand and … trend. Delivery choice is wide, from home to Post Office to nearest store.
Payment option is even wider, including credit card, COD, gift vouchers and account. More important, returns are allowed within 30 days, via store, Post Office or courier.
Probably the single most important option in all of the MrP bouquet, however, is it’s mobile site. It uses a web development standard called HTML 5, which allows the site to look the same on any phone browser, regardless of model. But the real killer app, so to speak, is not the mere fact that it can be used on a phone: it is that it looks great on a phone. It appears inviting, and that is the first step in convincing potential customers to become paying customers.
New generic top level domains hold dangers for brands, democratisation of Internet
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the body responsible for the Internet’s naming system, is working its way through nearly two thousand applications for New Generic Top-Level Domain (gTLD) names.