Mobile • Tags • Page 3 of 4 •

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.

The ultimate social media strategy is not having one

by Dave Duarte. On Sunday 1st May 2011, Barack Obama announced that Osama Bin-Laden had been killed. The strike against his compound in Pakistan was not televised, but it was tweeted. The thing is, Al-Qaida was already looking irrelevant after the “Arab Spring” – the social-media enabled revolutions that occurred throughout the Middle-East in early 2011.

[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.

Dave Duarte joins Ogilvy promising the “geekification of the ad industry”

Ogilvy Cape Town is making a tangible move towards integrating digital skills companywide and across traditional agency silos as ad spend continues its shift online. The agency has rolled out a comprehensive educational initiative with lecturer and digital strategist Dave Duarte, who joins the company to lead its Ogilvy Digital Marketing Academy (ODMA).

Mobile app providers rethink industry image

Consumer sites such as HelloPeter and investigative magazines such as Noseweek are regularly filled with stories of consumers billed outrageous amounts on their cellphone contracts by mobile content operators. Pensioners with bills running into the thousands, kids subscribing behind the back of their parents who are then forced to ‘pay-off’ the bills; there is no lack of horror stories about this industry doing the rounds.

Social networking secures place on the mobile web

Opera Mini, the mobile web browser, has released its monthly State of the Mobile Web report for the month of February 2010. Opera Mini had over 50.5 million users who viewed 22 billion pages in February. Here is a snapshot of the Opera Mini’s South African market:

Toby Shapshak: The power of cloud computing is incredible

With 2009 coming to a very rapid end The Digital Edge decided to take a look back into the year that was with commentry by local web celebrities. What news stories shocked them the most and what technological advances tweaked their interest in 2009? Find out in daily posts or listen to the podcast.

Banking from their cellphones

Research released by The World Wide Worx shows that the number of people banking from their cellphones has exceeded that of people banking from their PCs in South Africa, with more than a quarter of bank customers turning to their cellphones for services ranging from informational transaction types such as balance enquiries to financial transaction types which include account payments.