24.com launches Answer.it, gets deeper into the social web
Uno as Online, Products, Social Networks, South Africa
Apr|22|2008
As part of our recent foray in social services (not the welfare kind, the web kind) at 24.com, we’ve launched Answerit - a site where you can ask and questions and get human answers.
It’s a very well thought out product - you can thumbs-up answers, follow commentators and sections, view rankings and a whole bunch of other nice user features.
A question you might ask is “Why? Isn’t there something like metafilter or Ask.Yahoo?” Well, yes there is. But there’s also relevancy in being local (how do you like this one), as well as fostering the community that has been built up by 24 (we have one of the largest blogging audiences/platforms in South Africa).
Slowly but surely we’re builing up a good suite of social products - Laaik.it, Answer.it, Play as well as a number of communities in our other sections like Entertainment, Wheels and Health. We’re going to be doing some even more useful and exciting things in the short space coming up 
Other people mentioning Answer.it:
Pre-release Vincent Maher.
Stii.
Matthew Buckland.
Wasa and Google Analytics
Uno as Online, South Africa
Mar|7|2008
Now that Google Analytics is looking to open up their analytics packages, I wonder how long it would be before you could grab that data and show it all in nice little user segments.
Taken the whole shebang lately with Wasa, you’d think that this would be a great tool to showcase your stats in some ranked way - very similar to the OPA.
Charl Norman being Meta or…
Uno as Online, Social Networks, South Africa
Mar|6|2008
For those of you that don’t know…
Charl Norman runs Bandwidth Blog and Blueworld.
I can understand the linking to your own sites on blogs you run, I mean, we all do that but Charl, why on earth would you bookmark your own post, about one of your own sites. Are you scared you’re going to forget?
Or are you doing the shameless self promotion gambit 
Apartment for rent in Cape Town
Uno as South Africa, Travel
Jan|16|2008
I’ve finally managed to get my bachelor flat in Fresnaye finished and furnished. There are still some trimmings that need to be completed, but it’s ready and livable.
I’m renting it out on a daily basis as a holiday apartment, or if you find yourself in Cape Town for business then it should also be available.
The place is fully furnished and has all the amenities that you’d want, it’s also ridiculously close to the beach and promenade, as well as some cool shops in Sea Point. (Just around the corner from Eric’s eSquared Fashion).
For full rental details you can visit this site.
Like I said, I am renting out it, and if you use the special geek password (geekpassword) then you’ll be entitled to a nice little discount! Also, I have an affiliate scheme in place, make sure that people you refer use your name and I’ll swing a weekend your way!
And here are some pics! If you click through to my Flickr set then you will get to the before and after pics. Take a look and see what the difference is!
After:
More:
Before:
During:
Product innovation : Muti, Laaik.it and other SA startups
Uno as Online, Products, Social Networks, South Africa, Web2.0
Oct|25|2007
The company I work for, 24.com, went live with their Digg/social news clone today, called Laaik.it.
You can read the “scoop” over at Charl Norman’s Bandwidth Blog.
While it’s not an entirely bold step (it’s not that big a deal to launch a social news site), it is actually quite a large innovation in the South African market for some lesser than obvious reasons.
There are quite a few players in this space already. Internationally there is Digg and Reddit, to name some of the bigger players, and then locally there is Muti. Yes there are a whole bunch of other ones, but Muti is certainly the market player in this space.
Charl asks the question: Will it be a Muti killer? and concludes that it won’t be. I don’t expect it to either, but for different reasons. I’ve written about Muti a few times and I’ve also predicted way back in January that a 24.com product will offer strong competition to sites like Muti (I specifically wrote about Blik).
I’ve also written about niche contents before. If we had a large enough target market we would probably see a Rugby Digg as well, and a Cricket Digg etc etc. But we don’t so we still have larger scale generic networks.
So why do I think this product is innovative?
Simply because 24.com is a market leader. 60% of South African internet traffic goes through 24.com. You can’t argue with that. So it’s not technically innovative, or even visually innovative, but that really doesn’t matter.
24.com also has one of the largest blogging communities in South Africa, but the technology behind it is crap, old and clunky. But do you think the community cares? No they don’t! They’ve gotten alot of people blogging who wouldn’t have had exposure to it in another way. We have to understand that most people inside our little frenzied community are early adopters.
24.com will be able to bring social news to the broader SA audience, something that Muti struggled to do. If you take a look at Muti’s top submitters this month, I’m struggling to argue with myself that there is a broad smattering of users… It’s the same guys. Opening this up to a broader audience will get more people to use social news - which is a good thing!
On another note, I’ve written way back that I think SA is producing some crappy clones. I’m not really changing that opinion yet. (the data on that article is old, but I still stick with mah guns).
Vodacom to try mobile Social Networks with The Grid
Uno as Social Networks, South Africa, Web2.0
Oct|22|2007
As is covered by MyBroadband and Tyler Reed, Vodacom is to launch a new network called The Grid.
Some features that you can look forward to:
IM (obviously - but that would eat into their SMS market?)
Friending (duh)
Aggregation (between your other networks)
From another press release:
“A powerful mobile social network funded by mobile advertising could be established by combining the power of social networking and mobiles. We are also considering mobile TV and video insertions, a Vodacom radio station, as well as voice, text, content and mobile Internet searching funded by advertising,” Kumalo said.
It’s going to be interesting to see how this plays out. Vodacom obviously wants to get into the share that Mxit has managed to carve out for themselves. However, Mxit has a huge user base already, and as it has proven itself, it’s not about the technology but about the community. Vodacom would have a long way to go before they can get that kind of community going. Mxit however doesn’t have the social networking aspect built into it, it’s something that they’ve been struggling with for a while.
Seeding options for Vodacom would obviously be to bundle the application together with all the new phones that they sell. While Java apps have proved to be not such a huge barrier to entry (with Mxit), it’s still something that requires a lot of technology investment (you have to develop a different program for every device). Still, having to not have people download the app will lower that barrier even more. Web interfaces are still even better (from a flexibility perspective) but they offer poor user experiences (and their feature set is limited).
I’ve heard rumors about Mxit bundling in with an operator or handset before (I believe this specific one was Nokia). This is going to be interesting, also because Mxit has also recently expanded to open up quite a few new datacentres in the EU. Could this mean expansion into the European market? Probably yes. If Mxit bundles with a handset they could possibly cement growth as well. Also, if you buy a Nokia on a Vodacom contract… What will that mean?
Yet still, at the end of the day it’s about the community. Vodacom would have the advertising budget and partnerships to be able to pull a lot of strings. No doubt they are going to use that horrible rat of theirs to promote the service. Maybe Mo will become the Tom for “The Grid”. The recent Youth Brands Survey from Sunday Times shows that he’s quite popular amongst the Youth, pity most adults hate the bastard. If they can get the kids to transfer over then they would have some clout.
Also, most of the press releases that I’ve been reading have all said something about “we’ll support it through ads”. That’s a bit of a topsided approach… Saying something like that, when you don’t even have a product, belies the thinking behind it. For them it’s a commercial product first and foremost. Nothing wrong with that, I just prefer it a bit more if the user is thought of first. I hate design by comittee.
Technorati Tags: social network, south africa, vodacom, the grid, mxit, instant message,
South African Social Networks - Guy Berger
Uno as Social Networks, South Africa
Sep|27|2007
Guy Berger has written a great piece on South African social networks, you can read the entire post here.
Build social networks around South African contentMost media captains are tightly focused on their business, meaning that they understandably don’t pay much attention to seemingly obscure stuff outside their silo — for example, the rampaging online social networking among online youth.But some remember that a once-unknown IT business called Google came from nowhere to feast on their erstwhile monopoly of audience time and advertising tribute.
I agree with Guy that the way to play now is around content, and getting your content to spread as far as possible. We sit with media companies that have ridiculous amounts of locally relevant content - something that major international players won’t be able to duplicate.
Take a look at MTV’s network for an idea how some of the larger media players.
Technorati Tags: South africa, social network, guy berger
MTV Think: What Youngblood5 should’ve been
Uno as Social Networks, South Africa
Sep|21|2007
Remember the Youngblood5 network that 5FM launched a while ago? I wrote about it here if you’d like to read.
Well now it seems that MTV has gotten on board as well with their new Think.MTV, and it strokes well with their other activities and socially concious philosophy.
The network looks good (clean design) and looks like the functionality could be quite high. You can network with other friends, upload videos around an issue and discuss. Your profile is also quite rich, showing which issues and organisations you support.
Think has quite a strong focus on profiles and you being in the spotlight - something integral to social networks. This is probably where Youngblood5 made their second mistake (the first one was to desig in flash).
YB5 Doesn’t have any kind of networking abilities - only the option to view according to space (which could have worked nicely with a Google Maps mashup). Profile creation is central to any identity in a social network and without it you don’t really have anything to build a community off of.
Well, lessons learned I suppose.
Technorati Tags: youngblood5, mtv 5fm, social network
Guy Mclaren Interview
Uno as South Africa, Web2.0
Sep|10|2007
A few of you might have followed the recent spat between some of the bloggers around spam on Muti. I’ve asked Guy for a condensed interview putting down some of his ideas.
More after the jump.
Tank CMS
Uno as Online, Products, South Africa, Web2.0
Aug|20|2007
So the other day I stumbled across a pretty nifty new little CMS called withtank. or rather, just plain tank.
It’s a CMS, just like Wordpress but the design of everything is just really really cool. It doesn’t have the option to extend into infinity (like some of the other open source CMS’s do) but it doesn’t need to, the sites they are targeting are all midgard, low level content sites. It just looks really cool.
I haven’t had the opportunity to play around with it enough, but I’ve signed up for my 1 month free trial.
The dev company are Cape Town based and is called thisarmy. Gettit? thisarmy built the tank. hehehe.
All the cool shit is always under the radar…
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