Basically we’re seen as untrustworthy by the rest of the world and are punished for that. The perception is definitely greater than the crime here. Africans appear to be untrustworthy but are by no means the biggest offenders when it comes to internet crimes as Erik showed in his post.

Erik suggests two solutions:

Too true, and there are only two ways that this might change:

First, we in Africa come up with our own payment and business solutions that work here first, and then interact with other global systems.

Second, the global corporates wake up and realize that there is quite a bit of spending power and money to be made in Africa, just like the mobile operators found out in the 90′s.

I’d like to pitch a third and more challenge-orientated solution; screw them. Forget those who punish us for being African. There are many, many business models that don’t have to include Paypal or the multitude of global corporates that punish us for where we live. Mobile is booming and Africa is at the cusp of this movement. We are setting the trends and defining the direction of where truly mobile products are going and should be going. We are the ones in control.

Yet the problem exists that we, as Africans have a persecution complex and insist on needing validation from certain places, companies and organisations to justify our success and movement forward. This is absurd.

Don’t get me wrong, I understand that there are viable reasons which make us need validation from Paypal and require us not to be banned by Google and blah blah. But there are many, many flourishing startups in South Africa and Africa that are not running off the back of these giants. I can name 5 off the top of my head.

We need to start setting the trends, bucking the trends and developing the roads instead of deciding that the roads aren’t tared with gold for us as Africans. We need to stop settling for mediocrity and start striving for cutting edge excellence that we define, as Africans on our continent.

The very outdated notion that there is not enough money in Africa to create a viable business model or revenue stream is long dead. There is money on this continent, there are users on this land that we occupy and there is massive, massive potential and hunger for new products and creation of wealth.

What we need to do now is stop leaning on the developed world, toss them to the curb and take control of our continent, businesses and business models. It might be a hard road to travel but in the long term it will be the most profitable in my opinion.

Twitter is such a great way to gauge whether a brands PR campaign is working. Until now you had to rely on some dodgy report and some old fashioned press clippings from your PR agency .

A few weeks back saw the launch of the “Legends of Echo” a multiplayer social game for mobile phones launched by The Grid team. It’s a cool game that maps South Africa in the echo and players build battle gear, trade and battle. So after a week of action I mapped Twitter activity of #legendsofecho and it’s pretty impressive.

This nodexl map shows the action across Twitter on #legendsofecho. Everyone on the map has mentioned, replied or retweeted #legendsofecho in the first 4 days. The lines between the participants indicate a tweet containing #legendsofecho. The bigger and messier the birds nest, the better. This indicates lots of conversations and a dense network. The size of the images indicates the number of followers that participant have on Twitter, which indicates that there are a number of rockstar participants.

So what does this really tell us?

Right now Legends of Echo is on the right track, the right people are saying cool things about the game. This is what every brand aspires to in a launch phase. But Legends of Echo has a way to go because right now the tweets have not yet expanded far enough beyond the product team. While there is conversation around the core group, @Nicharry is still central to the tweeting. In time the team wants to see many duplications of the map above, see it growing and @Nicharry and the @Legendsofecho tweeting becoming less central, then they will have reached an effective virality on Twitter.

I pulled this map a couple of days ago, about 5 days after the last one. It shows some interesting development. The twittershere around the core group has become quieter but there are some interesting developments, Legends of Echo has been picked up by people completely unconnected to the core group, this is show by the individuals and the small 3 and 4 connected groups along the bottom. This is good and bad news for the team. While it’s really exciting to see Legends of Echo picked up by unconnected others, however most of these peoples tweets were not retweeted or replied too (hence the isolated individuals). What one wants to see is that these groups grow to the size and bigger and mirror the birds nest type activity of the core group.

All in all it’s been a good first few weeks for echo on Twitter, I’ll keep watching and map the progress with interest.

*Disclaimer: Nicky Allen is the Marketing Coordinator for Legends of Echo.

I especially love the very loose use of the curse words that rock through the song. These guys are fast becoming my new heroes on the music scene.

Do it, buy the album, watch the video, blow the lid off this song and give these guys the exposure they deserve.

Here it is:

* Originally published on SA Rocks.

Today marks the launch of a project that I have been working on at Vodacom for the past 11 months or so. Legends of Echo is a massively multiplayer online location based mobile social game (and if you feel like it, you can throw in role-playing game in there). All in all that makes is a MMOLBMSG(RPG). There are going to be a few different acronyms that emerge for Legends of Echo (LoE) but I like the whole bang-shoot.

Let me not get ahead of myself here. I’ve been trying to keep this all in check but working on a product for 11 months means that I have a lot to say about it, it’s difficult to put it all out there in a sensible fashion.

Let’s begin at the beginning. Vincent Maher is my boss at Vodacom (he’s also a great friend of mine but that’s besides the point) and he hired me nearly a year ago to help him with a few projects. The most ambitious and innovative was Echo (as it was known back then). My first week I was thrown in to the non-existent deep end of a product that emerged out of Vincent’s insatiable appetite for innovation. LoE emerged from a need that Vincent and our technology partners, Afrigis, had to take The Grid’s technology to the next level (The Grid is the other major product that I manage at Vodacom).

What emerged out of Vincent’s mind and the technology that Afrigis had built for The Grid was the desire to build a location based mobile game.

There are many different facets to building a game. I had never dealt with any of these different facets. I was a game-building virgin if I can say it that way.

So to sum a few things up

This game is not just a game, it’s going to hopefully become a way of life for the players in the Echo. It’s an alternative reality where role-playing is the order of the day. You can be who you want to be and you define the story. There is no underlying story line here. We wanted the users to take this game to the level that they felt it should reach.

There is an entire economy in the game. There is a marketplace that players can use to buy and sell items. You can also use your own home base or Arcanium to sell items. Currency or Elements form a major part of strategy in LoE. But don’t be misled, the game does not require players to spend airtime to be successful. Standard data rates apply and that’s where the cost begins and ends if you don’t want to spend money. You don’t have to spend cash to be a legend in Echo.

We encountered many extremely interesting scenarios around the mechanics of the game. You’ll see them all unfold but one of the most exciting for me was whether we were building another social network where you could play a game or a game that allowed people to socially network. You can decide which one you think it is, but I think we’ve built a game and integrated social networking capabilities that allow gameplay to be user driven and defined.

Many, Many thanks

Being named as the Director of a project of this caliber is incredible and I’m extremely proud of what we are launching today. Having worked with the people I have worked with I need to thank many of them:

Vincent Maher provided incredible calm and steadfast guidance when it was called for. He definitely helped us stay on our toes and assisted me in bringing this game to life in absolutely every aspect of the development process. It’s always great to work with people who push you to do better and approach the norms from abnormal angles and Vincent is most definitely that person. Whatever happens with Legends of Echo this game has, without a doubt, been the high-point of my career and would never have happened if Vincent didn’t hire me and put his trust in me to get this game done. So my main word of thanks goes out to him, no doubt.

Pietman du Toit and Armand van der Merwe need special mention over at Afrigis, our technology partners on this project and The Grid. The two of them did a sterling job of managing me while I managed them and worked many, many, many long and hard hours to ensure that this game actually went live.

Rob Van Zyl from Pleasant Company did the most phenomenal job of making this game stand out and have immediate appeal. He also created fantastic debate in the group and helped us arrive at a killer game.

Cow Africa, our advertising agency went well above and beyond the every day workings of an advertising agency. They will be bringing the game to life in all of our above the line media that is to come. Watch out for that, it’s going to be epic.

Lastly I think it is necessary to thank Vodacom for having the foresight to allow a project of this nature to exist at all. Being innovative is always easy to speak about but very rarely ever achieved and I think we’ve come close as a team. We wouldn’t have been able to do so if Vodacom hadn’t have endorsed our ideas and way of thinking in the way that they have.

I am not going to repeat my esteemed colleagues, tech partners and our ad agency by regurgitating definitions and explanations by hand here. What I am going to do is quote Vincent’s blog post where he effectively explains what we’ve been doing for the past 11 months:

Be sure to head over and read Vincent’s entire blog post on Legends of Echo.

What is Legends of Echo?

We remapped the whole of South Africa into a steam-punk-ish world and packed it full of weapons and other items that people can pick up and use against each other.

The players are divided into 5 bloodlines – Earth, Water, Fire, Air and we added Industry. Each bloodline has two allied bloodlines and two mortal enemies and as players try to thrive in the Echo they will need to make complex political alliances to get the stuff they need – Elements. Elements are the lifeblood of a bloodline. You need them to build weapons, buy weapons, gifts and other items that you need to survive.

The game world has an in-game newspaper called the Echo Enquirer where players get the latest news – for example a massive stash of Fire Elements laying near the Spar in Wendywood, or a shift in the Eastern Cape bloodline domination, or a general call to arms.

And underlying all of this, a location-based system that knows where you are in the real world and hence where you are in the game world. There are over 60 000 real locations in the game, excluding every single suburb in the country. You can tell your friends to meet you on Signal Hill for a massacre at 5PM, or that your Arcanium (your house) is near the Engen Garage in Ventersdorp.

South Africa looks different in the Echo

Your Arcanium is also a shopfront, so if you find stuff in the Echo you can sell and trade it for Elements. Passers-by can enter your house and buy directly from you, even when you are not online.

The Artwork

When we started this project our goal was to make it as visually rich as possible without breaking the bank. Have a look at some of the graphics below, our creative director Rob Van Zyl from Pleasant Company did a fantastic job of translating and augmenting our vision. Our agency Cow Africa have done a fantastic job of keeping us all sane (unusual for an agency) and have done some amazing things with our launch media, the cinema ad, the radio campaign that will go on air soon and our AWESOME t-shirts.

There are lots of different kinds of weapons, powers and items that you can pick up by moving around the country from city to city, province to province. Each one gives you a slightly different edge in battle.

Each screen has been meticulously designed to look as good as it can on a mobile phone and there are tons more game graphics, wallpapers and other cool stuff available at legendsofecho.com.

Nic and I story-boarded every single screen in the game, every single menu item and all the paths a user can take. There are just over 190 screens in the game with many permutations depending on the context.

Social Vs Battle

One of the most entertaining things to do in the Echo is to find a completely random person and challenge her to a battle. The battle is fun and is greatly affected by the weapons and health items that you carry around with you. It’s not all about battle though, you can also chat with other users using intant messaging, or go to their Arcaniums and leave messages on the walls of their houses.

There is a Players and Chat section in the game that keeps a list of your contacts, shows you who is online (so you can teleport to them and fight them) and a section for chatting with each other.

The Technology

Our development partners, Afrigis (who also work on The Grid) have done an outstanding job of getting this game as scalable and bandwidth-light as possible. As it’s a mobile game one of the main objectives was to keep the volume of data transferred between the client and the server ultralight and we have got it to the point where it will cost you about R2 (out of bundle) to play for an hour which is really good considering the richness of the experience.

The backend is build on Darkstar, a project initially by Sun Microsytems and now RedDwarf at Oracle. Darkstar is build for this kind of thing and it works really really well. We have made some modifications to the code to optimise it for the mobile experience but we’re all quire sure the people at Oracle are going to be stoked to see what we did with their tech.

Some background – LoE’s precursor was a SMS game called OpenSeason built by RetroRabbit and Afrigis in 2004 and our script-writer was one of the original team who worked on that game. Things have progressed really far since OpenSeason though, as you will see when you look at the UI.

You can download the game by visiting the mobi site: http://www.legendsofecho.mobi and choosing the application that will work on your phone.

Follow Legends of Echo on Twitter for game updates and information.

Integrating television and social networks is, in my opinion, one of the most exciting things you can do because of the instant feedback loop you create by merging broadcast and interactive media. At the Mobile Web Africa conference last year Nic Haralambous and I started chatting with the eTV team (eTV is a national television station in South Africa) with the end goal of using The Grid’s location-based mood data to enhance one of their shows.

Today we launched the Sunrise MoodMaps on eTV to a national free-to-air audience and so far the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. During this initial stage we are showing the percentage happiness of each province in the country based on the previous 24-hours of aggregated mood data from our social network. We introduced the concept to the audience today and from tomorrow the maps will be integrated into the two news slots and during the Sunrise show. Nic and I are pretty certain no-one has done this before, please let us know if you find another example of a social network adding moods to a national news/weather show.

I will post video footage as soon as we get the files but below is a screenshot of our initial designs for the show. They do look slightly different to the on-air version but they will give you a good idea of what we’re doing.

Wrapping it with content

As things progress we want to move from general to specific in terms of what these maps show and you can see how this can very quickly become an instant mass polling tool that is greatly aided by the fact that we have location attached to our users.

While we were looking through the historical data for the week, as an example, we noticed that the murder of Eugene Terreblanche doubled the total volume of people who were angry on Sunday morning. On average though, the whole country was 6% happier because of the Easter holiday.

Working with the eTV team has been great – they are an amazingly innovative group of people who really get the space we’re playing in – and we’re looking forward to making the MoodMaps better every day.

We condemn in the strongest possible terms the reprisals against journalists by Shivambu. His actions constitute a blatant attack on media freedom and a grave infringement on Constitutional rights. It is a disturbing step towards dictatorial rule in South Africa. We call on the ANC and the ANC Youth League to distance themselves from the actions of Shivambu. The media have, time and again, been a vital democratic
safeguard by exposing the actions of individuals who have abused their positions of power for personal and political gain.

The press have played a vital role in the liberation struggle, operating under difficult and often dangerous conditions to document some of the most crucial moments in the struggle against apartheid. It is therefore distressing to note that certain people within the ruling party are willing to maliciously target journalists by invading their privacy and threatening their colleagues in a bid to silence them in their legitimate work.

We also note the breathtaking hubris displayed by Shivambu and the ANC Youth League President Julius Malema in their response to the letter of complaint. Shivambu and Malema clearly have no respect for the media and the rights afforded to the media by the Constitution of South Africa. Such a response serves only to reinforce the position that the motive for leaking the so-called dossier was not a legitimate concern, but a insolent effort to intimidate and bully a journalist who had exposed embarrassing information about the Youth League President.
We urge the ANC as a whole to reaffirm its commitment to media freedom and other Constitutional rights we enjoy as a country.

Blog Roll

http://thoughtleader.co.za/siphohlongwane
http://rwrant.co.za
http://vocfm.co.za/blogs/munadia/
http://vocfm.co.za/blogs/shafiqmorton/
http://blogs.news24.com/needpoint
http://capetowngirl.co.za
http://thoughtleader.co.za/sentletsediakanyo
http://thoughtleader.co.za/davidjsmith
http://letterdash.com/one-eye-only
http://boyuninterrupted.blogspot.com
http://amandasevasti.com
http://blog.empyrean.co.za/
http://letterdash.com/brencro
http://6000.co.za
http://chrisroper.co.za
http://pieftw.com
http://hamishpillay.wordpress.com
http://memoirs4kimya.blogspot.com
http://thoughtleader.co.za/azadessa
http://watkykjy.co.za
http://fredhatman.co.za
http://thelifeanddeathchronicles.blogspot.com/
http://blogs.timeslive.co.za/common-dialogue/
http://www.clivesimpkins.blogs.com/
http://mashadutoit.wordpress.com
http://nicharalambous.com
http://sarocks.co.za
http://blogs.timeslive.co.za/stompies/
http://helenmoffett.book.co.za/blog/
http://01universe.blogspot.com
http://groundwork.worpress.com
http://iwrotethisforyou.me
http://fionasnyckers.book.co.za
http://attentiontodetail.wordpress.com
http://blogs.women24.com/editor
http://www.missmillib.blogspot.com
http://snowgoose.co.za
http://dreamfoundry.co.za
http://www.vanoodle.blogspot.com
http://www.exmi.co.za
http://cat-dubai.blogspot.com
http://alistairfairweather.com
http://www.zanedickens.com
http://www.nickhuntdavis.com
http://guysa.blogspot.com
http://book.co.za
http://baldy.co.za
http://skinnylaminx.com
http://blogs.african-writing.com/zukiswa
http://www.mielie.wordpress.com
http://blogs.timeslive.co.za/gatherer/
http://thoughtleader.co.za/sarahbritten
http://stii.co.za
http://blogs.news24.com/FSB_AP
http://twistedkoeksuster.blogspot.com
http://whensmokegetsinyoureyes.blogspot.com/
http://trinklebean.wordpress.com
http://commentry.wordpress.com/
http://matthewbuckland.com
http://blogs.news24.com/colour-me-fran
http://gormendizer.co.za

I don’t think that you are, I’m not. No one is.

What I should be doing if I was a smart little blogger is move this blog to a mobile domain and spend some acquisition budget on getting readers to visit, follow me on twitter (via mobile) and click on my adverts.

But I’m not doing that. In fact before you can just launch in to mobile you need to understand it, entirely and I don’t think that there are many people who have a very high-level holistic understanding that is worth while and valuable.

You want some free advise? Learn about mobile SEO and sell your skills. Soon.

I tried to attach a photo but that didn’t work. Apparently you need to make a folder in wordpress writeable. You can take a photo with your phones camera and add it to the post which is nifty.

The app even tells you your battery life and signal. Nice one. Get the wordpress application now in the blackberry app store.

I searched around the web for a while until I found a way to download evernote to a Blackberry Storm. The Evernote site was of no help really. They seemed to bury the links deep in the site. But I did manage to find them!

Here are the links for Blackberry Storm and non-storm Blackberry’s:

BlackBerry (non-Storm): ZIP | OTA: http://s.evernote.com/bbota
BlackBerry Storm: ZIP | OTA: http://s.evernote.com/stormota

Simply enter those URL’s in to your phones browser and download the app. I’ve got it working on my Mac and my Storm. Very simple. Brilliant application. Lovely environment.

Read the open letter from OKGo for more info on the whole situation with the Label and YouTube.