Nicisms

Innovation is such an exception thing to strive for. And I think that I am incredibly fortunate to land up in the market that I am in. Mobile is an innovative space.

Let me not get caught up in my own head and clearly lay out what I intend to say:

It’s simple idea but on that only recently dawned on me. I am fortunate to be in an innovate environment. Imagine if I was still a print writer? I’d be doing the same thing over and over and over, every day. I’d call my contacts, I’d gather information and construct a story from the information, I’d conduct an interview and write the story which would be edited, sub-edited and cut-up by the mechanisms in place. My byline would appear in the paper and the sun would set and rise again to repeat the cycle. Sure the focus of the story changes but more often than not it’s the same mechanisms.

Let’s look at an accountant, yes there are challenges in every client that an account might audit, but on the whole there is very little innovation in their market. Pascal might come out with an update, a law might be tweaked here and there and if an account is lucky they land an extremely strange client who they enjoy auditing, but the premise is the same, the actions are the same, the results are the same. NOTHING is new from year to year in the way that they do things.

Very similar situations apply to Lawyers, many GPs (which is a pet hate of mine), Judges and many other careers, career choices, markets and industries. There is very little that drives innovation.

Then you move in to the mobile industry and the market is booming, filled with innovation and change, constantly. That appeals to me.

Now don’t misunderstand me, I am not saying that other jobs or industries aren’t appealing and don’t have their own, relative levels of what some might term innovation. But where I am right now things change on a daily basis. My job spec today could be completely different tomorrow and in every likelihood will be entirely different next year when my current projects launch.

This motivates me and this keeps me interested in what I am doing. I hate being stagnant and I hate reaching a point where maintenance of a job is more common than innovation, creation and envelope pushing.

If you haven’t seen the video on youtube that was posted by two mentally unstable (surely?) teens in the USA then best you watch the news report below.

I am not mad about pets, they just aren’t my cup of tea, however i am well aware of animal abuse and it sickens me. I don’t understand how the abuse of an animal aids or assists the assailants in any way, shape or form. It’s ridiculous and uncalled for.

But the thing about the video above that absolutely intrigues me is how anti-animal-abuse people online who saw the video banded together and figured out exactly who was behind the mask in the video.

Watch the video again and notice how people jumped online, searched for the youtube users name and aliases online, gather images from the web relating to the user and pieced them together to factually define who the person was and where they were in the country.

Now this is a chicken and egg situation. Sure if there was no YouTube then the video wouldn’t have been online and one could argue that the act of abuse wouldn’t have taken place. But let’s assume that these unstable cowards are just that, unstable. Chances are they would be abusing animals with or without a platform to display their barbarous behaviour. So without the internet these animals (not the cat) would still be abusive. With the internet they were caught thanks to the dedication and keen eye of a few social media users and the tools at their disposal.

The future of social media is endless, the applications of the technology are endless and the potential to use these tools effectively is endless.

It’s fast moving towards the final day of 2008. What a year it has been. I usually (much like many bloggers) put together an end-of-year post that sums up a few things and pulls together events all nicely. I am going to be composing one of those articles but this isn’t it.

This post is a collection of answers from some of the top people, movers and shakers and industry leaders in the online market. I asked them two questions:

1. What was the single most defining moment in the South African online industry in 2008?

And

2. If you were to make one prediction for 2009 what would it be? And don’t tell me that mobile is the next big thing!

So let’s dive straight in to the answers:

Fred Roed, CEO of digital marketing agency, World Wide Creative.

1. Barack Obama winning the election. This meant that digital agencies such as World Wide Creative could justify their presentations demo-ing how messages are accelerated online. We could say ‘See! Look how he did it!’

2. Hype around Mobile and Social Media will be removed from the industry, meaning that digital will go mainstream. Following the international norm, marketing agencies will increasingly use online as the major destination point for all the other channels to feed into.

Vincent Maher, Portfolio Manager for Social Networking at Vodacom SA

1. For me the defining aspect of the whole year is that there didn’t seem to be a defining moment. There we a few things that happened but none of them were defining in the classic sense. In many ways this is a sign of maturity in the industry and an indication of resilience to smaller influences.

2. The breadth and reach of social networking is going to increase through services like Google FriendConnect and Facebook Connect and this will also reveal several vulnerabilities in the form of viruses and spam across these networks. Location-based services are going to become more accessible on the API level for developers to incorporate and, importantly, the global financial meltdown is going to cull a lot of the flimsy Web 2 operations and make the industry a little more intersting.

Andy Hadfield, The Internet & Social Media Guy, FNB

1. The credit crisis. The credit crisis is probably going to precipitate Bubble 2.0 – which is excellent news. Unlike last time, there have been precious few IPO’s, which means while many web startups may go down – they won’t take public shareholders with them. And any bubble burst presents a great opportunity for web companies that offer REAL value to rise to the fore. Oh, and Twitter. But it seems 3 million really active users still counts for value in someone’s book

2. The battle to own the social profile will increase. FaceBook vs MySpace vs Google Friend Connect vs Et Al are going to muddy the waters for the first 6 – 8 months of the year. Hopefully, coming out of that will be value driven profiling services which allow you to centrally store your social profile, pick it up whenever you want and hop all over the web. Let’s face it: storing a picture, bio and web links is not a value driven social profile. These companies are going to have push the boundaries a little to force consumers to make a call on where their social data and social networking time investment will sit…

Heather Ford – Web social entrepreneur

1. Quality Vacation Club suing blogger Donn Edwards
(http://donnedwards.openaccess.co.za/) for defamation. I think it’s
important because, while the same comments have come from the
mainstream media, QVC has chosen to sue the blogger. It will be
interesting to see how this turns out – at the crux, I think, is
whether ‘fair comment’ on a blog is being seen by South African courts
as equal in importance to ‘fair comment’.

2. My prediction is that we’re going to see greater diversity in the
South African blogging community next year – people linking to those
outside of their social circles, invitations to bloggers’ social
gatherings like the 27 dinner, and more training and connections
(here’s hoping!)

Duncan McLeod, technology editor, Financial Mail, and editor of www.FMTech.co.za

1. Definitely Altech’s victory against communications minister Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri which now allows just about anyone to build a communications network in competition with incumbent operators such as Telkom, Neotel and the mobile phone providers.

2. Bandwidth caps will soar — people will get at least triple the bandwidth for the same price — as Seacom comes online. This will lead to strong growth in online business in SA in 2009.

Charl Norman is the co founder and chief operations manager (COO) for Blueworld Communities. BWCOM owns numerous niche social networks based in South Africa.

1. Blueworld Communities (www.bwcom.co.za) being acquired by Naspers – this paved the way for other acquisitions in our local space – Zoopy and Afrigator soon followed with investment from Vodacom and MIH/Naspers. This created investor confidence in our small local market and enabled other startups to more confidently seek investment.

2. The economic crisis will slow down venture capital investments and startups unable to figure out their revenue model will have their funding reviewed or forced to merge with other similar lower tier startups.

Users will own their online identity (e.g. profiles) with tools like Google and Facebook connect. Users will carry this identity along with them around the web forcing online communities like social networks to embrace data portability technology.

Social media will also become more mainstream as tools like Twitter will be adopted by the general public and not just geeks. Good companies will have concrete social media strategies as part of their overall marketing strategy.

Catherine Luchoff is joint partner and founding member of MANGO-OMC

1. There isn’t one particular moment I can single out as the defining moment of 2008. Rather, I consider 2008 to be a defining year: One in which social media, crowd sourcing and micro-blogging found their footing and laid the foundation for converged campaigns that will, and have, defined the way we communicate and consume information.

2. With filter failure on the rise and information overload rife, community manager positions and descriptions such as ‘trusted filter’ will become more prominent. 2009 will also be the year in which the foundation for a holistic measurement tool, one that takes all channels into account (online, offline and mobile), will be defined.

Interesting stuff. Hopefully those who didn’t get to the questions will be able to post their responses in the comments of this post. I sent the email out to ±25 people for their comment.

Yes, it’s true. Well, it must be true because people have been receiving this message from “Facebook Founder: Mark Zuckerber” – isn’t there a “g” on the end of his name?

Anyways, here’s the message that’s been floating around and around. I haven’t personally received it but a friend sent it to me in an email after contacting me on Facebook in a frantic spin talking about the internet running out of space.

Attention all Facebook members.
Facebook is recently becoming very overpopulated,
There have been many members complaining that Facebook
is becoming very slow.Record shows that the reason is
that there are too many non-active Facebook members
And on the other side too many new Facebook members.
We will be sending this messages around to see if the
Members are active or not,If you’re active please send
to 15 other users using Copy+Paste to show that you are active
Those who do not send this message within 2 weeks,
The user will be deleted without hesitation to create more space,
If Facebook is still overpopulated we kindly ask for donations but until then send this message to all your friends and make sure you send
this message to show me that your active and not deleted.

Founder of Facebook
Mark Zuckerber

Well, I am trying to be as “inactive as possible” so that I can test this little theory and maybe be saved from Facebook. Please Mr Zuckerber, delete me.

I just received a very interesting email.

Here it is:

Hi Nic,

Thought this might of interest to you. If you access the Internet via your
mobile, and you are a Vodacom subscriber, I’m sure you’ve run into some
difficulty especially with sites like Twitter.

The Internet Society of South Africa released a statement strongly
condemning Vodacom’s actions. The full statement is below.

Let me know if you need some additional info. ISOC-ZA’s past chairman Alan
Levin is the official spokesperson for ISOC-ZA on this, and his contact
details are below if you want to chat with him.

Hope you have a great weekend!

Cheers,

Sentient Communications CC

ISOC-ZA strongly condemns Vodacom behaviour

On Wednesday, June 25, 2008 Vodacom claimed to revolutionise Internet
on the cellphone. They falsely claimed that millions of Vodacom
customers now (effectively) have the same experience of the Internet
on their cellphones as they do on a PC. In reality Vodacom have broken
the Internet for these millions of customers. This came without any
warning and ISOC-ZA is united against this sort of behaviour.

Various applications that include instant messaging, banking,
specialised mobile applications such as email, Youtube, Twitter, Fring
and at least a dozen others, are no longer working. In technical terms,
Vodacom installed a proxy service that was not sufficiently tested.
As one blogger so correctly pointed out: “Vodacom is essentially using the
public as subjects for an alpha test of their technology” (Flint.za 25 June)

The technology that Vodacom is using is not standards compliant and,
considering Vodacom¹s position as a dominant ISP, it should behave in a more
responsible fashion. Furthermore, some of our members have claimed that
Vodacom block many applications that it feels may threaten its business.
While we have no direct evidence of this, we appeal to Vodacom to disclose
what it blocks and intercepts on its networks.

Happily, some users have worked out how to bypass the new Vodacom changes
and ISOC-ZA urges all mobile Internet users to make use of this should they
too be unhappy with Vodacom¹s actions.

There are a number of bypasses freely available on the Internet, and are
simple to affect.

For example: If you use a Nokia phone then the following should work:
Access:

Tools
Settings
Connection
Access points
Vodacom
Options
Advanced Settings
Remove the Proxy server address

About ISOC
The Internet Society is a global not-for-profit membership organisation
founded in 1991 to provide leadership in the management of Internet
related standards, educational, and policy development issues. It has
chapters in over 90 countries around the world. Through its current
initiatives in support of education and training, Internet standards
and protocol, and public policy, ISOC has played a critical role in
ensuring that the Internet has developed in a stable and open manner.
It is the organizational home of the Internet Engineering Task Force
(IETF), the Internet Architecture Board (IAB), the Internet
Engineering Steering Group (IESG) and other Internet-related bodies.

I’ve removed names until I can do a bit more background research and chat to a few more people. But I just tried to access twitter mobile…it didn’t work. This doesn’t look promising for Vodacom and their mobile internet tactics.