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The very outdated notion that there is not enough money in Africa to create a viable business model or revenue stream is long dead.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.

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.

What will we all be doing in 5 years? Who can tell.

I studied to be a journalist. No, I studied to be a print journalist. And now I work in and around mobile social networking strategy and development.

Let’s just quickly repeat that: Mobile social networking strategy and development. I am almost 100% certain that when I started studying at Rhodes University in 2003 that my current job didn’t even exist.

There is one job in particular that is going to need a lot more focus in the coming years:

New media sales and advertising.

The reason that I think this job is becoming increasingly important and increasingly neglected is because there is a marked lack of skilled and experienced people to fill this position.

What does this position entail?

Sales and advertising has traditionally (back in the old days) been about selling and advertising products. Getting people to buy in to your product or getting advertisers to place an advert in to your publication, on to your store walls or on your car and so on.

Sales and advertising is becoming a much more complicated and intricate art. You cannot just sell banners, text links, full page adverts, splash screens, in-video sponsorships or product placements. Social networks and new media businesses need to have a salesperson who understands every aspect of the business. This person needs to be able to cross sell, integrate campaigns, work on new media, old media and media that might not exist yet.

What does this person need to succeed?

This person needs to understand CPC, CPA, CPM, CPSA and how to make these models work. This person needs to not only know what CRM stands for but what it actually is and how to make it relevant to the client.

This person needs to know who the client is or should be and how that clients business or latest campaign fits in to the business of a new media business.

Sales is shifting as fast as media is shifting and technology is growing and developing. The trick here is that technology, websites, mobile content and advancements can push forward as fast as they like but if there is no team able to monetize the products, there may as well not even be a product.

It’s time start thinking about integrated salespeople, sales teams, sales in relation to your core business and if sales actually might be your companies core business.

Mashable! today reports that Wordpress has launched two new mobile themes. But “mobile” here refers to iPhones and Android handsets not to the mobile market that we, in Africa, are referring to.

I’m interested to know how many 3rd world (low broadband) countries have Wordpress blogs. What is the number? Is it ten thousand, fifty thousand, more or less?

The reason I ask is because I have a feeling that if Wordpress was to start focusing on lower-end handset models in the mobile market they would open themselves up to a massively neglected market. The market that can’t afford “smartphones”, the market that can’t afford laptops, computers and fixed-line internet.

It’s interesting to think that in 1st world countries the term “mobile” refers to iPhone handsets or “smartphones”. What of the rest of the world? What of the people who don’t have these phones and can’t view the content they are looking for because it costs too much.

Meeting with Marc Smith this month was an eye-opener for many reasons. Firstly he told me that Obama winning a Nobel peace prize was not regarded in very high esteem by Americans. Why? Because if Europeans like their president there must be something wrong him. This seems to echo in the approach of many a large company playing in the online/mobile space.

Why is Wordpress not going after the African market? Why are they not providing those without fixed-line broadband an outlet for their mobile phones to read and write blogs?

To me it feels like a lack of insight and foresight.

OK, so social media isn’t almost dead but the fact remains that mobile is the now, new, next best thing. In fact, it’s not even the next best thing. It’s the best thing since social media and it’s here.

Vincent Maher just announced on his blog that The Grid is platinum sponsor for the event which will have some of the most prominent minds and personalities in the local mobile industry as well as some African speakers to engage with.

Some of the local regulars will be present but this time under the spotlight of mobile and the current developments happening.

This conference is finally something that doesn’t have a social media (web too point 0h n0) slant to it.

If you think you know, you have no idea.

Get on it.

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.

I think it might be. I have been watching closely over the past few months as newspaper after newspaper has fallen away in the US. It’s a very scary and very sad situation that American media finds itself in. Resistance to change over the past few years has positioned many papers in a dire situation where it’s a matter of shit or get off the pot. And many are shitting themselves.

Boston Globe is a one example that I have been watching withe extreme interest. Boston.com is a great resource that has not been used effectively enough to pull Boston Globe out of financial trouble.

The resistance to change coupled with a severe drop in advertising and circulation (with thanks to a recession and online media emerging as a force in the media industry) has left the Boston Globe almost crippled. Many people are set to lose jobs and Boston, the city, is set to lose it’s competitive media market. If Boston Globe closes down the city of Boston will be left with a single daily newspaper. This defeats the purpose of mainstream media acting as a democratic watchdog or fourth estate. With one media organisation remaining things are not looking good.

Enter hyper-local, location-based news content fed to mobile phones produced by hyper-local citizen media producers who put content up via cellphones on to hyper-local portals.

This is what Martin Langeveld of Nieman Journalism Lab had to say on the topic of Boston Globe:

Langeveld’s advice is to go (almost) online-only with Boston.com, and to launch or subsidise a network of hyperlocal sites all over the area, and launch a network of local niche verticals focussed on weather, traffic, jobs, entertainment, education and more. He proposes a tiered, variable pricing model for all, with most of the content free, but paid premium access for a “small but highly-engaged group.” This income could be supplemented with transactional revenue, through selling theatre tickets, for example, or facilitating restaurant reservations.

This model could also expose the Globe’s city-wide reach to a hyper-local market of advertisers (a longer tail than they would previously had access to). This coupled with a free/premium hybrid mode and the paper could be on its way back up.

Regarding the print side of things it’s a simple mechanic to alleviate some immediate strain: Make the paper a weekly and include the news created over the week from the hyper-local portals and citizens media. Pull city-wide, larger advertisers in to this weekly printed publication to subsidise the cost of the print and drop the price to allow for quantity to be sold and to make the paper appear to be more accessible to the everyday person in the street.

There is no quick-fix for papers such as the Boston Globe, that is certain. But it is imperative that these papers start to adapt or simply succumb to a swift death.

I didn’t really have anything solidified when I resigned from Zoopy so it is with great pleasure and pride that I can now say that I am moving to Vodacom as the Product Manager in the Social Networking Porfolio.

My time at Zoopy was well spent, I learned alot regarding myself, what I want to do and what I am good at. I also figured out where I think the market is heading, what the industry is doing and where I should be positioning myself.

Zoopy is doing fantastic things right now and are one of the online companies to watch this year.

I am going to be working very closely with Vincent Maher, who is going to be my new boss. I’ve worked with Vincent before and feel that I can only learn more and get better at what I do working at Vodacom for Vince.

If you haven’t realised it yet, mobile is not the next big thing, it’s the big thing.

Basically it’s a live mobile streaming service. You download the software to your phone. Open up the application and click “Stream”. The video is then recorded and streamed live to your Qik profile.

Find me at qik.com/nicharry

So what is the next big thing? What is going to make you famous? What will be the next Facebook or Google or fraction of these giants?

I have been hearing um’s and ah’s of the next “Killer App” or killer application. This phrase is taking a few different forms. Some more literal than others.

Andy Hadfield, on his blog, asked if Twitter is going mainstream. I knew what he meant but wanted to push the conversation to a different direction. I wanted to know what defines mainstream in South Africa since many of the online guru’s in SA think that the next Killer App is literally that, a single killer application that will launch a career, make a million or few and destroy the opposition.

This, as far as I can see, is an online impossibility right now. In fact, I think that it’s almost an impossibility for the next few years if you are talking strictly about fixed line internet. Even the coming Internet/broadband/fiber-optic revolution is going to take a while to penetrate the masses and therefore no online killer app in South Africa alone is going to be anything close to a killer app. It just wont.

Here’s a quick quote from my comment on Andy’s post:

I would be more inclined to argue that our precise problem here in SA is that we think a couple of thousand people makes something mainstream. The bare fact of the matter is that it needs to be a tool that is mainly used to be called mainstream (in my opinion only). Thus we could almost call facebook mainstream and be justified in that branding.

We could call Mxit mainstream and I would argue that Mxit trumps what twitter is trying to do.

So instead of us trying to push twitter in to the mainstream we should be looking at the ways the the majority of South Africans communicate (cellphones perhaps) and custom build a twitter-like solution that isn’t going to cost a bomb and provide the same functionality. Or would we call that Mxit or The Grid?

I think we need to think bigger, take products to market and then make them mainstream instead of trying to manipulate the word mainstream to suit our needs.

Simply branding something mainstream because the word was featured on the cover of a magazine with maybe 30 000 circulation cannot make something mainstream.

evl – “The prevailing current of thought, influence, or activity” – can you honestly say to me that twitter is a prevailing current of thought in the South African population, no, the South African ONLINE population. Even if we get the number of twitter users up to 10 000 South Africans that’s still probably between 3%-5% of all South Africans online on fixed internet using twitter. that’s not mainstream. that’s irrelevant.

There are three ways that I think Vincent will begin to see more local millionaires.

The first

is hyper-local content. That is what I think the next “Killer App” is. Hyper local is where it’s at when you combine it with the massive cellphone penetration in this country. An application like twitter is one that can be exceptionally successful in South Africa and reach mainstream status but while it is an online-centric application or service it is going to stay on the fringe in South Africa. We need to make hyper-local content contextual, relevant and easy to access. As far as I can see or believe in SA right now the contextualising of hyper-local and simplified content is going to be the winner.

The second

is a combination of things. The first entity is Africa. It’s one of the few untouched, untapped media markets. The second entity is mobile technology. The combination is a mashup of hyper-local, mobilised, African-centric content. I think that this, moving forward, could potentially be the combination of things that take South Africans in to the next realm of success (or the first depending on where you sit).

The third

is foresight. This is something that copyblogger has blogged about recently. We cannot beat those who entered this market first at their own game, especially not from where we sit.

From the Copyblog post:

The truth is, some models that worked a few years ago for early adopters are difficult if not impossible for new players to successfully get going today.

The key to avoiding this frustration is to see where things are going and become an early-adopter in the next big wave of the commercial Internet. Of course, even if you’re already doing well, it never hurts to take a look forward, right?

We need to sit where we sit, contextualise our problems, learn about our opposition and where the market is moving and make the first move. If we don’t make the first move we are going to be behind the early adopters again and have to wait man more years to have another chance to become the early adopters.

I am interested to know what others out there think the next Killer App will be, whether it is literally going to be a single application, a concept, a mindset, a minsdhift, a community or a project. Where’s the money at and is it actually about the money?