While a lot of internet minds were beginning to doubt Facebook’s ability to raise more venture capital after getting a huge $15 billion valuation following a $240 million investment from the blue monster, Microsoft, it seems the stakes are not too high for Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing, who dropped a $60 million investment in one of the most valuable Internet-only companies on the planet, according to sources close to Facebook.

Ka-shing is not making the investment in Facebook via the companies he controls, but through another investment entity. He also reserves the right to double his investment in Facebook with another $60 million round.

Ka-shing has plenty of zero’s in his bank account –he is considered the richest man in Asia and was named amongst the richest men in the world by Forbes last March with a personal fortune of $23 billion. Although, dispite his investment and that of Microsoft neither will acquire a seat on the Facebook board of directors.

Facebook has now raised just shy of $340 million in capital. That’s enough to keep them going as a private entity for years, if they choose to do so. It would be interesting to know Facebook’s capital burn rate per month to gage how long they can sit on their funding. It’s also interesting to note that this investment could possibly have strings attached with Li-Ka Shings company doing a joint venture with Facebook in Asia.

I just picked up that MyVideo has made changes to their interface with a sexy looking new header (pictured below) and a new content channel area called ‘iViews‘. Their new channel features interviews with prominent South African personalities. Surfing through the MyVideo site I was impressed with the quality of videos on display. I also noticed the MyVideo flyer ads on Facebook promoting their Minkie video which seemed to do well as the video has over 20k views.

In their own words regarding ‘iView’

South Africans are a diverse bunch. Some are incredibly intelligent, some are breathtakingly beautiful, some are both. An unlucky handful are neither. Every week on iViews, MyVideo brings you a fresh new video interview with a well-known South African – we’ll leave it up to you to decide which of the above descriptions they match most closely! Politicians, sports stars, top models, TV personalities – if they’re hot right now – in whatever way – we’ll bring them to you on iViews!

The new header

I attended the 27 Geek Dinner last night at Melrose Arch and witnessed the unveiling of Afrigator beta by one of the founders, Justin Hartman. Afrigator launched earlier this year in Alpha and has now emerged with the ‘beta tag’ and a host of new functionality.

With the new release the Afrigator team has focused on really turning the startup into a social media aggregator instead of just aggregating blogs. This is one of the most notable changes on the new homepage layout which now features podcasts and videos together with the latest blog posts. Down the right hand side the country channels have been kicked further down and have made way for a nifty tabbed content box featuring the latest and most popular aggregated data. Also down the right is the new home for content tags which have been moved from the original loading view.

Venturing deeper into the site you will find a host of new areas – News, Podcasts and Videos. Afrigator has been integrated with the Youtube api so you can provide your Youtube account details and see your videos stream onto the site. They plan to integrate various api’s from the leading social platforms on the web likely Flickr as well which will be a part of a new images section launching in ’3 weeks’ according to Justin/Stii. Read the rest of this entry »

Nielsen//NetRatings, a global leader in Internet media and market research, has revealed the sectors and brands where South Africans are spending the most time online. Categories where online South Africans are spending most of their time online are as follows. News & Weather sites accounted for 23% of all time spent by South Africans online (1.1 million hours) followed by Media & Publishing sites – 16% (0.8 million hours). The ten most engaging categories account for 92% of all time spent by South Africans online.

Alex Burmaster, European Internet Analyst, at Nielsen//NetRatings, comments,

“The online sectors where South Africans spend most of their time highlights the power of the Internet as an information resource. Almost one in every four minutes online is accounted for by a news and weather site.”

It’s also worth noting that the popularity of a sector isn’t necessarily aligned with how much total time it accounts for. Employment, for example, is the ninth most popular category but ranks as the sixth leading sector by total time.

Alex comments further

“The dominance of Media24 in the South African landscape is astonishing when one considers that just over one in every four minutes online is spent within their sites – and when comparing that to the most dominant brands in other countries.

MSN, for example, is the most dominant brand in the UK in terms of time, yet accounts for ‘just’ 12% of total time. Similarly in Australia it’s Nine/MSN which also accounts for 12% and, in the US, it’s AOL which accounts for ‘just’ 9% of total time.”

By category

By Brand

[Source Nielsen//NetRatings]

Introducing our latest blogging editor to BandwidthBlog, uber Tech Geek, Johan du Toit

Great developments in the ICT market this year (2007) opened up great new opportunities to save some hard earned cash. Vodacom dropped data rates, by as much as 61%, while also expanding 3G networks. MTN followed. Smartphones took off in a big way and clever developers seized the opportunity to get compatible software to market.

Fring is such an application. This great piece of software is easy to use, while also being feature rich. Registration and software installation is quick and easy. Just visit http://www.fring.com. It is compatible with most smartphones. It enables you to make calls to your Skype®, MSN® Messenger, ICQ, Google Talk™, SIP and Twitter contacts. The best part is that it is all free. You only pay for your data, but at 10MB per hour it is hardly worth mentioning. The only obstacle to all voice communication to become totally free is that everyone has not installed it yet. It will happen. The drive is huge from the likes of Skype, Google, Fring and Yeigo to become the dominant player in the mobile VoIP arena.

I thought a comparison between Fring and Telkom would be of great interest to us South Africans, since our call and data rates are amongst the highest in the world. If you drop your landline and use this information, you could save good money. You also get to go totally mobile for good.

Just the fact that you have read this far, must mean that you probably already subscribe to some data deal. In my research I used the most expensive rate at R2.00/MB, so you should save even more. To simplify matters, only peak minutes was considered. This makes the table below relevant for small businesses. A thumb suck total, of 300 minutes per month, was divided into different call types. Voipcheap (http://www.voipcheap.com) has the lowest VoIP rates in the world. All calls to the USA are free! All UK landline calls is also free. In this example the saving was 46%. I say it is well worth it. Go for it.

The Chart:

Other South Africa alternatives – Yeigo

I received a pleasant surprise this morning when I got a Hulu private beta invite to check out the site and write a review. There has been wide spread coverage of the launch with mixed reviews. Mainly because NBC and News corp (Myspace owners) failed to pick a name for the project right up until the launch – they eventually settled on ‘Hulu’ which means “cease” and “desist” in Swahili (apparently). Before Hulu was called “Clown co.” for not picking a name some called the site the “youtube killer“, not likely. There is no video sharing and very little user interaction besides creating your own play lists from all the titles available. Hulu is more an online distribution channel for premium video content, including TV shows, movies, and short clips which is all supplied by the big media houses such as NBC.

Content on Hulu such as TV shows will come from Fox and NBC, and over fifteen cable channels. Movies will come from Fox and Universal, and following a deal signed just this Friday, from Sony and MGM as well.

Hulu’s design is very impressive – minimalist, clean and sleek. Hulu has done a good job keeping the user interface simple and highlighting the actual content of the site. The video is high quality which is one positive it has compared to the compressed low quality videos you experience on Youtube and co.

Hulu also exists as a distribution network of premium video content for several online destinations – AOL, MSN, MySpace, Comcast, and Yahoo – that will display Hulu’s videos for free but in their own branded players. In addition to these partnerships, users themselves form a viral distribution network for Hulu since they allow its videos to be embedded in any website and shared via email. Unfortunately, (for us) no videos can be downloaded from the site or from their media partners but only viewable through the web based flash player.

My first impressions of Hulu are satisfactory and I think the media had it all wrong about the project killing off other video sharing sites – It’s merely a destination to catch your favourite shows in case you missed it on the PVR the night before

Hulu CEO, Jason Kilar, describes why Hulu?

“Objectively, Hulu is short, easy to spell, easy to pronounce, and rhymes with itself. Subjectively, Hulu strikes us as an inherently fun name, one that captures the spirit of the service we’re building.”

Hulu screens –

Video player – quite nifty

Netbuzz launched today featuring the latest news from South Africa’s top news houses mixed with some of the leading blogging personalities in the coza namespace. The site aims to be a one stop destination for all the news buzz in South Africa. If you entertain a lot of feeds everyday in your reader Netbuzz will be a good stop in your morning news consumption to get a grip on the latest news headlines.

Discription from the site

Netbuzz aggregates the latest news and images from the top publishers in South Africa creating a one stop destination to get your buzz of internet news.

Screen shot

Visit

Zuckerberg announced today (read liveblog at TechCrunch) the new monetization scheme, Social Ads, to finally turn their billions of page views and detailed user information into dollar signs for Facebook, inc. I’m glad they’re looking at things other than the sidebar skyscrapper, because we, as users, STILL DON’T SEE IT. Whether it’s relevant or not, there’s so much to see and do at Facebook that we zone it out, worse even than the TV commercials that we half listen to.

Microsoft won’t be serving Social Ads. This will be controlled by Facebook. Zuckerberg clarifies: “Microsoft is the exclusive third-party provider of IAB standard ads. This is not going to go through Microsoft. We think it is a different kind of advertising.”

“The pricing mechanism will be completely auction-based. People can either bid for a CPC or a CPM.”

I believe this is the first peek of Facebook’s new ad scheme. You can see the ads down the left column. It was widely believed they would be similar to AdWords and they are.

The ads are not contextually accurate but this is obviously a pre-beta rollout. They will have no trouble attracting advertisers to plug the 10′s of thousands of targets once the platform is live. My first impression is the ads are unobtrusive and properly placed, although as mentioned these particular ads seem very run of the mill spam style advertisements.

More Facebook news

Microsoft buys 2% of Facebook for $240 Mil
Rumour: Facebook To Launch MP3 Store?
Facebook friend grouping on the way
Web stats are in: Facebook up 117%, Xanga the big loser -44%