GelaSkins has released a range of visual candy for the Apple iPhone to cover the back of the phone and come with matching dowloadable wallpapers for the screen. You can now pimp out your iPhone with it’s very own skin to seperate your iPhone or iPhone 3G from the rest of the pack.

Breaking news: Zoopy has just reported on their company blog that South African cellular giant Vodacom has acquired a 40% stake in the local video sharing service (they have blogging and photo sharing as well). Vodacom will likely provide the finance and infrastructure Zoopy needs to innovate and grow their community. The synergies between their social platform and Vodacom’s mobile ambitions is another interesting match.

Earlier this year local social networking technology company, BWCOM, was acquired by Naspers. BWCOM owns social networks Blueworld, Zoopedup and GayPeers. Is this the attention the local web startup industry needs to gain more confidence from venture capitalists so entrepreneurs don’t have to sell off large portions of their equity to take their business to the next level?

Congrats to Jason Elk and his team

Here is Voda’s press release

Vodacom, South Africa’s Leading Cellular Network, today announced that it has secured a stake in Zoopy.com, a South African-based social media community website.

Launched in March 2007, Zoopy.com allows its users to upload and share videos, photos, podcasts and blogs. In just over a year, Zoopy.com have established themselves as a significant player in the user-generated content space in Africa, with Nokia selecting them as their regional imaging partner for South and West Africa. More recently, Zoopy.com was also chosen as Mail & Guardian’s Online video delivery partner.
This deal will give Vodacom a 40% stake in the South African startup and affirms its change in direction by entering the multimedia market. According to Tlhabeli C Ralebitso, Managing Director, Vodacom Ventures, the investment is an important move at just the right time for both parties. “Zoopy.com has established itself as a key role-player in the online social media arena and has a growing community that will now be able to grow bigger, better and faster.
“Vodacom puts great value in what has been achieved online thus far, and we look forward to combining mobile and internet strengths to create an even more valuable destination for all Zoopy.com users.”

CEO of Zoopy.com, Jason Elk, is pleased at having found the “perfect partner”. “At the beginning of this year we realised that we needed investment to roll out our strategy to its full potential. But from the start we were quite specific about the partner we were looking for.

“Funding was important, of course, but we wanted our investor to add value to the overall Zoopy.com user experience too. With Vodacom at our side, we’ll be able to bring many new features and opportunities to both their users and ours. This is exactly what we were looking for and we can’t wait to make it happen.”

[Disclaimer - Charl Norman is the author of this post, owner of Bandwidth Blog and share holder in BWCOM]

There’s been a lot of rumors and speculation surrounding the 3G iPhone coming to the shores of Africa. As many naysayers have annouced, “Even South Africa has no iTunes Music Store and the Apple presence in South Africa is meager”. All this deliberation has been proven inaccurate as Vodacom announced they’ll be offering the 3G iphone to their customers by the 20th of July 2008, this is part of the ten-country deal that Vodafone has signed with Apple to supply the iPhone to the continent.

It is expected that the new iPhone will come in a variety of colours and with 3G connectivity, integrated GPS and other new exciting features. South Africa will undoubtedly receive this version of the device.

The next generation of iPhone appears set to claim exclusive access to advanced graphics core and video decoding technology, thanks to a licensing deal between Apple, mobile graphics leader Imagination Technologies, and Samsung. Imagination’s next generation graphics core, the PowerVR SGX, introduces OpenGL ES 2.0 support, along with a Universal Scalable Shader Engine that provides mobile devices with highly efficient, shader-based 3D graphics with better performance and efficiency.

This is a very exciting time for iPhone users as it’s setting the standard for portable devices that support 3d graphics. Possibly in the future, mobile devices such as the 3G iPhone can support 3d rendering and image creation platforms such as Maya or 3d studio max.

BandwidthBlog posted the scoop a few months ago about the new M&G site layout and I’m sure you remember it. Vincent Maher head strategist for M&G and Amatomu co-founder, showed it to Charl months and months ago, but today ladies and gents the wait is over. We have the final version which should be ready to go live soon.

Took them a lot of time to renovate their website but M&G Online now includes a world-class design that’s based on a more spacious and sophisticated layout, which should offer a very easy and comfortable browsing experience. They’ve also implemented social media functionality by combining features from Thought Leader, South African blog aggregator Amatomu, and News in Photos sites.

Some say it may be faster than the older version. I agree.

Most important features of the new Mail & Guardian Online are:

• Save clippings of favourite articles and publish these on their own clippings blogs.
• The StoryPredictor suggests articles according to reader interests.
• See who is viewing which article on the M&G Online in real time with NewsSwarm.
• Enjoy better and centralised management of newsletter subscriptions.
• Use advanced article printing functionality.
• Add blog and news feeds from other online sources.
• Receive special announcements from the M&G Online.
• Use the ReadersChoice system to vote for articles or add articles from other sites.
• Explore major e-commerce areas: jobs, cars, dating, property and shopping.
• View related articles from other news websites.
• Comment on all articles and debate with other M&G Online readers.
• View a basic video feed of world news from AFP

Just for the records here’s a comparison : before and after.

We at BandwidthBlog have always been harsh and hard with newcomers or changes, but this time it’s almost a perfect A. Good job to all those that worked hard hours on beer and pizza to come up with the new layout. It’s looking great!

Apple customers and especially iPhone users seem to be an elitist group of people using only top notch technology. Therefore, the idea of creating a social network and include all of them, is not good but incredible. What would you say if there would be a mobile social network where you could see where your friends are or who in your area would be interested to go out on a coffee? Pretty neat, and obviously a big success if built right!

The new 3G iPhone was announced last week with a lot of buzz and once again it confirmed that no matter how good or bad, Apple fans will buy it no matter what. They worship it.

About the mobile social network for iPhone users, I still think it’s going to be a hit and its killer feature would be meeting new people. This may not be the reason why I would join, but this kind of features would really bring a lot of users in. Dating on your iPhone, sounds pretty cool, don’t you think?

Right now, Berkeley-based Fon11, developed something similar. Those who’d like to become a member will have to use the iPhone’s browser in order to register for an account, add friends or any other stuff. Though we’re not sure if you need the new 3G iPhone or if the old one should do, we do know that the application is limited right now. Wwe’ll keep an eye on these guys and see how they advance.

I had a thought on Twitter a few days ago: Could a Google acquisition of Twitter help the service scale? Or is it not an infrastructure issue but more a platform issue? Twitter has suffered from serious downtime over the last few weeks, trying to keep their service live during peak usage periods. They managed a 97% uptime during the WWDC keynote, which is’good’ by Twitters standards.

Would a Google acquisition be healthy for Twitter? One can’t help but to think about what has happened to other startups gobbled up by the search giant. Since the acquisition of similar life streaming service Jaiku, the community has suffered from negligence on Google’s behalf, much like the Dodgeball acquisition, an acquisition Google made in 2005 and never really did anything with. Some Jaiku users have even revolted and moved over to Twitter. Google’s strategy to gobble up small startups and then do nothing with them is an interesting one.

Then again Twitter has a strong community which won’t be affected by an acquisition from any big player. Youtube also has a strong community and flourished under Google’s guidance after the historic acquisition for $1.5 billion.

Google has plenty of infrastructure that Twitter could use to minimize downtime so that it could stick to focusing on innovation. They have been slow to roll out service updates, likely because of the scaling issues. During the WWDC keynote, it even disabled some functionality to try stay up. One of Twitter’s smaller rivals, FriendFeed, has consistently announced new features and innovated on its platform.

But does Twitter want to sell? With only a couple of million dollars in funding, selling Twitter would be a nice cash out for the founders and the VCs that back them. Google has the bank to buy Twitter, which would likely come with a hefty price tag despite no real revenue model. Although I’m sure Google looked at Twitter before the Jaiku buy, seeing as Ev Williams, one of the Twitter founders, also founded Blogger, which was sold to Google as one of the first web 2.0 acquisitions.

Imagine what an interesting mash up it would be to monetize your tweets with your Google Adsense account! Google has monetized conversation well with GMail, so doing the same for Twitter could work.

This blog post is from my Tech Leader blog.

Update – Vodacom has pushed back the release of the iPhone to late August because of huge international demand which resulted in low iPhone 3G stock levels.

So many people, expected Steve Jobs to come on the stage and make the new 3G iPhone official so that the media could crown it once again as king of cellphones. It happened!

Though the most interesting /expected feature was 3G the new iPhone has thinner edges, a full plastic back, a flush headphone jack and the iPhone 2.0 firmware. Also the 3G connection should be 2x faster than the old iPhones and will definitely trounce the competition, with pageloads 36% faster than the N95 and Treo 750.

But have I told you the price? The 8GB should sell for $199 while the 16GB version should be $299. Isn’t it great?The 3G iPhone is expected on the market on July 11th in 22 countries around the world while the rest, up to 70 demanding nations, will get in a month or so.

One last thing that really impressed me with Apple’s strategy is the fact that those customers who purchased a 2.5G iPhone on or after May 27 and want to swap it out for a new (3G) iPhone will be able to do so without incurring an additional handset charge.

Vodacom is to announce in July when they plan to release iPhone 2 in SA.