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]

Popularity: 44% [?]

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!

Popularity: 49% [?]

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.

Popularity: 39% [?]

mobimii.com, the mobile social utility, has launched its new beta version which officially opens MXit, MSN, Yahoo, GaduGadu, QQ and other IM transports as well as in-application browsing and content sharing for the first time in South Africa and globally!

No longer are MXit users bound to the MXit service, they can now chat one-on-one and in group rooms, share content, search profiles and network with other social systems all from one place on their mobile for free!

Key differentiators from other mobile applications are:

• IM Chat including transports such as MXit, mobimii, MSN, GTalk, AIM, QQ, GaduGadu
• IM Bots for aggregation of Facebook feeds and information
• IM Bots for advertising/sponsorships/information/etc
• Free group chat rooms
• Offline text messaging to drive IM Chat (To be activated with SMS sponsor)
• Integrated text messaging communication with IM Chat (To be activated with SMS sponsor)
• Text messaging from J2ME application (To be activated with SMS sponsor)
• Profile editing, preferences and picture uploading
• Friend finder and profile search
• Content upload and download (For applicable handsets)
• Content browsing and download
• Premium rate content download and advertising placement
• Mobile multi-player gaming currently being added

Popularity: 40% [?]

It’s been a week since I first heard off Plurk, and my first though was “not another Twitter”. I’m sure you know all the complaints users have on Twitter and looks like some smart guys wanted to prove that with a little bit more skills something great can be created.

I’m not going to call myself (and Charl) a Plurk guru, but for the last few days I’ve been using it and it sure is a great toy tool. Do you remember Mirc? Well Plurk is Mirc 2.0 and I’m sure it become the most popular microblogging /web IM solution simply because it’s much better.

The concept is great using a timeline to see whatever you friends are saying, Plurk introduces a new concept: karma. Plurk like hell and you’ll get the chance to change your name or to use special smilies when you want to express something. It also lets you divide your friends into “cliques”, meaning groups.

Plurk hasn’t experienced any downtime so far (relatively new), has a mobile version and should steal more and more Twitter users in the next couple of months. Although, we hope Plurk can scale their application as Twitter has suffered from continuous downtime the last few weeks.

Wanna join me on Plurk and tell me what you think ? Comment below if you want an invite..

[Updated 10 June 09:21am +2GMT]

Popularity: 48% [?]

Feedalizr is a Adobe Air desktop client that allows users to aggregate their Friend Feed account in a neat interface on their desktop. Launched earlier this year by SWAT (Strategic Worldwide Applications & Technologies) a division of Nasper’s MIH Internet, Feedalizr is one of the first quality Adobe Air applications to come out of South Africa.

Feedalizr recently launched their new version with major upgrades to the user interface, Flickr photo drag n drop integration and finally the most interesting feature: Feedalizr Video.

It’s pretty simple, you put your video directly into the Feedalizr application and all your Friend Feed subscribers will see it. Though you can record right from your camera in the applications it has one small drawback: the 30 seconds time limit which may not be enough to capture your entire message.

Some of the things you can do with the Feedalizr desktop application includes:

• Updates for Flickr, Pownce, or Twitter
• Updates filtered by friend,
• Post videos - which is rather seamless, and records right from your cam in the app
• Drag and drop or upload pictures directly to Flickr
• Instant updates

FriendFeed has a public API and Feedalizr seems to be one of the first apps based on the platform. You can follow the Feedalizr staff through their Friend Feed account.

What’s your favorite Adobe AIR app? Drop a link in the comments!

Popularity: 36% [?]