MANGO-OMC is a Cape Town based public relations and communications consultancy behind some of the leading social media and traditional PR campaigns we have witnessed in our local market this year. Bandwidth blog continues our series of office photos and take you inside the clean white offices of MANGO-OMC.

Launched this year in May, Nimbuzz is a free application that allows your internet enabled mobile phone to call, chat and text all your friends on most important communities including Skype, MSN, G Talk, AIM, Yahoo, and the list can continue.

The fact that they’re highly successful and serve more than 10 million logins each day and growing by 10,000 – after a successful deal with the Germans from StudiVZ, is not news anymore. But bringing in some Apple love, is.

Apparently the smart Nimbuzz guys managed to come up with an iPhone and iPod Touch compatible version and are working their arses to get the Facebook and Myspace chat on it. Sounds like a good deal if you ask me, so here is Nimbuzz in the iTunes App Store.

Google I/O ’08 Keynote: Imagination, Immediacy, and Innovation… and a little glimpse under the hood at Google

Marissa Mayer has been with Google for 9 years, helping to build Google into one of the world’s most popular web services. As the VP of Search and User Experience, her team is behind some of Google’s most popular and successful products including core web search, images, news, books, maps, iGoogle, toolbar, desktop, and health. This talk is a glimpse from inside the trenches of how Google builds products (including practical insights on how to build the best products), how to prioritize your efforts especially under resource constraints, and how to think about strategy.

Users who have updated their iPhones to OS 2.2 are facing some significant issues, including problems with applications from the app store, Internet connection issues, problems deleting their mail and more.

Third-party Applications broken – Some third-party applications will no longer function properly under iPhone OS 2.2 due to API changes and other modifications. These include a number of applications that make use of CoreAudio. These applications will generally need to be updated by their developers. However, you can try uninstalling then reinstalling applications for problems that do not involve API or other strict compatibility problems.

“Could not Connect to Internet” – Some users are encountering an inability to connect to the Internet over cellular networks after the iPhone OS 2.2 update. In some cases, this issue can be resolved by switching from 3G to EDGE (or, for carriers other than AT&T, the appropriate GPRS network).

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Like there wouldn’t be enough birthday reminder websites on the Internet, Facebook is trying to get their piece, too. For those using the service, it does sound like a good idea to have everything together rather than trying to find birthday alert services to do the same job.

But, if you ask me if they’ll get a good portion of the slice, I think they won’t.

Go into your account, check out the Facebook section and then click on Show More. Here you’ll find the “Has a birthday coming up” box that you can select. They’ll send you an email each time your friends have birthdays coming up. You’ll forget a birthday ever again, they say.

However, what I don’t get is why build their own, when there were many applications that did exactly the same.

Afrigator Internet today announced the launch of Adgator, Africa’s first blog ad network tailored specifically for South Africa. The Adgator network is aimed at helping advertisers get in to the conversation while offering bloggers the chance to earn money from their sites.

Justin Hartman, MD of Afrigator, said that “the Adgator network is a way for advertisers to reach thousands of South Africa’s top bloggers and blog readers.”

“Our simple but powerful system allows an advertiser to serve relevant and targeted advertising on a blogger’s site and collectively Adgator has a reach of more than 1.7 million unique readers – making it as powerful as News24 in terms of audience reach.”

Relevance is the key

One of the key features of Adgator is the ability to serve the right ad to the right readers. Hartman adds that “we have identified the primary focus of our bloggers’ content, and as such, we can serve ads relevant to what they write about. This means that when readers arrive at the site, the ad actually makes sense. No more wasted impressions, no more deaf ears.”

Generous Revenue Sharing

Revenue earned on the Adgator network is shared straight down the middle with bloggers. Adgator is offering bloggers an unprecedented 50 percent revenue share deal, so that bloggers can see real value from their sites.

“Our aim with Adgator is to be as transparent as possible and all blog owners will have their own access to our system so they can track their earnings in real time. In our reporting we break down cost, revenue share and total income so the blogger knows exactly who’s getting what.” says Hartman.

Value is the key

Hartman concludes that “as an advertiser or media planner the value proposition is easy to quantify. Without realising it at the time Afrigator has been indexing, filtering, categorising and profiling blogs in a way that is perfectly tailored for this business model. Instead of just throwing a banner up on a major traffic website we can now offer real, targeted advertising to markets and audiences that fit an advertisers’ needs perfectly.”

Google just launched their smart translator into some of their services. Google Reader was one of the first services to receive the new ‘plugin’ which is able to auto-translate any website you have subscribed to. And it looks like its working really well.

There is nothing  really special that you should do. Just subscribe to your favorite blog, then in the Feed Settings tab in Google Reader you have the option “Translate into my language”. The setting will also save and the next time you try to read your other language feed, it will be done automatically.

via TC

The iPhone is twice as reliable as the Blackberry after one year of ownership, a new study by SquareTrade finds. SquareTrade, which sells extra warranties for cell phones and other devices, looked at the failure rates of 15,000 phones covered under its plans. The malfunction rate for iPhones after one year is 5.6 percent, compared to 11.2 percent for the Blackberry and 16.2 percent for the Treo.

The study projects that the failure rate for the iPhone after two years will be between 9.2 and 11.3 percent, compared to actual two-year failure rates of 14.3 percent for BlackBerries and 21.0 percent for Treos.