We recently visited the Cape Town offices of local web hosting and data centre services company RSAWEB, located in the Cape Town CDB just a stone’s throw from Parliament and the Company Gardens.

Inside, the office consists of 2 floors, connected by a spacious skylit atrium at it’s center. The layout is mostly open plan with breakaway areas for meetings and solitude. The interior design is clean and stylish, but also shows a fun side with the three main boardrooms named Rock, Paper and Scissors. The official Xbox room also provides the ideal area for employees to relax and enjoy some quality gaming time.

RSAWEB is an Internet Service Provider, specializing hosting & connectivity. RSAWEB owns their own data centre infrastructure and provide a full range of enterprise class data centre solutions including dedicated servers, virtual servers, colocation and cloud hosting services.

You love online poker, and now that you have your fancy new iPhone you want to play poker on it, as well you should. Fortunately for you there are a number of exciting poker apps for the iPhone, each differing depending on the kind of poker you like to play. Here’s a breakdown:

Video Poker on the iPhone: Jacks or Better iPhone Poker

If video poker is your thing, iPhone has you covered with Jacks or Better iPhone poker. This simple app plays just like the real thing, allowing you to play up to five credits at once to win. Payouts occur according to a standard pay table, and you can draw as many cards as you want one time to improve your hand just like in the casino.

Friendly Poker on the iPhone: Apple Texas Hold’em

The first poker application many iPhone users find themselves experimenting with is Apple Texas Hold’em. This is a great app for those who want to kill a little time by themselves or with friends.

The graphics are high quality and the game play is smooth, and you can play against computer opponents or a group of friends who also have the application. You can make full use of the touch screen with Apple Texas hold’em to move chips around or select your actions with just one finger.

Online Poker on the iPhone: Zynga Live Poker

When you’re ready for the iPhone poker big leagues, it’s time to download Zynga. Zynga is as close to an online poker site as you can possibly get from your iPhone wireless device. You can join a variety of games with iPhone players from all over the world, including players linked to social networks like Facebook and MySpace.

It’s important to be aware that you can’t play for real money; Zynga has the functionality for it but Apple doesn’t allow wireless gambling on their mobile devices. Still, you can get a full interactive poker experience using Zynga, and if you want to work out privately with your competitors what your virtual chips are worth, that’s entirely up to you.

It was long back when Google denied Yahoo’s financing in its pre-revenue stages, but taking the risk paid off and Google is, what it is today.

Twitter, today, faces the same dilemma with suitors building up the pressure with every passing day, but investors are aware of this situation (although they do not discuss it openly). The big decision, however, needs to be taken and is if the company should turn the revenue on or ignore the takeover bids and take a risk just like Google.

Given the fact that Twitter has a high potential for the future, taking such a decision is a hard thing to do in the jittery world of the Internet. But reporting no revenue is also a problem, because experts cannot exactly estimate — which means that Twitter could say “bye bye” to any takeovers. Big public houses need a valuation spreadsheet to go ahead with the acquisitions. However, once the revenue is on, the valuation of a company like Twitter can also go down since a long-term growth rate is also furnished and that can never be relied upon — no matter who made the evaluation.

Twitter is at a stage where it has to make a brave decision and this decision could be the turning point for the brand in all senses.

What would you do, if you’d own Twitter?

AT&T knows it’s iPhone-strained network has become a public relations nightmare, with a number of major publication and news channels recently recounting how heavy iPhone use has resulted in unsatisfactory service.

Instead of generating understanding and goodwill, a video posted on YouTube has been mocked by angry customers, social media experts, bloggers and commenters as defensive and too little too late.

Rather than empathize and connect to with their customers on a personal level, AT&T offered up a know-it-all spokesman who evokes little empathy, while failing to apologize for AT&T’s flaky service.

Nimbuzz has succeeded in launching its Android Application and the Mac Suite and as far as the future is concerned, they’re now planning to expand by opening new offices in Palo Alto, USA, and London, UK.

Concerning its American expansion, Nimbuzz is seeking to capitalize on the immense opportunity represented by the US market which is said to account for 280 million mobile subscribers. And given the company’s fast growing user base in the United States, the expansion sounds like the right thing to do.

Just to set things straight, Nimbuzz is growing at well over 1 million new users per month, serving more than 200 million VoIP calls per week. Their mobile VoIP and social messaging products have seen quite a few stability and performance enhancements, making Nimbuzz the number 1 app on the GetJar USA app store.

“Nimbuzz has been very warmly welcomed by Silicon Valley and by a huge number of users in the USA. We’re excited by the US opportunity for a number of reasons. Firstly, we will be better able to support and respond to the needs of our growing user base in the US with local representation. Secondly, Nimbuzz will be well positioned to take advantage of the unrivalled business development, media and networking opportunities which exist here,” said vice president Tobias Kemper.

Together, the USA and UK offices will join Nimbuzz’ growing international network comprising headquarters in Rotterdam, offices in India, Argentina, Brazil, Europe, the Middle East, South Africa and Asia.

The guys from Yahoo & Flickr have released a new Flickr iPhone app(Open iTunes), which enables you to easily share the photos you’ve captured with iPhone’s camera, geo-tag them, and add them to sets.

You can also view your Flickr contacts pictures, as well as view recently uploaded pictures by your contacts. You can also comment on your contacts pictures & videos, as well as an option to search for photos from within Flickr.

Overall the app has a very easy to use interface, which allows users to control thier Flickr stream and activity from the iPhone. I also enjoy the slide show on the front page, which shows your contacts (who have the app installed) Flickr stream in a slideshow. Very cool to watch

To download the app, click here, or you can scan the QR Code at the top for a direct link

Cross posted on http://www.marcforrest.com/2009/09/08/flickr-iphone-app/

While the companies are not each others’ biggest rivals, they are increasingly in competition. This follows years of enjoying one of the best relationships in Silicon Valley, one that will now get more complicated as the companies compete in more areas.

Their most significant rivalry today is mobile phone platforms, where Google’s Android phones compete with Apple’s iPhones. So far, Apple has had more success, both in getting consumers to buy its phones, and in getting software companies to develop apps for its platform.

But Google has a big year ahead: It’ll eventually be distributed by all four major U.S. wireless carriers, while Apple is exclusive with AT&T. And phone manufacturers like Motorola have plans to make lots of mid-range, high-volume phones with Android. Assuming the efforts are adequate, Google could catch up significantly in the next year.

The book sales business is getting tougher and tougher with Amazon accusing Google of trying to gain monopoly. But funny thing, Amazon fails to look into their own yard.

The guys who have been busy selling online books at a loss just to gain market share — which is something that will not happen forever — are now accusing other companies for wrong intention. However, it’s interesting why the whole fuss since Google caters to out-of-print books and doesn’t constitute a threat as of now.

Well it looks like Amazon (which is currently the largest seller of books online) is trying to cement their rank into the e-book industry, too — the only problem is that their Kindle is not yet popular — so the only solution was to play the smart game of pointing the finger at someone else.

You know Amazon, as much as we like you, we’re not dumb and we can figure out what you’re up to in the back.

[via AuthorsGuild]