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?

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 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]

Instead of getting themselves someone who’s experience enogh to build scalable infrastructures, Twitter has been struggling to please the user with more and more new features. Hence why newly-hired Dick Costolo, the cofounder/CEO of RSS service Feedburner, is going to take over as the Chief Operating Office (COO) from Santosh Jayaram — the current head of operations.

Costolo — who has been an early Twitter investor — left Google back in July and there were reports that he was starting a new company, Twitter, however, managed to rope him just in time.

Although we know the answer to the “what’s going to happen with Feedburner now?” question (as many call it Google’s worst investment so far), what we’re more interested in is if Costelo’s experience is enough to actually help Twitter reach the next level.

What do you guys think?

[via TechCrunch]

The AT&T and Apple bonding for the iPhone sales across the United States has solely dominated the market share for years now. But word is that the two companies are about to break up in a years time.

This isn’t a confirmed detail but Apple analysts have reported that the sales for the iPhone have been more conquering in places where the single service provider approach hasn’t been used. Consequently Apple intends to end its single carrier exclusivity model to further expand its market share.

Reports also suggest that this change will be brought about with the launch of a new product in 2010. As far as the American alliance is concerned, people have been happy with the iPhone but the AT&T services have not really been satisfying.

Although AT&T is eager to continue the deal through 2011, Verizon might be next on Apple’s roadmap. Given that Verizon has sped up work for its 4G network and the next iPhone model is bound to adore that, that sounds like a deal made in Heaven, don’t you think?

[via AppleInsider]

Web Africa is busy working up its new network, and the South African company has just announced a trial for its new tier 1 ADSL network. The company is inviting anyone with an ADSL line and a router to take part in the trial and is offering a 10 GB free bandwidth to those who accept.

Clearly, the offer will have a number of people interested — since everyone loves free bandwidth — so they have capped the number of free accounts to 5,000.

The company says that the new network will allow it to offer better services to its customers, as Web Africa will no more be required to adjust with the requirements of other providers. Also, this free trial will help the company to fine tune the network and ensure that they don’t run into any problems when the service officially rolls out.

“The decision to launch our own ADSL network has been made specifically with our customers in mind,” says Matthew Tagg, CEO of Web Africa. “Not only will we now have more freedom to offer new products and services to our users, we will be able to offer the very best service at an affordable price. Our goal is to optimise our network according to what our customers need for their various internet usages.”

Their plan is to make the shift to the new network as smooth as possible, once the trials are over, existing customers will be moved to the new network, without any change in services offered, subscriptions, and/or the pre-paid costs.

Have you made it to the 5,000. How is it?

Google has announced that street view’s latest destination will be South Africa. Soon, Toyota Prius models mounted with cameras will start their journey across cities of South Africa, taking pictures along the way. Cities to be included in the Google Maps Street View are Johannesburg, Cape Town, Pretoria, Port Elizabeth and Durban.

Google’s Street View is a very popular service that currently includes a number of major metropolitan areas across the globe, where cars fit with directional cameras did the job of capturing the 360 degrees view from the street. In some locations, Google also used a trike to capture images, though it is not immediately clear if they will be used in South Africa as well.

Where available, Street View can be accessed by zooming-in to the lowest level, or by using the “Pegman” icon on a highlighted street. Also, roaming about in the environmentally friendly hybrid Prius helps to give Google’s image a boost, while bringing good PR for the Prius as well. Once the images have been collected, they go through a process of being “stitched” together, and may only be available on street view after several months.

“We are thrilled to be partnering with Google and supplying our fuel efficient and environmental friendly Prius for this groundbreaking project in South Africa. South Africans and international visitors alike will benefit tremendously from Street View, which is both fun and practical. We hope that people across South Africa’s major cities keep their eyes peeled for the Street View cars, and feel part of a major new initiative,” said Toyota’s Senior Vice President for Sales and Marketing, Andrew Kirby.