Looks like Web Africa did very well in the latest MyBroadband survey. Based on Value for Money, Ease of Use, Billing, Customer Service, Tech Support and Overall satisfaction, the scores are averaged to find the winner amongst South Africa’s top ADSL ISP’s. The survery base was 3072 users, of which 1811 were ADSL users. Not surprisingly, Telkom came stone last. It scored lowest in every single category.

Web Africa scored consistently in the top three for all the categories, which is an admirable performance. Second and third place overall goes to Openweb and Afrihost. As part of the survey, Mybroadband also found that Web Africa customers are least likely to want to move to another ISP.

Good on Mybroadband to help us find the ISP to go for, and also who to avoid!

Here is the full findings of the survey: (Click the image to enlarge)

Source: Mybroadband

Disclosure: Web Africa is a Bandwidth Blog partner.

Greplin, a company making waves for “tackling the other half of search”, launched a competition to redesign wikipedia’s search experience: “everything from the behaviors on the search page, to the layout of content, to the details of typography, color, animations. Today, many people use Google to search Wikipedia, but imagine a whole new experience that makes using Google to search Wikipedia feel outdated.”

It is a novel and positive initiative that might yield some interesting results, but I am wondering if it is possible or needed. Let me explain:

How do you search wikipedia? If you are like the rest of us, you mainly go through Google, then click on the wikipedia link if it exists. When do I only use wikipedia’s search? It is when I am sure there will be content available (something broad like France or Gears) and even then I usually use the Google Chrome’s autocomplete search function.

I feel this is an important point, because it shows the difference between Google and Wikipedia. When searching for information related to the keyword that I am not knowledgeable about, I use wikipedia. When travelling to another country (say Singapore), you want information on that country, you don’t want something specific (not until you are more knowledgeable about the subject). Here Wikipedia crowns king. However this beats the purpose of searching (or trying to improve a search experience): when I know what to find and how to find it. (I don’t know, but I know where to find information so that I can know more).

More often that not, I use Google to search for answers (or when I don’t know where to go look for information). (I don’t know, and I don’t know where and how to find information that I want). Of course you can’t extrapolate one user’s habits to the whole population. Let’s assume I am searching for information (not answers) on something that I am unsure of whether it will be in Wikipedia (random small suburb in a backwater town). Should I use Wikipedia or Google? Google of course. If it is on Wikipedia, it should be in the top few links. If not, then I can find relevant information on other websites. If I went the Wikipedia avenue, I would’ve been presented with nothing and then had to go Google anyway.

In other words, Google will always be more useful when searching answers and information. It boils down to the fact that not all information is for the purpose of being encyclopaedic.

I do think there are perhaps areas where Wikipedia’s search can be made more useful:

> This is a big suggestion, but maybe Wikipedia shouldn’t have 2 frontpages. I like the globe, but if it wants to improve search, the bar has to be made more prominent.

> The second ‘frontpage’ is language specific (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page). Once you are on there, there is no (obvious) link back to the ‘globe’ page and you are stuck with the search in the right top corner.

> Increase the speed. Wikipedia’s search is slower than Google. If I do choose to use Wikipedia and I mistook my perception that there will be information on it, I don’t want to feel as if I wasted time that I could’ve spent by just using Google instead.

What if Wikipedia’s search wasn’t primarily about finding information, but an experience in itself?

A fancy, shiny minorty report whizzing and whistles experience (for example), could make Wikipedia’s search fun to use, but maybe that would just turn into qwiki?

In the end to me, the nature of the information on Wikipedia doesn’t lend itself to being about ‘search’. There isn’t much to find: either there is an article about, or there is not. The middle way is vague, and then I have to resort to Google to find what I am looking for.

What do you think? Can Wikipedia’s search experience be improved? Can it be improved enough so that when searching for information, users would go to Wikipedia first, instead of Google? If I am wrong, I am looking forward to the results of the competition. I am open to being pleasantly surprised!

ANCYL.org.za must probably be the most frequently hacked site in South Africa, and every time it happens everyone has a huge laugh and celebrate like they just blew up the Death Star and it’s party time in The Republic. I on the other hand get chills down my spine.

Let’s face it, anyone with some time on their hands and a decent head on their shoulders can learn html, php, css, sql, javascript and slap together a site. Not long and some clever folk might even consider to sell their services to the first willing client, and because there is such a huge demand out there they are bound to get at least a dozen or two before they finish high school.

The result is that the internet is filled with millions of websites oozing with security problems. The biggest issue is that most of them go completely undetected by both the clients and the creators, then all of a sudden one day out of the blue a slightly more clued up bloke with a point to prove or just for the-hell-of-it comes along and replaces your homepage with “0Wn3d”.

The reality is that most developers treat web-security rather casually because most of them have never really faced a need to think about it too much. An alarmingly large number of them also have never been taught about security, even those from the most prestigious institutions.

So perhaps it’s time you start teaching yourself web-security the way your future attackers picked up their skills… learn how to hack. There are a number of training grounds for young hackers on the web, hackthissite.org probably one of the more well known. Go find some video tutorials, spend some time on some forums, read some blogs and books on web-security. And once you know the basics make it part of your development process and hack your own websites to iron out vulnerabilities.

Sure the earlier attacks on ancyl.org.za have not been very sophisticated but they have become increasingly more so. The guys behind the ANCYL website are fairly well educated blokes based on their company site, but they have been ravaged by hackers over the years. This could happen to any of us, so pull your head out of the sand make damn sure you know the threats out there.

If we have learnt anything from the last year is that even the largest organizations from the FBI to Sony can be brought to their knees by a guy behind a glowing LCD screen. We are all at risk. Be warned.

All this talk of DStv’s BoxOffice has got me thinking. More specifically, thinking about the future of television, which all seems rather unclear at the moment.

As is always the case when traditional media starts edging more and more into a digital media space, there’s a bit of uncertainty as to which approach to take in making that transition. Take a look at print, for example. On the one hand, there’s the view that ‘citizen journalism’, freelance bloggers, and social media will take the power away from the traditional publishers altogether. Then there’s the approach that says that digital is just a new distribution channel for the same content, and the fight between free and pay-walled services within that. Or that digital consumers expect something more in terms of content than traditional print consumers. And, finally (though probably not), the debate as to whether to continue to distribute things through your own channels with dedicated sites, tablet applications and the like, or let people get the content wherever they like (a la Flipboard), and to figure out that whole “how do we make money now?” issue later.

For television, though, the changes are even more disruptive.

How I watch

This is where the BoxOffice debate kicks in. In the days of old, the television experience was incredibly limited by the technology that could be utilized to actually provide the content. Locally, the launch of PVR finally allowed consumers to choose to watch their favourite content at a later time. BoxOffice is the next big step in this direction, allowing subscribers to once-off ‘rent’ a movie and watch it in on-demand. There’s one very simple reason that this is where it stops, really in SA – our broadband. But as this continues to improve, the changes to the way we actually watch television will continue to manifest.

On the one hand, the concept of a ‘connected TV’ is made possible, allowing content to be pulled into your television experience from all over the web, and an endless library of content streamed on-demand to your television screen. Google is very much leading this charge at the moment, but don’t count out (surprisingly) Yahoo yet (more on that later…). AppleTV opens up your television to the full on-demand power of the iTunes library. While Hulu, Netflix and the like make all of it possible.

On the other hand, there are a whole new range of devices themselves. While television used to be constrained to the living room, tablets and smartphones means that you may never have to switch your actual television on again. Better still, concepts like central cloud-based storage mean that instead of choosing what device you use based on where your content is, you instead choose which device you use based on where you are.

What I watch

In the same way as the news industry is discovering that consumers aren’t interested in the same sort of content online as they are in, for example, their Sunday newspaper, so too the video content people are interested in is different in a different space. While I’m not for a second suggesting that viewers will switch off their TV’s to Modern Family in favour of piano-playing cats in HD glory, a wider network of content with a lower barrier to entry for producers means that the space for a new style of content is endless.

Revision3 was founded some 6 years ago now and has grown to be the world’s most popular ‘Internet television network’, producing and distributing a variety of very niche shows, primarily for the geek community, including the beloved Diggnation. Touting millions of downloads every month, Revision3 represents a new possibility; content made especially for a new era of television.

What I do while I watch

According to Nielsen, a rather staggering 86% of mobile users are busy using (playing) with their phone while watching television, with almost 40% actually browsing the internet, and another 40% social networking. What this represents is an amazing opportunity to do something to augment the television experience, no matter how that is delivered, by making use of the ‘second screen’.

While services like GetGlue and Miso have tried to introduce the ‘media check-in’, in a way that FourSquare has done in the space of the ‘geographic check-in’, there is none more exciting than smartphone app IntoNow. This startup was recently picked up by Yahoo (remember them?) for a cool $20m+, and is essentially the ‘Shazam of TV’. Based on an underlying service called SoundPrint which identifies TV programs based on an archive of over 250 years worth of content, IntoNow ‘listens’ to whatever is playing, checks you in, and allows you to then view information about it, share it socially, and even comment on the show. Not convinced? Try it for yourself. Amazingly, it even works if the episode is being aired for the first time.

While still in very early days, the ability to chat to my friends as we all watch the F1 together in real-time is a hugely exciting prospect, and would go a great distance (to continue the example) to bring the television experience, or at least the experience surrounding it, into the digital age.

So where to from here…

As connected devices and, more generally, connectivity itself continues to improve, television is about to undergo a massive revolution. What does this mean to you? Hopefully, it’s as simple as the best experience winning – more available content, more conveniently, and surrounded by a much more enjoyable, engaging and interactive experience.

Got an idea of what your TV habit of the future will look like? As always, we want to hear it…

Just as I posted on LivingSocial.com coming into South Africa, we now have Facebook Deals making its entrance. If anyone thought the social buying landscape was going to be shaken up by Groupon, it seems it is only now becoming of age.

In a slightly new style of doing deals, Facebook Deals has appointed Habari Media as their official sales partner, which is said to be launching in August 2011. And that, by my watch, is in 5 days time. However, this is not going to be the “rush and buy the deal without reading the fine print and be unhappy later” kind of deal – customers are going to use a Foursquare-type check-in to earn rewards and deals alike.

There are different kinds of deals to earn:

• Individual Deals are those offering something for someone checking in – this could be a discount or an actual product/service. Imagine a free coffee for checking into a new coffee shop.
• Loyalty Deals rewards customers after a certain number of check-ins (finally something for all the Foursquare mayors in South Africa?).
• Friend Deals offer discounts to a group of up to eight friends – so this equates to the sort-of Swarm Badge effect that Foursquare has.
• Charity Deals mean that a business gives money to a cause when you check in.

The only group buying deal really is the Friend Deal, all the others would be to build awareness and loyalty. But Facebook Deals does not only generate awareness, and place feet with a merchant – they also create a loyal following. And in the end, one can imagine the kind of “sharing” and “liking” that will really place small and large businesses on the map, online and in person.

According to Habari Media, there are at this point in time “over 300 000 local Facebook users who daily check in to Facebook Places, with no incentive to do so.” The biggest eyebrow-raiser, as always: Where does Facebook Deals get a cut? So far, the only way for them to earn bucks here is on the advertising that businesses will spend on to attract people to their Places. This does not necessarily seem viable.

There are many also debates:

• How accurate is this sort of check-in? Foursquare in Africa is not accurate and I doubt Facebook Deals will be.
• How do the merchants check it? If I check into a coffee shop four times from my office and arrive on the fifth time for my loyalty cup, how would they know?
• How does one know where to check in? Will the iOS, Android and RIM Facebook apps start telling us what is around us? Or is Foursquare still going to trounce Facebook Deals in South Africa in this regard?
• What if someone wants to check in and not let others know – will this be available?
• Can merchants add their own deals? What will they add? Can offices add deals, such as on Foursquare?

Many points remain to be answered, but one thing seems sure – Facebook Deals will be in South Africa in August 2011. The questions are: Will you be using it, and will it be worth it for businesses and customers?

Guest Post: Kobus Elhers is a lecturer in Informatics specialising in Decision Making. He’s passionate about good design and spends his time looking at how technology impacts society. Of course he also has a slight gadget addiction.

Technologically FNB really has no equal in the South African banking space. They have an excellent internet banking platform (integrated with share trading and investment platforms), they offer several innovative mainstream products like card-less withdrawals and cellphone transfers, their use of Twitter is unparalleled (check out @RBJacobs), they have (mostly) figured out how OTP’s should work, they provide the only PayPal service in SA and they even operate as a VASP providing ADSL and VOIP services through FNBConnect. The list continues…

A few years ago FNB launched their first App (FNBConnect) to allow users to locate ATM’s and utilise some of the other VASP functionality. This week, however, saw the launch of the first integrated mobile banking application in SA. The FNB App was launched for Android, Blackberry and iPhone platforms. The app has generally been well received and generated a large amount of internet buzz. For those of you who are not FNB customers, do not have a compatible phone or haven’t installed the app yet, I’ll provide a quick review of the iPhone application here.

Functionality
In essence the app provides a more convenient and elegant version of all the commonly used functionality provided by the online banking system. (more…)

Count us fooled. A few days ago Facebook did a seemingly normal little update to its iPhone app – only to have Techcrunch figure out that it contains the secret iPad version of the Facebook app, using a universal binary. A while back Mark Zuckerburg said they will not build an iPad app, because it is not a “mobile device”. Despite recent mumblings of Facebook switching its focus to HTML5 only development (Project Spartan), it looks the FB developers have indeed been very busy with a great looking new Facebook for iPad app.

The apparent refusal by Facebook to develop a full iPad app until now has long been one of those things that bothered many users, so its great to see this new app. The design is pretty great. The app seems to work in two panes – with simple navigation on the left hand side, with content on the right. Simple pop-ups appear whenever you want comment and “like”, and new interface looks great for photos. Another weird design decision is the new dark left hand side, which is a welcome shift from Facebook’s traditional white and blue designs.

At present the only way to install this “unofficial” FB app is to install the current iPhone FB app on a jailbroken iPad. We are not going to tell you how to do it, but a simple Google Search will help you out. But we are more than willing to wait a little. So when can we expect it? Most sources seem to suggest that it it imminent – so lets give a few weeks… Expect our runthrough here the moment it arrives.

Images: TechCrunch (and MG Siegler who clearly does not have an issue with his profile page being shown over the entire web…)

Mark your calendars for a bullet-slinging, fruit-slashing party this September because Twisted Pixel’s Kinect-enabled action shooter “The Gunstringer and the highly anticipated “Fruit Ninja Kinect” will be bundled together at retail for R399.00. (See our review of the Kinect here)

Whether you shoot-em-up or slice-em-up, YOU are the controller in these two fun, action-packed titles. The retail bundle will be available in South Africa from 16 September 2011.

In “The Gunstringer”, you control a fiery gun-toting marionette through his adventures, combining solo platforming and shooting mechanics into fun, competitive action with a full suite of collectables, unlockables, abilities, rewards and more. Plus, as a special bonus to celebrate the release of “The Gunstringer,” players can also download a free add-on pack for the game at launch called “The Wavy Tube Man Chronicles” which pits players against the time-traveling son of Wavy Tube Man, the first boss players battle in the game. In this add-on, Wavy Tube Man Jr. steals a time machine to prevent his father’s death at the hands of “The Gunstringer,” and it’s up to players to battle classic western cowboys and futuristic warriors to save the world from destruction.

Along with the disc for “The Gunstringer,”the retail package will include a token code for the full downloadable version of “Fruit Ninja Kinect” via Xbox LIVE.

“Fruit Ninja Kinect” is an amazing evolution of the slice-em-up genre created by Halfbrick, which brings the worldwide mobile gaming phenomenon to Kinect so you can use your arms as blades in an epic battle against the world’s most delicious produce is just beginning.