Created by moneysmart‘s creative director Lilian van Zyl, the infographic below provides a simple explanation of the importance of the budget speech 2012/2013 announced today by finance minister Pravin Gordhan and offers a few interesting statistics.

View the infographic after the jump…

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According to MyBroadband, Stellenbosch is planning to provide free Wi-Fi Internet access for everyone in the town, a service that will be offered free of charge without any need for registration.

Stellenbosch mayor Conrad Sidego has said that they are planning to make Stellenbosch a Wi-Fi town, an initiative by Stellenbosch, MXit and the University of Stellenbosch. While large downloads will be prohibited all other services like web surfing, messaging and VoIP services will be fully supported.

The trial network will go live on Friday 24th February according to Stellenbosch councillor and head of the municipality’s finance portfolio, Pieter Venter. This trial Wi-Fi network will cover the town centre, and will run for two to three weeks before extending the network to the greater Stellenbosch area. The next phase involves rolling out the network to all populated areas within the Stellenbosch municipality including Franschhoek and Pniel.

While the rollout period of just six months may be considered especially fast, Venter explained that the core Wi-Fi network is already in place and currently used to connect the municipal offices and carry municipal calls therefore cutting costs and limiting their reliance on Telkom. All that needs to be done at this point is to put repeaters on lamp poles and on suitable high sites closer to residents to “fill in” the network and boost coverage.

Venter explained that Stellenbosch has been wanting to provide a free Wi-Fi network for its residents for a few years now but Internet access costs (hence national and international bandwidth) was a problem. MXit stepped in to solve this problem by making their unused capacity available.

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Established businessman, Nick Essame, and young entrepreneur, Martin Ras, launched an exciting new initiative on 1 February 2012, Crowd-funding.co.za.

The idea revolves around the notion of a collective co-operation of people who network and pool their resources together to support efforts initiated by other people or organizations. However, Crowd-funding.co.za is different in comparison to the conventional manner of crowd funding, primarily because the start up is identified prior to your pledge and the money is only going to one start up, once off.

Martin Ras, co-founder and operations manager explains that “While there are several venture capitalists currently in South Africa, not a lot of them are focused on providing seed capital. Most of them only invest in companies with a track record, so raising money for a startup is quite a daunting and a time consuming exercise in SA. In addition many of the VC companies have very focused investment criteria’s and Mobile Payments is not a common one.” And so, with this in mind, Martin and Nick decided to set up a front-end to raise capital for their start up.

The startup in question is Ching, a third party payment facilitator that enables merchants to accept Pin based credit and debit card payments via a web or a mobi site. The “Ching solution” makes the opportunity of accepting debit or credit card payments available to any merchant, whether big or small; new or established, and will benefit any business. The security mechanisms that surround the Ching environment also protect the merchant from repudiation based disputes and chargebacks.

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If you’re involved in mobile technology or gadgets in any way, you’ll know that the majority of news, reports and statistical information is focussed on the growth of the global smartphone market. Estimates in 2011, indicated that by the end of that year about 472 million smarthphones would be sold globally. This could arguably be due to the launch of the more affordable ZTE and Hauwei devices operated by Google’s Android versus Apple’s iPhone.

However, Mobile research firm Vision Mobile created the graph below to illustrate the size of the feature phone market in comparison to smartphones globally (collectively called the “connected device” market). Results reveal that while smartphones make up 27% of the graph below, the remaining 73% comprises of feature phone devices. That’s a very clear majority so while smartphones may make the headlines, feature phones are the most widely used and should therefore not be precluded by developers and marketers.

Due to the constant improvements in technology and cost efficiencies in manufacturing, the definition of a smarthphone versus a feature phone can change rapidly. It is therefore important to define what we mean by a feature phone, especially in the African market.  In this case, a feature phone can be defined as a device that supports WAP(GPRS/Edge) connectivity, has a colour screen, can send an MMS message, has low-resolution camera and lastly supports J2ME native applications.

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Last week, a report in the Wall Street Journal revealed that Google and some other advertising companies were bypassing privacy settings to follow users browsing through Safari on their iPhones and on the Web which has sine lead to three U.S. lawmakers calling the FTC to investigate further. Now Microsoft has claimed that Google is doing the same for its browser, Internet Explorer as well.

All Things D reports that Microsoft’s corporate vice president for Internet Explorer, Dean Hachamovitch, has written in a blog post that Google is using similar methods, though the actual bypass mechanism is different, to get around default privacy protections in Internet Explorer in order to track users with cookies. Microsoft says that by default IE blocks third-party cookies, unless the site presents a “P3P Compact Policy Statement” in which case the the site will use the cookie but ultimately won’t track the users.

Microsoft said it has contacted Google and asked them to commit to Microsoft’s standard privacy settings for browser users. “In the event that Google continues this practice”, states the blog post, Microsoft has offered a Tracking Protection List that Internet Explorer 9 users can add as a protection if they wish.

Google has responded to the above allegations by saying that the software giant has omitted important information in its blog post. The statement reads: “Microsoft uses a ‘self-declaration’ protocol (P3P) dating from 2002 under which Microsoft asks websites to represent their privacy practices in machine-readable form. It is well known — including by Microsoft — that it is impractical to comply with Microsoft’s request while providing modern web functionality. We have been open about our approach, as have many other websites.”

Google also went on to mention that in 2010, a research report from Carnegie Mellon University revealed that more than 11,000 of 33,139 Web sites were not issuing valid P3P policies as requested by Microsoft and the policy is widely considered as optional.

According to a survey conducted on News24 by PayU, 77% of respondents stated that they believed online shopping was the way of the future. A further survey, conducted by online shopping site Kalahari.com, revealed that 31% of shoppers said they chose to shop online for Valentine’s Day and NetFlorist, an online flower and floral shop, experiences an approximate 59% profit increase each February.

Wayne Gosling, joint CEO of online group buying company Groupon SA, says there is a need for online companies to recognise the increase in sales and public interest in romantic deals around Valentine’s Day. “As shown by previous holiday sales, we’ve realised our service is one that people like to utilise especially over romantic holidays to experience things in their city that they wouldn’t normally know about; let alone get to try.”

Groupon SA offered a variety of options to romantically-minded customers, including a night away or a helicopter ride for two, jewellery and spa Groupons. This kind of variety is essential to ensure successful online retailing, Gosling believes. “Online shopping offers creativity at your fingertips,” he says. “Whereas previously one would have to spend hours searching for the right gift for the right situation – now it’s a matter of simply following a few links; it removes all hassle.”

Jewellery retailers have reported selling an increased number of diamond engagement rings: Sterns and American Swiss, both controlled by the Foschini Group, said Valentine week sales swelled by as much as 50% above normal.

Yumna Ebrahim, from economic analysis firm Econometrix, believes that the country’s prosperity over Valentine’s week can be attributed to South Africa’s economic resilience in comparison to retailers in the UK and US following the global recession.

According to Ebrahim, impulse shopping over the festive season, followed by favourable interest rates, could have a sustained positive effect on prosperity and consumer spending in South Africa.

The office pictures below of LEGO’s development department office in Billund, Denmark provides some insight into how the company comes up with its fun, colourful and inventive figures and sets. The creation of Rosan Bosch and Rune Fjord, the open plan space is a grown-up’s playground that focuses on creativity, imagination, and innovation.

On the ground floor, staff are provided with a number of informal meeting spaces where they can exchange ideas and interact with one another. Lounge areas lie between individual workspaces, displays, model-building tables and a library of Lego pieces.

On the first floor, the balcony has been expanded to make room for eight glass-fronted brightly coloured meeting rooms. The two floors are connected by a fun slide that makes it easy to make a fast escape from meetings and head for the various other meeting areas on the ground floor, where occupants land on a bulls-eye in the centre of the office.

The entire office space is filled with brightly coloured furniture, LEGO displays, natural light and glass doors.

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IT News Africa will be hosting Africa’s inaugural Tech Demo Africa Showcase in Johannesburg in April. This event aims to showcase cutting edge technology from established companies and start-ups and will focus on two main sectors: Enterprise technology and eGoverment.

This two day event will feature cuttingedge demos, engaging keynotes, lively panel discussions and noted local and international speakers, along with an amazing technology exhibition area.

The event provides the opportunity to launch and demo your product to an audience of IT leaders, venture capitalists, local and international media as well as potential partners and customers.

This event is aimed at business leaders, service providers, key government dignitaries, VCs and developers.

Event details:

When: 17 – 18 April 2o12

Where: Radisson Blue Gautrain Hotel, Sandton, Johannesburg

Tickets: Visitor’s Pass  - $150 includes full 2 day exhibition access as well as seminar, Gala dinner, keynotes and demo presentations access.

For more information about the event and other packages available click here.