I often think to myself: “what did I do before Twitter when I’m bored?”

The truth is, the 140 characters of time wasting are great to keep you busy and entertained however I can’t help but find complete disdain for the sins performed on Twitter. I will now demonstrate these sins with my own examples:

• Sin 1: “My life is so f*&king awesome:

Not what I expected from my Friday @ Grand Central Airport instagram.com/p/Zr-vsFy1Jo/

— Saul Kropman (@saulkza) May 24, 2013

This was me posting a picture of spending a Friday in a small plane. Why… I want to look awesome.

• Sin 2: “Here’s an article I think will make me look smart”: (more…)

If you’re not reading Asymco for insight into the business behind mobile technology you’re missing out. Writer and analyst Horace Dediu put a great tweet out earlier today about the marketing spend of some of the worlds biggest retail companies:

Interesting to see that Samsung spends the most although this does make sense in that they’re advertising everything from the latest Galaxy phone to a TV or laptop (for full info on what falls under Samsung Electronics click here). These are interesting numbers but nothing without context. Twitter user @Chiphanna went and ran these numbers in order to compare marketing spend vs revenue and came up with some interesting figures:

Essentially for every dollar Apple spends on marketing, they make $156 in revenue. Compare that to Samsung that have to spend a dollar to only make a  relatively low $46 in revenue and you wonder if someone like Samsung is doing something wrong? (more…)

In America the Federal Trade Commission have come out with some interesting rules on the disclosure required by bloggers and twitter users that are seeded free “stuff”. Locally we have no such regulations and it’s interesting to see what sort of regulations have been put forward:

• Where and how to disclose: As far back as 2009, the FTC was already publicly recommending that disclosures not be buried at the bottom of a post or on a separate page
• The disclosure needs to travel with the content: The disclosure must be in every Tweet. You can’t tweet a single disclosure that covers the whole conversation; there is no guarantee that readers will see the disclosing statement. The hashtag #spon is not sufficiently clear. The word “ad” is sufficiently clear, but needs to be in a prominent place. The FTC also suggests not using a #ad hashtag after a URL or shortlink as it could be overlooked.
• Longer disclosure required: When an advertising claim merits a longer disclosure than is practical for the format, a hyperlink to additional information is acceptable, provided that anything material, or “triggering” is included in the original advertisement and the link is clear and conspicuous. In other words, you cannot bury CRITICAL disclosures in hyperlinked pages, but you can provide additional details.

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There’s been a lot of talk about Telkom dropping the 8ta brand despite pushing millions into marketing the brand. Respected brand journalist Chris Moerdyk essentially says this is the biggest mistake Telkom has made in ages.

Chris is quite patently wrong. Yes, Telkom have plowed tons of money into the brand and it’s now a waste but the truth is that 8ta is actually a terrible brand. It’s confusing, the colours are frankly quite heinous and their stores are clinical.

Telkom is also a crap brand but the truth is that 8ta is actually a decent mobile network. Their data is well priced and they are the cheapest for phones such as the iPhone 5.

In addition, Telkom users can now get add on data or voice contracts on their current account without extra credit checks and hassles. Telkom has suddenly expanded their footprint for walk in stores or, in the case of both stores being in a mall, save costs. Let’s not even get into the concept of business customers who now have the ability to bolt on a cheap contract to their ADSL or voice line.

The Twitterari, tech journalists and marketing consultants might think this a bad idea but they’ve clearly never been into a Telkom store during the day. It’s busy, it’s chaos and it’s an amazing opportunity for Telkom to suddenly tell the general public that they happen to have a mobile network.

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We live in South Africa, a country where labour is cheap and readily available. We also routinely complain about poor service in South Africa. The connection here is that since labour is so cheap it’s easier to constantly hire people, give them minimal training and then set them loose on the hordes that will enter your stores.

You’re essentially stocking your store with cattle that are unable to answer any questions but will work for the lowest common denominator salary.

A perfect example is almost any technical store. I’m not exactly expecting a salesperson to know the manufacturer of a motherboard but I do want them to avoid telling gullible customers that the iPad Mini has a retina display. I also find it fairly amusing that most iStore employees have Blackberry’s.

This isn’t a fringe case though; most store attendee’s have little care of empathy for their customers. They’re doing a job and they only care about a paycheck at the end of the month. That said, is it the fault of the store attendants or is this an issue that stems from the top? (more…)

I’m so sick to death of waiting for the Mailbox app on my iPhone I’m almost at the point of deleting it yet something keeps me hanging out. For those not in the know:

“The Mailbox app uses gestures to make quick work of incoming mail, allowing you to clear out your inbox in a jiffy.”

The app is apparently life changing, however I’m tired of waiting and I think this reservation system is a bad way of going about things. The reservation system is fairly simple: “Demand for Mailbox has been incredible, and in order to deliver a world-class email experience we’re filling reservations on a first-come, first-served basis. If you’ve already reserved your Mailbox, download the app and enter your reservation info. If you don’t have a reservation, download the app to get your place in line. Everyone can watch the line move in real-time from inside the app.” (more…)

As a teenager all I ever wanted at school was a locker. There were two reasons for this, firstly so I could have awkward encounters with the pretty girl serendipitously placed next to me and secondly so that I didn’t have to carry all those heavy books around!

Thankfully Core (the distributors of Apple in South Africa) have both solved my historical problems and ruined my serendipity fantasy. Last week the company released ZABooks, a project to get every single South African textbook onto the iPad to get kids learning using digital textbooks.

The concept is simple: you download the ZABooks app onto your iPad (I can see the iPad Mini becoming the de facto choice for schools soon) and then go to the ZABooks website to buy the books you require. You then login to the app on your iPad and you can start downloading books. You can get books from Grade 1 to Grade 12 and at launch there are over 600 textbooks already available. All the major publishers are on board and books are generally at least 25% cheaper than the print editions. I took a random book on the store (Advocates For Change by Moeletsi Mbeki) and while ZABooks charges R180 for it you can get the print edition for R202 on Kalahari.net. That is without shipping (anything over R250 gets free shipping) and Kalahari is generally cheaper than brick and mortar stores so pricing does seem spot on. From a pricing perspective it’s probably going to take a while to amortise the cost of the iPad but in my house we have an upgrade cycle where an “old” iPad is passed down to the younger members of the family meaning that child already had access to an iPad. (more…)

As I write this, Blackberry (they are no longer being called RIM) are launching their new devices to the world. Their new Blackberry 10 OS might be innovative and their new devices look vaguely decent but I still wouldn’t buy one. I can’t exactly bash them before I’ve tried them but here’s why I’ll avoid these new Blackberry devices like the plague:

1. I don’t trust them:  (more…)