Integr8 IT CEO Rob Sussman received several accolades at ForgeAhead’s annual African ICT Achievers Awards, held on Saturday, in Johannesburg.
Sussman won the overall individual winner award, and also scooped the Top CIO of Africa and Top ICT Young Entrepreneur of the Year awards. He was also noted as one of the top ICT businessmen on the continent.
“It is an honour to be acknowledged by the industry for the business and social impact that Integr8 IT continues to make on the African continent,” Sussman said.
He added that he was excited about the impact Integr8 has made on the market, but even more excited about where the company is going. “We have spent nine years building our proven operational delivery model, and this is just the beginning. We are now ready to take our running into a sprint.”
He noted that Integr8 is “a true South African success story”; a story “from bedroom to boardroom”.
Founded by ICT research and consulting house ForgeAhead, the African ICT Achievers Awards is an Africa-wide ICT recognition and reward programme that has been in existence for 11 years. The theme of this year’s award was “Making the African Century a Reality”.
The programme recognises those who have proven they are globally competitive, and have made a difference in the lives of others less fortunate by helping them overcome the challenges Africa faces in leveraging ICT for development.
By Jacob Nthoiwa
Visit the Integr8IT website here
Local Internet service provider, RSAWEB, has announced that, effective immediately, consumers of its broadband offerings will be privy to price cuts of up to 60 percent on select packages! These include the company’s Super, Premium and Ultra DSL packages. This is great news for broadband consumers.
Amidst similar announcements by competitive providers, Rob Gilmour, MD of RSAWEB says “Our message differs in that going forward, we will only offer price cuts that are sustainable. This means that we continue to provide consistent, reliable access and support to our customer.”
Gilmour says, “In addition, RSAWEB’s Hosting and Data Centre products, which all rely heavily on bandwidth usage, will also become more accessible to customers. The move also means that we will be well placed to offer faster access to online spaces to new customers for less, in a consistent and sustainable manner”.
Here are some of the highlights from the newly release pricing structure:
Premium DSL at R49/GB (10GB package)
Super DSL at R56/GB (3GB package)
Ultra DSL, unshaped at R109/GB (10GB package)
Top up per GB at R59/GB (Premium DSL packages)
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]
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?
If you thought that the app store helps rake in millions for a developer, it is probably your misconception and not all (actually not sure if any) developers sitting out there are driving Ferraris because their application was a popular arrival at the app store.
As per a recent AdMob survey (with 1,117 relevant respondents) users purchasing applications at the App Store spent on average $9 per five downloads.
Apparently there’s $200 million worth of applications sold in Apple’s iPhone store every month, which makes for some $2.4 billion a year. But people love freebies and believe it or not the main thing that convinces them to spend money is actually playing with the free one at first.
The iPhone and the Android users download ten new applications a month and the iPod touch users get 18 new apps downloaded a month on average. Combining the stats for both iPhone and Android, almost half the number of people downloads the freebies. The fact of the matter is that ‘cheap is here to stay’ and a free version is how you can entice a user to download your application.
So how many of you have made money with apps … and can you tell us how much?
[via ArsTechnica]
With curtains on the Pirate Bay drawing closer and closer, there are some who’d like to know what are some alternatives — and we got them for you.
To begin with, there’s Demonoid which has a solid community and most importantly it’s said that the quality of the torrents is much higher. Mininova is another option with tons of torrents from multiple trackers, a simple interface and a pretty decent search — with some even appreciating the similarities with TPB.
ISOHunt is another Bit Torrent which also facilitates P2P search and thereby earns the laurel of being the most sophisticated search engine. BTJunkie is the self acclaimed largest torrent search engine with 5,000-25,000 new torrents added to the index on a daily basis. However, all these credentials are marred with a sad interface so the choice is purely yours. Last, but not least, it’s EZTV — the most prolific TV rippers with high quality videos.
Although all these are supposed to be legitimate torrents, we’re pretty sure that shutting down Pirate Bay will be a loss that will never be made up.
[via Gizmodo]
All the Apple gadgetry fanatics realize the importance of the Keynote event which the company holds since 2005. The event discloses all about the updates related to Apple products such as new iPods, iPhones or iTunes new features.
Hence why we think that you should know that this year the “grand ceremony” will be held on Wednesday on September 9th. Most likely the will be Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, for the keynote event has has been held there on all previous occasions.
Sadly all the hype regarding the event revolves around Steve Jobs making his first public appearance after coming back from his medical leave.
More to it, the buffs expecting to see the Apple Tablet will have to return home disappointed since it’s now pretty obvious that the project has been postponed and we’ll get our eyes on one, no earlier than next year. Of course that doesn’t mean that Steve won’t have one to play with in front of everyone.
Smells like, it’s going to be an exciting fall!
[via allthingsd] Image courtesy of dekuwa
Is there is an Apple PayPal Killer in the ranks!? That’s the question on everyone’s minds these days.
After being rumored to come up with the Apple Tablet and a bunch of new iPhones, the newest thing we’re itching to know is if Apple is planning a service that would allow the iTunes Store account holders to make purchases on participating third-party sites across the Internet.
Considering that behind the rumor are the Wall Street gossips, you’ll have to take it with a pinch of salt before getting too excited. There’s no official word from Apple, but if we’re to consider the success of Paypal and the fact that Facebook recently introduced a “pay with Facebook” feature, Cupertino may want to cash in on their amazing user base in the online payments business.
Could it be that Apple depends too much on their hardware products (iPhones, Macs, iPods) — which may see a drop in sales, soon — and they’re looking for a way to diversify their business?
No matter whatever the reason is, we’d love to get it tested out.
[via BusinessWire]
Yesterday was probably a day were you had to unwillingly keep away from your favorite social networking site, Twitter. Hell you were being restricted in opening your Facebook or your Livejournal account … Getting back to Twitter, the glitch was a courtesy of a denial-of service attack but thankfully the service is now back-on-track. The recovery though hasn’t been fully made as there is still degraded service for some people.
The ddos has been defined as a single massive coordinated attack and Twitter has been working closely with other companies and services affected to recover completely. As a motivation behind this event, Twitter prefers not to speculate. The good news however, is that no user data was compromised in this attack and that is as far as we should be bothered.
Just to clear out things — it is an activity about saturating a service with so many requests that it cannot respond to legitimate requests thus succeeding in denying service to the intended customers. This attack has made Twitter realize that there is still a lot of work to be done to safeguard the site against such attacks and the company fully acknowledges the fact.
So we can’t help but wonder if Twitter isn’t too big for the infrastructure they’re using at the moment. It’s somehow unacceptable for a site at this size to go down on a ddos attack! We hope for the better!
Although the Netherlands allows all sorts of illegalities (that we enjoy) to get a legal license, that’s not the case when it comes to ruling against Pirate Bay.
The Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN has just won a court against the infamous domain. BREIN’s lawyer argued that Pirate Bay is responsible for millions of copyright infringements every day and therefore the site should be blocked to visitors from The Netherlands. The owners of Pirate Bay however did not receive any summons regarding the case nor were they aware of such kind of a development. As a consequence, they have asked the Amsterdam court to quash the case and impose damages against BREIN. What though ensued was the case decided in favor of BREIN.
The Pirate Bay has been ordered to stop all their activities in the Netherlands within ten days and in case there is non compliance- all defendants will be ordered to pay 30,000 euros ($42,300) per day in penalties up to a maximum of 3 million euros ($4,231,000).
What’s ironical though, is that BREIN never filed the case against the Pirate Bay when it used to be an illegal domain, yet they thought of doing it when it became legal…
[via TorrentFreak]
