There is not a technology business or digital services business in South Africa at the moment not looking for developers. It’s been this way for a couple of years, it’s getting worse and it’s a problem that will choke the industry in the next couple of years.

The problem seems to be emanating from tertiary institutions not capable of dealing with the demand of our growing industry. Businesses generally rely on tertiary institutions to deal with educating, testing and accrediting the workforce so that we essentially do not have to. Unfortunately these institutions do not have the capacity to produce developers at the rate at which the industry are demanding them, and they also seem to be teaching developers dated languages and techniques that we have long moved on from.

Tertiary institutions are essentially bottle-necking our industry and we are sitting by the sidelines waiting for something to happen, but it will not. In a country like South Africa most students capable of attending University do not have the financial resources to do so. This coupled with Universities’ inability to scale their businesses to meet the demands of both industry and prospective students I believe we are sitting with a problem only entrepreneurs can solve.

I think this is a problem we can solve ourselves without breaking the bank. I think more businesses firstly need to start teaching their craft to the public free of charge, I think we need to stop relying so much on official accreditation and testing and take over this process ourselves. I think every year we need to teach a couple of eager kids how to code on the spare PC in the office and later offer them internships and maybe even jobs.

I refuse to believe that we cannot solve this issue ourselves. Let’s do what entrepreneurs do, and start solving this problem so that it doesn’t end up killing our other businesses in the future.

You might already know that today Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs goes on sale worldwide. It is already the top selling book on the Kindle store, so expect massive sales. There have been many biographies of Steve Jobs, but this is the first authorized one, and Isaacson interviewed Steve Jobs over 40 times in the last two years. The book description:

“Walter Isaacson has written a riveting story of the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing.

At a time when America is seeking ways to sustain its innovative edge, and when societies around the world are trying to build digital-age economies, Jobs stands as the ultimate icon of inventiveness and applied imagination. He knew that the best way to create value in the twenty-first century was to connect creativity with technology. He built a company where leaps of the imagination were combined with remarkable feats of engineering.  

Although Jobs cooperated with this book, he asked for no control over what was written nor even the right to read it before it was published. He put nothing off-limits. He encouraged the people he knew to speak honestly. And Jobs speaks candidly, sometimes brutally so, about the people he worked with and competed against. His friends, foes, and colleagues provide an unvarnished view of the passions, perfectionism, obsessions, artistry, devilry, and compulsion for control that shaped his approach to business and the innovative products that resulted.

Driven by demons, Jobs could drive those around him to fury and despair. But his personality and products were interrelated, just as Apple’s hardware and software tended to be, as if part of an integrated system. His tale is instructive and cautionary, filled with lessons about innovation, character, leadership, and values.”

Exclusive Books already has Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography, and it goes on sale today for R249 for the hardback.

As part of the book’s launch, 60 Minutes interviewed Isaacson. We have added the first and second half of the video below. Personally, I will be skipping the videos until I have read the book.

If you are all interested in how Jobs conducted his business or personal life, or how the book was written, get hold of a nice uncapped internet connection and watch the videos below:

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I’ve never had much faith in selling things online. I buy things online, a lot of things for that matter. But I’ve never really cracked the whole ebay/craigslist/gumtree thing. Until I managed to sell a car on Gumtree Cape Town in 16 hours.

Having moved to Cape Town a year ago I’ve been contemplating a scooter lifestyle for a while. Then my partner moved to Cape Town and brought her car too. So now we have two cars in a small city geared towards bicycles and scooters. So after deciding to buy a scooter I decided the next thing we had to do was sell the 2002, 1.6 litre Fiat Palio that we had. It’s blue and sexy (in a cheesy sort of way). Here is the beauty that I speak of on the right. So after snapping 4 photos on my trusty Android, Samsung Nexus S (Yes I went there, I use Android) I uploaded the images to the Cape Town Gumtree Site.

The process on Gumtree is nothing to be intimated by, it maybe took me ten minutes, maybe, to get the specifications good and ready, upload the photos (they tell you that adverts with photos are more likely to receive offers), set a price, decide whether to promote the advert or not and then hit publish.

I chose not to spend the tiny sum of R40 to promote my advert. I figured that after a week of no replies I’d be ready to fork out the cash for that.

This all took place at about 11pm on a brisk Tuesday evening. By Wednesday morning I was waking up to replies for the advert coming through via email with offers to purchase, requests to view and negotiations.

I used my incredible intuition to select who I thought were worthy replies to the advert and contacted them all by 8:30am – the first reply had come through at 6am, sharp sharp.

Fortunately one of the candidates I selected was serious and had emailed me twice and then called me to confirm a few things: Time to view the car, payment method and confirmation of location of the car. Done, done and … done.

Once this was done I began to panic thinking about all the scam stories I had heard about selling content on the interwebs. So I did what any panic-stricken sole might, I skyped my mates and had a group conference on the possible outcomes. We all agreed that very little could go wrong but that it would be best for me to call ABSA and find out what the protocol would be for some to revoke an EFT. I also had to find out what bank the buyer was with. Fortunately he was with ABSA so and EFT would be immediate ABSA to ABSA.

After calling the incredibly helpful ABSA EFT call-center staff I had learned the following: due to the immediacy of the transfer from one ABSA account to another if the buyer was going to attempt to recall the money he had deposited he would have to call his bank (not do it online) and ask them to take the funds back out of my account. The bank would then need to phone me and get my permission to go in to my account and remove the money. So at this point I could basically say no and move on with my life.

With that knowledge safely tucked away I set forth. Meeting with the buyer went smoothly, we popped over to the roadworthy agency and had a quick 1-2 on the car. They said the car was good to go.

A bit of haggling and price negotiation and we had set a price, done the EFT and shaken on the deal.

Here are a few things that helped me make this sale easy for the buyer:

1. All of the paper work for the car was in order.
2. The car had recently been serviced and was well within the period of the next service.
3. I had recently put new tires on the car and aligned the wheels.
4. I knew the history of the car (no accidents, mileage, previous owners).
5. I went with the buyer while they test-drove the car.
6. The Gumtree advert was explanatory and descriptive, giving any potential buyer most of the information they’d want.
7. The Gumtree advert had photographs.
8. We have two sets of keys and the master key for the car (Fiat master keys cost about R15000 to replace).

As you wake up to this post chances are the world economy is looking unpleasant and at the core of the storm is an issue I think is unnecessarily woven into the fabric of Silicon Valley and the technology world as a whole. The issue is an insane attitude towards money and business, and in our case we have adopted it through idolizing Silicon Valley types.

As you read this the world is suffocating on American debt issues and at the same time some pimple-faced kid that hasn’t ever run a business or even made a penny in his life is being offered millions of dollars in VC to get that next great idea off the ground. It’s more than likely that the kid will burn through all of the cash and his business will fail. Ironically when he fails the community will congratulate him because in this industry failure for some crazy reason is good.

So basically the motto is grab as much borrowed money as you can lay your hands on, as young as you possibly can and if you fail… it’s okay. More crazy is that making money is not even really something most people in Silicon Valley are interested in, they just want to get acquired and drive off into the sunset.

Young kids building new start-ups today look up to the likes of Mark Zuckerberg for inspiration, when in fact they should rather be standing in awe of the guys down the road developing websites and applications for local businesses for money. Mark Zuckerberg and any other Silicon Valley douche-bag you can think of are the worst role-models for kids because they teach kids bad habits.

What happened to the real entrepreneurs? Remember those guys? Yes, The guys that built real businesses and not money burning doomsday devices! I miss those guys… because you could always learn a lot from them.

I recently started a services business and realized how many good lessons kids today could learn about business from doing simple services work: Everything from acquiring new skills like marketing, business management, development… but most importantly learning how to make money instead of borrowing it.

I am sincerely not impressed by the hotshot attitude that is laying waste to brilliant young minds and millions of dollars every year, what we need to go back to is being impressed by the real bootstrapping and business building attitude that we take for granted and even consider boring.

Far too many of us have TechCrunch Syndrome, if we’re honest about it. No idea what I mean? Let me explain.

Firstly, I should probably say that I don’t actually have a problem with TechCrunch itself at all. Hell, even their new logo has grown on me in the past few weeks! The problem that I actually have is with the countless entrepreneurs, including in South Africa, who seem to live their life and build their business in the pursuit of a TechCrunch headline.

I’m just as guilty of it. That salivating morning glance over the headlines that read like a just-slightly-more-attainable fairytale to any entrepreneur. “Color Looks to Reinvent Social Interaction With Its Mobile Photo App (And $41 Million in Funding)”, “Social Commerce Network Lockerz Raises $30m”. “Blah blah raises $(insert stupid number)m/bn in funding from blah blah Ventures”.

I’m no expert, but I know for sure that that approach won’t get us as an industry anywhere except on the rather sad inside of a burst bubble.

I’m lucky enough to know some really great tech entrepreneurs and innovators and not a single one of them has started a business in the hope of raising a wad of investor cash and riding that bank balance for as long as possible, before moving onto the next venture. Forgetting the debate around whether there actually is one or not, it is in that space that the hushed whispers of “bubble” crop up. And rightly so. The definition of a bubble is one of unwarranted investment, rather than simply large valuations. Color screams of a bubble. MXit doesn’t.

I’m not suggesting that the motivation for entrepreneurship should be all altruistic. Or that there is no place for venture capital. Far from it. What I’m suggesting is that the motivation for entrepreneurship should be to build a great business; one that will, in turn, make those dream figures of cash. Rather than the other way round. The success is not raising capital – it’s what you do with it once you’ve got it. Build a business of sufficient innovation, appeal, and scale, and financial success will follow. The mark of a truly successful startup, after all, is one that deserves investment, not expects it.

So don’t stop reading TechCrunch; but rather than lusting for the headline of an unjustified value of venture capital, instead keep scrolling down until you hit those headlines spelling out successful acquisitions, IPOs, and Q3 earnings. With that approach to entrepreneurship, it won’t be long before initiatives like Silicon Cape, Google Umbono, Quirk Labs, and the like start to see some truly exciting results. And Bandwidth Blog becomes SA’s very own TechCrunch. Perhaps we’ll make our logo 8-bit, too.

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.

Millions of people spend all their time perpetuating a poisonous myth to young entrepreneurs… one which if believed will likely lead to you ending up living with your mom at age 40. I’m sure you’ve seen the stories: “A high school kid builds an app in his bedroom one day and after just a couple of months gets a 100 million dollar acquisition”. Let me be the barer of bad news… it’s a lie, don’t buy it.

There is something about a story about a young unqualified person that effortlessly makes millions that appeals to us in this industry. In fact it’s very much like every Hollywood movie you’ve ever seen: some unlikely hero against all odds manages to come out on top in under 90 minutes.  We all know it’s a lie and that in real life things are a lot more complicated, but when it comes to the tech industry for some reason we buy the lie.

The myth is that you don’t need a formal education, that you need to be fresh out of high school or younger and in some magical way you are going to make it. Seriously? Is this responsible advice to be giving kids? Is this responsible advice to be following? (more…)

Seriously – the amount of attention this insane actor is getting is spiralling out of control. Everywhere I go online I have to read about what he said and did. If you are like me, and you want to rid your own webpages of the scourge of Sheen, you will be happy to know there is a plug-in available for Firefox and Google Chrome which removes all mentions of Charlie Sheen, and all the current internet memes that surround him, including his hashtags.

Its pretty easy – just go and download the “Tinted Sheen” plugin here.

You can thank me later.