Vodacom’s the Grid, South Africa’s first location-based mobile social network available to everyone who has a WAP-enabled cellphone, has mapped out close to 11,000 HIV-related support services covering prevention, treatment and support across South Africa.

By utilising the Grid’s location-aware technology, South Africans are not only able to see on their cellphones which HIV support service is closest to them, but they can also obtain the centre’s contact details and get directions to it.

This initiative sees the Grid partnering with the HIV-911 programme – a comprehensive guide of HIV and AIDS related support services in South Africa. The main objective of the programme is to ensure that information about HIV support services are accessible to all South Africans. HIV-911 is funded by United States Agency for International Development / President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief through the Foundation for Professional Development.

Says Shameel Joosub, Managing Director, Vodacom South Africa: “By utilising the broad reach of cellphones in South Africa and tapping into the large user base on the Grid, we are able to make crucial HIV and AIDS support information readily available to all South Africans. This is a great initiative to communicate the value of getting tested to a younger target audience in a social networking environment. It’s just another example of how mobile technology can help create a better life for ordinary South Africans.”

All the HIV-911 information is available in the Grid’s latest application release to coincide with this year’s World Aids Day. To access the Grid SMS ‘GRID’ to 33313 (50c/SMS) or visit http://onthegrid.mobi/

In South Africa, the credit for the development of the certain new services on the mobile platform goes to ordinary people in the lower income brackets who have led the way by adopting, even instigating new ideas to turn the cellphone into a powerful transacting tool.

Compared to a low eight percent fixed internet penetration, South Africa has cellular penetration of a 114 percent. It is clear from the statistics that South Africans have leapfrogged fixed-line telephony and internet in favor of mobile telephony and have called for an increasing array of data services to be delivered to this platform.

This is patently true when it comes to banking and transacting using the mobile phone. To the surprise of the airtime providers, the African continent has witnessed the use of multinational pre-loaded airtime (most notably MTN airtime vouchers) as a type of cross-border grassroots currency, swapped and bartered via sms, and a way to send “money” quickly back to family in other African countries. The informal airtime-economy is an excellent example of the organic development of technology by ordinary people to meet their transactional needs in contexts where credit cards and banking facilities are lacking.

Meet MiMoney

mimoney works essentially like preloaded airtime, or, in other words, converts cash into an electronic currency that can be used to make purchases in a secure and controllable manner. The currency is free to buy, free to get and free to keep, so a R100 note converts into exactly R100 mimoney to be used online, with no leakage or transaction fees incurred. Read the rest of this entry »

With the economy on the grind, even Microsoft’s Windows 7 may have a cold opening on October 22 when its due.  And although Windows 7 has already been acknowledged as an effective OS much better than the Windows Vista, even this repute will not help the cause.

In a survey conducted by ScriptLogic Corp – a firm that helps companies in managing their Microsoft Windows-based networks – the main patterns hinting at this cold response are primarily related to money, while after money there are compatibility issues with the already in use applications. More than 1000 companies who responded to the survey said that they have kept money in their pockets by keeping software updates at bay.

Even the likes of Intel has stayed with the XP variant fueling rumors that the Windows 7 is unstable. Statistically talking, 60% of the participants will not deploy Windows 7, with 34% to do it in 2010 and only 5.4% to get it this year.

• 42% mentioned that the biggest problemwould be lack of resources
• 35% of the lot is doing it to avoid upgrades or delaying purchases to save money
• 39% of these participants expressed concerns over compatibility of the Windows 7 with existing applications.

So are you going to get Windows 7 on your machine? If so .. when?

Source: Reuters

If it’s not broken, don’t fix it! That’s why many webmasters choose not to update for the latest release of WordPress, but when it comes to WordPress 2.7.1 you should consider it as the new version has received some pretty good reviews from all around and has been hailed as one of the best bug-free version among all the ones dished out thus far.

More like a maintenance release than a security release, the new 2.7.1 update fixes 68 tickets and one of the pleasant aspects is that if you’re already running wp 2.7 it will only take like 10 seconds and a push of a button (via the Tools → Upgrade menu) to have it up and running on your blogs. Or you can download it.

For WordPress fans, the biggest positive out of the new version is the highly improved Plugins Directory Search which now uses Sphinx to power all the search requests. It works far better than any of the plug-in directory searches from previous versions and the few lingering bugs in this new tool will be fixed in the next release according to the guys working on it.

The initial 2.7 version has been so good – considering how much things evolved since wp 2.3 or wp 2.5, that there has been little that needed change, but with the 2.7.1 update working so well, WordPress has decided to put away the 2.8 version for a while and bring it out when it is fully ready. Wise decision indeed!

The guys at Ushahidi (means “testimony” in Swahili), widely known in Kenya for mapping real-time citizen reports and crisis-related information to help civilians avoid conflicts, just announced a couple of interesting things a few days ago.

They managed to secure a $200,000 financing from Humanity United, an organization focused on ending modern-day slavery and mass atrocities, and will move on from local Kenya to the whole African continent and maybe to the whole world, soon.

“The Ushahidi platform will soon empower anyone in a crisis situation to utilize the tool for their own community, and provide a central place for citizens to easily post critical information via mobile phone or the Web,” said Randy Newcomb, President and CEO of Humanity United.

Another reason for the press release is the new layout of the site which is now easier to be use. Design by a small group of volunteer developers, these guys will get at least my applause for coming up with a solution so fast.

Last thing, the Ushahidi platform is going to be available worlwide, pretty soon and more important, it’s going to be free.

Feedalizr is a Adobe Air desktop client that allows users to aggregate their Friend Feed account in a neat interface on their desktop. Launched earlier this year by SWAT (Strategic Worldwide Applications & Technologies) a division of Nasper’s MIH Internet, Feedalizr is one of the first quality Adobe Air applications to come out of South Africa.

Feedalizr recently launched their new version with major upgrades to the user interface, Flickr photo drag n drop integration and finally the most interesting feature: Feedalizr Video.

It’s pretty simple, you put your video directly into the Feedalizr application and all your Friend Feed subscribers will see it. Though you can record right from your camera in the applications it has one small drawback: the 30 seconds time limit which may not be enough to capture your entire message.

Some of the things you can do with the Feedalizr desktop application includes:

• Updates for Flickr, Pownce, or Twitter
• Updates filtered by friend,
• Post videos – which is rather seamless, and records right from your cam in the app
• Drag and drop or upload pictures directly to Flickr
• Instant updates

FriendFeed has a public API and Feedalizr seems to be one of the first apps based on the platform. You can follow the Feedalizr staff through their Friend Feed account.

What’s your favorite Adobe AIR app? Drop a link in the comments!

We decided that we should start a series of Firefox Extentions articles on BandwidthBlog and will start today. The first one to be reviewed is Search Status by Quirk.

The best thing about the Firefox Search Status add-on is that it won’t interfere with the pages you load, won’t eat memory or slow down your connection. It stays in your browser bar and shows you the PageRank, Alexa Rank and Compete Rank of the website you’re visiting. It also features a keyword density analyzer, highlights no-follow links, makes link report, meta-tags, whois for the domain, shows you the robots.txt file, shows indexed pages and backward links. You can view all of these by a simple right mouse button click.

For a search engine marketer these are incredible powerful tools, and if you plan to do SEO on your own it’s a must. It looks like this:

So far I haven’t heard any complaints about Search Status by Quirk. Let us know if you used it, if it was useful or if you had trouble with it. Download it from their website.

Located in California, Smaato the company that wants to be the Google Adsense of mobile phones has managed to raise $3.5 million in a Series A funding and will use the money to develop their Smaato Open Mobile Advertising (SOMA) platform. The product will be delivered to phones that run on JAVA, Symbian, Windows Mobile, and Palm’s OS.

The company managed to secure advertisers like Allianz, Toyota, Microsoft, Mercedes-Benz, Martini or Weekly in Touch to trial out their service.

“Since founding Smaato we are experiencing a growing interest in targeted mobile advertising. With Smaato we are at the forefront for developing innovative advertising solutions to reach the mobile consumer. With the support of our international investors and our advisory board of experienced and globally connected individuals, we will continue to expand our reach within the industry on a global scale,” stated Ragnar Kruse, the Co-Founder and CEO of Smaato.

I still think Google has an advantage, but if Smaato plays the cards right, this could turn out great for them. Meanwhile, they’re near the pool.

SmaatoBlog

The London-based company that revolutionized advertising, allowing small and medium websites to sell advertising on their own, OpenAds, managed to get a second round $15.5 million funding led by Accel Partners, PaidContent said. The money will be used for hiring more staff and product development but I can only ask, how will they make money from an open source product?

The answer could be simple,  because OpenAds just announced they will offer a hosted version of their software. No need to upload the files and host it yourself. But still is this a good business plan? Probably so, because they may think of a commercial version.

Take Wordpress for example with their free blog hosting until you need more features and you give them some money. Wish you luck OpenAds and we shall see what the $15.5M funding can do for them.

Introducing our latest blogging editor to BandwidthBlog, uber Tech Geek, Johan du Toit

Great developments in the ICT market this year (2007) opened up great new opportunities to save some hard earned cash. Vodacom dropped data rates, by as much as 61%, while also expanding 3G networks. MTN followed. Smartphones took off in a big way and clever developers seized the opportunity to get compatible software to market.

Fring is such an application. This great piece of software is easy to use, while also being feature rich. Registration and software installation is quick and easy. Just visit http://www.fring.com. It is compatible with most smartphones. It enables you to make calls to your Skype®, MSN® Messenger, ICQ, Google Talk™, SIP and Twitter contacts. The best part is that it is all free. You only pay for your data, but at 10MB per hour it is hardly worth mentioning. The only obstacle to all voice communication to become totally free is that everyone has not installed it yet. It will happen. The drive is huge from the likes of Skype, Google, Fring and Yeigo to become the dominant player in the mobile VoIP arena.

I thought a comparison between Fring and Telkom would be of great interest to us South Africans, since our call and data rates are amongst the highest in the world. If you drop your landline and use this information, you could save good money. You also get to go totally mobile for good.

Just the fact that you have read this far, must mean that you probably already subscribe to some data deal. In my research I used the most expensive rate at R2.00/MB, so you should save even more. To simplify matters, only peak minutes was considered. This makes the table below relevant for small businesses. A thumb suck total, of 300 minutes per month, was divided into different call types. Voipcheap (http://www.voipcheap.com) has the lowest VoIP rates in the world. All calls to the USA are free! All UK landline calls is also free. In this example the saving was 46%. I say it is well worth it. Go for it.

The Chart:

Other South Africa alternatives – Yeigo