Pretty good infographic over at Mashable today detailing the usage patterns of text messaging across the world. Clearly teens are texting each other at an incredible rate, and Mashable claims that this form of  communication has surpassed normal face to face communication with many people.

The scary part of all of this is of course that the networks make around 25 – 85c per every 160 characters. 160 bytes of data for that amount of money – you can clearly see why the networks want people to SMS. Clearly someone should let people know of IM – hell, use Mxit, Google Talk, BB Messenger etc.

But enough with the rant – here’s the infographic.

Its finally happening – Telkom is starting its rollout of upgrading certain 4Mbps lines to 10Mbps, but it will at first focus on metropolitan areas. While the cost stays the same, users can expect big speed increases from their existing lines – but only users who have 4Mbps line speed activated. No good news to customers with slower ADSL lines.

While this is great news, I expected a bit more from Telkom. True, our infrastructure might not support much faster lines yet, but I at least expect Telkom to increase the speeds of its lower end offerings. At present, its lower end 348kbps and 512kbps lines can hardly be considered “broadband” (click here to see how SA stacks up against the rest of the world in terms of internet speed). Despite Telkom’s misleading advertising, SA is still firmly in the stoneage of internet connectivity, with users paying ridiculous prices for slow internet. At present ADSL clients have a choice of 348kbps, 512 kpbs or 4Mbps lines, with the 4Mbps lines getting upgraded to 10Mbps lines eventually. My opinion is that this should at least be 1Mbps, 2Mbps and then finally the 4-10Mbps offering.

At least in the past year things improved with uncapped internet becoming more affordable, and many people have moved to this method of how the internet is supposed to be used. The whole idea of thinking about how much money this youtube video will cost you in bandwidth is a very antiquated idea by world standards. The problem is now that people who  might have 10Mbps capable lines will need to pay more to their ISP if they want to stick with uncapped.

At present Mweb has made public that they are working towards a 10Mbps uncapped offering, but pricing is still unavailable.

Now if Telkom can just increase the speeds of their lower end ADSL offerings…

As a commenter on IOL said, it seems its “To hell with peasants with slower lines”.

Very interesting infographic from the folks at GigaOM. You might want to glance at the figures for South Africa – as you can see, we are very much behind the rest of the world once it comes to broadband connectivity. Our mobile-only phone access looks impressive – but this is of course because of Telkom’s ridiculous pricing and poor service levels. Or that is my interpretation anyway.

Here’s hoping that EASSY and WACS will set things right.

You might have heard by now that Blackberry’s in the UAE will be banned soon if they do not open up their encryption of their BIS servers to the government – well that is the simple explanation, and there is rumours that a few other countries are also wanting to do the same.  They say this is for security reasons, but naturally there are some high profile people out there who do not want their communication to be opened up to governments.

But one should also understand the reason why these governments want – just like South Africa is currently implementing RICA in order to keep track of cellphone users, there are many security reasons for this. Police would like to be able to keep track of certain people or use electronic communication as evidence in court, and I am all for it.

It is for this very reason that I dont know whether RIM’s CEO, Mike Lazaridis, is brave or foolish. In a recent interview with Wallstreet Journal, he says these issues comes down to governments “not understanding the reality of the internet”. He mentions that “everything on the internet is encrypted, this not a Blackberry only issue”. This is of course very true, and I agree that many governments not understanding the internet. Hell, just look at SA.

And then finally he stated – “if they can’t deal with the internet, they should shut it off”. I dont know if he refers here to the internet or Blackberrys, but its a pretty brash statement.

I really hope Blackberry sorts this out, because I have a feeling that more governments will start asking similiar questions. This is a difficult situation for Blackberry – on the one hand they should open up their servers so that governments can access communication logs, and in that way the phones wont be banned, keeping Blackberry clients happy.

On the other hand, if they do open up their records, some Blackberry clients will suddenly feel that their communication is insecure – something that Blackberry has always emphasized in the past.

Lets see how this one plays out.

This morning MyBroadband had an interesting  article about the sales of iPhone vs Blackberry in SA. Despite the success of iPhone worldwide, somehow the handset has reached less than 1% of the SA mobile market. While this low figure is probably more to do with the SA mobile demography, I thought I might look a bit more into it. A user called Filip Chudzinski over at iFun put together a infographic chart with the worldwide cost of unlocked iPhone 4s. Unfortunately SA was not on that chart, so I decided to add SA to it as well, seeing as our iPhones are unlocked as well.

But first off, you might ask how am I able to “project” iPhone 4 prices? Well, this is the current price of the iPhone 3GS in SA. Since the iPhone 3G was launched in SA, the price of the iPhone has not dropped in SA. In fact, it has gotten more expensive. Now we can say this is because of exchange rate, but the Rand is a bit stronger these days, but iStore stills charges a price of R8699 for 16GB or R9999 for 32GB. So, if we assume the iPhone price stays the same with the release of iPhone 4, here is a comparison of worldwide unlocked iPhones. Please note this does not include phone which are network locked, like in the US with AT&T.

It looks pretty grim right? With iPhone 4 there is bound to be some competition however – it is not only Vodacom who is carrying it this time around, lets hope MTN can somehow drop the price somewhat. On the other hand, with the 3GS, the price was suddenly a thousand rand more per model than the 3G.

But lets stay optimistic, competition can be a great thing after all…

Sources:

iClarified (Creative Commons)

iStore iPhone Tariffs

Euro to Rand pricing on 2 August 2010

Currently content creators are sitting with a bit of a dillemma – the internet is not a place that necessarily likes paying for content, or at least thats the opinion of users. Any business case looking into news media will confirm this – people do not want to not want to pay for something that they can get free. Just ask Rupert Murdoch who recently decided to start asking people subscription charges to access the Times website. Early indicators show that its not neccesarily a big success. But this not because people do not want to pay for content, they hate the fragmented paywall system.

Solutions like iTunes for multimedia proves that people are willing to pay for content, provided its easy to do, and universal in terms of scope. And this is where Cred comes in, created by South Africans Saul Kropman, Jason Kramer and Toby Kurien. Instead of having to register at every content site (for example like The Times), users will use the Cred micropayment system to purchase credits to buy access to the relevant article. Cred is not only applicable to text based content like news, but multimedia sources as well.

At present, one Cred is worth one South African Rand, and publishers can charge up to a maximum of 20 Creds. At present  different denominations are available, starting from around R50 up to R150. In future users will be able to define their own amount. At present the system uses your credit card to pay for these, but Paypal support is coming in future.

For more info, here is the official press release:
As the developed world moves towards spending more online than on traditional media such as television and print, you’d assume that monetization of the Internet would come from advertising. With advertising revenue come massive expenses as journalists, technology and marketing come into play.  Internationally, media mogul Rupert Murdoch runs around calling everyone on the Internet a kleptomaniac for stealing his content and is aiming to lock down his online portals and go so far as to remove them from Google.

The fact remains that even with a full advertising complement, revenue simply cannot outweigh costs.

This is essentially where Cred comes in, we allow content providers to monetize their websites by charging users for content with individual micropayments or subscriptions. We at Cred love content; we personally create and consume content on a constant basis and it was this passion for excellent quality that led to the idea for Cred. With online text, audio and video being free there is little ascribed value and if there’s no value, what pressure is there for excellent content to be produced? Cred aims to preserve quality content by putting a value; we believe that the cream of content will then rise to the top.

Currently in the final stages of testing, we’re accepting sign ups from content providers looking to prove their content is worth charging for. Initially we’re available for the WordPress platform and eventually will expand to other platforms such as Drupal, Joomla as well as provide documentation that will allow developers to hook into their own niche content management systems.

The revenue model affords content providers 80% of all revenue without having to worry about fraud, payment gateways and are linked to a ubiquitous payment system thus allowing for easier access to your content by users with a Cred account. Cred scales perfectly for larger organisations as they can white label the Cred offering if desired.

Whether a small, niche publisher, band, photographer, author or massive media conglomerate anyone can start charging for their content with Cred.

Go to www.yourcred.com to sign up and follow us on twitter: @yourcred