Recent emails that have begun to circulate have revealed that as of 00:01 GMT February 14th 2012 betfair.com and all its associated products will no longer be available in South Africa or for South African residents. The decision to pull out of the country was as a result of a ruling by the South African Supreme Court of Appeal.

At this time however,  we are unaware of the reasons for this development.

Registered account holders have begun to receive an email from the UK based online betting site to inform them of the developments.

Read the full email after the jump.

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Wikipedia will be going dark on Wednesday in protest against two Congressional bills – the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA). The announcement was made by Co-Founder Jimmy Wales in a number of tweets. The website has also uploaded a banner that displays the message: “Please note: In less than 21 hours, the English Wikipedia will be blacked out globally to protest SOPA and PIPA.”

The bills have attracted fierce opposition from many in the technology industry. The New York Times Blog reports that “opponents say several of the provisions in the legislation, including those that may force search engines and Internet service providers to block access to Web sites that offer or link to copyrighted material, would stifle innovation, enable censorship and tamper with the livelihood of businesses on the Internet.”

According to Wales, the English Wikipedia receives approximately 25 million visitors every day. Wikipedia’s decision means that rather than those millions of visitors seeing the volume of knowledge available, they will be met with a screen explaining the company’s stance on the bill and information on how to take action against SOPA. Wales has also said that if passed, the bills could censor what information and links various websites will be allowed to publish.

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ScaleConf is a two-day conference that will bring together local and international experts to talk about the challenges and future of building and running online sites and services. The conference is the first of its kind to be hosted in South Africa.

Presentations will cover the culture and methodologies used to architect and develop the strong foundations that enable large-scale web companies to function smoothly, and smaller ones to grow gracefully. The speaker line-up includes some big names like Coda Hale (Yammer Inc.), Simon de Haan (Praekelt), Zach Holman (Github) and Miles Ward (Amazon Web Services).

The conference is the brainchild of two operations engineers at Yola.com, Jonathan Hitchcock and Duncan Phillips. “We created the conference because there’s a growing startup focus in Cape Town, and with that comes the need to build web applications at an unprecedented scale. While in the US I had attended some great technical conferences, and I wanted to bring that level of quality to South Africa,” explains Jonathan. Duncan adds, “Ultimately, the aim is to promote the best practices and technologies that will help drive a world-class DevOps culture here in South Africa.”

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Google has recently announced that the world’s second favourite browser has a new beta version that aims at speeding up the browser as well as providing even more security.

According to the official Google Chrome blog, the browser will “now start loading some web pages in the background, even before the user has finished typing the URL” and if the URL auto-completes to a site the user is likely to visit, Chrome will begin to prerender the page which reduces the time between hitting Enter and seeing the fully loaded we page.

In terms of the enhanced security, protection from additional malware attacks is provided by improvements to Chrome’s Safe Browsing technology. Google noticed an increase in malicious websites that try to convince users to download and run a file that will harm a computer, even those that pretend to be an anti-virus program.

To help protect users against malicious downloads, Chrome now includes “expanded functionality to analyze executable files (such as “.exe” and “.msi” files) that can be downloaded.” If a file that a user downloads is known to be malicious, or is hosted on a website that hosts a relatively high percentage of malicious downloads, Chrome will warn users that the file appears to be malicious and recommend that it should be discarded.

For the first time digital music sold more than actual physical store sales of music, according to the latest results by Nielsen and Billboard. Digital Sales jumped by 8.4% to take 50.3% of the market. Physical sales dipped by 5%. Here are some interesting facts about this year in digital music sales:

• For the first time, digital music sales are larger than physical sales; accounting for 50.3% of all music purchases in 2011.
• Digital track sales set a new record with 1.27 billion sales in 2011; an increase of 100 million sales (8.4%) over 2010.
• Digital album sales exceeded 100 million for the first time with a new all-time high of 103.1 million sales (up from 86.3 million in 2010); an increase of nearly 20%.

• Digital album sales accounted for nearly 1 out of every 3 album purchases (31%) in 2011; compared to 26% in 2010, 20% in 2009, 15% in 2008, 10% in 2007 and 5.5% in 2006.
• Nearly all digital album genres had a positive year in 2011; except for Soundtracks which were down just over 2% compared to 2010.
• For the last week of 2011 (week ending 1/1/2012), digital album sales set a new high with sales of 3.5 million

Clearly people were eager to download even more music during the festive season, or maybe a lot of people needed to fill up their new music player or phone with some songs. Adele’s 21 was the year’s top selling album, and is also the best selling digital album of all time.

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Nasper’s CEO Koos Bekker paid a visit the 2oceansvibe radio studio on Wednesday morning for an exclusive interview on the “Hard Willi” show with Richard Hardiman and Lindsay Williams.

Prompted by their own questions, as well as responding to tweets from listeners of the show, Koos covered a range of topics, from radio and print media, to the local and international online landscape.

Naspers is a leading multinational media group and over the past two decades the group has evolved from a traditional print media business in one country, to a broad-based e-media company in multiple markets. Naspers’ principal operations are in internet platforms (focussing on commerce, communities, content, communication and games), pay-television and the provision of related technologies and print media (including publishing, distribution and printing of magazines, newspapers and books).

Touchlab, A division of Media 24, recently launched the go! South Africa travel app.

Listen to the podcast of the live interview below:

As 2011 draws to a close we thought it might be a good time to look back and see what products we really enjoyed using in 2011. Some of our choices might be controversial, but hey, horses for courses. Let us know what you think in the comments?

Best Phone: Samsung Galaxy S2

Even the most ardent fans of iPhone have to agree – the Galaxy S2 is a truly great phone. It is very fast, is built well (despite being made of plastic), the screen is beautiful, the camera is excellent – the list goes on. Pricing is also pretty good, and the phone is still great several months later, which you cannot typically say of the Android phone marketplace. You cannot go wrong. Not even Samsung’s bigger and faster Galaxy Note could change our name. Now we just have to get our hands on the Samsung Galaxy Nexus. Close second: Apple iPhone 4S. Expect our review in the new year.

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Travelstart, an online travel agency with its headquarters in Cape Town that has been in operation for 12 years, recently sought to find out why traditional travel agents charge so much more for flights than the online bunch. The data obtained was quite alarming, finding many bricks and mortar agencies charging customers significantly more in comparison to the cost of  booking flights online.

The research process, conducted by Synovate, included:

• Comparing prices offered on the Travelstart website at the same time that it queried prices from the agencies surveyed.
• Contacting 50 different outlets across 6 travel agency brands, and successfully collecting 317 quotes for flights to 10 international destinations to investigate pricing, consistency and the quality of service offered by the travel agents
• Not revealing to agents contacted  that they were part of a survey, in order to establish the level of service that would be offered to any regular call-in customer. The first price that the agency quoted was used in analysing the results of the survey – so no negotiating took place.

While Travelstart commissioned the research and identified six travel agency brands and 10 popular flight routes, Synovate selected the dates and flight times, the number of passengers and other elements that were used in the research.

The results of the research were displayed in an infographic that compares the price of flights from traditional travel agents and online travel agents.

View the infographic below:

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