Though no country in Africa sells the iPhone, there are people to own one.  You buy it online and then use all sorts of jailbreak software to “crack” it. Apparently there is a small market of iPhoners that would like the websites optimized for their phone.

All these being said, there are news from Afrigator. After launching the second version they are now optimizing their site for the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch. They use a browser detecting software to make sure you’re redirected to the appropriate location.

Here’s how Afrigator looks on an iPhone.

Popularity: 8% [?]

Acceleration Group have sold their media division, “Acceleration Media” to Kagiso Media and Lagardère Active Radio International (LARI) for an undisclosed amount.

Acceleration Media is one of the leaders in the South African online media with a profitable track record and great knowledge, so the deal makes sense for the buyers that wanted to diversify into digital media. What was a company like Kasigo - that owns lots of radio stations but no sites - supposed to do to enter the market? Yes, the answer is “buy someone”.

Another reason why I think this is going to be a good deal is because Acceleration Media and Acceleration Group were heading into different strategic directions. It’s not good business to follow two different paths, they knew it and sold.

However there are a few concerns because it will be interesting to see how Acceleration will continue with the current business model now that they are owned by a media owner? It’s interesting to note Kagiso Media’s RadMark venture which they use to sell adspace to all their radio stations. Will they apply the same principle with Accelaration Cape Town?

How do you feel about it? Here is the press release.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Today Mail & Guardian launched a stand alone job site, dubbed JobConnection, that will replace their previous jobs portal which was hosted on M&G’s main site.

This is a good addition knowing that job portals are a very competitive market in South Africa with big players including CareerJunction, JobMail or BizCommunity’s job area.

Getting back to JobConnection I’ll start with the design. It’s clean and simple with good colors for my eyes and though it doesn’t have much content, you get exactly what you need. Browse jobs by category easily, advanced search form to view only what’s important for you and a Newest/Popular jobs tab to keep you up to date.

Uploading a CV, posting jobs or setting up alerts to new offers is as easy as a mouse click on those big banners in the right.

From what I’ve seen JobConnection partnered up with CareerJunction, South Africa’s number one online career site and with BizCommunity to offer advertising and media industry jobs. This sounds like a good deal.

There is one thing I don’t like about the whole layout of the site and I’m talking about the ugly Adsense banner in the right. Why I don’t like it? Because it’s not matching the site’s colors. They could be making big bucks with it (or not) but I would change it with some CPM advertising or I would fit the colors to match the design.

As you can see this review is pretty positive because of the functionality and the usefulness of the site, so if you’ve been looking for a job lately, take a look on JobConnection, maybe they can help you out.

by Alex Ion

Popularity: 9% [?]

Last week the big buzz on the Internet was Microsoft trying to buy Yahoo for $44.6B but no formal response was received. However, Yahoo rejected the takeover bid and considered it inadequate. The fun thing is not the fact that it was rejected but the fact that they could sell if the offer was higher.

Another interesting point is that Microsoft was interested to buy Yahoo from 2007 when they made a $40 per share (only $29.87 today) offer that was rejected, too. So I wonder, will they accept forty-per-share now when we know the odds where not on their side last year profit-wise.

Microsoft could go directly to the shareholders if the board is not happy with a new bid, and they may get a better response.

From what I’ve seen/heard so far Yahoo customers wouldn’t be that happy to know they’re actually Microsoft customers and may decide to go. I am not sure if Microsoft is doing the right thing, but time will tell.

Popularity: 7% [?]

We’ve published quite a few scoops over the last few months namely the release of Laaik and Play from 24, the Nudjit launch and now leaked screen shots of the much anticipated and documented M&G redesign.

OK, so maybe the screens weren’t leaked but actually graciously sent to me by the head strategist of M&G and Amatomu co-founder Vincent Maher. I caught up with him on Skype and he gave me the low down on their latest project -

The screen shots below is straight after their first internal review attended by Vince Maher, Matthew Buckland, Riaan (M&G editor) and Matthew (the news editor). The goal was to bed down the style and the grid of the homepage which is about 50% done. The way they setup their homepage mock up is exactly what it would look like online with real content, the exact type size, face and line height. The next step was to print and review as a team (team mentioned above). Then they navigated the same mock up in a browser to check the vertical units have their own visual logic in the loading view.

Vincent Maher: Ideally we want people to stop scrolling at logical points and what they see is something that makes sense on its own. Or, if they don’t, there must be enough visual markers to understand that they have stopped between blocks..

Some of the other notable changes are -

• Horizontal navigation
• Wide format 96opx wide, centered
• Essentially four columns decreasing in width towards the right
• Colour - we’re dropping the red and black links because its hard to read
• Blurbs shortened from 5o to about 17 words

Tomorrow is the second round of meetings and then Vince and his team start work on the sections and story pages. Screen shots below -

Pics of the M&G brains trust working on the design

Remember you saw it here first!

Popularity: 11% [?]

Bandwidth Blog’s first office photos post was pics from leading internet companies offices and ended up being a huge hit with our audience. Today we are featuring local internet power house 24.com’s offices which is the digital arm of Media24.

Now you might think - “Media24, aren’t they old school corporates?” - Think again - They have made serious in roads with aligning themselves with the latest internet trends and the vision behind their office reflects this - staff party room with stocked bar and xbox360, staff library, boardrooms themed with geeky virus names like “Trojan” and “Dark Avenger” and a huge open floor office with plasmas hanging above the offices streaming the latest news24 headlines - 24.com certainly has a great environment to work in.

Here are some photos of the 24.com offices -

Cubicle area

Top view of office platform

The “Trojan” boardroom

Staff party room/bar

Library

Library

Flashy lighting

Thanks goes out to Elan Lohman (Head of social media) and Karen (Marketing) from 24 who sent me the pics.

Popularity: 11% [?]

Nudjit is the brain child of Nic Haralambous who approached Justin Hartman and Gregor Rohrig to collaborate on a locally flavoured gadget blog. All three founders are devoted gadget geeks (check out the ‘gadgets we use‘ page) and hence Nudjit was born.

If you look at global trends some of the most popular websites around the world are gadget and tech blogs and this clearly proves there is a market for a blog that covers gadget reviews in South Africa. Coupled with the fact that South African consumers don’t have a single independent resource to get objective reviews from which opened a market they could tap into.

South Africans love gadgets but not every gadget in the world will work in South Africa. Nudjit reviews, often harshly, how these cool new toys relate to our local market and try to give consumers information that they can’t find elsewhere. Will Nudjit be a success? They’re certainly on the right track with all the crucial blogging startup elements in place - good writers, better design and a proven topic.

Some of the topics Nudjit covers is audio and visual, computing, photography, tech videos and Apple software. The blog uses the popular open source blogging platform - Wordpress - which is put so good use with an awesome design.

Finally, the latest tech news from Afrigator also streams onto the Nudjit homepage.

Thanks must go out to Justin for sending me the scoop on Nudjit.

Popularity: 9% [?]

Have you ever heard of Moli. I can’t say I had until today when I found out that a new social network managed to raise $29.6 million. The first thing I can see about it is that it’s ranking #87,000 on Alexa while Compete said they had 48,000 visitors in December.

I will let you be the judge for that one, because other than the standard features of a social network (profiles, comments or friends lists) I can’t find anything new for the market, hence they think “Moli is a next-generation social media community”. Oh yeah, there’s a “one account manages multiple profiles” slogan, but I’m not sure how innovative that is.

If you need to know more about Moli to make up your mind, other than the above, you should know they are part of Mainstream Holdings Inc which was founded by ex E*Trade CEO, Christos Cotsakos.

I am putting them in the pool for now, because the raised sum is way more than what the site offers and I don’t think Moli will take on FaceBook or LinkedIn any time soon.

via VentureBeat

Popularity: 7% [?]

If there were any Arabian, Hebrew and Persian bloggers out there that can’t do it properly because of the language, Blogger.com just announced that from January 17th it should be available to them, on their blogging platform.

Arabic, Persian and Hebrew languages are different from others mainly because you write from right to the left. It was hard work to flip the entire interface but my assumption is there will be people who will get their fingers on a keyboard and will start blogging.

If you’re one of them and want to change you can do it from the menu in your Dashboard.

For a Middle East country with a lot of communication boundaries it is a very good and easy tool to break them. It’s looking great and I think Blogger made the right choice. They are now supporting a total of 40 languages.

buzz.blogger.com

Popularity: 8% [?]

I’ve just heard that Zude “an enabling technology that allows even novice web users to create and control their own web pages” managed to raise $5.3 million from Irwin Lieber and Barry Rubenstein of Wheatley Partners, Persistency Capital and Gund Investment, LLC.

You may probably ask, just like me why they did it, because $5.3 million for a website that Alexa ranks as 228,000 may not be that good for those investors. The money will be used for product development that include new tools and growing the user base but is it me, or they’re trying to be a better Netvibes?

It’s a truly web 2.0 company, I’ll have to agree but claiming to bring all your social networks in one place, consolidate your web, share photos and experiences could be to much. I’m just an inch away of putting it in the dead pool but I’ll have to wait for the signs to confirm. Meanwhile, tell us your experience with Zude, if you had any.

Source

Popularity: 6% [?]