Vodacom’s The Grid yesterday launched Legends of Echo, South Africa’s first multi-player, location-based social game for mobile phones.

The Echo is a parallel virtual universe based on the South African map, but instead of cities and skyscrapers, players will find that there are rolling green hills, rocky outcrops and valleys to explore.

Legends of Echo makes use of Vodacom’s Location-Based Services (LBS) to determine a player’s physical location; from their location, players can then explore their surroundings or move – virtually, of course – to anywhere else in South Africa to interact with other players in real time.

Real-world place names are used to navigate; so, for instance, a player could teleport from Bellville in Cape Town to Randburg in Johannesburg to battle another player.

In the game, five bloodlines (Air, Earth, Water, Fire and Industry), incorporating twenty characters, battle each other for domination. Each bloodline has specific abilities and traits with regard to weapon use and creation.

Apart from engaging in one-on-one battle, players can trade with each other or communicate via an in-game instant messaging system.

The object of the game is to become a legend of the Echo. To achieve this, players need to gain enough Legend Points to appear on the high score sheet, by battling other players, and obtaining advanced weapons and other items by exploration or trade with other players.

Vincent Maher, Portfolio Manager Social Media, Vodacom South Africa, says, “Legends of Echo combines the best in real-time Location-Based Services and mobile multiplayer gaming, in that it allows players across South Africa to interact in a virtual world that is linked to their real-life location – all via their cellphones. As such, it’s an exciting and entertaining extension of The Grid as the leading location-based social network in South Africa.”

The game is available for free as a Java download to cellphones. To play Legends of Echo, SMS ‘ECHO’ to 33313 (50c/SMS) or visit http://www.legendsofecho.mobi.

The Grid, Vodacom’s location-based mobile social network, has partnered with e.tv to create a daily Mood Map of the country based on Grid user data.

The Grid allows users to set their mood to happy or sad; this data is then combined with each user’s geographical location, and a map is produced, much like a weather map – except that the Mood Map shows “happy” and “sad” percentages in each province, rather than cold fronts and approaching thunderstorms.

e.tv will feature the Mood Map every morning after the weather report on Sunrise (weekdays from 6AM to 8AM). The partnership is reportedly the first to see a news channel using data from a social networking platform for statistical purposes. It’s not the only recent partnership for The Grid, though – last December we reported on how the mobile social network had partnered with the HIV-911 programme to map out around 11,000 HIV-related support services across South Africa.

Vincent Maher, Portfolio Manager Social Media, Vodacom South Africa, says, “The partnership with e.tv is a great interactive way for users of a social network like the Grid to see how their actions influence the general mood of the country. We are using the data from a social network in an innovative way by showing users how their mood updates contribute to the overall mood of the country or province.”

To access the Grid, SMS ‘MOOD’ to 33313 (50c/SMS) or visit onthegrid.mobi.

Vodacom this week confirmed that it has partnered with Nedbank to bring M-PESA, Vodafone’s mobile money transfer solution, to South Africa.

M-PESA’s key feature is that it allows users to make peer-to-peer payments using their mobile phones, without either party needing to have a bank account. Deposits and withdrawals are effected through a network of agents, such as airtime resellers and retail outlets. Other functionality offered by M-PESA includes bill payments and airtime purchases.

Both Vodacom and Nedbank have alluded to how this service will impact the lives of those who are not yet part of the formal banking system in South Africa. According to FinScope 2009, around 40% of South African adults do not have a bank account of any kind (up from 37% in 2008) – certainly a significant sector of the market. And because M-PESA doesn’t rely on a branch or ATM network for deposits and withdrawals, it is particularly well-suited to countries that have vast rural areas with no existing banking infrastructure.

M-PESA was first launched in Kenya in 2007, where it has been enormously successful, particularly amongst urban workers needing a secure and quick way to transfer funds to their family members in rural areas. M-PESA is now also operational in Tanzania and Afghanistan, and has gathered over 10 million users.

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Admob has launched a number of great tools designed to enable publishers to more efficiently manage their publisher account. The mobile advertising network made headlines last year when Google announced they where acquiring Admob.

The New Publisher Dashboard allows publishers to view key statistics for their mobile websites and apps from one streamlined location. Users can customize the AdMob interface to see data that is most important to them such as revenue for the day, real-time pending earnings or performance statistics by geography. Improved navigation also makes it easy for a publisher to quickly review key performance metrics for each site or app in their account

Enhanced Reporting UI gives users the ability to customize, view and save reports from the same interface. Publishers can easily save time by saving reports they run on a regular basis. Reports can be saved for either a fixed date range, June 1-30 for instance, or for a dynamic time period such as the previous 7 days.  Users can also create reports for different groupings of their sites or apps, for example viewing performance for all Android apps together.

Reporting API (Beta) enables both publishers and advertisers to build their own internal tools and dashboards that incorporate AdMob data.  All statistics available through the AdMob interface can be accessed through the Reporting API allowing users to easily evaluate and compare their performance to that of other networks.  The Reporting API can be found in the Tools section of their AdMob account.

Server Side Controls enable developers using the new iPhone, Android and Flash Lite SDKs to dynamically control ads within their applications from their AdMob account. For example, users can easily edit the text and background color of their ads along with the refresh rate of their applications without the need to submit the changes to their respective app stores. This not only saves time, but also allows developers to test different aspects of their apps and optimize the content based on their findings.

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Mobile ad network AdMob has just released its latest stats tracking the rise of Android, and it’s clear that Google’s mobile platform is quickly gaining steam. AdMob writes that between October and December, the number of ad requests worldwide from Android devices increased a whopping 97% to over 1 billion ad requests. In other words, the number of Android devices doubled in just two months.

AdMod records the number of ad requests its system generates, meaning this leap has come about through more people downloading and using ad-supported apps via the Android market.

Here are the higlights of AdMob’s latest metrics:

• 97% increase in worldwide requests from Android devices, totalling to 1 billion ad request between October-December
• 98% of the ad requests came from HTC devices in October, 56% in December from HTC devices and 30% from Motorola DROID.
• Among the Android devices that generated more than 3% of ad requests are Motorola DROID, HTC Dream, HTC Magic, HTC Hero, Motorola CLIQ, HTC Droid, HTC Dream, HTC Magic and HTC Hero.
• Motorola DROID received 30% ad requests in December making it the number one Adroid handset in terms of ad requests.

Interestingly, these data have to come in just in time for Google’s announcement of the Nexus Phone. And even more interesting is the fact that AdMob is already owned by Google.

Will the Nexus One phone add spike to Android’s current achievement in terms of ad request?

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. (more…)