Itching to get your hands on the new Nokia Lumia 800? Vodacom have sweetened the deal by giving away a Xbox to the first few hundred customers. Hurry, get your free Xbox with your new Nokia Lumia 800 tomorrow morning. I’ve never been much of a gamer myself. Have always watched other people playing and wondered about the inner workings of the game and the technology involved. But if you really want an Xbox to go with your new Nokia Lumia 800 smartphone and your post holiday season budget is depleted this is your opportunity to kill 2 birds with one stone.
Nokia Lumia 800 South Africa
Simon Dingle tweeted the pic above but without any indication of where exactly this promotion is happening and he didn’t reply to my query either.
Business Plan Tips
Thinking about starting a business and have no idea where to begin? Unless you know some people with past experience when it comes to starting a business and writing business plans the journey may take much longer than it needs to. Would-be entrepreneurs and small business owners in South Africa now have the free assistance of the SEDA Small Business Stars Business plan competition to assist you on your “how to write a business plan” journey. They are also throwing in R4-million worth of prizes for the best business plans. You have until the 29 February 2012 to enter.
Firstly, the competition is designed to encourage and assist you in taking your business idea, or existing business, to the next level and support the development of your business concept. It’s open to any South African citizen over 18 who has a business idea or an existing small business and they provide free workshops/training to assist you in entering the onlien competition. You do not have to have a registered business to enter. To register click here.
The SEDA Small Business Stars Business Plan Template is broken down into the following 9 sections that have come all too familiar as I’ve written my first business plan in 2005. Herewith those 9 sections of the business plan and some tips based on past experience.
If you’re like most people out there who have no idea what the Wikipedia, and many other sites, blackout a few days ago was all about watch this emergency TED Talk by Clay Shirky. Not will the proposed SIPA and PIPA bills kill our beloved internet AND innovation but it could turn the way we use the internet into a consume only platform. Clay Shirky explains this in a much more eloquent manner. If there is one video you watch today let it be this one.
Pinterest is not just another social network. Well, not like you think it is. It’s really just a virtual pin board – a place where you can store and share all your serendipitous internet finds in a practical and visual way. It’s like ‘bookmarking’ taken to a whole new level. There’s not much in the way of cheesy or ostentatious status updates or anything like that… so SCORE. There’s no arrogance or bickering, and no show-offs or ‘Look, look at me!’ phonies. In fact it’s quite the opposite. It’s just a bunch of interesting people sharing cool stuff they find on the net.
Pinterest is visual in a way that anybody can enjoy. Male, female, young, old – there’s a little somethin’ Pinteresting (I just had to. Sorry.) for everyone. It’s a place where you see positivity. It’s like this unpretentious, noncommercial island in the middle of the advertising-riddled internet ocean; a place to escape to and indulge in eye-candy overload. I don’t know… there’s just something about Pinterest. When days seem dark, take a hop and a click over to ogle some ‘Pins’ – you may find yourself pleasantly distracted. Whether it’s by the discovery of a new exotic destination to add to your travel bucket list (I’m eye-balling the heck out of Patagonia right now) or whether you’re entertained by an infographic poster depicting the evolution of the geek – the point is, there is a distracting pin lurking around a pinboard near you.
Source: dzineblog.com via Adam on Pinterest
I want to wax lyrical about this site and what a treat it is for the eyes but I won’t. I’ll just go so far as to say that it’s a place you’ll find easy to get lost in. The part I like most though, is that you can choose to follow other people’s boards. So if you’re keen on learning about or seeing more of a specific topic or theme, you’d just need to ‘follow’ a fellow Pinner’s board and you’ll start seeing all their cool Pins in your Pinterest news stream. And if you spot something you really like, you can ‘Repin’ it and store it in one of your own personalised Pinboards, making it easier to track down later on.
This post is about one tool, a Sign Language Alphabet Mobile app, but let’s first take a step back and look at the bigger picture…The Education for All (EFA) movement is a global commitment to provide quality basic education for all children, youth and adults.” It’s interesting to note that 164 governments pledged to achieve EFA by 2015. The question that arrises though. How do we educated over a billion people within such a short period of time? Local startup AppCRAFT thinks that mobile education is the way to go.
One Goal?
Back in June 2010 they launched a new project that aims to bridge the huge gap between hearing and non hearing people around the world by teaching users the Sign Language Alphabet with a mobile application.
Simon Botes Founder of AppCRAFT says: “It is our belief that even if you take the time to learn only the Sign Language alphabet, it will make communicating with the deaf in your area a lot easier. Our application helps you to learn the Sign Language Alphabet. Learning the alphabet is the best place to start when learning any new language and eSign makes this process fast, easy and mobile.”
”Our earlier research found that there was nothing for the deaf in the Nokia Store. It was with this in mind that we started by creating eSign for Nokia Devices.” Says Botes. 18 months later and the free Sign Language Early Learning Applications developed by AppCRAFT have already seen 44000 downloads or “students” as Botes likes to call them and this with zero government or corporate funding.
The Sign Language Alphabet Mobile app (eSign) aids in learning sign language SPELLING in 6 localized Sign Languages and is currently available freely for Nokia S605th, Symbian^3, S40 and Meego devices including the Nokia N9 (which I’m still waiting for).
Botes concludes: “If one small african startup with a non existing budget can help 44000 people to learn something in 18months with zero funding, just image how fast we could reach those EFA goals, if we had the support of governments and or large corporations around the world.”
If you’ve been following what we’ve been publishing here over the years you know how much Web AddiCT(s); love SMS. I fondly remember learning what was possible with LAMP and the first site I built on my favourite open source platform. It was 2003 and a few friends and I patched together site1 that attempted to build a community that targeted the tourism industry. There were no Bulk SMS providers worth mentioning back then. Actually, let’s rephrase.. there were no free Bulk SMS providers. Our friends at Clickatell were founded in 2000 but we couldn’t afford to utilize their services then. When you’re a student the cost sending an SMS actually had a direct impact on your budget (or lack thereof). Back then you were allowed to send a free sms to any Vodacom number via email. Having just grasped PHP’s mail() function I quickly set site1 to alert my friends & I whenever a new user signed up or anyone completed the online contact form. Remember, this was before the days of smart phones and push notifications. So much has changed since then, yet SMS remains an ubiquitous communication mechanism, the web has evolved and with it our need to always be connected and informed.
Gerhard Potgieter released a WordPress SMS plugin that allows you to build an opt-in list of subscribers and allows you the functionality of sending out a Bulk SMS to your subscribers. You can see it in action in the sidebar of this site (SMS competition Alerts).
A few months ago the WooTeam assimilated JigoShop into WooThemes, rebranding it WooCommerce. A brilliant move by Adii and the rest fo the WooTeam.
With WooCommerce morphing your WordPress blog into a full featured e-commerce shopping cart some extra functionality is required. Alerting your customers to the status of their orders via SMS using the Clickatell APi is one of those features I’m sure most online stores would desire. With Gerhard already having designed the Clickatell SMS Alert WordPress plugin that has been downlaoded 5000 times, the next obvious step would be creating something for the 30 000 strong WooCommerce community…
It’s called WooCommerce Clickatell SMS Notifications, basically the idea behind it is to keep WooCommerce customers in the loop of the progress of their orders, you can personalise the messages with variables ranging from the customer name, address, order total to the order status. Shop owners can enable/disable automatic sending of sms updated based on the status of the order. There is also ability to send out special SMS updates from the customer order page and then the option of sending out bulk sms messages to all your customers from the WordPress dashboard.
Like I mentioned I am also busy with the development of a lite version, basically this version will have no customization options, SMS updates will always be sent out no matter what the order status changes to, and you will not have the ability to use variables in the messages to personalise it. There is also no bulk messaging widget in the lite version.
Keep a lookout for the WooCommerce Clickatell SMS Notifications plugin coming to your Woo within the next few weeks.
Update: Clickatell SMS Notifications for WooCommerce now available to download.
The Clickatell SMS Notifications plugin for WooCommerce allows you to keep you customers updated on the progress of their orders by sending them SMS notifications when their order statuses change.
SMS Notifications are fully customisable via the settings pages, allowing you to give the messages a personal touch by adding order totals, first names and the shop name. You also have the option to enable/disable SMS notification depending on the status of the order.
You can get delivery reports on each message that is sent. Delivery reports are integrated into the WooCommerce order notes system showing when SMS messages have been sent, what the message was and whether it was delivered or not with a short error message explaining what went wrong.
When twitter was born, the early adopters would recall, it had no search functionality. However, when they published their API, suddenly there was a wave of new and exciting possibilities. Out of that, a new company was born. This company quickly leveraged twitter’s API, eventually got acquired by Twitter, to create what is known today as the twitter search engine.
Government should be a platform
API stands for Application Programming Interface. Wikipedia defines it as “a source code based specification intended to be used as an interface by software components to communicate with each other.”
The government, in its role as a service provider to the citizens, needs to be completely capable of providing high quality, effective, affordable services. However, sometimes, in conditions where the government itself is unable to do so or when the government is not the best delivery vehicle (for example, citizen access to its own information), it must involve or allow third-party involvement (profit or non-profit organisations) in producing efficient and innovative ways to deliver access to governmental services. Hence the need for a governmental API. Is that too much to ask?
At the present time in South Africa, Access to basic government information is a serious problem. And so one of the ideas I had in mind is a simple implementation of this API to create or aggregate government services. And if a mobile version could be made available, this could be a potential game changer. By allowing citizen to search to find the relevant services offered by their local, provincial or national government – the possibilities are endless.
Tell us what you think?
Wed AddiCT(s); note – Aslam Levy’s prediction for 2012 could really make a difference when it eventually happens.
The Samsung Galaxy Nexus is the first smartphone to ship with Google’s much-hyped Ice Cream Sandwich Operating System(OS). The new OS is especially interesting because it ships without the cumbersome manufacturer interface that normally gets thrown on top of Android’s software. This is pure Ice Cream Sandwich and it is pretty cool.
Fans of Android devices in South Africa will have to wait until “early 2012” to get this latest smartphone. The recent rumour has been that the new Galaxy phone by Samsung will hit South Africa on Feb. 14 with a price point of R 6,999 – R 7,299.
The Galaxy Nexus is an improvement over the Galaxy S II in a few significant ways.
First, the Nexus features a superb AMOLED screen with 720×1280 resolution. AMOLED screens have contrast rates that are much better than LCD screens. They are also much more power efficient so you won’t have to constantly recharge your phone because the screen is so luminescent.
The most important difference though, is in the software. Besides being a more feature-packed software set, Ice Cream Sandwich trumps the S II because of its “pure” Android experience. With the Galaxy Nexus, users can expect regular updates that are speedy and useful. The biggest beef Android users have had has to do with infrequent or non-existent updates for their devices. Those problems will be a thing of the past for Galaxy Nexus users.
These two phones are top of the line devices, but when the Galaxy Nexus comes to South Africa in February, expect it to be the new king of Android devices.
Where can you pre-order the Samsung Galaxy Nexus in South Africa? Can you upgrade to the Galaxy Nexus on MTN, Vodacom or Cell C? Continue reading for a video review and more details of the benchmark Ice-Cream Sandwich phone coming to South Africa soon..
One of the perks of being a Web AddiCT is the privilege to work, and interact, with some of the leading thinkers and doers in various industries throughout the wwworld. As this blog has been covering technology that has an impact on the daily lives of (South) Africans and the rest of the web I asked some of the people within my social graph, who I believe will have an impact on the various tools and technologies you interact with daily sometimes forced but hopefully by choice. Herewith some 2012 trends as predicted by Joe Botha, Jon Cherry, Dave Duarte, Erik Hersman, Henk Kleynhans, Alan Knott-Craig Junior, Aslam Levy & Paul Scott. I asked 12 people for 1 sentence with an idea/prediction for 2012 and 8 of them replied. Herewith their thoughts for 2012…
Get a Free Xbox with your new Nokia Lumia 800 tomorrow
SEDA Small Business Stars R4 Million Business Plan Competition
Is Education For All (EFA) attainable?
Simon Botes: Just got this news via Twitter: "Hi Simon. The Nok... 
Rafiq Phillips: TYFYC Clinton. What is really interesting to see i... 
Clinton Liederman: I have an Xbox and decided a while ago to migrate ... 
liem ht: Really useful about tip SEO for WP. I have to book... 
Chuksbenz: need a B-Boy coach ... 
© 2011 Web AddiCT(s);. Powered by Wordpress.
Daily Edition by WooThemes modified by Foxinni
