Brainstorm Magazine

Software for Africa

Thu, 17 May 2012 01:00:00 GMT

From the sprawling township of Alexandra to the bustling streets of Nairobi, the furious clicking of keyboards represents the hopes of thousands of bright African minds as they craft and cajole code in their quest to create ‘the next big thing’. Sure, there has been the occasional story of phenomenal success à la Mark Shuttleworth, but can we answer the clarion call to develop African solutions for African problems? The answer is a resounding ‘yes’, although significant hurdles litter the path to Africa’s digital nirvana, hurdles that we love to call, ‘uniquely African challenges’. The continent is rapidly shrugging off the mantle of...

Glueing eyeballs to apps – profitably

Wed, 16 May 2012 01:00:00 GMT

Shakespeare drew in his theatre audiences with low humour and high poetry from 1594 onwards. In the 20th century, soap operas became a television staple, watched by millions of viewers. More recently, sales and marketing types discovered potential in extending enterprise applications to mobile devices. For all these audiences, a satisfying personal experience is the main reason they keep coming back for more, be it comedy, drama – or finding the closest hamburger served up by a global brand. Also, audiences have always been fickle. Consumers can write off a clunky enterprise mobile app by flicking a finger. Even business to...

When copyright goes wrong

Wed, 16 May 2012 01:00:00 GMT

We brush against copyright rules every day. A well-known example is the local restriction we face on Apple’s iStore. And just as Syria’s embattled president Bashar al-Assad has learnt to circumvent sanctions and restrictions by simply registering iTunes at an American address, South African users are also trying to avoid the increasing mesh of terms and conditions governing software use in this country. It may come as a surprise to some that downloading copied music isn’t fundamentally illegal. In fact, the Netherlands, Canada, Spain and Panama do not impose copyright restrictions. While it is legal to download copyrighted material in Canada,...

Preparing for the big data flood

Mon, 14 May 2012 01:00:00 GMT

By some estimates, 90 percent of the data in the world today was created in the past two years alone. From social media posts, financial market data, server logs, machine sensor data and medical imaging files, through to metrological, astronomical and genomic research information, we are gathering data about the world around us at a far faster rate than ever before. Market researcher IDC predicts that the volume of digital content in the world will reach 2.7 zettabytes during the course of this year. Networking vendor Cisco Systems reckons that by 2015, we’ll be pushing a zettabyte of data around the...

You’ve been +1’d

Mon, 14 May 2012 01:00:00 GMT

When it comes to social networking sites, functionality and user experience can make or break the site. That’s why it’s interesting to see that Google+ (also referred to as G+) isn’t simply mimicking other big social networking sites, but cutting its own path based on user feedback from its 100-million active users. “There is a common perception that Google+ is competing with Facebook,” says Ade Oshineye, Google+ advocate in London. “It’s not about competing with Facebook, it’s about taking the existing Google experience and improving it.” To this end, Google announced in mid-March that the feedback of South Africans has...

Gaining access

Fri, 11 May 2012 01:00:00 GMT

One of the most daunting things about starting a business is the maze of payment systems and options that must be navigated before you can send and receive money. Charles Pittaway, MD of Softline Netcash, has been serving as a buffer between entrepreneurs and the banking system since 2002. Netcash was acquired by the Softline group in 2010 and Pittaway is up in Johannesburg at the Softline offices to have various meetings with senior executives. He’s just done a workshop with some of them to explain the potential role of Netcash as a service provider between the other divisions when...

African technology, tailor-made

Fri, 11 May 2012 01:00:00 GMT

Africa’s status as probably the largest untapped market in the world is driving Samsung to greater efforts in its Built For Africa campaign. The initiative started last year by adapting ordinary products to deal with the harsh conditions in Africa, including power surges or no power at all, intense heat, dust and humidity. Yet the population’s low average income also means that gadgets and appliances typically need to last five times longer than in Europe or the US, and not pack in under these tough conditions. The Africanised products are already paying off, with Samsung winning market share in fields as diverse...

US BI specialist expands in SA

Thu, 10 May 2012 01:00:00 GMT

BI vendor Pragmatic Works has expanded its local operations to include a Cape Town office. Pragmatic Works South Africa already has a staff complement of ten in Johannesburg, and the new branch adds a further two employees. Brian Knight, founder of the Florida-based business intelligence specialist, was in the country in March to attend the launch of the Cape Town-based offices in what he described as a ‘whirlwind’ trip. “Getting used to the Capetonian lifestyle has been a bit of a challenge,” he laughs, citing the somewhat free interpretations of event starting times at the coast. But there’s no lack of...

Chess gods and little fishes

Thu, 10 May 2012 01:00:00 GMT

The world computer chess championships was an exciting tussle of many competitors in the early to mid 2000s. That is until the arrival in 2005 of a new engine called Rybka. Czech for “little fish”, Rybka was written by an international master, Vasik Rajlich and tested by his wife, also an international master. Rybka swept the board, winning the world championships for the next four years. It played embarrassingly well, making none of the strange and pointless moves that programs sometimes come up with because of the way they work. Rajlich improved his program constantly from its original version 1.0,...

The new oil

Wed, 09 May 2012 01:00:00 GMT

You’ve seen the slides and read the articles, so it should come as no surprise that the steady increase of data in the world is described by experts as explosive. As connectivity improves every year and mobile migration continues to work its magic in developing regions, the acceleration of data generation escalates. We’ve got a lot of the stuff, and we’re getting exponentially more every year. Storing it is just one challenge. Finding ways to capitalise on it is another entirely. Take Walmart, for example. The retail giant has to deal with over one million customer transactions every hour, which are...

Things that raised a chuckle

Wed, 09 May 2012 01:00:00 GMT

Google’s hipster specs Speaking of futuristic visions that instantly sink under the weight of sniggering, the launch of the Google Glasses concept led to instant sneers from the tech community. If the name Google Goggles wasn’t already taken, the idea might have had some steampunk cred, but as it stood, it just invited parody. Years ago, as a young tech reporter, I recall visiting some large IT outfit – it may have been IBM, whose research was always quite hot despite its stuffed-suit image – to be introduced to ‘virtual reality’. On a specially-designed pedestal that detected some body motion, you could...

An entrepreneur in exile

Tue, 08 May 2012 01:00:00 GMT

It must be frustrating for youngsters who are passionate about technology to realise they have very little chance of achieving their full potential in South Africa. Youngsters like Vinny Lingham used to be, perhaps: a fledgling computer programmer at the age of eight who could have launched not one, but four or five startup ventures – but not in a country where only ten percent of the population has internet access. Lingham moved to Silicon Valley four years ago with his wife Charlene, and has commuted back to Cape Town two or three times a year. Now, as his son turns two,...

Figures at your fingertips

Tue, 08 May 2012 01:00:00 GMT

Emerging markets gather smartphone steam According to the IDC’s latest smartphone forecast, emerging markets India and Brazil are poised to make significant inroads on country-level smartphone market share, currently held by mature players China, the US and the UK. Said Ramon Llamas, senior research analyst with IDC’s Mobile Phone Technology and Trends team: “Due to their sheer size, strong demand, and healthy replacement rates, emerging markets are quickly becoming the engines of the worldwide smartphone market.” Mature markets will experience continued growth in smartphone adoption, says IDC, but volumes will not be able to keep up with the burgeoning demand in emerging...

Access revolutionary

Mon, 07 May 2012 01:00:00 GMT

Rapelang Rabana believes being an African entrepreneur begins by capitalising on immediate opportunities. “The most powerful ideas,” she says, “come from solving problems that are real to you. “Problems that are real to us, and that need to be addressed in developing markets like South Africa, include the delivery of critical services like education, health and financial services, and farming support. The role of mobile services and the internet in delivering and facilitating these services is crucial.” Rabana is one of those resourceful people who choose to see solutions instead of problems and she maintains that the key is access. “Access to...

The big three

Mon, 07 May 2012 01:00:00 GMT

There’s a common belief that men can’t multitask anywhere near as well as women, but you have to hope that’s not true for CIOs. Most heads of IT are still men, and they must juggle competing business needs and competing technologies on a daily basis. So we asked a few multitasking CIOs whether they were paying most of their attention to business intelligence (BI), cloud computing, or virtualisation, or trying to deliver all three. “The development and improvement of our BI services is one of our key priorities this year,” says Faan Barnard, general manager of IT for Omnia Group. “Our projects...

MXit’s new clothes

Fri, 04 May 2012 01:00:00 GMT

MXit is a bit like Abba, says Alan Knott-Craig Jr, striding through the traffic on a leafy Stellenbosch street. Knott-Craig Jr has been at the helm of MXit for six months and he still has a spring in his step. A couple of weeks earlier, he pitched his case for the future of MXit to reporters at a media briefing in Johannesburg. The response was generally positive. The briefing was meant to whet appetites before the relaunch of MXit in April. MXit 2.0 is expected to fix some of the deficiencies in the company’s long-running instant messaging service, position the firm as...

Absa: ‘Today, Tomorrow, To Court?’

Thu, 03 May 2012 01:00:00 GMT

This is a scrap being fought in spectacular style in the social media, with trade union Solidarity launching an unprecedented campaign using Facebook, Twitter, a website, email and YouTube to try to derail Absa’s retrenchment process. It’s a fascinating example of how power has shifted away from organisations and into the hands of the masses. But, really, it’s only the power of publicity that lies in the public domain, because despite the backlash, it’s still very much Absa and its majority shareholder Barclays that hold the ultimate say over who stays and who goes. The public now knows how Absa is treating...

The application of content

Thu, 03 May 2012 01:00:00 GMT

Despite the current gold rush in the mobile content market, becoming a part of it is harder than it looks. How do you package a magazine or a book, or some corporate marketing material for publication to a mobile device? Which mobile device do you go for? All of them, or just the iDevices? What about the approval process? And do you build your own eBook reader or use someone else’s? Wesley Lynch, CEO of Realmdigital, has been playing in the digital publishing space for some time. “We’ve played with a lot of different technologies and we felt no one had produced...

E-signatures finally go legit

Wed, 02 May 2012 01:00:00 GMT

The Electronic Communications and Transactions Act made electronic signatures legal back in 2002. This meant South Africans could use electronic signatures (digital or a scanned, handwritten one) to sign documents. For most purposes, an unsecure, uncertified signature will do, but for some purposes, a signature that guarantees the authenticity of the transaction is required. Says Lance Michalson, of specialist law firm Michalsons: “The ECT Act recognises all electronic signatures, while at the same time incorporating provisions for particularly reliable electronic signatures, those that have been accredited (and can be called advanced electronic signatures). So, an advanced electronic signature (AES) is the...

CIO Roundtable Cloud: stop talking, start doing

Wed, 02 May 2012 01:00:00 GMT

Enterprise users could be forgiven for thinking that cloud has been discussed to death. But from a cost and agility point of view, few alternatives recommend themselves as readily as cloud, particularly given the ongoing slashing of budgets and the pace of innovation in the mobile space. What hasn’t been asked in detail is what hurdles exist to adoption of cloud right here and now. Can South African – and African – enterprises move to cloud computing easily? Rabelani Dagada, Wits Business School, says awareness of the true power of cloud and what his institution can already offer would be...

CIO Roundtable: Where are the local cloud services?

Wed, 02 May 2012 01:00:00 GMT

Move your applications and data into the public cloud and chances are you’re choosing a provider based overseas. But that means latency issues that cannot be changed because of simple geography, questions of jurisdiction, and the support risks that come with any outsourcing, only magnified many times. What South African organisations could use is a healthy local cloud ecosystem, available to both government and private sector companies, so that companies can get the benefits of cloud with far less risk. Lee Naik, senior director of IT strategy and transformation at Accenture, says we’re making progress....

CIO Roundtable: How well are you performing?

Wed, 02 May 2012 01:00:00 GMT

Performance management is no longer limited to measuring application health, network performance and storage capacity. It’s about illustrating the alignment of IT systems to business functions, identifying critical areas for improvement and ensuring service levels to external and internal customers. How, then, to divine business performance from the mass of raw data produced by IT monitoring systems? The problem is certainly not a shortage of data. If a service is running, it can be measured, and IT departments are very good at collecting data, says Werner Bornman, head of risk and governance at Stanlib. But the deeper meaning eludes a lot...

Homebrew is back

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 01:00:00 GMT

When one of your very first commercial models is donated to a museum, chances are you might be on to something. Auctioned on eBay, one of the first ten models went to the Centre for Computing History. Serial number 01 was sold for 100 times its nominal price tag. The Raspberry Pi is as bare-bones as it gets. A Broadcom system-on-a-chip with a 700MHz ARM1176JZF-S CPU, and a Videocore 4 graphics processor support a version of Arch Linux, as well as BluRayquality high-definition video, OpenGL and OpenVG. It has 256MB of RAM, and has connections for composite video, HDMI, audio out,...

Big changes in South Africa

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 01:00:00 GMT

Nokia Lumia 800 – A phone to brag about The Nokia Lumia 800, the first-ever Nokia to use the Windows Phone 7.5 operating system, is now in South Africa. It uses a tiled interface, is driven by a 1.4GHz Qualcomm processor and comes with 512MB of RAM. You will need a Windows Live account to get started, which will give you access to the Windows Phone marketplace and Xbox Live games. These portals contain a variety of third-party apps to customise the phone to your needs. Expect to pay: R279 on a Business Call contract. Prices will vary according to contract. Availability: Vodacom...

Mobile entrepreneur

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 01:00:00 GMT

Today is not an ordinary day for David Prosser. Normally the MD of Comunity would be sitting around a table with his team at their offices, finding out what they’ve been up to during the week and what they plan for next week. But today is about meetings with potential partners and clients. Comunity makes a middleware and application layer for the mobile application space, bridging the complex enterprise software world where large critical business systems run in datacentres, and the fast-moving mobile applications market. We kick off the day with an early coffee at Doppio Zero in Sunninghill, Johannesburg. Prosser...