Archive for May, 2009

Posted on May 28, 2009 - by Justin Hartman

Unboxing the HTC Magic (Android G2) phone

My Mom always told me that if you don’t ask you’ll never get and this is true of the HTC Magic phone which I received from the kind team at Leaf over the weekend.

I plan on doing quite a detailed blog post reviewing the phone and sharing my experiences but for now I thought I’d share the unboxing pics I took. You can view the full set of pics on Flickr over here.

What I will do is give you my initial thoughts which are mostly positive. The Android interface is super sexy and very intuative and for the most part is pretty damn stable. I’ve only experienced one or two freeze ups on some applications but I think that is application specific.

The major problem for me so far is the fact that the Android Marketplace (think Apple’s App Store for the iPhone) is not going to be available in South Africa. I have contacted the guys at Leaf to get more details and once I get an official response I’ll add that to my conclusive review of the phone. The Android Market place is a key element to extending an Android phone and considering the phone will retail for around R8,200 there has to be something to replace it else I’m not sure it’s worth it.

That said, I’ve already played around with Android mobile application development and Afrigator now has a Gatorpeeps Android application which you can download over here. You can see screenshots of the application in action and it was fun learning to do this.

I’ve still got the phone for about another week so I’m going to test it extensively and hopefully my full review will be an unbiased look at how the phone compares to others in the market.

 

Posted on May 21, 2009 - by Justin Hartman

GivenGain: Hidden South African Giants

Today I stumbled across an amazing initiative called GivenGain which is run by a bunch of South Africans. Here’s a quick excerpt from their About page.

We call our service GivenGain because we believe that we are rich only through what we give, and poor only through what we refuse and keep.

GivenGain has an established reputation as a service provider to the non-profit sector. We provide a web-based platform to non-profit and support-based organizations with a complete electronic payment, donor management, online publishing, and communication solution.

We have offices in London (UK), Stellenbosch (South Africa), and further represented by partners across the world.

Why this site has interested me considerably is largely due to the fact that fund-raising online is a model that doesn’t really generate that much cash for the organisations in question. Well not in South Africa that is. Unlike other initiatives GivenGain is a model that appears to be working very successfully.

According to the site they’ve generated a total of $37,5 million donated by more than 32,000 individuals and this has directly benefited 1,626 projects. This is stagerring if you think about. It means that on average each individual donates $1,143 and each non-profit project receives $23,118. Granted this is an average and others have donated more/less while other projects have benefited more than others but it’s a massive average at that.

The team behind this initiative deserve to be commended. More often than not people in this industry only ever focus on the players who make the most noise but these giants in the online space are not only doing a whole lot more but making a success of it at the same time.

 

Posted on May 19, 2009 - by Justin Hartman

Vodacom – please send me an HTC Magic

Vodacom, if you’re listening, I want to make it abundantly clear that I will not, under any circumstances, turn down an HTC Magic from you. Seriously though, since I found out Vodacom were bringing the HTC Magic to South Africa I’ve been scampering around trying to get my hands on one.

I’ve been an iPhone owner since January 2008 and this is by far the longest I’ve ever kept a phone without feeling the need for a replacement. Over the last 16 months I’ve written extensively about my experiences around being an iPhone user and rightly so – it’s the single biggest mobile device to hit the world since say… the Android OS.

While I still love my iPhone it’s time to part ways and the Android operating system has had me excited since it was announced. I doubt the Magic is really the iPhone killer but it’s clear that Android devices are going to get better and smarter as the technology and OS evolve.

Yesterday evening I was listening to the latest ZA Tech Podcast, aptly titled Paranoid Android, where Toby Shapshak takes us through some of the coolness that is the HTC Magic and now I’m even more convinced I need one seeing as my life literally revolves around Google Apps.

Thanks also to Duncan McLeod who mentioned a really cool email client called Postbox which I have duly installed and am now running on my Mac. Since I only use Google Apps for all my email I’ve found email clients (including Apple Mail) to be clunky and generally very slow with the Google IMAP servers however Postbox is not only fast but looks and functions great. Think of tabbed browsing for email and you’ll get an idea as to what Postbox can offer.

On a very amusing sidenote Toby and Simon Dingle claim that I made them swear during the podcast and you’ll see what they mean at around 11:00 minutes in the show. These guys had me in stitches and I’m pleased that I cracked a cool mention on the show.

 

Posted on May 13, 2009 - by Justin Hartman

Street life in Lagos

Lagos is an adventure that I maintain any African should experience at least once in their lifetime. Lagos reminds me of one really big township and it has a real sense of adventure about it. This photo was taken while driving and depicts a typical scene of what street life is like in Nigeria. You can buy anything from vegetables to recharge vouchers for your mobile phone and on the streets everything is dirt cheap. I have to admit it’s not a city that one really wants to walk around in by oneself but if you’re with a local it’s pretty safe to do so.

Over the coming days/weeks I’m going to be posting a series of photos I took while I spent some time in Lagos. I know that everything in Lagos was an experience to me and I hope that some of the photos will help depict that experience to you.

 

Posted on May 12, 2009 - by Justin Hartman

Getting rejected, it’s never fun

While this blog has been a lot about my good news lately, today it’s a lot about my bad. If you’ve been reading my blog then you’d know I was chosen as a nominee in the Men’s Health Best Man Awards 2009 and last week I received an update to inform me that I was not chosen as one of the three finalists. Congratulations though to Vinny Lingham who did make it as a finalist in another category and I wish him all the best because he deserves it!

To be honest I’m not disappointed about not being a finalist because if you look at who else was nominated in my category then you’ll understand why I was flattered to even be considered in the first place. I was expecting a rejection email and as such the nomination is going to make a great addition to my CV.

The second rejection I received last night and this one has been bitterly disappointing. About two months back I applied for a TED Fellowship and despite being extremely confident that I’d crack it I didn’t quite make the grade. Herewith an excerpt from said rejection email.

The response to the new Fellows program has been exceptional – far greater than we could have imagined – and winnowing down the application pool was a formidable task. Unfortunately, due the to extraordinary qualifications of all of our applicants, we are unable to offer you a Fellowship for TEDGlobal 2009.

If any of you have ever applied to be a TED Fellow you’ll know just how strenuous the application process is. To apply you need to complete an application by answering various questions that try to gain insight into how you tick as a human being and then you have to get references to fill in referee forms on your behalf. It’s kind of like writing your year-end exam only much tougher!

It took me over two weeks to complete my answers to the questions and in it I told TED stuff that only my family know. I really shared every inner-most secret in the hope that doing so would get me a seat at the conference.

The anticipation in waiting for an answer was the real killer though. I didn’t want to entertain any negative thinking so I convinced myself that my ticket was booked and I was headed for Oxford. I realised that the risk of doing so was utter, gut-wrenching disappointment but I wasn’t going to allow myself to ruin the small chance that I had.

Unfortunately my gamble didn’t pay off and I honestly feel like a teenager who’s girlfriend has just dumped him for a smarter, better looking guy. It has long been a dream to attend a TED conference but I guess my time will have to wait…

For now I’ll continue to watch from the sidelines and I thought this latest video from Seth Godin titled Why tribes, not money or factories, will change the world would be an apt way to end this post. Enjoy the brilliant talk from Seth as he shares ideas on how tribes give ordinary people the power to lead and make big change.

 

Posted on May 11, 2009 - by Justin Hartman

Afrigator tried to buy Twitter, we launched Gatorpeeps instead

The news is finally out that Afrigator has officially launched Gatorpeeps. Gatorpeeps is our very own micro-blogging platform that we hope will connect our vastly growing community of users.

One of the biggest problems we’ve had is that we sit with more than 12,000 users but we’ve had no way to connect these users together. We’ve had numerous requests to allow peeps to connect with other like-minded African users and for a long time we’ve been trying to figure out the right way to do it.

When we sat down to work the model out Stii had this ingenious idea to buy Twitter so, we made them an offer. Unfortunately our offer of R250,000 was rejected and the result is that we decided to build our own platform instead.

At first glance Gatorpeeps may appear to be competing with Twitter but let me assure you we’re certainly not trying to compete or steal Twitter users but rather leverage off the technology to enhance our existing product.

In truth we modeled a lot of Gatorpeeps off the best that both Twitter and Jaiku had to offer. Twitter has certainly brought micro-blogging to the mainstream and Jaiku revolutionised community interaction and we wanted to bring the simplicity of both into our offering.

So the question then is if we have such amazing micro-blogging platforms already why would we need another? Well, in a review of ten micro-blogging platforms ReadWriteWeb had this to say in their conclusion:

Micro-blogging isn’t a short-term trend – it is here to stay. The evolution of blogging has spawned this new mini version of blogging and many are latching on. The simplicity and ability to post frequently are what attract most to the concept. We expect much faster adoption and mainstream penetration than blogging in general.

I believe this is even more true in Africa as we simply don’t have the penetration that other developed countries have. Also take into consideration that the mobile phone remains the African version of the PC and as such micro-blogging addresses both penetration and accessibility problems. If you take Gatorpeeps into this context, couple it with the fact that less than 5% of Afrigator users have Twitter accounts then you’ll see why launching a micro-blogging platform to our audience is in fact a wise move.