SA Rocks

Congratulations to Vincent Maher and Amatomu for winning the award for best corporate initiative in Africa.

What is Highway Africa? From their site:

Highway Africa is an annual ICT conference hosted by Rhodes University which is situated in Grahamstown, South Africa.
Each year, more than 500 delegates from across the globe attend the conference to discuss issues relating to Internet governance, ICT policy and media for democracy.

The criteria on which the award was based is as follows:

Corporate category: Judges will be looking for creative adaptation of global technologies in an African media context.

Other broad criteria: (which apply to both categories), is the use of new media to benefit press freedom in Africa and encourage social empowerment in African communities. Ultimately the award aims to highlight innovations that result in African media benefiting from new ideas and developments in communications technology.

Well done Vincent! A great achievement, well deserved. We’re very, very proud of you!

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Recently (on the 4th of September), Inside the box, a Lenovo blog, announced that they are planning to ship with a Linux Distro as the default OS installed on their system. In true Open Source fashion, they decided to run a poll so that people can vote for which Distro they would like to see shipping on a Lenovo. The results are astounding! At the moment Ubuntu is by far the distro of choice!

They have 5883 votes with Debian as a close second on 1089 results.

You have to admit, Ubuntu being a South African produce, it makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside when something like this happens!

Hop on over to Inside the box and cast your vote!

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Recently Afrigator was featured in a list of non-US startups on CNN Money. Personally it was a great honor!

In 2006 our favorite Muti was featured in a similar fashion. We were all very chuffed and proud that some African site got noticed!

And now, for the third time, a South African Internet innovation was recognized by CNN Money. The Stormhoek story made it to the headlines! How the Hoekers successfully market their product using social media / Geek Dinners / blogging, etc… A great story and a great achievement.

You can read it over here.

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What is AIM911? Aim911 (Address Incident Management) allows you to report crime by sms-ing a code you’ll see on your nearest AIM911 street pole fitted UPN board. The process of fitting these boards countrywide has already started. You can even use a landline to make the call. Each board is geo-mapped, with a text description of the position address as well as GPS co-ordinates. This means that help can be dispatched to the exact spot where the crime is being committed, or where the accident happened – REAL TIME, REAL PLACE.

You can optionally register with AIM911 and set up a profile with them. You can add your medical aid details, your insurance company details and even the numbers of selected family and/or friends for example. In a case of emergency, when you SMS AIM911, they will notify all the relevant contacts listed with your profile that you have been in an emergency
situation, which saves you time and effort of doing it yourself.

This is a great initiative and could very well save your life. If you would like to register, you can do so by sending an SMS with your name, surname and mobile phone number to 32588. As a special introductory offer, the first 50 000 registrants will pay only R1 to register!

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Ed’s Note: It is with much pride and elated pleasure that I welcome Stii as the newest SA Rocks contributor. Stii has taken over the weekly Tech contribution on a Thursday.

He has a great technical/personal blog and is involved in some of the most cutting edge projects in the country at the moment, one of which being Afrigator, the hit blog aggregator for Africa.

Stii will be writing about all the wondrous things happening in SA surrounding technicals and technology!

South African projects are very democratic. In SA a lot of these new and exciting startups tend to listen closely to their users. They are all extremely keen to give you what you would like, rather than expecting you to take what you can get out of their services.

Recently a new service launched called iJol.co.za. It is a social networking site where you can register and tell other socialites about jols happening and what the jol is about. They released early (like most other projects!) and are still actively developing and improving and changing.

When a couple of bloggers mentioned some features they would like to see, iJol was very quick to respond and more so take action. Some of us wanted them to build in the hCalendar Microformat so that you can export and save events to Google calendar if you were using the Operator plugin on Flock or Firefox.

In a matter of days, they have done it! Dispite the fact that there are little use for microformats yet, they have done it and they impressed their community by giving them what they asked for.

It is a healthy situation for a growing community to make users an integral part of a project. Not only does it give users a sense of belonging, it also makes the project grow quicker and in the direction of demand. Its not always a healthy situation for the developer implementing the changes and demands, but thats what he does. He’ll just have to put up and shut up!

So next time if you think a South African project needs some feature, tell the people developing it. Rather than thinking it would be cool to have this or that, say it! Get involved, thats what these project thrive and depend on.

(This is just one simple example. The other big project like Afrigator, Muti and Amatomu do exactly the same.)

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