Category: Tech

31 October

What is Twitter?

People often ask me – What is all this Twitter, Facebook stuff all about?

My answer usually hinges around explaining to them how people’s communication choice’s are changing in a similar way to how we changed our method of communicating when we bought our first cell phone. We no longer needed to wait at home for that important phone call, we could just pick up our cell phone at any location and call/text our friends. Twitter and Facebook are the next step in this communication evolution as the Internet allows us through these platforms to communicate for free on a one to many basis, rather than a one to one method like your cell phone. So you can now tell all our friends about the new bike you have just bought or about where we are having dinner tonight. Your friends who are now following you on Twitter have the choice of whether to act on this information or to ignore it.

After dabbling a bit with Twitter I initially wrote it off as a niche teenager communication tool that while sometimes useful would not be something I would ever use, however I am finding more and more business uses for it as I interact with others through it and explore its uses.

So, what is Twitter? According to Wikipedia

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users’ updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length.

For a business Twitter offers new ways of engaging existing and new clients in a way that was never possible before. Take a look at this short screencast video that explains how to use Twitter in your business. Enjoy!


Screencast courtesy of www.smallbiztrends.com

06 October

Do you SMS more than you phone

Send More SMS MessagesI personally do, and it seems that for the first time in history the average American does too. The New York Times published an article stating that in the fourth quarter of 2007, American cellphone subscribers for the first time sent text messages more than they phoned, according to Nielsen Mobile.

I have no doubt that in South Africa, the average cellphone user has been SMS’ing more than calling for some time due to our higher call tariffs.

So what does this mean, how can you capitalize on this?

Here are 2 examples:

  1. Use SMS communications from your website, rather than email/call/fax, try send pertinent information via SMS.  An example of this may be a “contact me form” where when a user inputs his details for you to call him back, you could SMS the user immediately thanking them for their request and alerting the user that it may take up to 30 minutes before you call them back. In time sensitive business applications such as selling insurance online, managing this expectation could be the difference between providing what you consider a good service, and the users expectation for an immediate response.
  2. Allow people to SMS your business, try setting up a inbound SMS system. For example this same insurance company could publish a number and say on their website: “SMS 08xxxxxxxx with your car make, model and year and we will get you a quote in 30 minutes”

The bottom line is marketing is now all about using communication methods that users are already comfortable using, so if you are already using the web and email and are finding you are not growing your business or delighting your customers more, try SMS.

Checkout MyMessager, should you need the technology and API’s to do this.

26 August

Getting the most out of virtualisation & dedicated servers

Virtualisation of dedicated servers

Thinking of a new dedicated server? Have you thought about virtualisation? Virtualisation is allowing companies to maximise server, storage and power resources. Instead of running each different application on a different set of server hardware, why not run mulitple operating systems on one machine.

RSAWeb is helping customers to maximise dedicated servers. Instead of purchasing 2-3 servers for a production / development setup, why not virtualise and use one server to do the job of many. The latest Dell XHD server from RSAWeb is extremely powerful, with 8 CPU cores and up to 32GB RAM. This can support multiple virtual machines. For example, a server with 8GB RAM allows you to run a production frontend server on 2 cores and 2GB RAM, another database server with 4GB RAM and the balance can be split amongst smaller development servers. All on 1 set of hardware!

At the same time, you will need to make sure you arent overutilising your resources, however Virtualisation has a great benefit that should you need to scale this out at a future date as your requirements grow, you can easily migrate one of the virtual servers to another physical server also running Citrix Xen (RSAWeb’s virutalisation standard) – this allows for easy flexibily, all without any reinstalling or changing of settings on the server, amazing!

Use your server in a flexible manner and cut your costs whilst also going GREEN! Using the latest AMD and Intel processors and DDR2 RAM you use less power, less cooling and benefit the environment at the same time.

08 August

Beijing Olympics begin

The number 8 is extremely lucky in china, and it is no coincidence that the Beijing Olympics start on the 08/08/08. In keeping with this 08 theme, a group of industrious Chinese  bloggers at 8:08am this morning released a twitter campaign named #080808 to tag all Olympic news from around the globe. All you have to do is tag any social media post with the #080808 tag and you can join in the fun. Take a look at this mashup one of Google China’s developers hacked together to bring all of the tagged technologies together. Even more amazing is that he developed the mashup in only 6 hours…

Currently if you search for #080808, you can see a new #080808 tweet coming up every 0.5 seconds!

Update: Google has just launched a Olympic landing page that includes a map of medals, Youtube video highlights and news headlines.

07 August

Back Up a Linux Web Server

So you have a Linux Dedicated Server and your apps are working like a dream, all good right? Well good for now, until you by mistake overwrite your apache.conf!

Backups are essential and we have a number of solutions to help you backup your servers. The easiest is to backup your server to our NAS backup facility using some common linux commands. Here is a good tutorial on how to Back Up a Linux Web Server.

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