Blog - Industry News & Opinion Pieces from RSAWEB

Christopher Wray

RSAWEB talks to eTV about Seacom cable

June 24, 2009

The tide is turning for Africa’s bandwith deficiency with the upcoming switch-on of Seacom, an undersea telecoms cable, on the 27th of June. The cable, which links London and India to South Africa, is set to reduce bandwith costs and increase data transmissions for African countries. Much will be said about this exciting and historical development in the coming weeks but what do the experts have to say about how this will affect our lives?

RSAWEB MD Rob Gilmour recently appeared on the eTV Sunrise breakfast show to discuss the implications of this landmark event.

Here is video footage as it appeared on the eTV Sunrise breakfast show:

Christopher Wray

NetProphet an outstanding success

May 15, 2009

Feedback from the NetProphet conference has exceeded all our expectations. Originally planned as a 100 delegate conference, then 200, it quickly expanded to 450 registered users, so much so that registration had to be closed! On the day an extra row of chairs had to be put out to accomodate all the delegates.

The speakers were fantastic, they also managed to keep the topics less technical and more informative so it wasnt just another geek event. The appeal was across industries, not just IT. They shared insights into what they do with real world examples of their experiences and advice on how to build your own web-enabled business. The content from the event will be posted with video and slides on the Netprophet website to allow more people access to the excellent content.

Some comments: Arthur Goldstuck said “I have never seen so many people at an Internet Conference before”, Peter Flynn said “All software will ultimately be web-based” and Mike Stopforth – “How conferences in SA should be run”

RSAWEB was one of the headline sponsors to make NetProphet possible, along with sister company WhiteWallWeb and the Innovation Fund. There is talk that Cape Town has become the “Silicon Cape” – the Silicon Valley of Africa and NetProphet has helped enable that!

Twitter was also a major success factor in the conference, with a twitter fountain pulling up all the #Netprophet tags. We managed to ‘trend’ into the Top 10 and got to be the 2nd most talked about topic on twitter in the world for over 2 hours.

NetProphet was conceived by the Directors of the RAMP Foundation and is a new initiative created to inspire creativity and the flow of ideas among entrepreneurs and stake-holders who operate in the internet-tech space in Africa & South Africa.

If you missed the event this year, go and register now on the Netprophet website for updates around the next event.

Christopher Wray

Geek Gear Competition

April 08, 2009

Here’s one for the geeks amongst us…

For the months of April & May, we’ll be giving away one of these stunning limited edition Geek t-shirts every week. To enter, all you need to do is add @RSAWEB to your ‘following’ list (not to be confused with ‘followers’) on your twitter account. Each week we’ll select a new follower to be the recipient of one of these fashion gems.

Following RSAWEB on twitter, you’ll get real time news and updates and access to industry insights from our experts. Plus, you’ll be able to join in the conversation, engaging with us and our twitter following.

Our twitter address is http://www.twitter.com/rsaweb

T’s available in #000000 only.

Christopher Wray

FREE Internet Conference

March 27, 2009

RSAWEB is proud to be sponsoring an exciting new initiative called Net Prophet. The conference aims to educate, inspire creativity and promote the flow of ideas amongst South Africans operating within or investigating the Internet business/technology space.

Net Prophet essentially provides a platform to introduce South Africa’s true ‘Net Prophets’, a host of industry experts who will help delegates get a handle on where the industry is headed, the technologies and companies investors are interested in, hot new trends to follow and practical ways to extract maximum business value from the Internet.

Net Prophets speaking at the event include Herman Heunis, CEO of Mixit, Arthur Goldstuck, owner of World Wide Worx, social media specialist, Mike Stopforth, Hannes van Rensburg, founding member of Fundamo, Dave Duarte of Huddleminds and Peter Flynn, MD of White Wall Web to name but a few.

Topics to be discussed include:

Why the Digital Going is Good in Bad Times
Harnessing the Social Web for Brands
Successfully Integrating Web and Mobile into Your Media Mix
Software as a Service
The Entrepreneur’s Perspective on Vulture Capital
The Art of Making the Transition to Transacting Online
Opportunities for Entrepreneurs Looking to the Mobile Web

The conference is hosted by the non-profit RAMP Foundation and is FREE to attend (delegates must register at www.netprophet.org.za in order to attend).

To find out more, or register for this event, visit www.netprophet.org.za.

Christopher Wray

Online convenience for tax payers

March 17, 2009

RSAWEB is proud to be the hosting partner behind a handy little Free-To-Use web application that affords South African tax payers the convenience of logging their travel related expenses online.

The application, Travellogger, was developed by White Wall Web in response to recent stipulation enforced by SARS, which states that effective 1 March 2009, South African tax payers will be required to properly track their travel and related expenses in order to qualify for rebates.

Travellogger enables users to track their mileage online throughout the year and easily export the data to a CSV file for use in Excel, when it becomes time to submit their annual returns. This application is also compatible with most cellphone browsers, making it ideal for “on the road” logging.

All data is stored on one of our web servers in the Cape Town Data Centre environment, greatly reducing the risk of data-loss normally associated with paper based alternatives. Ruby on Rails is the web language of choice used to build the application and its developers worked in conjunction with RSAWEB engineers to setup and migrate the application onto our web servers.

Visit www.travellogger.co.za to check it out.

Christopher Wray

Who’s got your back(ups)

January 29, 2009

Just about every business relies on data in order to function. From the basic Spreadsheet to the more complex Payrolls, all depend on the accumulation and manipulation of data on a daily basis. It’s crucial for the smooth running of almost every project, account, customer and query. Businesses have become so dependent on data that they cannot function without it.

Disasters
Fires, floods and other disasters always can catch us unaware at the best of times. Your average business will have their physical assets covered by insurance – smart businesses will have their data covered with a backup solution.

Theft
Laptops, servers & other storage devices are rarely recovered in the event of theft. A good backup solution provides a highly secure environment for data storage hardware.

Accidental deletion
Statistically, this constitutes the highest percentage of data loss causes. Human error should always be factored into the equation where business-critical data is concerned.

Hardware failures
It’s no secret that PC & laptop hard-drives crash on a regular basis. Daily automated backups help to effectively minimize the data loss resulting from hardware failure.

We cannot foresee what obstacles might get thrown our way, but we can control how we recover from them. With RSAWEB’s online backup service you can be rest assured that your precious data is given the five star treatment it deserves.

RSAWEB provide a strictly confidential vault for your data’s safe-keeping and only you determine who has access to the information. With the Desktop License Package, you can backup up to 2GB of data for only R75 per desktop per month and with the Server License, you get access to backup 5GB of data for only R245 per server per month.

Still not convinced? RSAWEB is offering a 30 day trial version that you can download from the website for an instant 1GB data backup, it’s quick and easy and definitely worthwhile, cause let’s be honest…. There’re just some things money can’t buy back.

For more info visit our online backup website.

Christopher Wray

Does online advertising work for your business

January 12, 2009

Seth Godin writes about how simple your approach to online advertising should be in his post:

If your ads work, if you can measure them and they return more profit than they cost, why not keep buying them until they stop working?

And if they don’t work, why are you running them?

The time-tested response is that you’re not sure, that ads are risky, that you can’t tell. …

Digital ads are different (or they should be). You should know cost per click and revenue per click and be able to make a smart guess about lifetime value of a click. And if that’s positive, buy, buy, buy.

And if you don’t know those things, why are you buying digital ads?

We do a lot of online advertising through various providers and it is amazing how scientific you can get in order to gain real value from the medium. Online ads have totally changed the marketing landscape and we no longer rely on made up stats like “readership” and “circulation” that off line print media rely on the help justify their advertising costs. I’m not saying don’t use “off line” media, as not all of your target audience are necessarily online, but it sure does help to focus your marketing efforts with stats such as cost per click and revenue per click.

The one thing about online advertising is that you need to actively track them. Gone are the days of sending off an advert to your favorite magazine and then waiting for the phone to ring. Today, you can see exactly how your online ads are performing, who is viewing them and if they are delivering real business results. All in real time. Its amazing how the Internet is revolutionising marketing and the way we reach customers.

Christopher Wray

Read magazines online

December 10, 2008

Google has set about to digitize the worlds books through a complicated scanning and indexing system. This never really excited me as the books they chose to index first were all old library classics and journals. This has now changed with the inclusion of magazines. Today Google launched magazines as part of their Book Search tool which is still officially in beta, but can be accessed here. My favorites are all included, take a look at the full catalog scanned in for your viewing pleasure (the Popular Mechanics from the early 1900’s are classic). Here are some of the magazines already scanned, expect more to be added soon:

Christopher Wray

Twilight Running

December 08, 2008

Many of us at RSAWEB enjoy a 5Km run around the block from time to time however call it a race and the competitive spirit in all of us comes out. Last week the RSAWEB staff headed down to the Community Chest Twilight run through the streets of Cape Town. This annual event is always fun with 3 180 teams entered in 2008, which meant there were about 19 080 entrants all in fancy dress.

The run finishes with a stunning final straight down Adderley Street under the Christmas lights to the finish line and the corporate tents with braai’s and drinks to end off an awesome evening.

Well done to Vern who burst out of the blocks and achieved second place overall.

Meghann Leo from the Community Chest said that the race had been “stunning” and that R524 700 was raised. Well done to everyone who participated

Christopher Wray

Our website evolves

November 20, 2008

A good website is never finished. The fluid nature of the web & technology in general, demands that you need to be constantly upgrading, redesigning and publishing if you want to stay on top.

We often advise clients to adopt a continual improvement philosophy when it comes to their website, encouraging them to keep content fresh and to make a few small improvements every month. However, from time to time a major change is needed, we felt that time had come.

It’s also important to be listing to your users. The site is, after all, for their benefit.

One such example of where we applied this principle was in expanding the pixel dimensions of our site. Based on older web-standards, our website was design to fit within an 800 x 600 pixel PC screen resolution. Usage statistics however, showed us that only 4.5 percent of our users were still using the 800 x 600 pixel resolution, with the majority using 1024 x 768! Consequently, we changed the site to fit the 1024 x 768 resolution, which not only catered to the majority of our users, but also gave us the extra space to add more content and improve the overall usability and aesthetics of the site.

Other noticeable improvements included:

Improved SEO capabilities. this helps users find us easily using search engines such as Google or Yahoo.

More informative. More content around our products and services was added to aid users in making informed decisions.

More Helpful. Various help mechanisms such as our Online Broadband Consultant help users to find what they’re looking for without having to spend money on a phone call.

Refined usability. It’s the little things that improve usability. Accessible menus, adding extra links, removing unnecessary pages/steps.

Got an opinion? go take a look at the improved site here, and let us know what you think.

RSAWEB Blog