- Franklin D. Roosevelt

We were recently visited by 4 Grade 11 students from the LEAP Science and Maths School, who were required to spend time job shadowing at a company in the field of business which they are interested in.

Philisiwe Mzwana, Tina Lubambo, Nomfundiso Malgas and Nosiphiwo Rose Breakfast spent some time with our Team to gain insight into what we do, and how we do it. They were introduced to our company, the various roles and responsibilities, and how our employees came to be in their respective positions. The students were also presented with the various education paths they could pursue should they want to follow a career in IT.

Nomfundiso Malgas commented, “It was a great experience for me – I obtained the information I needed to make decisions about what I want to do, and I heard a lot about all the different fields of business. I enjoyed the day and learned a lot.”

LEAP Science and Maths Schools are based in Langa, Gugulethu (Cape Town) and Alexandra (Johannesburg), and aims to transform educationally disadvantaged communities in SA through mathematics and science focused education initiatives. The LEAP learning model is designed to support children from township communities to become South Africa’s leaders of the future.

Maths and Science are highly beneficial subjects to study at school level, not only for a potential future in Information Technology, but in most career fields. Studying Maths and Science equips scholars with essential skills that will make them highly employable. These subjects also teach scholars problem-solving skills, which is not only important in a practical or experimental career field, but is essential to employers in all fields.

Google Street View is a service linked to Google Maps and Google Earth that provides users with panoramic, photographic detail at street level. Areas in Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, Pretoria, Johannesburg and Durban were mapped out by stitching together millions of photographs taken by the Google Street View Trikes (vehicles), enabling users to view panoramic images of local streets in vivid detail, as if they were standing on the very street they were viewing. Users visiting www.remax.co.za can now see the ‘Street View’ of specific properties listed on the site.

A huge value-add to property consumers, this opens the doors to many ancillary benefits which are soon to be exploited, but most significantly, buyers are afforded an improved perspective on the properties in question, and sellers are better able to recoup the intrinsic value of appealing neighbourhoods, attractive houses and proximity to amenities such as educational institutions, shopping areas and police stations. Adrian Goslett, CEO of RE/MAX of Southern Africa says, “Each year an increased number of South Africans are searching online for property, so the implementation of Google Street View to our service is the natural progression.”

The benefits of Google Street View to clients are vast as they will no longer need to page through newspapers or drive around on Sundays, painstakingly searching for show houses.

Prior to the launch of Google Street View in South Africa, Google SA approached White Wall Web and RE/MAX as potential integration partners for Street View as a result of their long standing relationship building and innovating web-based technologies for the property industry. Google Street View subsequently became the ‘cherry on top’ for the newly launched www.remax.co.za website, which features address level map data as well.

Executive Director at White Wall Web, Noel Ross-Gillespie, states, “The incorporation of Google Street View into the RE/MAX of Southern Africa website is a big step in the right technological direction. While South Africa might be behind the rest of the developed world in some aspects, we’re also in a unique position in which we can take the best-of-breed technologies and fast-track our growth. We are pleased to have been able to assist RE/MAX in bringing the very latest technology to the forefront of the Real Estate industry.”

See it to believe it – visit the RE/MAX site and experience it first hand, or take a look at some of these randomly selected samples below:

http://remax.co.za/300148190/

http://remax.co.za/300176836/

http://remax.co.za/300207313/

http://remax.co.za/300229443/

http://remax.co.za/300267310/

Buildings are decorated, streets bannered, cars socked and flagged and many faces are soon to be painted, but online? That place which holds so much of our attention? Not so much.

It’s time to fix that… it’s time to Spread The Feva!

We’ve created the perfect way to fast-track the release of pent-up patriotism by introducing The Flag Tag. With very little effort, you too can proudly sport the online equivalent of mirror-socks!

With a 1-line addition to your site’s <head> tag (preferably with all your other JavaScript includes), one of a variety of flags can be added to your site. Visit www.flagtag.co.za now to show your true colours!

Right. Now that you’ve taken care of your online reputation, go out and buy some real stuff, take a deep breath and practice Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika – we’ve got a lot of excitement to prepare for!

(And just because this is interesting, we made a point of checking the correct orientation for a vertical flag. Doing our best to be on the ball!)

Without a doubt, the most noteworthy improvement to the site is the inclusion of address level data, which locates the listed properties on an actual map. This makes RE/MAX of Southern Africa the first agency within the South African Real Estate industry to provide this value-added technology. Previously, users could only view properties at a provincial level, which didn’t provide the user with sufficient knowledge of the area in which the property was situated. But with the newly implemented technology, users can see the exact street level address of the property for sale. Not only does this assist the user in accessing the property on sale, but it also allows them to view other available properties in the surrounding areas with greater ease.

Other significant enhancements include:

Improved usability and interface design

At first glance, you’ll notice that the new website interface features cleaner design aesthetics and improved search functionality (with new categorised search functions). This was done to improve the usability experience, cutting user search times down to the bare minimum.

Cleaner code

Another improvement is the reduced dependence on JavaScript, which ensures more pages will be indexed, leading to improved SEO, and ultimately, greater accessibility via search engines, as search engines significantly favour pages with faster loading times.

Social media integration

New additions include the incorporation of the RE/MAX social networking channels, such as Facebook, twitter, the RE/MAX YouTube brand channel, and blogs for both the CEO and Chairman of RE/MAX.

A few more features are also in the pipleline, some of which will be BIG news in the online property industry.

Take a look at the site at www.remax.co.za and let us know what you think.

Entrepreneurs and their success stories, innovative companies, universities and their research projects, and venture capital landscape is the name of the game at the exhibition. A dedicated section on Agile development in the Cape and case studies of successful Agile implementations will also be on display.

The exhibition is free for all and is aimed towards people in the Cape technology industry, university students, and school learners. Various industry experts will be attending the exhibition – including our very own Peter Flynn (Managing Director), Noel Ross-Gillespie (Operations Director) and Zayne Upton (Head of Operations).

Times:

• Exhibition opens: 09h00 on Wednesday, 5 May 2010

• Industry: 09h00 – 17h00: The exhibition is open to anyone who works in the Cape technology industry or its supporting industries, from 09h00 – 17h00 on Wednesday 5th and Thursday 6th May and from 09h00 – 16h00 on Friday 7th May.

• University Students: 11h00 – 12h00 & 14h00 – 15h00: Students are invited to attend between 11h00 – 12h00 and   14h00 – 15h00 on Wednesday 5th, Thursday 6th and Friday 7th May.

• School Learners: 16h00 – 17h00:  School learners, their parents and teachers are invited from 16h00 – 17h00 on Wednesday 5th and Thursday 6th May.

• Exhibition closes: 17h00 on Friday, 7 May

We are proud to be associated with this event, and look forward to meeting you there!

• Andy Volk‘s presentation about how his company, DownTempo use the margin generated from their consulting business to generate spin-off products and businesses. I was refreshed to learn about a company with so many similarities to ours, and learn about the ways that they have addressed many of the same challenges we face. I enjoyed his philosophy of preferring to “live in the land of “yes”" which means have a far more open relationship with other organizations with potential or real competitive overlap.
• This in-turn inspired some great conversations between some of us who own and operate “overlapping” businesses – conversations we have all agreed to continue with – in this regard, I had excellent conversations with Jarred Cinman, Guy Taylor and Wesley Lynch;
• Meeting and chatting to Sheraan Amod (Co-founder of Personera.com – check it out) about the “relentless focus” required to launch a web-based product and the journey he has been on;
• Sitting in on a discussion with seasoned Tech journos like Samantha Perry and Ivo Vegter along with a bunch of other great minds while they discussed telecoms advocacy and what the most important issue(s) to address are in 2010;
• Learning about the world of “Digital Agency” from Rob Stokes and Wesley Lynch and discovering how different that is to our world where we focus on heavy-lifting web app development consultancy – similar perhaps in terms of some of the “1′s and 0′s” churn out behind the scenes, but entirely different in terms of pre and post sales client engagements, the stakeholders we talk to and the types of conversations we have with customers and the industry at large;
• Spontaneous, hilarious live entertainment from Willem van Straaten on Saturday night – and the general craziness of the community;
• The international element and more tangible experience of “7 (or less)degrees of separation,” especially highlighted by Stefan Magdalinski, and also Stefan’s demonstration of how the internet can be used to liberate information (…and info wants to be free…)
• The discussion about the role (and validity) of the various “ICT Entrepreneurship Initiatives” in South Africa at the moment – with special focus on The Silicon Cape Initiative, GeekRetreat itself and NetProphet;
• A look into the excellent product Cognition and a conversation with Patrick Kayton about their journey so far;
• A conversation with Andrea Broom and others about the uses of PersonL in the education field (something we had not seen before);
• Seeing how many companies are running SCRUM in South Africa;
• Steve Vosloo‘s “proof of concept”  project called “Kontax” showing that kids will read books on a mobile web interface because “something is better than nothing”;
• And finally, the general quality of conversation (ok – maybe not all of it – the Birkenhead Black Snake and Tequila supplied by Elan Lohman did its work:) on Saturday night);
• And I’m pretty sure I have forgotten some things that I will only think of later…

A big up to all the sponsors as listed on the GeekRetreat site for funding the brilliant initiative.

Pic by Paul Furber, CC BY 3.0

So says Pete Flynn, MD of White Wall Web, who says that the growth in the number of users who understand and trust the Internet equates to a target market that is happy to transact online.

“South Africa is still around four years behind the rest of the world in terms of online transacting and we’ll probably never completely close this gap but we will continue to follow quite steadily,” he says. “eCommerce is an inevitable progression for South African businesses especially when you consider online giant, Amazon.com, which records more online turnover than our two main local competitors, Pick ‘n Pay and Shoprite, combined.”

Andrew Smith, Co-founder  at Live Alchemy concurs saying that while the rest of the world’s traditional retailers often supplement their brick and mortar business quite successfully online, South African businesses are seemingly reticent to follow suit.

He says Telkom and the lack of Internet access have taken the blame for slow eCommerce uptake for far too long.

“If you walked around a shopping centre today you’d find that almost everyone there has access to high-speed, always on Internet, be it at home or work,” he says. “The reality of the situation is that traditional retailers simply don’t know where to start with their online efforts. They think ‘eCommerce’ and see ‘high tech’ and become intimidated by the unknown.”

Flynn agrees and says that eCommerce is a cloudy concept for many South African business owners and says the perception is that eCommerce is expensive, difficult to get right and only for the technically savvy younger generation.

“These perceptions are slowly changing due, in point, to the number of examples of successful companies operating in this field today, like Kalahari and Yuppie Chef.”

Smith says: “Big name retailer, Game, has yet to dip its toes in the water and, while Woolworths and Pick n Pay have made treads online, they don’t offer a national footprint.

“This has opened the door for specialist online brands like Yuppie Chef, Kalahari, eDreams and the like and, while turnover is still tiny compared to their offline counterparts, business is growing at a rate of 30 percent per year and it’s going to be difficult for latecomers to compete with them.”

Smith says that buying online requires a big leap of faith for South African consumers but that once trust has been solidified, it will be near impossible for late entry competitors to win existing online consumers over.

White Wall Web’s Flynn says the Web has grown up, users are more experienced, standards have begun to take shape and Web-based solutions for eCommerce are more affordable – all of which has laid the groundwork making the online market an increasingly attractive.

“Working in partnership with Live Alchemy, local eCommerce specialists, has enabled White Wall Web to provide a range of consulting and implementation services to assist businesses that rely on traditional marketing and distribution methods to develop and implement a successful eCommerce strategy that works for them,” he says.

But eCommerce isn’t necessarily for everyone, Flynn warns. “Like any marketing and distribution method, some implementations and conditions around the implementation are better than others, which directly affects the bottom line.

“But eCommerce does offer several advantages over traditional, including not having to stock products before selling them, not needing expensive retail space and being able to showcase products to an international market as opposed to just a market local to specific stores.”

One thing businesses should keep in mind when they decide to explore eCommerce is their partner of choice, he adds. It is important that the company assisting business in transitioning to online selling has real-world experience in selling online.

The intricacies of online payment methods, delivery companies, combating fraud, packaging, customer service and user experience can only be learnt firsthand and it is through working with companies like White Wall Web that users can experience a trouble free move into the online space.

That said, the underlying technology is doing an excellent job. Nay. A Very Excellent Job.

New (at least with this ease) was the ability to drag your navigation route to insert any number of waypoints – producing an instant recalculation of directions, turn-by-turn instructions and time/distance figures. Try it here. Oh. And perhaps alter the destination completely. No sweat. Processing. Done. Not only fantastic from a usability point-of-view, but demonstrating some pretty incredible behaviour ‘under-the-hood’.

A key-point during the presentation was the assertion that almost 70% of all searches return a geographical component – either an address or a proximity to an address – naturally prompting the thought that searches ought to natively focus on the location of results. To this end, Google’s Point-of-Interest (POI) search is clearly very powerful, and certainly one of the sharper arrows in their quiver: By locating businesses (via a layer) on their maps, they can aggregate everything known about these entities – their cloud-knowledge consisting of reviews, photos, recommendations etc – and present them all as a “more info” page. Not a big deal for Corporates perhaps, but a tremendous opportunity for vendors in hospitality, travel, activity and interest sectors, especially given the huge online research which now takes place before one travels. And not only will this cloud-knowledge grow with time, but this new potential for discovery provides a beautiful incentive for people to start adding their businesses to this layer, spending all their precious time making sure the salient information – operating hours, costs, services etc – is properly input to guarantee the correct display. Definitely in the businesses’ best interest. Yes. Indeed. If your business is not on the map, be sure to pop on over to the Local Business Center to increase your chance of winning. Presumably you’ve already registered to still be reading?

OK, so a few more comments. Considering the focus of the event was – as I understood – a more technical presentation, I felt that it could have capitalised far better on various methods of interacting/integrating with the mapping engine – via the API for example. Furthermore, very little spin was placed on the Android 2.0 incarnation which has caused more than a few GPS-vendors’ shares to “retreat” with its cloud-connected, turn-by-turn voice navigation. Click here for awkward-but-impressive video. Reading between the lines, it’s fairly apparent where Android is headed – premium access to the wealth of features Google sprouts from its Labs.

It’s also fairly obvious that layers are a big part of the Maps story. Already Transit layers exist, showing connections and promising timetables.  Photo layers, Real-Estate layers, personalised “My Layers” and all manner of anecdotal mash-ups – all kindly supplied by you: The greater Google Employee.

So. My take-home at the end of the presentation was simply a “wow-gosh”. Not really about the barn-like venue, draped with sheets and lit with the 4 bright colours of world domination. Not really about the maps. Not even about their fancy javascript and mind-boggling aggregation algorithms. Simply a recognition that in this age of Crowdsourcing, Google are still miles ahead of anyone else in terms of incentivising people to share their time and effort. And I’m not just talking about registering businesses. I’m thinking about the effort we go through

• making sure our blogs index correctly – Google has more access to information and opinion
• doing the grunt work of facial classification in Picasa – how long until they’ve got a face/person search?
• defining the conversion goals of all your sites – allowing further site-rankings on success?
• populating their planet with 3D buildings – courtesy of SketchUp
• fixing the cartography for fun – Map Maker to the rescue
• providing a gazillion mails and documents a day to advertise against – all for the merry price of nil

The list is long. The incentives are spot-on. The enabling technology is spot-on. So just how many other industries will be beaten into submission because Google is spot-on?

Then fast foward to today…

400 delegates arrived and queued to get access to the Old Mutual Business School (amazing venue). Some nice touches faciliated an incredibly interactive vibe – a Twitter fountain on the big screen was one, a decent number of breaks was another, a one hour lunch was another and QA sessions when time allowed was another.

A great mix of speakers, some well known, others less known, but all “experts” (or at least passionate and researched) about particular subjects. See the full agenda and speakers on the NetProphet site. Marlon Parker wrote a succint personal account of the days procedings, naming it a “wake up call.”

All the Twitter activity got us top 10 trended on Twitter for about 5-6 hours (we hit 2nd at one point and were 4th overall for the day on #NetProphet).

As a sponsor and organizer, this was incredibly satisfying, especially since the community expressed so much appreciation for our efforts (I trust that we won’t have to lobby so hard next time to get the sponsorship required to run this event).

At RAMP HQ tomorrow I’m sure there will be loads of discussion and post event analysis and we’ll be deciding how to take this event (and brand) from strength to strength. I hope to convince Tim Price (who heads up RAMP Marketing) to blog the story of how NetProphet came about, and how we managed to make it succeed as it did, as a kind of marketing case study.

Mike Stopforth blogged a great endorsement for NetProphet which seems to sum up the sentiment (which is also immensely satisfying).

Right now, I’m about to hit the sack feeling very pleased with our first NetProphet and proud of the amazing team of people I get to spend my working days with.

All presentations, videos, post talk interviews (video) and pics will be up on www.netprophet.org.za shortly.

Available through www.travellogger.co.za, the online travel log enables users to track their mileage online throughout the year and easily export this data to a CSV file, for use in Excel, when it becomes time to submit their annual returns.
The web-based nature of the app affords users the convenience of logging their travel any time and any place where they have internet access. The app is also compatible with the majority of popular cellphone web browsers – making ‘on the road’ logging a breeze.

Users can feel assured in using this application as their information is backed up on a web server in a secure data centre environment. Users also have the extra option of exporting the information, and backing it up for convenience on their own PC or laptop.

Employees that are required by their employers to log their travel will also find this app particularly useful.

1 March 2009 to 28 February 2010 will be the last year where the “deeming provision” may be used to calculate a business travel deduction. Before, taxpayers were only asked to provide their total business and personal mileage for the year. However, according to the SARS web site, this provision was open to abuse and resulted in excessive deductions, which did not match actual business expenses.

So, from 1 March 2010, taxpayers seeking to claim a deduction for business travel will be required to keep a logbook and www.travellogger.co.za will assist taxpayers in doing so.