Today is one of those defining moments in my career in digital media – we have just switched on a new world called the Echo, which corresponds geographically with the surface of South Africa.
At midnight tomorrow Vodacom starts a really cool campaign to grow mobile internet usage in South Africa by launching its customized version of Opera Mini 5 and making internet access through the browser free for the next four weekends.
I don’t often do technical posts but I spent so much time trying to find a solution to this one that I had to put it up for others.
The Problem: Several Samsung and Cricket devices (predominantly in the US) seem to have problems accepting cookies from mobile web sites.
Over the past week The Grid has been rolling out components of its version 0.8 release across its Java and .mobi platforms and in it are some notable feature upgrades and some interesting new content.
As of this week my portfolio at Vodacom has been renamed to Vodacom Internet Services in order to align more closely with our UK counter-part Vodafone Internet Services (VIS) but the change is more than just a new label.
I am spending the week in Dhaka with the team that are working on the Grid and some other projects and after being here for 24 hours I am become less and less capable of describing the place. Here is a link to my Flickr photo set which I will be updating during the trip.
Like every other month since I joined Vodacom, October has been a busy one. I am happy to announce that The Grid is now available in Nigeria and that our new .mobi site is up and running in both countries with Tanzania soon to follow.
This is a map of where The Grid’s users were last month. As you can see, the northern part of the country (Gauteng, Mpumalanga and Limpopo) is where the bulk of the base are with a few brights spots in southern cities like Port Elizabeth and Cape Town.
This is a set of two mood maps for South Africa based on the moods set on the Grid yesterday (12 Oct 2009). You will notice that we are now rendering these based on aggregated data matched to suburban shapes rather than dots like my previous post.
Things keep getting more interesting at the Grid. This week we decided to map out the moods of a sample of Grid users so we could get an idea of the daily zeitgeist of the country. Have a look at the map below, its very simple at the moment and doesn’t indicate stacked moods (at this zoom level many are stacked on top of each other).
He has worked in the online media industry since 1996, has presented papers at many international conferences and specializes in profitable innovation in emerging markets.
RSS for this blog
Learn more about syndication, feeds, and feedburning.
