beyond438

Top posts of 2007 – South Africa’s wealthiest, SolarCity, SAP Business ByDesign and Elon Musk of SpaceX

Posted by beyond438 on Jan 4, 2008 in Business | 2 comments

Here are the list of the most read post on my blog in 2007:

1. South Africa’s wealthiest people in 2007 – Most read post by a factor of 5!
2. Lyndon Rive – Green energy CEO of SolarCity. Nice article in today’s San Francisco Business Times.
3. SAP’s on demand/SaaS ERP solution, codenamed A1S
4. Elon Musk of SpaceX
5. Mark Shuttleworth – Ubuntu founder and first African in space
6. What color is your personality? – interesting that this one made it so high up.
7. Laurie Olivier – Venture capitalist
8. Andy Stanley – The most powerful man in the room
9. New Google Maps Mobile – hold on to your GPS
10. Jack Welch / Lars Dalgaard Keynote video – I finished Jack’s book, “Winning” — easy read with LOTS of practical info. Highly recommended.

Thanks for reading my blog.

SoCon08 – Web 2008 in 1.5 days

Posted by beyond438 on Jan 3, 2008 in Blogging, Business, Technology | 0 comments

I attended SoCon07 last year and really enjoyed it. SoCon08 will be held at the University of Kennesaw, just North of Atlanta from February 8-9, 2008. You can register here. It’s not free like ’07 — this year it’s $43 for the full 1.5 days (including a Networking Dinner) or $15 for the Saturday. It’s still a great deal vs for example AlwaysOn’s $1875 OnMedia NYC 2008 event.Great place to meet all sorts of people that are part of the Atlanta (South East) tech scene.Are you going?

Free and Low cost cell phone calls – Jajah, Soonr, Jaxtr, Fring, Lypp, MaxRoam

Posted by beyond438 on Dec 24, 2007 in Business, Technology | 0 comments

Skype is not the only game in town anymore for free or cheap local and international calls. I use Skype a lot for making international calls when I’m connected to the Internet with my MacBook Pro. When I only have my Blackberry, I use VIP’s local and toll free access numbers to make international calls. Recently I started using Jajah’s local direct dial. On Christmas day Jajah is offering FREE calls.

Here are a few options for making cheap or free calls from your cell phone:
Jajah: Jajah has been around for about a year and I’ve used it on and off. Their new Jajah Direct service works great. They link an international number to a local US number. You dial a local US number and the phone rings in the foreign country you’re calling. This way you can make cheap international calls from your mobile phone. At the moment they have local numbers for most large US cities, e.g., Chicago, New York and San Francisco. I hope they add Atlanta soon. Jajah is very easy to set up and use. You can also use Jajah Mobile Web to make calls from your mobile phone. BBCalls integrates Jajah functionality directly into your Blackberry’s phone book app.

Soonr: I posted about Soonr before. Soonr brings your Mac or PC desktop to your cellphone. With Soonr Talk you can call your Skype friends from your cellphone. If they are online the call is free, else you pay the SkypeOut rate. I haven’t used this recently, however when I used it, it worked great. It does take some time to set up. If you have a lot of Skype friends and you have a browser enabled cellphone with a data plan then your calls are free, cool! This “SoonR Talk workaround enables VoIP on your iPhone” — post from Engadget.

Vinny Lingham – CEO of Synthasite

Posted by beyond438 on Dec 10, 2007 in Business, Entrepreneurship, South Africa, Technology | 0 comments

Recently Vinny Lingham stepped down from his post as chief strategy officer of IncuBeta, the online marketing company he co-founded, to concentrate on the interests of his venture capital company, Lingham Capital and more specifically on Synthasite. Lingham, along with his wife, Charlene, and a couple of friends started IncuBeta in 2003 and have grown the Cape Town company into a 50-employee operation with offices in the United Kingdom and United States. IncuBeta owns and manages several businesses, namely Clicks2Customers, a performance search marketing partner; SEM agency Quirk, ReveNews, and CostPerNews.

Another IncuBeta startup company, Synthasite, is now one of the primary investments of his venture capital enterprise, Lingham Capital, and one of the primary targets of Lingham’s attention. Synthasite recently received another round of financing worth $5mm.

Lingham is a mix of youthful energy and idealism, hard work, brains and national pride. He’s 28, works 60-70 hours a week, is a member of the Mensa organization, and loves South Africa.

Raised in East London, a city on the east coast of South Africa, Lingham received an information systems degree from the University of Cape Town and (Vinny corrected me: he dropped out because he didn’t have the finances to continue. I wouldn’t be surprised if he gets an honorary degree from UCT) an honors degree in electronic commerce from the University of South Africa. He is a fourth generation South African with ancestors from India. He loves to read, especially novels by Dan Brown and Tom Clancy, and is a movie fan. He considers Virgin founder Richard Bransen and U2 lead singer Bono personal role models. (He admires Bransen for his passion and fun, and Bono for his work for Africa.) In 2006 Lingham was the winner of the Top Young IT Entrepreneur in Africa Award. He is also listed in South Africa’s who’s who database.

Are we losing the World Wide Web (www)?

Posted by beyond438 on Dec 7, 2007 in Blogging, Technology | 0 comments

Well, not really…I recently started to see that many blog URLS omit the www. prefix, e.g., using only blog.beyond438.com instead of “www.blog.beyond438.com”, or “jeffnolan.com” instead of www.jeffnolan.com.

Read all about the deprecation (I had to look up the word) of “www.”. The no-www.org site seems to be the definitive source. It’s a quick read and I decided to cite the main idea:

No-www.org philosophy

No-www.org strives to make the Internet and communications about it as fruitful as possible. To that end, we make the modest proposal that website makers configure their main sites to be accessible by domain.com as well as www.domain.com.

Wikipedia has a no-www entry that’s a bit more technical. This Dailyblogtips post is well written and understandable. I quote some of the article here:

The problem arises because Google and other search engines view the two versions as two distinct sites, even if they have the exact same content (technically, in fact, the “www” denotes a subdomain that could point to different content).Search engine ranking is based, among other things, on the number of incoming links to your site. If you keep the two versions available some people will link to “http://www.domain.com” while other people will link to the “http://domain.com”, basically splitting your backlink count.

Dialyblogtips also posts on how to tell Google your preferred domain. If you have a WordPress blog then you can use this no-www plugin from Mr WP himself (read the comments).Finally, you can test your own site’s no-wwwness here…is it a class A, B or C. Be careful your site may end up on the “Wall of Shame”.Ok folks, this is a test. In the comments explain in 2 sentences what all this means. Go!