Johannesburg:- Smartphones have made a dramatic entry into corporate South Africa, far surpassing general consumer use or small business use.

This is a surprise finding from a new research study released today by World Wide Worx. The Mobile Corporation in SA 2010 report reveals that three quarters of South African companies have deployed smartphones within their organisations, compared to almost none two years ago.

The study, backed by First National Bank (FNB), leaders in cellphone banking in Africa, and Research In Motion (RIM), the developer of the BlackBerry solution, shows that saturation point has almost been reached by large South African companies in the use of fixed landlines (96%) and ordinary cellphones (92%). And, as forecast in 2007, 3G data card penetration has also reached near saturation, with 94% of large companies deploying it. Now the focus has turned to integration of smartphones with business processes.

“These results show that enterprise mobility solutions are no longer just nice to have. They’re essential for businesses that want to be competitive, responsive and efficient in a world where a customer won’t wait for a salesperson who is visiting customers and where project flow can’t stop because a manager is at a full-day meeting,” says Deon Liebenberg, Regional Director for Sub Sahara Africa at RIM. “Not only does mobility allow companies to improve internal efficiencies and communications, it also enables them to interact more effectively with their increasingly mobile customers.”

The study also showed that corporate South Africa expects to embrace the new world of online services to an extent that was not even anticipated as recently as one year ago.

“Until last year, concepts like Software as a Service (SaaS) and Cloud Computing were regarded as little more than buzzwords,” says Arthur Goldstuck, MD of World Wide Worx.

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Due to unforeseen circumstances I’ve been forced to move the date of the next Internet Cafe workshop schedules for this Saturday. The primary reason for this is that I’ve been on a short break in Uitenhage and on Sunday missed my flight back to Johannesburg. My car has been parked at OR Tambo airport for 3 weeks and I have to drive directly to Rustenburg from Tuesday till Thursday to deliver 7 talks to parents, teachers and children at Selly Park Convent Primary School, Selly Park High School, Fields College Primary School. Fields College High School and Lebone II.

So the new date is Thursday, 18 March 9am-5pm. And the venue remains Sandton Library on Nelson Mandela Square. Any queries? Please post your questions below as comments. More updates will be posted on this announcement.

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This is originally from the Facebook Blog:

At Facebook, we’re constantly connecting with interesting people—from experts in their field, academics and researchers to celebrities or visitors to our office. Occasionally, we’ll share these conversations on the Facebook Blog in our “Connecting with….” series. I had the opportunity to speak with Sam Gosling, professor of psychology at The University of Texas at Austin and author of “Snoop: What your stuff says about you.” He recently published research that found that people are expressing their real personalities on social networks like Facebook, rather than inflated takes on themselves.

What made you interested in researching the psychology behind people’s profile on Facebook and social networking generally?

I think it was a confluence of two different forces. First, I had already done a lot of research on how you can look at people’s physical spaces as reflections of what people are like and how people use that physical space to communicate messages to others and make them feel certain ways. …It just seemed quite a natural extension to apply this approach to a virtual space…

Second, so many people are on the social networking sites. And although from the outside their activities may appear frivolous, they clearly aren’t because so many people devote so much time and psychological energy to them.

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Another gem from SEO guru Tony Roocroft, a mentor and friend.

Critical to SEO Success: Link Popularity and Link Relevancy.

• Links: You need them.
• Links: You need lots of them.
• Links: You need lots of RELEVANT or RELATED links

Links on a web page enable the visitor to move around within and without a website easily.

A significant proportion of any website’s visitors will probably arrive at the site or page from a direct search query. By this I mean if a searcher types in good cheddar cheese he will be taken directly to a page about good cheddar cheese. On the other hand the searcher may have come from a link elsewhere maybe the searcher had been looking at a completely different site about English cheeses and saw a link to the site about good cheddar cheese.

When I review my own websites logs I find that about 60% of all page views come from search engines. The rest from other links or bookmarks.

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Veteran technology journalist Sean Bacher has been appointed editor of South Africa’s longest-running online technology magazine, Gadget. The appointment comes as Gadget prepares to celebrate its 12th year online, and plans a heavy focus on the technology of the World Cup.

“It’s a landmark year for South Africa, so it is a privilege for me to be at the heart of covering the developments that help shape its outcome,” says Bacher.

He started his journalistic career writing for the technology section of The Star in 1999, reviewing high-end technical products, and gradually evolving to consumer and business technology. He has had stints with FHM, Africa Geographic and Elle, before taking up a technical journalist position at Computing SA. He then moved on to become editor of Computing SA in 2005.

“The market has changed dramatically in the past 12 years, both in gadgetry and in media,” says Bacher, “and this year promises to increase that pace of change even more dramatically. It’s the right place and the right time to be in online media.”

Gadget is published by World Wide Worx. The company’s MD, Arthur Goldstuck, who previously won the Electronic category in the Telkom ICT Journalist of the Year awards for his work in Gadget, will continue to act as editor-in-chief. Gadget’s senior reviewer, Steven Ambrose, who is also MD of WWW Strategy, is appointed associate editor.

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* Sean Bacher can be contacted on:

Tel: +27 82 9951510

Email: sean.bacher@gmail.com

Web: www.gadget.co.za

Skype: seanbacherza

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