hitting the wire*

TechCentral doing well.

TechCentral, a new online media site covering ICT related issues in South Africa launched at the beginning of this month and seems to be flying from the quality of the articles, the debate in the comments about those articles and their click-through rate on ads (acc. to Duncan Mcleod). Duncan ended a long run at Financial Mail, to start out on his own, having spotted a significant "online" shift in journalism happening.  

I was a little taken aback to be asked to contribute an opinion piece from time to time, after all there is a distinct difference between writing the odd blog post on a piece of digital real estate you own and can abuse as you see fit, and airing your views in a genuine online publication!

But what the heck, the first column is out there ("From digital janitors to enablers of business"). I digitally shredded the first attempt and notice Duncan has done a fine job of editing the second attempt. If nothing else, this might force me to improve my writing style and start writing a bit more often.

I am truly grateful that it is only once a month or so - I'm not sure how these journo's churn out vaguely sensible stuff day in and day out.

IT, SysDev, Telecoms, Telecoms

Is funding for SA startups not the real issue?

Justin Spratt of IS has a thought provoking article on TechCentral on what is lacking in stimulating growth of technology startups in SA.

A nice graphic of the funding continuum:

Darren Gorton has a nice blog post here which lists a good few local funding options - would be good to accumulate these plus incubators, accelerators and mentors somewhere... maybe on Vinny's Silicon Cape? ;)

VSAT cheaper than Diginet? Surely not.

It's really cool when you discover something pleasantly surprising right under your nose.

I've just discovered that VoIP over VSAT works really well if configured properly and that VSAT could be a darn good replacement for a large Diginet network. Depending on how long you take a contract for and what you need it for, you can see significant savings like those shown below. Details here.