SMSs went out yesterday informing MTN users who had subscribed to NokNok in the past and if you visit the NokNok website it simply says it’s shutting the service down at the end of this month. It’s hardly surprising. The product was ill-conceived, poorly rolled out and was hardly supported by the network operator. History […]
Search results
Posted inMedia
If the shoe fits in your mouth, wear it
Every now and then an ad comes along that offends people, and there’s an outcry and outraged calls to 702 and threatening comments on some company’s Facebook page, and the ad is withdrawn, everyone says sorry, and the agency gets blamed. It happened with the spoof sell-your-organs pamphlet campaign for a local horror movie. Its […]
Posted inBusiness
Walmart, Massmart, nationalisation and MTN
Pick ‘n Pay recently rolled out its Smart Shopper card, one of those loyalty cards that allows you to amass redeemable points. Do I smell the influence of the recent move of US retailer Walmart into South Africa, via Massmart? It’s a possible small example of the benefits of competition or the threat of competition. […]
Posted inGeneral
Gaming, simulation and killing
The recent killing of a seven-year-old girl by a teenage online gaming “addict” in Vietnam raises important and disturbing questions. From reports it is apparent that Mong The Xuong, 15, tempted Anh Nhu to accompany him into the woods near their northern Vietnamese village of Yen Hoa with the lure that they could pick fruit […]
Posted inNews/Politics
When sex becomes a race issue…
By Tim Bester The sexual adventures of the rich and powerful have always been the focus of public fascination when these are aired in the public domain. These peccadilloes make for good and lurid copy in our newspapers. The most recent of these, involving Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Arnold Schwarzenegger, are good examples. And they have […]
Posted inGeneral
Unified communications can benefit SMEs too
Unified communications (UC) is enjoying accelerating adoption in the enterprise, based on its inherent efficiencies, cost-savings and business-process improvements. Partly thanks to the rise of tablet PCs and smartphones, it is one of the great success stories of ICT, and many vendors have come to the party with excellent functionality. But the benefits of UC […]
Posted inNews/Politics
When Muslims rule the world
Osama bin Laden is not dead. There is good reason why his body was cremated and tossed into the ocean. As we all know, or should know, this was not only to insult devotees of certain segments of the broader Islamic faith; it was to ensure there was no DNA trace. No proof. What was […]
Posted inNews/Politics
To all the tea girls I have loved before
There’s a problem with the tense of a popular, communist freedom song which goes “my father was a garden boy, my mother was a kitchen girl, that’s why I am a communist, a communist, a communist”. Sometimes “socialist” is used instead of “communist”. In this song garden boys and kitchen girls are relegated to the […]
Posted inGeneral
Five top contact centre trends
Multichannels The age of the one-way communication street — where brands controlled the manner in which their customers communicated with them — has passed. Today’s customers want to communicate using a channel that suits them and that could be Facebook, Twitter, Skype, video calls, SMS, email, fax or regular phone calls, depending on the demographic […]
Posted inGeneral
The fight against child trafficking
Communications technology, such as the internet and mobile phones, certainly make life easier: from online banking, to staying in touch, to news and weather on the go and all the other benefits that have become such an integral part of our daily lives. Unfortunately, the same technology has also made it easier for criminals to […]
Posted inNews/Politics
The future of the two Sudans
By Aidan Eyakuze It didn’t last very long, did it? In January, Africa celebrated the successful referendum in which the South voted for independence. Four months later, Abyei, a region nestled between the North and South Sudan was violently “seized” by the North, risking war with the South. Between the vote for secession and the […]
Posted inNews/Politics
On Cope and coalitions
The Congress of the People, perhaps surprisingly to many, has been placed in a rather awkward position as “kingmaker” in a number of municipalities, primarily in the Western and Northern Cape. The position is challenging primarily because Cope has to decide whether it wants to throw its lot in with the DA, or side with […]