Archive for category Internet
Brawn GP may get sponsored by Google
I am a dedicated Ferrari fan in Formula 1, but Brawn GP has proven to be one of the coolest teams on the grid. First, they mashed a Mercedes engine into the Honda chassis a couple of weeks before the championship started, and then proceeded to kick everyone’s ass with their Frankencar. There’s no doubt that Ross Brawn has had a huge positive influence on the team (he helped Schumacher win his 7 world drivers titles), but this kind of performance is unheard of. They then secured a sponsorship deal with Richard Branson’s Virgin group, which is one of the companies I admire most in the world.
Now, Brawn GP may enter into another sponsorship deal with Google. The search giant is rumoured to want to enter F1 as soon as possible, and Brawn GP would be a logical choice. There’s still loads of space available on the car to plaster some Google logo’s and the car is mostly white, which is typical of Google’s sites. If this goes through, it will unite 3 people I admire a lot: Ross Brawn, Richard Branson and Larry Page. Fricken awesome.
The Twitter effect
Posted by Johann in Internet, My Projects on May 28th, 2009
Recently I decided to start marketing one of my projects with Twitter. Newsvibe is similar to Digg, except that it automatically collects news from most South African news sites. What I did was to integrate it with the Twitter API, and automatically tweet all South African news stories to Twitter accounts I set up specifically for the site. The main account is http://www.twitter.com/newsvibe. After I did this, the following happenned:
Traffic generated by Twitter
According to Google Analytics, I now get almost a 1,000 hits a day, compared to less than 30 before I started using Twitter. This is awesome – loads of traffic for free. I’m still figuring out how to best monetise and exploit the traffic. More importantly, I need to figure out how to get these visitors to use the site and start discussing the news stories.
Preparing for the South Africa’s .com bubble
Posted by Johann in Internet, Making money, Technology on May 27th, 2009
As we all know, the economy moves in cycles. There are ups and downs occurring all the time. Currently we are experiencing one of the worst economic downturns in history, and I don’t expect we’ll see economic growth to turn positive before the middle of 2010. It was announced this week that consumer inflation is still stubbornly high, and that the country is now officially in a recession.
However, that doesn’t mean we have to sit paralyzed with fear. Now is the best time ever to start a new business. If you can start (and more importantly bootstrap) a business in the middle of a recession, you can be virtually assured that your business will flourish when the economy starts growing again.
So what am I doing in preparation for the next economic upturn? I’m learning all I possibly can about how to run online businesses. I have chosen this field for two reasons. Firstly, it’s incredibly cheap to start an online business. It shouldn’t cost you more than R150 to get a website up and running, and nothing more than R100 per month for hosting (I have seen hosting for much cheaper than this, but I would recommend you get a good stable hosting company). Then you need a very basic computer, with a cheap internet connection. I dare you to try and start another type of business for cheaper than this.
Secondly, South Africa will experience a massive technology bubble over the three years, even discounting the effect of the expected economic upturn. The country’s internet access is currently being strangled by Telkom’s incessant efforts to make profits at the cost of the consumer. With Neotel and Vodafone entering the broadband market much more aggressively than Telscum, and all the new international connections coming to South Africa over the next 2 years, the cost of internet access will plummet. In two years, everyone and their dog will have broadband. Even those without computers will access the internet on their cellphones. Websites that are marketed correctly, and with moderate traffic now, will receive a huge amount of traffic in 2 years. And we all know that traffic equals money, but only if it is done correctly.
I’m learning these skills now, and making the mistakes before the upturn. I will be ready to take full advantage of South Africa’s .com bubble. I will build my businesses while the bubble inflates, and then cash in before it bursts.
How are you going to take advantage of the next economic upturn?
Things that annoy me on the Internet
I use the Internet. A lot. Although it is a great tool, there are some things which annoys the heck out of me.
- Telkom. OK, I think this applies to all South African Internet users. Slow internet, overseas pages that won’t load, connection going down randomly, high prices, etc etc drives me crazy.
- Autoplaying videos. I hate it when I open up a website (not something like YouTube) with an embedded video which starts playing automatically, especially if I have to scroll down to see it. With high bandwidth costs and the above mentioned slow internet, this makes it worse.
- Flash Ads. I understand the importance of ads on websites, as many sites won’t be able to operate without them. However, I dispise flash ads which makes noises when I move the mouse over them, or which expands out of the ad’s container, or anything like that. Plus it chews up even more valuable bandwidth.
- Poorly written websites. It is incredible that so many companies seems to neglect their websites. Good (bad?) examples of these types of sites are Telkom’s online billing site, ananzi.co.za (the 90′s called, they want their animated GIF’s back) and computicket.za (this site seems horribly outdated). The situation is improving, but way too slowly i my opinion.
- Get rich quick schemes. Come on people, how stupid do you think I am?!? The only way to make money is either being extremely lucky or working hard. There’s no way I can make millions every month by submitting ads to Google, or capturing data, or something like that. Of course, in order to start “working” in this industry one has to buy an “information pack”, usually costing anything from $5 to $500. It’s actually really sad that some people are so desperate to make money that they fall for these scams.
- Having to sign up to use sites. I wish everyone would just start using OpenID or something. I hate filling in my details every time, and having to remember yet another username and password.
These are my major gripes with an otherwise awesome experience. What’s yours?
Facebook OpenID goes live!
Posted by Johann in Internet, Technology on May 19th, 2009
This is what I’ve been waiting for for a long time. From now on, we will be able to sign into any website which supports OpenID with our Facebook accounts. I simply love the concept of OpenID, and have been using it for some time now by signing in with my Google account at any site which supports the standard. Of course, with virtually everyone and their dog using Facebook, this will become a much more widely used function of websites (not many sites supported it before because very few people have OpenID compatible accounts). We should see OpenID spread like wildfire from now on, as it will drastically increase the conversion rate from site visitors to actual members. It’s much simpler to just click “Login with my Facebook account details”, rather than filling out another form and picking another password.
More information on Facebook’s blog: http://developers.facebook.com/news.php?blog=1&story=246
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