Posts Tagged Telkom
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?
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