Lekker Spots: Localizing lekker

This site will be for all South Africans: The main objective of this site is to see what places are lekker to go to and what places are not lekker to go to – with a lekker twist.

So if I’m new to a place in Cape Town that I haven't been to like a restaurant near table mountain, I would want to check what a good place and if any local people have commented and said it's awesome of not and awesome place.

It's always nice to have local people commenting about places they've been to and sharing their experiences.  read more »

Is IS (Mobility) going to invest in HSPA which is said to offer up to 21 Mbps in perfect conditions.
If so would IS consider peering with Cell C, or would it rather wait for the likes of Vodacom and MTN?

Deploy a cheap VoIP network using the Jabber (XMPP) Jingle protocol. This can be built in a standards compliant way on at least 2 extremely well known and well used Jabber servers (ejabberd and Openfire).

IDEA SUMMARY: Display wine reviews from Twitter and aggregate postive / negative language and scores to produce a recommendation engine. If successful, look to build community features of the back of the data stream.

POSITIONING: Wine information for the man in the street. For the guy or gal that can't describe bouquet, but knows what they enjoy. And doesn't mind commentating on it publicly.

THE PREMISE: It is highly unlikely that any major new social players will arrive in the next couple of years. Because

a) information overflow  read more »

One of the most fantastic collections of educational and inspirational videos in the world is located at TED.com. The videos are Creative Commons licensed which means they can be freely copied and distributed. There is also an RSS feed on the site containing direct links to the various videos which means they can be downloaded and mirrored easily.  read more »

A lot of power users use local-only ADSL due to the cheaper data rates and a lot of them also tend to use Dynamic DNS (DDNS) to gain remote VPN/SSH access to their home (or work) machines or even run the usual internet services (Web, FTP, XMPP, IRC, etc) across their ADSL connection.

The problem with using these two together though is that the DDNS providers are generally hosted overseas so pushing DNS updates while on local can be a problem.  read more »

The launch of the Investors Network Blog halfway through 2009 has proved to be a good move and many articles are continuing to attract a large number of readers from both enterprise investors and entrepreneurs alike. Here are top ten articles for 2009:

Let us know if there is anything specific that you would like to see articles on?

The South African government is increasingly being asked to do more in support of small businesses when it comes to business investment and start-up capital. Although the government is already investing substantially into the small business sector more still need to be done.The benefits to the government are obvious and difficult to ignore. Small firms provide job opportunities, much needed competition in the key areas as well as of course tax revenue for the government.  read more »

SA Investors network a recently launched community of angel investors and entrepreneurs where business ideas get funded, who is still currently in BETA is already setting the SA small business finance environment alight. The business launched by the experienced team of entrepreneurs and investors at SA Start-up systems is a timely and very welcome solution when it comes to business finance for business owners in South Africa.  read more »

Host a freenode IRC server in South Africa to help reduce latency and bandwidth issues for IRC traffic.

Freenode hosting info:
http://freenode.net/hosting_ircd.shtml

If IS could mirror the sourceforge repository that would mean speed and bandwidth saving. I'm not sure how much that's your department. But there are a lot of software applications that are hosted there that have some quite widespread use.

Set up an eJabberd instance to peer to major Jabber/XMPP providers to support PubSub and/or PubHub for SA locally. This would simply require server infrastructure (dependent on traffic of course), bandwidth and physical placement in a datacentre.

Using this type of technology, web developers could implement "push" updates to other web apps, users and other services. This means a general reduction in bandwidth usage overall as it scales as there will be way less polling for RSS feeds, updates etc.  read more »

Network Africa, is a proposed internet cafe chain. We plan to launch in South Africa and grow into the top 10 internet consuming countries of the African continent. Our stores will be leased, fitted and operated on the principle of ‘economies of scale’. Most stores will open 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, each with about 35 PC’s. We hope to open our first store in the first quarter of 2010 in Johannesburg. We recognise that Network Africa’s product offering has certain characteristics which are critical to consider at this stage that we seek to raise seed capital.  read more »

First IS ideas.....
I would like to see Telkom and Neotel offer API's for their business users telephone numbers database. Many a-time I find myself looking through an online directory or Google for a service provider and asking myself is this business actually in existence? How do I trust them? If they offered an API, business directories could do cross checks on the numbers, to ensure that the business says it is who it is. Well actually we could go a little further and have SARS offer an API that just provides a business name and whether their up to date on their taxes.  read more »

It would be really cool for enterprises if you could get an ADSL account, make use of the boradband speeds, but not have access to the internet, and only to an internal VPN service on the same IP network.