MIH SWAT

I have been on the web my entire working career. In the early days it was mainly just a communication tool and a way to find information on how to do this or that on your PC. Then along came this, this, things like this and most importantly this. (more…)

There is much talk about the coming of the Web to Africa. Much of it completely misdirected, in my opinion. The web has already arrived in Africa – there was simply very little uptake. (more…)

This year SWAT marked its first year of presence at the Zend/PHP Conference, also known as ZendCon. Neil Broers and I were chosen for the mission of going to ZendCon and bringing back all we could learn. (more…)

Android will beat the iPhone in the long run, for the same reasons that PCs became more popular than Macs. PCs are more diverse, more open, and therefore have more applications; they are capable of becoming more specialized and therefore more useful in many different scenarios. (more…)

A paradigm shift is defined as a change from one way of thinking to another.

Since the beginning of the Internet we have experienced many paradigm shifts, such as the invention of the browser & World Wide Web, eCommerce, and the various forms of communication that have driven the usage of the medium, such as email and instant messaging. (more…)

Making your site secure has always been an issue… an issue that most developers ignore. There are, however, a few things you can do to defend your site from the majority of attacks. Everybody knows what these attacks are… buffer overruns, sql injection, etc., and there are many ways in which  you can successfully prevent these types of vulnerabilities. (more…)

Being relatively new to the Scrum way of doing things (2 projects in progress and starting a 3rd), I thought it may be useful to start a series of blog posts on our experience of Scrum. To kick off I will start with our understanding of what scrum is. (more…)

Cloud computing is one of the most hyped topics being discussed today. Just do a Google search and you’ll find 13,700,000 results for that term. Amazon started their cloud offering way back in the last millennium, and others are following suit. Dell even tried to register the trademark, but failed. (more…)

When we talk about Apple, mankind is pretty much divided into three camps: lovers, haters and developers. Seriously, I never thought the day would come when I’d say such a thing, but the fact is: Apple needs the other Steve. (more…)

Welcome to the blog of the Strategic Worldwide Applications and Technologies (SWAT) team of Naspers/MIH – a Global Media Company.

Naspers/MIH has one of the largest developing market investment portfolios in the Internet/Mobile space. You can see our investment portfolio here.

The SWAT team is a global product development and Internet Strategy team, comprised of Internet Analysts, Product Specialists and software engineers. Together we form a think tank and execution arm of the Internet division within Naspers, and this blog serves as our outlet for strategic thoughts, technological idea sharing and general discussion both with the users of the products within Naspers/MIH Internet as well as other new WWW destinations.

We encourage our team members as well as other Internet thinkers within our Group to write blog posts and welcome feedback and debate from the wider community.

Welcome All!

John Kotsaftis

CIO Naspers/MIH Internet