MIH SWAT

South African’s woke up to the exciting news today that MWEB, one of the countries’ largest Internet Service Providers, are launching long-awaited uncapped broadband packages.

Read more

The big news in Search last week was the final go-ahead on the integration of Microsoft and Yahoo’s Internet-search businesses.

The on-again, off-again deal by the two internet giants was signed back in July, but regulatory approval by the European Commission and the US Department of Justice only came through this week.

Read more

A few months ago i had the pleasure of getting to know the Android SDK and got to create a prototype Android game. For this reason I got to use a HTC Magic running a standard Android 1.6 or Donut as its known to the Android community. I have since rooted the phone and flashed the ROM with several community created ROMs. I had a ROM running HTC’s Sense User Interface(UI) , which is a layer on top of the standard Android UI. Since then I got tasked with creating an iPhone application and obviously I would need to use a iPhone as development phone. At this stage it dawned on me that nowhere on the tech blogs have I read a blog post describing a Android user having to adjust to the iPhone OS.

Read more

From 25th till the 31st january, the 3rd. edition of Campus Party Brazil took place in São Paulo. The event, that is said to be the biggest one in technologic innovation, internet and eletronic entertainment, has been held since 1997 and happens in four different countries annually: Brazil, Spain, Mexico and Colombia.

Read more

Coming back from a week in India, I was left with a few lasting impressions, which could be summed up in one word: ubiquity. Of people. Of noise. The organised chaos that is Delhi traffic. And energy – something that seems to have reached a frenetic level quite shocking to a laid-back Capetonian. This energy translated into some excited and stimulating debate in the classroom, which is where I found myself with 50 other Naspers employees at 8am sharp on the first Monday of 2010. For three days, we discussed mostly Internet and technology cases under the guidance of two HBS strategy professors, Bharat Anand and Felix Oberholzer-Gee.

Read more

Web services are key elements in the fields of distributed software engineering and code reuse. They also play a very important role on the Semantic Web by providing data to semantic software agents, as described by Tim Berners-Lee:

“The real power of the Semantic Web will be realized when people create many programs that collect Web content from diverse sources, process the information and exchange the results with other programs. The effectiveness of such software agents will increase exponentially as more machine-readable Web content and automated services become available. The Semantic Web promotes this synergy: even agents that were not expressly designed to work together can transfer data among themselves when the data come with semantics.”

Read more

January brings with it the usual proliferation of lists predicting technology trends for 2010. I’ll add to the swarm by providing a short list of events which I believe will have a significant impact on the Web As We Know It in the coming year.

Read more

With TechCrunch’s Robin Wauters and Michael Arrington speculating about the future of ICQ and in so doing giving many users, who have never heard of Naspers before, some insight into our mobile and online investments. This post does not comment on their speculation but instead will focus on the various Google Android applications developed by the companies MIH has invested in.

Read more

This year I was honored by being invited to participate as a member of the PHP Community in Microsoft’s Web Developer Summit. I used the opportunity to represent the huge PHP community in Brazil and highlight the community’s work.

Read more

The development team at DStv Labs, a division of DStv Online and MIH SWAT has recently been thrown together to look at some exciting projects in the New Media space. In keeping with the latest thinking around agile development frameworks, the DStv Labs team has adopted Scrum as the framework that will be used to deliver these projects.

Read more