South Africa says goodbye to Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri

Breaking news across South Africa today is that Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri, who has served South Africa as minister of communications since 1999 has died of natural causes in a Pretoria Hospital at the ripe old age of 71.

“Expressing his condolences to her family and friends, President Kgalema Motlanthe said Matsepe-Casaburri was “an outstanding leader and servant of the people of South Africa”.

A few tech savvy South Africans seem to be divided on the ‘outstanding leader’ part though, and some are breaking the news about Matepe-Casaburri’s passing less tactfully: Toby Shabshack for example thinks the President “must be looking at a different track record because that is not true of her decade as Communications Minister.”

Toby goes on to say: “While government spokesmen will be quick to eulogise her, they have forgotten how she hamstrung an entire industry for the benefit of Telkom’s profiteering. This was ultimately at the expense of ordinary South Africans, who were forced to pay ludicrous telecoms costs.”

Although many would agree that Toby’s comments hit the nail on the head, taking into account Matsepe-Casaburri’s age, I would have to say that for an elderly lady she did quite well, I mean just think how well your grandmother would do as the minister of communications.

Maybe a new and hopefully younger minister, will be better equipped to take South Africa into the digital age.

On behalf of the entire fring team I would like to express our condolences to the family and friends of Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri.

friends of fring - The French connection

fring recently hosted the very first ‘friends of fring’ (FOf) event in Paris.

Despite a public transport strike, we pushed ahead in the cozy, Charlie Birdy’s Bar & Lounge in Montparnasse, where we enjoyed a great evening with our new friends of fring.

Following a welcome drink (or three) Neal presented the friends of fring program and gave our guests an exclusive behind the scenes look at some of the exciting things planned for the near future.

Neal and Marc (our very own French connection) then spent some time chatting and answering questions and listening to some great ideas and feedback.  Finally, as the evening drew to a close, Neal left our friends with some cool fring gifts.

Guys, this is the first of many FOF events to be held around the world.  If you’d like to apply, and get sneak previews of what we’re working one and even try new features for yourself before they are release, drop us a line at friends [at] fring.com.  Please include your full name, fring nick, mobile no., location and a few words of why you’d like to become a friend of fring.  Hope to meet you in person sometime soon as well!

Add-ons come to minifring

Hey minifringsters

Great news.  We’ve just incorporated fring Add-ons into minifring – these cool new mobile internet apps help you get even more out of going mobile with fring.

The first fringAdd-ons now live include Facebook, Gmail notifier, Orkut, vTap and Yandex.mail notifier! Add-ons are available thanks to us opening up fring to brainy developers out there via the recently released fringAPI and we’re expecting all kinds of mobile games, tools, and cool new services to be available from the fring Add-ons catalog coming soon.  You can keep an eye on developments and what’s new in the catalogue inside minifring itself or on the web.

To get fringAdd-ons, SE user need to click More > Settings > Manage add-ons & Nokia users need to click on Options > Settings > Manage add-ons.

All is available through the latest version of minifring.

And if there’s an app you’re just itching to take mobile, let us know or find a developer of your own to mobilize your favorite web apps for us all to enjoy via fring!
As always, let us know what you think and how we can further help you go mobile!

Have fun!

The fringTEAM

MobilePress: WordPress made easy for iPhone and other Handsets

WordPress, one of the most popular and possibly the “coolest” blogging platform around has just been given a very unique new plugin from a South African company who’s name says it all. The hard working guys over at Younique, working together with the team of Project Wolf have just launched a shiny new WordPress plugin simply called MobilePress, the plugin will enable WordPress for mobile devices in such a way that the end user has a better viewing experience.

On his personal blog Tyler Reed the Founder of both Younique and Project Wolf says that MobilePress is “a plugin for WordPress, which allows users, designers and publishers to extend their audience and service by having specific themes for specific mobile devices or browsers.” Apparently blogs using the MobilePress plugin can be viewed nicely across multiple platforms and handsets, including the iPhone and other high end Nokia and windows mobile devices.

One of the readers of Tyler’s blog puts it this way when he says that this “plugin is definitely filling the previous, massive void.”

From reading a bit about this project and after seeing a few screenshots I am now convinced that this new plugin for WordPress will revolutionize the way blogs are seen and read when using mobile devices and this can only be good news for everyone, I wish Tyler Reed and his teams all the best in their future projects.

Oh and did I mention MobilePress is free to download and is open source! To download the file click here.

Before and after screenshot thanks to Allan Kent and MobilePress.

World’s highest-resolution commercial satellite - GeoEye - first image

The world’s highest resolution commercial satellite, the GeoEye-1 recently went live and the image above is the first image snapped shortly after opening it’s Eye in space.

The project which is partly sponsored by Google, will not only provide images to Google it will also provide images to the “National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), a U.S. government agency that analyzes imagery in support of national security.”

Now before we rush off and call this a “US spy satellite” according to the vice president of communications and marketing at GeoEye Mark Brender, “This is the opposite of a spy satellite, Spies don’t put info on the internet and sell imagery. We’re an Earth-imaging satellite, and we can sell our imagery to customers around the world who have a need to map and measure and monitor things on the ground.” This basically means they can sell images to anyone who can afford the rates.

Sadly though as usual there is always a catch and this time the catch is that “While the GeoEye-1 will provide imagery to the NGA at the maximum resolution of 43 centimeters, Google” and anyone else for that matter who can afford images “will only receive images at a 50-centimeter resolution because of a government restriction.”

The only good news is that luckily the NGA is not the only agency on earth who can afford the images and I can’t wait to see images in higher resolution on Google Earth

The iPhone 3G finally arrives in South Africa

Update: fring V1.0.4 is now officially available via the app store.

According to industry insiders in South Africa, this week we will see the release of the much awaited iPhone 3G. Customers who pre-ordered the phone will in theory be first in line to receive the new handsets when they go on sale on the 26th of September.

“The phone, which was originally expected to be released in July this year, will be available through Vodacom which has an exclusive agreement for its distribution in South Africa.” mybroadband.co.za

Out of curiosity I called up my local Vodacom store this morning, apparently pre-paid iPhone will sell for.

• R7695.00 -   8 gig
• R9120.00 - 16 gig

Sadly the much awaited iPhone 3G seems to have missed all the original hype in South Africa. With more than 6 Million iPhone 3G’s already sold world wide, it will be interesting to see what will happen on the day of launch. Will South African’s flock to Vodacom outlets nation wide to grab the iPhone hot of the shelves?  Will they que for hours just to be the first to get their hands on the Phone? mmm well, Only time will tell

Welcome to the 4th screen

Here’s a creative look at how multimedia, entertainment and communication have evolved from the big screen to the small screen. Welcome to the 4th screen.

Thanks to Tyler Reed for originaly blogging this video and to Scott for linking it via Twitter.