I’ve recently had a few people ask for advice regarding sales calls where a company states that another company is trying to register a domain name similar to their own. The individual is then given a chance to purchase the domain first at an exorbitant fee.
This is an old scam and fortunately I don’t know anyone who has fallen for this recently.
However, today I feel that maybe I fell for something similar a few years back.
In 2000, before I moved to South Africa, I wanted to register some .co.za domain names for my wife’s business, Better Beginnings. I forget how I came across Internet Solutions in South Africa but I contacted them and they quoted for the domains.
Whilst sorting through some old paperwork today I came across the quote and realised that I had been quoted and paid R500 + VAT for each domain. Domain’s have come down in price in recent years but looking back at the records it seems that IS would have paid R200 inc VAT.
That’s 185% markup. Not a bad profit margin!
I would be very interested to find out if R500 + VAT was a fairly standard price back in 200o or did they just take advantage of a poor unfortunate foreigner who didn’t know better.
I’m addicted to Microsoft Office and can’t live without Outlook 2007. I create list after list in Excel and have done for years but over the last couple of weeks I have been introducing Google Docs into two of my businesses.
So far I have to say I’m hugely impressed. I update a spreadsheet and my colleages get the update straight away. No more sending around by email or fighting over who’s using the spreadsheets at any one time.
The one question I keep getting from staff is what happens if the internet is down (which seems to happen in East London more often that it should).
Well, I have to say I’m very excited about Google Gears launched this week.
Google gears allows developer to create offline web applications. This currently allows me to download my Google Reader reading so that I can read offline and then sync back. In the future this offering is poised to allow the downloading for my Google Doc’s spreadsheets and work on them offline.
I’ll keep you posted on this software as it develops and let you know when this is available with Google Docs and what our experience of working with it is.
The Free Bandwidth Campaign website states that South Afrian’s monthly bandwidth allocation is not supposed to include local traffic? “According to regulations promulgated in terms of the Electronic Communications Act of 2005, all local bandwidth must be provided free to ADSL users.
“The local bandwidth regulation was gazetted as Notice 1112 of 2006, and clearly defines ‘Local Bandwidth Usage’ to mean data that can be transferred from South African based Internet Protocol addresses’. Most importantly, Notice 1112 clearly states that ‘local bandwidth usage shall not be subject to any cap’.”
The Free Bandwidth Campaign are planning a day of action on the 30th June whereby a piece of software that they are asking us to install will download “as much local content as possible” from South African websites. This is to prove that Telkom have indeed got the local capacity to provide this local bandwidth.
I’m not convinced they will have much success with the campaign as most ADSL users I know battle to stay within their monthly cap already. Personally, I haven’t decided whether I will take part or not.
There seems to be a bit of a riot going on over a Digg over a decision to remove a story that included a key that would allow someone to crack the copy protection on an HD-DVD.
Every other story seems to be about the HD-DVD key or Kevin Rose’s removal of the post. The story is also spreading fast – people are writing/blogging about it and the code is popping up all over the place – Slashdot, Youtube, etc.Of course this is not the first time a community has vocally objected to actions of a website – for example, similar things happened in good old web1.0 companies such as ebay. However, this type of action went largely unnoticed whereas with the advent of Blogging and social media small events, such as this, can get blown up much bigger and much faster than they used to.
Microsoft has released Deepfish, a mobile browser for Windows Mobile devices, as a Technology Preview.
The Deepfish Technology Preview enhances existing mobile browsing technologies by displaying content in a view that is closer to the desktop experience. Our zoom-able interface and cue map allow you to quickly access the information you care about over the web without ever losing track of where you are.
The browser is compatible with Windows Mobile Smart Phones, or Pocket PCs running Windows Mobile 5.0 or greater.
Unfortunately they are only releasing to invited individuals but you can register you interest here: http://labs.live.com/Deepfish.
Despite the wobble the TyTN seems great so far. The most difficult thing has been to get it to synchronise with my laptop.
HP NX6125
Vista Ultimate
Office 2007
Vista no longer uses ActiveSync but now has something called Windows Mobile Device Centre. As much as I tried I could get my TyTN to connect but not to sync.
Having searched around for a solution, I found a firmware upgrade on the Leaf website and despite being very cautious of the possibility of killing my new phone I decided to go ahead.
My TyTN came with ROM version 1.35.255.2 and this upgrade was to 2.11.255.1 (AKU3).
The only confusing matter was that there were a number of files and no instructions – I finally worked out that the correct exe was called RUU_Inside.exe which puts the TyTN into BootLoader mode and carries out the upgrade.
I did this connected to an XP machine – I’m not sure if it would work with Vista but I wasn’t going to try. However, despite having a newly flashed TyTN it still wouldn’t sync.
Much more searching I found that Windows Update was offering me an update to WMDC and following a failed update I resorted to removing WMDC completely, downloading the latest version from the Microsoft site and reinstalling. This seemed to do the trick – and may well have worked without the flash upgrade. Certianly if I was in the same position again – that’s what I would try first.
So, after 24hrs of having my TyTN I finally have it sync’d with my calendar and address book, and can get back to something more productive.
My Motorolla MPX200 died on me recently so I’ve been on the lookout for a new Windows Mobile based phone. I finally decided to go for the HTC TyTN which I picked up yesterday afternoon.
So far I’m pretty pleased with one exception. Leaf, who if I understand correctly are the South African importers of HTC products, have stuck a tacky Leaf badge onto the back of my new phone. At first sight I thought it was a bit stupid, especially as they hadn’t quite got it straight, but later on I realised it’s actually a bigger problem than aesthetics.
The badge protrudes by about 2mm which means that when the phone is laid on a flat surface, such as desk, the phone rests on this point. Everytime you tap something on the screen the phone wobbles back and forth on this badge making the use of the phone unpleasent and almost forcing you to pick it up to use.
This short (low quality) video demonstrates.
I could of course pull this badge off, and maybe that’s what I’ll end up doing, but I wonder if this will in any way void my warranty and/or leave a horrible mark on the battery cover. It might be that I will just have to purchase a new cover but I’m not sure how easy they will be able to get in South Africa (£13.95 in UK).
I will email Leaf and ask then to replace the battery cover and let you know what they say.
Update 2007-03-26
I received the following email from Leaf:
Hi Simon, If the badge is removed your warranty will not be void. If removed carefully it will not leave a mark. Regards, Shavaan Datadin, Technical Support
The badge was a bit fiddly to come of but it did indeed come of without marking the phone so now my TyTN do longer wobbles. I wonder if Leaf are likely to change this practice.
I while back I wrote about running multiple versions of IE on the same machine for website testing purposes and the problems I was having with Vista.
The solution I suggested was to run Virtual PC with a copy of XP and IE6.
Last month Virtual PC 2007 came out of beta and so far it seems pretty good.
For all you web developers who have just bought a new computer with Vista pre-installed then Microsoft have released Internet Explorer 6 Application Compatibility VPC Image which is a VirtualPC hard disk image containing a pre-activated Windows XP SP2, IE6 and the IE7 Readiness Toolkit.
The Mail & Guardian have just opened the alpha testing of Amatomu which seems to be a South African equivalent of Technorati. Vincent Maher seems to be the developer behind this and he covers the launch in detail on his personal blog.
At present there appears to be just over 100 blogs listed (with this blog being the 111th) which will somehow explain why I am currently listed as the 74th most popular blog in South Africa and my wives blog, Better Beginnings, is 99th.
The concept looks good and we’ll be keeping an eye on it.
