When i heard the news, i complained to them that hosting the debate between 12-1 on a Friday would exclude muslims. Just like jewish people consider Saturdays holy and Christians sunday, muslims consider friday a holy day and all muslims are required to pray Jummah on a friday, which is usually between 12:30 and 1:30.

And i received a response within a few minutes:

Naeem, Raised a valid point however

And Jason felt it was too little too late

Yes, it may be too little too late and… it may exclude 99.9% of the population who are not on twitter. However lets be clear, this is a huge step. Why?

They are making an effort at real engagement, and not just getting up on the soap box. I would like to see what comes out of this.

The DA have also been making a huge effort in engaging with online audiences using the twitter profiles of Helen Zille.

This can only be good for South Africans with the parties making a real effort to engage.

Some thoughts of including the rest of the population without access to the net or twitter?

How about Fielding questions from people via SMS, responses are sent directly to the user as well as posted to the twitter profile and website.

WTF?

If there is one THING that will definitely derail 2010, and plans for 2010… its the Taxi Industry!

Pictures below

Please note: I received these pictures via email, so if you are the source pop me an email and i will credit you

Hat tip to Abu for sending them!

Is’nt it Ironic…. don’t you think?

“The government said Monday that the Dalai Lama’s presence at the conference would have distracted the world’s attention from South Africa’s hosting of the World Cup and drawn it instead into the fraught relations between the Dalai Lama and”

The result of refusing the VISA has caused world wide focus on the the same issue they tried to avoid….

Is’nt it Ironic…. dont you think?

A peace conference, with Nobel peace winners FW De Klerk & Nelson Mandela, but the Dalai Lama who shares the same honor is banned!

Is’nt it Ironic…. don’t you think?

I had a meeting this morning in Johannesburg city, and i noticed a street vendor selling books. Street vendors are common here. You can literally buy fruit, flowers etc. from the comfort of you car while waiting for the traffic light to change. However it’s the first time i have seen a street vendor selling university text books. Picture below:

Driving into a clients premises this morning, i heard one of the security guards mention Obama. So i chatted to him, asked him a few questions.

Who would he support?

He said Obama, i asked why? And his answer was

“Obama is change and he’s black!”

Let me paint this clearer,

Security guards are on the lower end of the Salary scale here in South Africa. They earn a menial salary. He most likely has no access to the internet, no computer and he may own a low end mobile phone but that’s it. He has no car and relies on public transport in mini bus taxis.

Yet his response was

“Obama is Change”

Read that again, not stands for change, not will make things change, not will initiate change

He IS change

While i was driving off from the security gates, he asks me if i think he will do anything good, i respond with “that remains to be seen”.

He responds with

“Never trust a black man”

This was a joke, considering he was black as well. I bet if i had asked him what did McCain stood for he would not be able to answer. Can you ?

What’s the point?

Even here in South Africa, the average man on the street knew what Obama stood for (Change), have a look at the video below where South Africans are questioned on the US elections. Count the number of times, change is mentioned in the video below. Some of the comments could have been scripted by Obama’s campaign team.

You can read this huge report from technology review on how Obama did it, but the technology did not really matter, It just amplified the message. When you boil it down… to the core

Obama never ran a campaign….

He lead a Movement for change….

There is a wealth of difference in this, it’s the difference between engaging vs speaking at, between top down vs bottom up, allowing people passionate about something to do something vs trying to control and tell people what needs to be done.

He recognized people were unhappy with the things were, the world was unhappy and change was what they needed. And he used that message, the message was simple and sticky, so simple and so sticky that even a security guard, earning a menial salary, half way across the world knew what he stood for. Compare his to McCain’s, do you know what it was? “Reform, Prosperity, Peace”?

When you get rid of the technology, social media and the way it was run… when you boil it down….

He stood for something, he made the message sticky and he spread it far and wide….

That’s how he did it…

To be honest, i am APPALLED at this. It has me wondering if my decision to resign from my cushy expat position and move back to South Africa was the best considering this and the Xenophobia attacks,.

Is hatred, animosity, fear and racism just getting worse?

In a world, where communication and people can group together very easily, are we going to see increase in hate 2.0?

Are parents passing on their hatred,fear,animosity to their kids. So even though we now live in an open society, and you have kids being born in the new South Africa, those feelings are passed on?

Take an example, my little brother who is 9, born in 1999, he never knew the difference between black and white. It never existed to him. As a kid, he played with the neighbors kids, he started speaking a little Zulu when he was very young due to the amount of time he spent with these kids. Yet when he started going to school, something changed. It was like all of a sudden he somehow “learnt” that people were ‘different’ based on skin colour. I remember a year back he made a comment that was clearly racist. At home, we are conscious of this and have always tried to instill the right ethics in him. Such as there is no such thing as class or racial divisions. Yet he some how picked it up from somewhere, most likely school.

I had a chat with him, and explained to him how it was wrong and it was unacceptable, how people should not be judged by external factors such as race, religion or wealth. How the only thing that matters is Character and Ethics.  Since then he has never made any comments (in front of me), though for an 8 year old kid, you can understand how confusing it must be. At home he may be learn one set of values, while his friends may have another set of values that completely conflicts with those at home.

For kids who’s parents / family are NOT conscious of this or who may be racist themselves this passes it on to the next generation, and other kids could pick up on it, they in turn affect the kids around them.

So is it all getting much worse rather then better?

There’s a campaign…. It Starts with you. It really does, so here’s a challenge. The next time you hear someone say something….

“These xx are so y…” , have the courage to say

NO, thats wrong, what you said was unacceptable and purely Racist.

One of my favourite movies of all time is American History X, Some lessons to be learnt from that for South Africans. Hatred breeds hatred and then its a slippery slope down till we get things like this.

So make a stand against racism, I am starting, with Naming and Shaming the racists who joined the Group

• Jose Pinto
• Peter Rohan
• Dwayne Halliday
• Ben Joubert
• Jeandi Basson (Hoërskool Hoogenhout ‘10)
• Jacques Louw
• Melissa Postma
• Rynhard de Villiers
  
• Jonathan Taylor
• Dwayne Swart
• Renaldo Kapp
• Katryn De Klerk
• Marthinus Jacobs
• Johannes Menne
• Heinrich Coetzee (Hoërskool Hoogenhou)
• Ruhann Pelser (North-West Uni.)
• Werner Pretorius
• Thinus Schoeman (North-West Uni.)
• Franja van Heerden (North-West Uni. ‘09)
• Hennie Knight (North-West Uni. Grad Student ‘10)
• Gideon Meiring
• Hansie Coetzee
• Louis Edward van Staden
• Dewald Taylor
• Bennett Pretorius
• Jaco Van Der Merwe (University of Pretoria)
• Coetzee Nel (North-West Uni. Grad Student ‘11)
• Corrie Engelbrecht (North-West Uni)
• Thinus Pretorius
• Eddie Ellis
• Jaco Terblanche
• Phillip Olivier (North-West Uni. Alum ‘07)
• Armant Barnard (North-West Uni. Alum ‘07)
• Juan Fourie
• Tertius Moolman (North-West Uni. Alum ‘07)
• Gerhard Munnik (North-West Uni. ‘08)
• Stian Lemmer
• Denzil Engelbrecht

You cant wait to get your hands on your iPrecious….

But the launch date is only the 11 July. You have to wait a month more if you are in one of the 21 countries, what if you want to get your hands on the phone and you happen to live in the countries that are not part of the list or you want an iPhone without a 2 Year contract? What if you cant wait?

The price of the 8GB is set to $199 with a 2 year contract, so expect the prices of phones without a contract to be much higher. There have been discussions on twitter that the price may be as high as it was for the first IPhone 4000-5000 AED(R8000/R10000) in places like South Africa and UAE. Well i am going to tell you how to get it at the normal retail price without being ripped off (Just between us ok?) .

Some major shipping companies have a service(often not well advertised) where you pay an initial sign up fee and they allocate you an Address/P.O Box in any country(i.e US/UK). They then monitor that mailbox for you, collect the mail and ship it to your normal mailing address.

So as an example, here in the UAE i could pay 40 AED(+-R80) per year, i get an Address in the US. They charge +- 200 AED(R400) per 500G to ship whatever arrives at that mailbox in the US to me.

Signup for the service with an address for a country which has an existing apple online store(i.e US/UK). Use the address given to you by the shipping company to order your brand new 3G iPhone. The shipping company will handle the rest. Some of the companies even insure your mail as well as giving you a shipment tracking number. (You can also use the same address to sign up for an Itunes store account if your country is not supported)

What about the 2 year contract you ask? Well, when you buy through apples online store, and you are a new customer they send you an AT&T sim card. You are are supposed to use the sim card to Activate and sign-up for the contract once you receive your phone. (Which you don’t necessarily need to do)

So if you are in a country which does not even have a deal yet like the UAE or South Africa where the phone will be reserved for 2 year contracts and do not feel like being tied down with a contract and do not feel like paying high prices, take a look at this option.

P.s This is based on current online ordering process for the iPhone, which may or may not change.
P.P.S This method could also be used to order electronic items that Amazon and online companies do not ship out of the US.

****** Update 7: The following countries sell the 3g iPhone officially unlocked South Africa, Italy & Hong Kong.

****** Update 6: The following countries sell the 3g Iphone without a contract (Prepaid) South Africa, Italy & Hong Kong, UK.

This means, if you purchase the 3G Iphone that is officially unlocked and without a contract from South Africa, Italy or Hong Kong, it can be used in any country.



***** Update 5: It seems O2 UK, will be offering it on prepaid, however no pricing announced. I think this would be a good step however i suspect the way things are in South Africa, Vodacom may try to milk as much as they can out of the hype and keep it ‘exclusive’ so you have to take out a High End/Costly package. If they do, You could still use the method in this post to order it from O2 UK.

**** Update 4: Engadget is also reporting in-store activation



And yes… Another update

*** Update 3:
Reading the comments at Gizmodo, it seems some people state its not required to activate the phone in store you can still activate online and order online. The instore activation for apple stores is a new option offered to customers. Lots of conflicting stories, the best is just wait it out and see what the order process is when it launches.

** Update 2:
According to Gizmodo, Penalties will be applied if not activated within a specified time frame, and it will only be available for activation in store. So it seems they have changde the process, though until the launch we can never know for sure and i will update here once i get more details.

*UPDATE 1:
According to one of my plurk friends, if you dont activate the phone within 30 days they penalize you by charging your credit card.
However:
firstly, this would be illegal unless they informed you in advance and 2nd, this method was used to import the original Iphone with no penalties. Monitor this plurk post to see if there are any updates.

I asked a similar question on this blog several weeks back, “Where are all the black bloggers and readers?” and noted we needed practical steps. Posts like Mandy’s and Ramons are counter productive and actually serve no purpose as they are separating us in groups. Nic pointed this out as well on his blog and Nur Ahmed also looks at the issue on his blog.

Blogging about things like this actually does nothing other then change perceptions and as i pointed out in my previous post the only thing that really matters is ACTION and practical solutions. It boils to down to access to ICT and education. I posted on why access to ICT is a key economic driver as quoted below:

“In a study (PDF) by Harvard economist Robert Jensen he reported that when mobile phones were launched in kerala in 1997, Fisherman used the phones to call local markets while still at sea. This in turned helped raise profits by 8%, lowering consumer prices by 4% and reduced catch wastage from 6.5% to practically nothing.”

Instead of asking these silly questions and debating issues that draw racial lines in the sand(which further perpetuates difference and hatred and turns into this), we should be asking:

- How can we use technology, to uplift people in poverty?
- How can we grant people people who don’t have access to ICT that access?
- How can we TRAIN people with very little knowledge of technology cheaply and efficiently?
- How can we use technology to stimulate entrepreneurship for people in poverty?

This should not be about race, but about empowerment not based on skin colour but of PEOPLE IN POVERTY, irrespective of race.

Having said that, i recently started a project to actually take action and use the varied skills everyone has to make a change. I posted about it on techleader and created a google group to discuss practical steps. However, no one bothered to join. With only 9 members, i am forced to conclude that no one really cares (except for a few) we are more interested in blowing smoke, debating issues, blogging about making a difference while having dinners, meetups and networking events amongst a selected few, “the technology savvy/early adopter crowd”. We can have conferences to spread ideas, but the only thing that will matter is ACTION.

So lets re-frame this, and let me give you a purely selfish reason why you should care.

Our country is facing serious economic issues and social unrest. We have fuel prices being hiked, interest rates going up, massive food shortages and inflation at the highest level in recent times. Do not get me wrong, this is not a doom and gloom post i am just pointing out the facts of the current situation. We may not feel the pinch, but people below the bread line will definitely and this could lead to social unrest.

South Africa has about 47 million people and according to a report by world wide worx only 8% internet penetration as of November 2007. Based on these figures that equates to just over 3.7 Million people. This means, that South Africa has a very small economy of scale for any Internet Company / Blog / Online media company, This means less profits, less people viewing your blog, less people joining your niche social networks, less people clicking on your adsense ads. It also means less tech savvy people, less people who would study internet or IT engineering related fields, which makes it more difficult to source talent for companies.

So look at it this way, if you could increase that penetration you could increases the number of people that are tech savvy, increase the number of people that are educated and trained, you increase people who could have the right skills for jobs, increase people clicking on your ads and you get more profits, and we are also better off as a country with more people out of poverty, more people educated and trained and more people that are economically productive. Now, these may seem like big goals but they are not when you consider the power of technology and drastically reduced costs of publication and co-ordination.

So here’s an open challenge to the white boys club, the non white boys club and everyone else, basically all of us:

Rather then point out the elephant in the room which does nothing but acknowledge that it exists.

Ask yourself: what small practical steps can we take, to make a difference?

Ramon, you run Netucation: how about free training for those that can’t afford it?
Nic, you seem to write well on your blogs, how about training on how to blog online and run a business from blogging?
Dave Durate, you run a programme at UCT, how about a competition giving someone a sponsored place at the next one? If that is out of the question we could raise money from the tech community or get a sponsor

These are just a few of the ideas, off the top of my head. Small things like this will actually make a difference.

The question really is Do you really care enough to to do something.

Stii was kind enough to provide me with a dump of all blog posts that were tagged with ‘Xenophobia’. Though there is currently no way to link twitter usernames to the blog posts. Therefore i have uploaded the spreadsheet to Google docs, anyone can edit it as long as you have an account. Please add your twitter username to all your own blog posts or any others that you may recognize. the rest of the fields are optional. If you cannot edit the spreadsheet send me your blog url and i will capture it:

Email: (idhorat)-(@)-(gmail)dot(com)
Twitter: ismaild
———————
Invite to collaborate on the document:

I’ve shared a document with you called “xenophobia_blogs_google”:

Capture Directly onto the sheet (Use this to see if your blog post is included on the list):
http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=pTD3FWar02UT7peKMx1YXSg

Capture in the Form (Use this, it’s the easiest option)

http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?key=pTD3FWar02USt49zxHtknJQ&email=true

It’s not an attachment — it’s stored online at Google Docs. To open this document, just click the link above.

Doing an analysis on effects of social media / twitter / blogs in a
crisis situation, I need to link up the blog posts to twitter
usernames. If you have blogged about the Xenophobia please claim it and
add your name under the column ‘Twitter username’
————

I would also appreciate if you could pass this on to any bloggers you know that have blogged about the situation.