2010 Kick Off
Okay so a new year is here and it is a year with a lot of expectations. Of course in South Africa the World Cup will be the dominant event but besides that there are a load of other things that will be going on with regard to Information and Communication Technology and how we get these to be used for development/community empowerment.
I’ve started off the year by releasing a simple mobile web portal for the casual South African mobile web user - It is called wena.mobi (for non-south Africans “Wena” means “You” in most South African languages). 
. It is my attempt to broaden mobile web usage and improve the experience of the large (and growing) causal mobile web-using population in SA. Through a number of conversations over the past month I have noticed that while many (mainly younger) people have used the mobile web the usage is limited. Many are just J2Me app based (Mxit, Mig33, Games etc..) and use “wap” (how is this name still used) just for downloads. A few also look at the vodacom portal and a limited number of sports or news sites or access facebook/twitter. However, no one I spoke to is using the mobile web extensively. All that wena.mobi does is make about 60 quality mobile websites (over half South African) accessible by a attractive optimised menu system - No downloads required and an easy to remember name. It also can be used a a shortcut for some of the more popular J2Me downloads. So please try it out and let me know what you think - If people start to use it then i’ll add a few more features.
Another interesting development is that Community Mobile Channels has been selected to go through to the 2nd round of the Knight News Challenge. See j.mp/comcha for the initial proposal detail. I have to get a full proposal out by the end of this month and if anyone would like to get involved now is a great time to do so - what would be perfect is to get a local community partner to agree to extensively trial it.
I have also been involved behind the scenes with another Knight News Challenge proposal which is exciting and I believe has a high chance of success - I will blog about this when more details are released.
I hope to have a lot to talk about this year but in the meantime - compliments and begin well in 2010.