Mark Forrester - Independent digital designer and online entrepreneur

Thats quite an acronym for a post title. I do apologize.

MTN: South African Mobile Telephone Network Provider, HSPDA: The new form of internet connecitvity avaliable through some mobile networks, 14Mbps: A very fast internet connection.

There has been much talk about the new HSPDA service avaliable from Vodacom. Vodacom boasts speeds of up to 1.8mb/s. For all you foreigners, in South Africa thats pretty fast, quite a bit faster than our ADSL (our broadband internet) options. Sad, but true.

The beauty of HSPDA though, is that unlike wireless internet providers, like iBurst, you are connected anywhere you have cellphone signal. You are by no means restricted to the limited reception areas of wireless internet providers. See Techblog for a good example of the benefits of Vodacom HSDPA.

Its only a matter of time before MTN’s HSDPA service becomes a strong competitor to Vodacom.

Seligmann, MTN data and messaging senior manager, says to ITWeb that “although HSDPA was only rolled out last month, MTN has many plans to upgrade the network in various stages over the next two years.

“The upgrade process for HSDPA is to take downlink speeds to 3.6Mbps, then 7.2Mbps, and then to 14.4Mbps,” he says.”

It looks like the future of internet connectivity in South Africa is starting to look a bit brighter. HSDPA is costly, and it’s going to take a bit of time to tweak, no doubt about that, but hopefully soon internet connectivity will be fast, completely mobile and affordable.

Link courtesy of Grouchy Blogger

Today Feedburner announced a new service that I am taking full advantage of straight away. It seems a lot of people still don’t know what an RSS feed is, nor how to use it.

Email remains the most popular way of receiving news.

The benefits of using Feedburner to deliver your mail:

• Free
• Daily emails
• Blog Branding
• Very good HTML/CSS rendering
• Blogger owns the email list and can export it at any time

Feedburner has existing partnerships with Feedblitz and Squeet for their competing products – those partnerships remain in place and bloggers will have a choice as to which of the three services to use. (Source: Techcrunch.com)

So if you want to recieve my wonderful, insightful posts everyday, via email, then simply fill in this little form and I’ll be visiting your inbox soon. Don’t worry I hate spammers just as much as you do.

It looks like Google maps have been busy updating pretty much all their map’s image resolution, taking the image quality to similar standards as Google Earth. The notorious white cloud has gone, leaving Cape Town exposed. (courtesy of Techblog)

I went searching and spotted our Gravit8 offices, next door to the Cape Town City Police Station. The image quality is great, the Police station’s blueprint makes the Prison Break series a reality for some genius brother of a Cape Town gangster sitting in a holding cell.

Making Big brother even more noticeable is Loki, the first location-based search, navigation and sharing web application.

With Loki all you need to do is install a Firefox extension, that installs a driver to your computer. This driver is then used everytime you use the Loki search tool in Firefox, for instance to search for coffee shops nearby, or the nearest train station. Loki pinpoints your location to within a few metres and lets you know what is avaliable in your near surroundings.

It all seems pretty freaky to me, why would people want to do this? I’m sure it serves a good purpose for the FBeyeee and secret services in finding criminals, but do you really want to give out a whole bunch of personal information to any Tom, Dick, or Harry? I know I would struggle with stalkers following me everywhere, its hard enough already.

Who knows what other information Loki would obtain from your computer using their little “driver”.

With satellite tracking and geo-mapping, of just about anywhere in the world, obtainable at the click of a few buttons, you got to wonder what information is avaliable about you, and what psycho is going to use it.

It looks like the South African tabloids are starting to get it.

Get what?

Get that blogging is growing and growing fast, and its impact can be bigger than some may think.

Read these two articles to see what the media is thinking of the South African blogosphere, and how blogger’s “authentic, clever conversations” can have a very big impact on company brands.

I don’t know if my articles can be defined as authentic, clever conversations, but I sure hope one day, some how, one of my articles will change the way some huge corporate makes it money. And they will give me a huge cut of the profits. And I shall retire to my own island, in the Carribean, with my endless supply of biltong and castle beer.

mmmmmm……….

Links courtesy of the boys at Joblog