So, the big announcement was that Apple have released the iPhone 2.0. It now has 3G and GPS, it’s thinner with a black plastic back, solid metal buttons, same gorgeous display, camera, flush headphone jack, and dramatically improved audio. There will also be a white version!

It is also a lot more affordable. When it first launched, the 8GB iPhone cost $599 (R4700). It now will retail worldwide for $199 (R1500). So I’m guessing when it launches in South Africa on the 20th of July, you’ll be able to pick one up on some of the more affordable Vodacom contract packages!

Read more about the iPhone over at Gizmodo.

MWeb as a whole are a totally useless and overpriced Internet Service Provider, but their business division takes the cake. Read on why…

My “Brother-in-law’s” job is his phone and email. I’m talking 300 emails a day type of email. Blackberry email is also probably the only way he can stay in touch with his clients as they are mostly international, and their spoken English is very bad compared to their written English.

I setup his new Blackberry Pearl on Sunday just before he headed overseas. Anyway, because of the traveling and not having being able to use his Blackberry, his mailbox limit was reached and mails started bouncing. He called me to help find out what the problem was, so I called MWeb’s business on 0860 100 154 to get help increasing his limit. The technical guy was only helpful enough to tell me he had a 200MB limit and that he would put me through to the sales division who would be able to increase the limit to 1GB.

Suffice to say, I waited on the phone for about 30 minutes and no one answered. I called their sales division directly on 08600 32000, waited around 15 minutes and still no one answered. I gave up and asked our technical guy in my office for a direct MWeb business number. (Our company also has had major issues with MWeb, but that’s another story)

I then got hold of their reception on 021 596 8300. The lady put me through to a “team leader” in the business division, who, after scrounging around on her desk for 2 minutes to find something, told me that only “Vanessa” could help me. (021 596 7163). Vanessa’s number went straight into voicemail, so I gave up on that avenue. I called reception again, pleading for some help, and they then put me though to Gillian, who also told me that she couldn’t help me and that I must call Vanessa. I told her Vanessa wasn’t answering her phone. She then said she would get Clinton to call me back the second he gets off the phone. She logged my name, number and query, and I told her this is urgent as my clients emails are bouncing! This call ended at 11am on Tuesday.

It is now 48 hours later. I am still awaiting with baited breath for “Clinton” to give me a call.

Amazon MP3

Amazon’s digital music portal features 2 million songs from 180,000 artists and 20,000 labels all without DRM. They even include songs from EMI and Universal, which iTunes no longer sell. The top 100 tracks will cost $.89 (Just over R6), with the rest costing $.99.

In order to download songs, you must install the Amazon MP3 downloader, which converts the .AMZ file you download to .MP3 and then automatically imports that song into either iTunes or Windows Media Player for you. So it literally is a glorified download manager.

I downloaded Makes Me Wonder by Maroon 5 to test the service, and it worked perfectly. The screenshot above doesn’t show the downloaded song in the queue, because after I closed and then reopened the application after downloading the song, it no longer listed it there.

The songs are encoded in 256Kbps which is not CD quality, but you won’t be able to tell the difference. It’s those audiophiles that will be the only people complaining. ;-)

So now no more sulking about not being able to buy international artists MP3’s in South Africa anymore, just use Amazon MP3!

Disclaimer: I’m not 100% sure if this is legal from SA, or because I am buying it outside of America causes trouble, I don’t care. The person that made the song is getting paid. ;-) That is all in my mind that counts!

Proof that spam is evil, if only for 1 minute.

Update: And now my spam seems lucky.

I seem to open Gmail at the most opportune times. :-)

For those of you needing informal business cards, these cards are so good, that whoever you give it to, wouldn’t be able resist sticking them to their PC monitor! People might also attack you to get hold of one of your über sexy MiniCards. So watch out!

Here are the front and back of one of my cards.

So after reading a couple of reviews on the new Performancing Partners, (most notably Problogger.net), I logged in to my account, hit the partners program, and the ugliest word stared me in the face…

I love Paypal and the simplicity of paying and receiving money online, as well as the endless opportunities it offers on the web. The big but in this is Paypal is not accepted in South Africa, thanks to SARS. We can setup a Paypal account to use it to pay others or transfer money into other Paypal accounts, but we cannot have anyone pay us.

The reason SARS won’t allow Paypal, is the fact that they want their share of the pie, for when you get paid. If you are using Paypal, they cannot track money coming into our country, and therefore cannot get paid.

This is just another reason to add to our online problems (along with Telkom’s ridiculous bandwidth pricing etc).

Think about this scenario. I’ve decided that I want to sell funky designed T-shirts online. Something along the lines of Threadless.com. I design a simple website with pictures of my T-shirts. I have a hosting account setup, which is lank cheap – R20pm (or even find free hosting at worst), and that’s afforable right?

Step 2. Now I need to be able for people to buy my T-shirts online! I’m an American, so I pop into my Paypal account, create a shopping cart, pop that into my small website and now it’s gone all e-commerce! Cool I say! Paypal takes 2.5% to 3.5% of every transaction, as well as 30c. The big factor in this is, if I don’t sell 1 T-shirt, I won’t have to pay a cent. No risks = no loss.

Now imagine this scenario in South Africa. There is no free online credit card processing shop that I can use. So I have to fork over at least R100pm for this functionality. What started as a small hobby, now means if I don’t sell, I’m losing money every month! That American guy is smiling because although he isn’t selling, at least his hobby isn’t costing him anything, and if his site all of a sudden takes off in 6 months time, he hasn’t wasted more than R600 on credit card processing.

The moral of this story is that not being able to stick a simple Paypal button on our websites, means dozens of budding entrepreneurs in SA are being put off the whole e-commerce thing, and will try to apply their trade elsewhere. Some will pay the bucks to start online businesses, but others just don’t have the capital to start, but they do have somre really awesome ideas.

I love this country, and everything it has to offer, but sometimes I really feel we are moving backwards, rather than forwards when it comes to the internet and e-commerce. Just for interests sake, the co-founder of Paypal, Elon Musk is South African. Imagine Paypal was a South African company. How much would SARS be making off them? A globally accepted form of payment processing is raking in billions of dollars annually, of which SA is seeing zero. It really is a shame.

Update: Check out the list of countrie’s Paypal supports. SA is in the Send Money to Anyone in the Growing PayPal Network group.

Just some background on it… Wufoo was created by the fine folks from ParticleTree, who also run the Treehouse magazine. I’ve always paid close attention to their blog and magazine, as their work is a constant source of tips, tricks and the never ending, “Why didn’t I think of that?” in the web design and Web 2.0 fold. Anyway, they have been busy developing Wufoo for the last couple of months, and I must say, I’m extremely impressed!

What is Wufoo?

Wufoo, for the less informed, lets you build and host online forms. Things like mailing lists, marketing surveys or even customer management systems using simple forms that you and I have used and painstakingly created before to capture data on the web. I’m currently using Wufoo as a beta user, and Wufoo is very much a beta, as I found some very simple bugs in the system within 10 minutes of playing around. But that doesn’t detract from what is going to be a killer Web 2.0 application.

Why I really like Wufoo

There hasn’t been a Web 2.0 app of late, actually 6 months that has really made me take notice. (Actually Newsvine, but who’s counting?). I saw Wufoo a couple of months back, but couldn’t grasp what they were trying to achieve with their fancy form builder that did nothing else. Today I received a beta invite, and everything fell into place. Need a mailing list? Bam. Done. Want stats on the list? Bam. Done. Emailed to you? Bam. Done. What about a colour or theme change? Click. Bam. Done. Sounds simple hey? It is just that simple. I can already see places where I’ll be plugging in Wufoo forms with great ease.

I’m really looking forward to see where Wufoo is going. They say it’s nearing completion, so a public launch shoudn’t be too far off. For those that want to see Wufoo in action, check out my Wufoo form – Who Wufoo-ed Jason Bagley? Fill it in, and let me know what you think!

One of my biggest irratations of late, are emails that I receive that people haven’t taken more than 3 seconds to type and click send. It sometimes feel that the person that sent the email, is being extremely rude, but in actual fact, just doesn’t care much about the tone of their emails. It comes down to knowledge. If a person knew better, than more often than not, do better.

So for anyone that uses email, these tips are for you. For those that already know better, if you have any email ettiquette tips, please add them to the comments.

• 1. Address someone specific. When sending an email to a company department, or a grouped email address, use “Hi So-and-so”. More often than not, the person emails asking for help, but there are many people who recieve the email, and invarably no-one responds.
• 2. Write an email like you would a letter. Start with an opening paragraph, write all the content in the body, and end off with a closing paragraph. Paraphrase your email aswell. It makes it easier to read. Obviously if you sending a one line email, then no need, but common courtesy is always nice.
• 3. Use decent signatures. Have your name, job position and contact details in your signature. Also, 2 colours and 2 font size changes max! Thats it. No funny quotes, jokes, wierd pictures, 5 colour names, 3 different fonts etc. If its a personal email, no problem, rainbow style your email, but with business email, keep it professional.
• 4. Make use of the From address field. In your email’s account settings, fill your full name and surname in. It makes it easier for people to recognise where the email is coming from immediately, without having to sift through the entire email to read your name in your signature.
• 5. Use the subject field for the email’s subject! Use a descriptive subject in the least amount of words possible. Do not ask or answer questions in the subject field and especially, NEVER leave the subject blank.
• 6. Make proper use of the Importance field. (The “!” button) The importance of a document should only be set to high, if the email should be brought to the recipients attention immediately. Jokes or simple requests or emails that only need to be opened when the recipient has a free moment, should never be flagged.
• 7. Never delete email. You never know when you are going to need the information or prove that you sent or recieved an email. Make use of mail folders, email sorting and archiving, so your email client doesn’t get clogged, but the simple rule is… never delete.

I hope you’ve learn’t a thing or two from these tips. So why not practice them and send me an email! jason[at]jasonbagley[dot]com :-)

You might ask, whats the reason for using Web Standards?
Quote from WebStandards.org: Web standards reduce the cost and complexity of development while increasing the accessibility and long-term viability of any site published on the Web.

If you want more info, read Roger Johansson’s post on Ten reasons to learn and use web standards. There really shouldn’t be any doubting the use of Web Standards after reading that post. :-)

So lets get into the nitty gritty. I used the W3c’s HTML validator to validate 10 SA sites homepages. Below find the results of my little experiment:

• Mweb.co.za – 302 errors
• News24.com – 145 errors
• ITWeb.co.za – 481 errors
• IOL.co.za – 633 errors
• Ananzi.co.za – Failed validation
• Supersport.co.za – Failed validation
• iAfrica.com – 585 errors
• CareerJunction.co.za – 50 errors
• Mail&Gaurdian – 786 errors
• Telkom.co.za – 29 errors

I’m actually not as shocked as I thought I would be. I almost kind of expected it. Seems like news sites, like Mail&Gaurdian, IOL and ITWeb, racked up close to 2000 errors! Are half those errors even neccesary? I’m willing to bet that if they just used valid HTML elements and attributes, that error-log would almost halve, without them having to tweak any of their CSS files (If they even know what CSS is!?).

With bandwidth and internet speed an issue in South Africa, these sites aren’t helping with their over-crowed and invalid markup. You actually don’t have an excuse not to use Web Standards. So why then?

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Google reclaimed their blog address – googleblog.blogspot.com, but I still received Trey’s message in my Bloglines account pictured below.

Google’s explanation of the problem…
[tag]Google hacked[/tag]