Please vote for DChetty.co.za & help a brother win this year.

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This year, the competition allows folk to vote once every 24hrs with the same email address, so please do.

Since the explosion of Twitter and the massive amounts of new users, it has become very evident the openness of the platform is what has encouraged the success of Twitter. As a result, there many many Twitter applications that leverage the platform and allow it’s users to manage their Twitter accounts effectively.

One such application is TweetDeck. One of the more commonly used applications that is easy to use, pretty and very functional. It is built on Adobe Airand though the install file for TweetDeck has the Adobe Air bundled with it, it doesn;t seem to work properly… so here is a simple step-by-step guide to installing TweetDeck.

Four steps to using TweetDeck:

1. Download Adobe Air
2. Run the Adobe Air install file
3. Download TweetDeck
4. Run the TweetDeck install file

It’s that simple! Once you are up and running, don’t forget to follow me on Twitter, I go as @DChetty!

Some cool features to check out in TweetDeck:

• Facebook integration allows you to monitor and post Facebook status messages.
• Preview shortened URLS before you end up clicking on a spammer’s link.
• Preview TwitPic images directly in TweetDeck.
• Keep up with Trending topics.
• Enjoy the power of search inside TweetDeck.

The idea behind SEACOM, is that they have layed down an undersea fibre-optic cable to join India, Europe and Africa in a massive loop of international data transfer, which essentially hooks Africa into the internet, providing massive amounts of data traffic to surge in and out of Africa.

The well organised event was very different to the standard media launches which are normally full of news agency reporters and photographers. Instead, the event had a bus full of Twitterati, the who’s who of the Social Media scene in SA where flown in from Johannesburg and Cape Town. It was very evident that this plan worked superbly well, by the amount of real-time tweeting that took place and which generated so much hype about SEACOM on Twitter that this tweet by @Jarredcinman was inevitable.

We met the CEO of SEACOM, a pretty young, well spoken guy, who chatted to us about some of the challenges that they have faced during the project, the potential benefits, the costs and his excitement at being this far in the project.

Brian Herlihy, SEACOM CEO, said: “The team has made tremendous progress over the past couple of months and we are truly excited to finally have the finish line in-sight.

“With the system substantially completed and testing underway, we are one step closer to delivering on our commitment and become the first project to provide eastern and southern African retail carriers with equal and open access to inexpensive bandwidth.”

We were then taken to visit the site where the cable lands in SA, along the Kwazulu-Natal coast. It was quite interesting to see and it certainly is an amazing set up.

Some facts:

• The backup generators and battery has the capacity to run the cable for about 30 days without any support from ESKOM or refilling the generators.
• The main cabin houses equipment to the value of about R55 million rand.
• The cable leaves SA underground, though the beach and comes out undersea about 1km from the shore and goes as much as 800m deep.
• The cable itself is about as thick as a hair, but the protective sheath is about 2inches thick.
• The cable has a max capacity of 1.28Tbs. Current SA bandwidth uses a 130Gbs cable.

Now, since the massive Twitter hype created yesterday and flurry of blog posts, I have noticed that many people don’t quite understand what SEACOM is and how it will affect us. This is an opinionated schpeel, so if you are pedantic, sorry for you ma chyna!

SEACOM is link between South Africa, Mozambique and a host of other African countries to the global internet. It will carry data to and from our local networks within our borders and drag it undersea, along the east coast of Africa and into the mass of Cyberspace that sits internationally.

SEACOM is NOT an ISP. SEACOM will not provide consumer targeted products and will never be in business of connecting homes, offices, etc to the internet. Instead, it is a B2B company that will sell its products to companies that will onsell bandwidth to consumers. So, the Vodacoms, MTNs, ISs, Telkoms and Neotels and other ISPs will be the customers to SEACOM. Mostly those companies with local network infrastructure that can plug into SEACOM’s international line.

So what is the benefit to the consumer?

Previously, all our international bandwidth used to be transported over another international cable, which had the data capacity of about 130Gbs. SEACOM will provide an alternate cable to these ISPs which have the capacity to carry about 10 times the amount of data per second as our current provider does, at a speed of 1.28Tbs (thats a lot!).

So with this additional competition, ISPs will have the freedom of choice, instead of being tied into a monopoly. Competition will therefore affect pricing and we will see a drop in price as more and more ISPs begin to shift over to SEACOM, creating a competitive market to supply bandwidth to ISPs.

SEACOM’s CEO says that pricing has the capacity to reduce as much as 50% of the current consumer prices that we pay for access to the internet. My opinion is that while this is true, I do not foresee this actually filtering down to teh consumers as aggressively as this. I predict upto 25% price reduction to consumer for data charges within the next year.

The speed is however an altogether different story. The speed that consumers receive its bandwidth is limited by the capacity of the LOCAL networks. So if Telkom’s infrastructure can feed us access at a speed of 4MBs, that is the max speed that consumers would be able to receive data. Local network capacity is what limits South African consumers from 50MBs fixed line broadband connectivity to the home. Only until local network capacity has been improved, will the true effect of the speed implications of the SEACOM cable be passed onto consumers.
It’s not all doom and gloom though. We have all come to accept that Telkom will most likely not upgrade its local network capacity anytime soon, but the GSM networks are keen to change this. Vodacom and MTN are both actively pursuing LTE driven networks, which will extend the capacity of 3G to about 100MBs to the consumer.

This of course will not be an overnight shift and while MTN actively upgrades its network to a capacity of 7.2MBs, we can be certain that projects are in place to handle this LTE evolution. Issues that would concern the consumer, would undoubtedly be the cost of hardware and the fear of traditionally high bandwidth costs.

These changes will not happen soon though. So if you were planning on holding your breathe, I strongly urge that you reconsider this plan. Local networks will phase the benefits of this new competitive pricing wars that are soon to start in order to maximise profits, ensure redundancy and allow for product development to catch up with the potential onslaught of true broadband services that it will allow.

Imagine a converged service of 1000 TV channels of which 350 of them are in Full HD, Unlimited phone and uncapped internet acces through a 50MBs line to your home. This is what the CEO of SEACOM has at his apartment in New York, and its his mission to make it a reality in Africa.

My predictions

• Increased cap sizes at the same prices that we pay now.
• Mobile operators will drive the speed issue more than fixed line operators as a result of incapable local fixed line infrastructure.
• Prices on a per GB basis will drop by about 25% within a year but we should start seeing a better Rand/GB ratio next year sometime.
• Converged services will not be popular in SA, so don’t expect to see triple-play solutions, TV, Internet and Phone, in SA anytime soon as it is controlled by different sector players in SA. E.g. Naspers will not kill Multi-Choice to pump MWEB and Telkom will not kill their revenue driver, PST phone, for IP based solutions.

Other SEACOM Media event posts worth checking out:
From the Couch
Tech Start News
Charl Norman
The Digital Edge

Roxilla, has stepped up and started a campaign called “Spread The Love” which she is running through a Facebook Group. The idea is to raise funds and awareness(just as important as funds) to help out streetkids in the Cape Town CBD, under the banner of “The Hardened Street Child Care Plan”.

To help out, simply join the Facebook group and leverage the viral nature that Facebook is so famous for spread the love by inviting your friends to join as well. Then step up and make a donation to the fund using one of the payment mechanisms in place for the cause (details can be found on the Facebook Page)! That’s it!

Organised and managed by the guys from Huddlemind, it was obvious that a lot of time and effort went into arranging the function and I have to thank them for that. Great job on a job well done!

I was in the running for two awards this year and it being my first year, Best New Blog was the category that I was most keen on winning, though an award in Best Science and Technology Blog would have truly been fabulous.

I must admit that I thought that I had a very good chance of winning Best New Blog and was fairly concerned about the competition in the other category, especially iMod. ChrisM has been around for a few years and has developed a massive following over the years. He puts in many many hours and in my opinion, the only true competition in the category.

Rightfully so, iMod won Best Science and Technology Blog again this year, with him defending his title that he won in 2008. Though I did not win, I was complimented by Chris when his girlfriend chatted to me early at the awards ceremony and told me Chris was particularly concerned about losing his title to me. I have a great deal of respect for iMod and Chris, and though winning would have been great, I am satisfied with the compliment of being considered a good competitor to iMod in this category. Next year, I will take up the challenge again.

Best New Blog went to the brothers of From-The-Couch. I am a fan of their work and though not winning disappointed me immensely, I think that I would have been gravely disappointed if I had lost to any other blog in the category. These guys deserve it and I am proud to have lost to a good contender like From-The-Couch.

The other awards were predominantly cleaned out by 2oceansvibe, who took away SIX awards (my count), including Best Blog of 2009! Well done Seth, I know that you put a lot into your work (if you would dare call it work!).

To the other blog awards winners, well done and good luck for 2009/2010! I will definitely see you in the running of the SA Blog Awards 2010 and it will be an honour for me to compete amongst you next year!