scenius

South Africa by Dirk Tolken

The changes in South Africa over the last few years have been possibly greater as those in any other country on the planet. We asked Cape Town-based Web Entrepreneur Dirk Tolken for his take on the Tech Scene in South Africa:

Who are you? What do you do? How big is your operation? What's your role?

My name is Dirk Tolken and I am the managing director of PERONii Solutions (www.peronii.co.za), a new media marketing solutions provider based in Cape Town, South Africa. We are a small, sub 10 staff agency that enables us to keep up to date with current online trends and change direction quickly (especially with the volatile nature of SEO / SEM). This allows us to deliver the latest innovative web development and marketing technologies to our clients. Our services include web development, internet marketing (search engine optimisation, search marketing like PPC, email marketing and more) and graphic design.

PERONii is part of a group of companies that specialise in various fields, including inbound tourism, mobile software technology and online gaming, all of which we provide various inhouse Internet related services to.

My role in the company is that of chief strategist, new business, online marketing and project manager. As small business owner one tends to wear different hats at all times.

What percentage of your business is local, national, continental, or global? Do you find that the demands of your customers dictate what software you use? How aware are your clients of developments in the web space? Do you find yourself explaining new technologies to explain their benefit?

Most of our business is South Africa based (with probably a 70/30 split of local and national), but we're busy breaking into the global market with strategic partnerships and our optimisation skills gaining us ground on the internationally competitive search terms. We're actively looking for agencies in Europe and the US to promote our skills as we're able to provide service at almost two thirds of the pricing in the UK and US which is of course an attractive selling point. As far as continental goes, we find that tourism & communication plays a major part in how technology enters Africa (when taking a perspective from the Internet industry). There is an ever growing sub-Saharan tourism industry and with South Africa being the most developed country we often have tourism start-ups that direct tours to these countries. In essence we find it to be more South African initiatives than clients that approach us from other African countries (other than the odd 419 scam now and then).

We usually dictate the technology to be used, but in certain cases clients come to us with existing solutions and we then build on that or suggest better solutions.

In South Africa, people are starting to wake up to the power of online marketing and we're working hard on educating existing and prospective clients. I tend to keep a library of FAQ's that I use to educate prospects. I have been published in a local magazine, writing about the 'Power of Internet Marketing' and have had positive response on that so I'll be looking at doing more of that.

Technology developments like for instance Web 2.0 and other lesser known developments tend to go under the radar to most of the buying market here, except in some cases where mainstream advertising picks up on certain trends. There was an ad on TV recently about margarine of all things that mentioned blogging and the online community here were quick to criticise the advertising company for not using it to their advantage and actually extending the campaign to the web. It could have been great education opportunity for the mainstream.

Our larger portals and service providers also do well in education, but there's always something new and more education to be done.

How did you get into technology? Was that typical of South Africa at the time? What equipment/software do you work with? How does Open Source help you in your work?

I have always been interested in science and technology. I guess I grew out of science and adopted technology as my main interest. In my early years we were playing with Atari's, Commodore 64's and later PC's, mostly through gaming. In the mid to late 90's networking and getting Microsoft Certification was all the craze, with many networking engineers leaving for London. I still have friends who have stayed on there.

We're PC based, using all the major software (Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Flash and a string of others). Open source helps a lot. Our space venturing pioneer Mark Shuttleworth, who started Thawte Consulting (online security technology acquired by Verisign) is now doing great work through his Shuttleworth Foundation to promote math, science and open source to young learners here. We use open source daily, but only that which has good support systems behind it.

Can you explain about the computing scene in South Africa? Is there much User Group activity? How about Events? How conducive is the South African scene to Start-ups? What particular challenges do new tech businesses face in your country? What African/South African developments should the rest of the world be aware of?

The computing scene in South Africa is alive and well and growing very fast. As mentioned before, gaming is a good entry point for young people to get introduced and the Internet is accessible throughout most of South Africa. We are pretty much on par with the rest of the world technology wise, but infrastructure tends to be a problem with the monopoly of Telkom, our main telephonics and Internet infrastructure provider. Things are however slowly changing with increased wireless mobile technology and a second telephone operator entering the arena soon.

The larger user groups here are mainly from large portals, but there are many smaller niche groups just as anywhere else in the world. Computing events are still limited to gaming mostly, but there are some conferences on Internet Marketing starting to show around the major cities. These are of course good points of access for the industry trying to do some education.

South Africa is a land of opportunity at the moment and entrepreneurial spirit is rife. Our economy is growing well and technology is playing a big part. There are various start-ups here that are leaders in their field globally. Paypal for instance was started by a South African, but unfortunately due to certain financial laws (mainly from SARS, our revenue service) we're not able to use it here. The greatest challenge for new tech business is the education aspect. I was part of a company in 2000 that developed dynamic pricing technology that was way ahead of what anyone has seen before (in fact I have yet to see something like it again), but we had a rather reluctant market at the time so it went down as a dot bomb. I think with that being history now, the second wave of Internet technology that is available now is much better received due to the local market having been exposed to it for longer. It is like any new technology that arrives on the market anywhere around the world I guess.

Developments here that the world can be aware of? That's a big question, but I can say that the South African tech / IT community consists of hard workers and we're technologically well advanced. We're not an India or China as far as outsourcing is concerned (as in pure bulk), but I believe we have a place in the world as the gateway to Africa, and Africa will be (in my opinion) the next big thing the world industries will look at over the next 20 years as there is much development (economically and technologically) still to be done.

Mobile technology is big in South Africa and there are some great social networking services on the up, which I am sure will spill over to the business world (as with web 2 technologies) as it grows mature. Tourism is also a huge industry here, and there are still many opportunities surfacing around the 2010 World Cup Soccer. We're looking forward to have everyone visit Cape Town!

Paris by Xavier Cazin

Introducing Scenius

Geeks and poets: both work in isolation, and yet both love to meet to talk shop. While it's a pre-requisite for techies to be able to work well on their own, it's abundantly clear that they thrive in a vibrant scene where busy user groups and stimulating events let them air their dreams in public. Give them a pint of beer and a few like-minds in a scruffy pub and ideas are triggered and innovative solutions to seemingly intransigent problems pop into their heads that might not have occurred when hacking away before a terminal. A thriving scene can help them lift their game to the next level as the fun and feedback catalyse their natural talent and their desire to create. Scenius is the word musician and producer Brian Eno coined to describe this collective intelligence working at scene level, the Greater-Than-The-Sum-Of-The-Parts phenomenon that kicks in when people gather with a joint M.O. and a willingness to pursue their own aims while helping their counterparts pursue theirs, the Get-Together equivalent of Web 2.0..

It's not just in technology that this happens - Paris in the 30's was the place to be a writer, the Brill Building in New York in the early '60's was the dream location for wannabe songwriters, the Grunge ethic and aesthetic crystalised in Seattle in the late '80's: suddenly, the infrastructure and the talent fall into place, a mixture of innovative ideas nurtured with intelligent tutelage, a touch of patronage and the appropriate marketing vehicles, and epochs are born.

All over the world, these scenes are blossoming, and each are as ripe for legend as any involving Hemingway or Joyce, Jobs or Torvalds, at least in the hearts of the participants. World notoriety might be a long way off, but there's a much greater chance of a project getting a wider audience or VC funding if there's an infrastructure and grapevine working to champion its cause and an existing user pool benefiting from it on a daily basis.

To look closely at the interconnecting parts of these burgeoning scenes is to see community in action. Each scene is different, each can learn something from the other, yet the common thread is the creative individual stretching themselves to make their mark, all the while having a fine old time in the company of their peers. Huge revolutionary leaps and small evolutionary increments are going on around the planet all the time, and the more we hear these tales, the more we feel we can do it, too, we can create something that makes a difference.

Craig Smith, May 2007

 

Paris: by Xavier Cazin

A few days before he spoke at XTech in Paris, I asked Xavier Cazin of O'Reilly Editions to talk us through the Parisian Tech scene:

Paris seems a great place to be a techie at the moment, with XTech just around the corner. Is that the case? Has that always been the case? Does Paris and France have a history of encouraging technology in general and computing specifically?

Paris is becoming a very comfortable place for a techie to live. Thanks to the explosion of high bandwith triple-play ADSL boxes, anyone can now enjoy at home a minimum of 600Ko/s incoming bandwith and 100Ko/s outgoing, as well as free telephony and hundreds of international tv channels for just 30€ per month. This network of boxes even allows Wi-Fi telephony; the most innovative player on the ADSL front, Free (www.free.fr) recently enabled this feature for its 2 million subscribers: you now can benefit from the free telephony feature of your own box whenever you walk near other so-called Freeboxes, or from any accessible WiFi network in the world for that matter. The future of networking in Paris also looks bright; free wifi access and fiber optics everywhere before 2010, dedicated servers in brand new datacenters for around 30€ per month: Parisians will be able to broadcast their own TV very soon, and companies won't need to host and maintain their own servers.

Technology has always been encouraged in France, but, until very recently, it was made "à la française", that is mostly via big universities and big corporates or directly via government initiatives. French innovators tend to come from these established structures, where they learned enough about French communication infrastructure to start a niche. For example, the founder of the above mentioned Free started as a Minitel service provider, where he understood the specificity of the France Telecom homogeneous network and key people. Quite a few French innovators today come from the early days of the French Internet (even people behind http://www.nabaztag.com/!)

What is the scene like with regards people getting together to talk geek? Do you have a vibrant User Group infrastructure? Is there a cross-pollination between different tech tribes, eg do the wireless guys party with the Unix crowd, do the developers and designers hang-out together? What events are specific to your part of the world? And what is the benefit of live events to the attendee? How does it affect their output?

Technical user groups have usually been quite small and informal here. Often they meet during their studies and start a project there, but don't try to grow. There may be tons of them that I didn't even hear about! There have been visible ones around Linux, TeX,  XML, PHP, IPv6 or Wi-Fi, and also music or games, but there doesn't seem go beyond a few dozens of people at the same time. The two biggest events for techies to gather and exchange are Solutions Linux and RMLL. On the proprietary side, Microsoft and Apple both organize regular events, but visitors seem to mostly come there in order to keep up with new products more than exchanging and building new opportunities or get exposed to new challenges.

Now that you make me think of it, it seems that almost no one still knows how to set up conferences in France that would gather key technical people and allow them to mix together and with attendees :-)

What are employment opportunities like for a techie in Paris and in France? Are there big companies that dominate? Do they innovate? Is the work on offer interesting or routine? Do they focus on any particular technology or admin/programming skills? Are there Open Source opportunites? What about the big US tech companies - do they have big set-ups that co-ordinate with the grass roots developers? Any developments in the pipeline to look forward to?

Someone who masters web technologies has no problem finding a job right now. But this is not because companies innovate, rather because they keep up with the natural movement of things toward Internet OS. Investments are usually made where money already is, not were innovation happens. Big US companies (IBM, Microsoft) have always understood that in France money was in publicly funded institutions :-) Apple always had a lot of faithful fans, and Google doesn't seem to have a specific French policy, although they probably were made bored by French publishers' attitude against Google Book Search. International companies usually do what French companies do when they want to hire: they go fishing directly in Universities and Engineering schools. They don't seem to see a need for setting up specific gatherings yet. This may change as interesting individuals will soon be able to expose their work easily thanks to telecommunication boom I was talking about earlier.

Does the culture support start-ups? Are the government helpful in this regard? Is there a ready supply of venture capitalists eager to invest in the talent of a promising set-up? Are other techies supportive? Do the best ideas come from the best techies or do they come from outside the pool of Parisian/French geeks? Is there a particular business model preferred round your way, eg do the start-ups build to sell, use advertising as a model, give the app away and hope that somehow money will follow, or do people develop purely for fun?

It is very difficult to find true risk takers here. Startups do exist, but they usually are financed on proper founds or because founders have established records or success.  Venture capitalists seem to invest in me-too projects that may one day be bought by big corporates that fear to be left behind.

In France, more than the usual rants about too strict labour rules, I think there has been a idealistic view that great projects, like real art, don't mix well with money, because having to make money from your product means making trade-offs and compromises and French people used to dislike compromises. As a result, a lot of great projects are just developed for fun and never compete: better nothing than a soiled thing :-) This is actually changing, but the change is just at its beginning. For instance, bloggers have nothing against soiling their blog with AdSense.

Often, the most ambitious projects seem fueled only by goodwill. For instance, videolan.org (home of VLC, the versatile multimedia reader) is a fantastic and crazy project that has roots in Ecole Centrale, a famous engineering school. They probably could have attracted a lot of money, but they preferred to continue to improve their tools continuously, as new students replace old ones. Another, smaller, project I like a lot, called Savonet/Liquidsoap (a scriptable radio coded in OCaml) would probably have a hard time finding investors while having the potential to be a marvelous multimedia tool.

What part do key bloggers play? Is there a feedback loop that helps everyone keep in touch with what others are doing? What sites do you all read?

It's interesting to note that the most visited blogs are web and technology reports more than new thoughts on how and where technology goes. People read these blogs to stay informed on latest technology or latest (international) events, not to get their mind boggled like they would on Radar, for instance. True geek blogs, with practical sharing of new recipes and experiments, often very good, all have a Google Page Rank of 0 or at most 1! Fortunately, some of them are relayed by the oreilly.fr site, which give them a bit more exposure. Also, I think people are still reading newsgroups a lot, which give them their technical fix more surely than blogs.

What major conferences go on in your neck of the woods? How do they affect the day-to-day life of a techie? Are they a source of inspiration or something that goes on in the background for a while but doesn't really touch the grass roots geek?

You know, Microsoft is doing a really good job at setting up small technical conferences around their new .NET products. Last year, I attended a presentation on SQL Server 2005 and LINQ that not only showed me that MS would soon become a true actor on the data and networking side of technology, but also triggered a lot of thoughts on what Web 2.0 actually was and where it is going. Inspired by Microsoft, do you believe that?

Other than that, the conference around Open Source and Free Software get their usual faithful attendees, but it's hard to get a sense of their output, beyond spending a nice moment with 10000 family members.

Other "Technical conferences" are not places for geeks but rather for IS departments.