Inline Studio has been drinking a lot of coffee recently!
We started working with Miko Coffee South Africa a few months back when we got a call on Thursday afternoon asking if we could put together a new website by Saturday morning. The website turned out pretty well for such a quick job and we have had some nice feedback from Miko internationally.
Part of the site also deals with Puro Coffee with is South Africa’s only Fairtrade Coffee. We’re hoping to expand this area of the site in the near future.
Spotted a post on Cherryflava of an iPhone being blended.
Facinating to watch but also an excellent example of viral marketing. The website Will It Blend? is run by Blendtec, the manufactuer of The Total Blender that is used in the series.
I have to say it worked on me. I don’t exactly want to run out and buy a blender but if my blender burnt out tomorrow I’d be tempted to buy a Blendtec (assuming availility on South Africa).
Oh and guess what, I’ve now written about them on my blog, linked to their website and here’s the video…
I was discussing my favourite bands with a friend recently. Over a period of about a week I added and subtracted from a list that may or may not be my top ten.
What I mean is this is a snap shot the beginning of July. It will be different next week and probably the week after next.
Being inspired by a post over at 456 Berea Street I decided to post them here.
Inline Studio has been busy with a few interesting jobs over the past month. Here’s just a few of them.
StaySA
I’ve been working recently with StaySA to upgrade some of their websites. They have a number of websites listing various South African Accomodation options.
Most of the work currently is in the background but I’m hoping to get a chance to redesign soon.
FamCare Aesthetic Clinic were undergoing a name change and needed both printed materials and a new website. The website, launched this week, is a pure CSS design. I’m particularly happy with the background images - it was pretty tough getting 2 background images to work together but it works on everything apart from IE6. Anyway, I’m sure you all using Firefox right?
Amatola Water Intranet
Amatola Water needed a new intranet for their office staff to list documents, procedures, etc and to include a discussion forum - and they needed it within a month! One of our biggest projects to date and one of the most demanding schedules as well but we pulled it of with a week to spare.
I’ve recently had a few people ask for advice regarding sales calls where a company states that another company is trying to register a domain name similar to their own. The individual is then given a chance to purchase the domain first at an exorbitant fee.
This is an old scam and fortunately I don’t know anyone who has fallen for this recently.
However, today I feel that maybe I fell for something similar a few years back.
In 2000, before I moved to South Africa, I wanted to register some .co.za domain names for my wife’s business, Better Beginnings. I forget how I came across Internet Solutions in South Africa but I contacted them and they quoted for the domains.
Whilst sorting through some old paperwork today I came across the quote and realised that I had been quoted and paid R500 + VAT for each domain. Domain’s have come down in price in recent years but looking back at the records it seems that IS would have paid R200 inc VAT.
That’s 185% markup. Not a bad profit margin!
I would be very interested to find out if R500 + VAT was a fairly standard price back in 200o or did they just take advantage of a poor unfortunate foreigner who didn’t know better.
I’m addicted to Microsoft Office and can’t live without Outlook 2007. I create list after list in Excel and have done for years but over the last couple of weeks I have been introducing Google Docs into two of my businesses.
So far I have to say I’m hugely impressed. I update a spreadsheet and my colleages get the update straight away. No more sending around by email or fighting over who’s using the spreadsheets at any one time.
The one question I keep getting from staff is what happens if the internet is down (which seems to happen in East London more often that it should).
Well, I have to say I’m very excited about Google Gears launched this week.
Google gears allows developer to create offline web applications. This currently allows me to download my Google Reader reading so that I can read offline and then sync back. In the future this offering is poised to allow the downloading for my Google Doc’s spreadsheets and work on them offline.
I’ll keep you posted on this software as it develops and let you know when this is available with Google Docs and what our experience of working with it is.
The Free Bandwidth Campaign website states that South Afrian’s monthly bandwidth allocation is not supposed to include local traffic? “According to regulations promulgated in terms of the Electronic Communications Act of 2005, all local bandwidth must be provided free to ADSL users.
“The local bandwidth regulation was gazetted as Notice 1112 of 2006, and clearly defines ‘Local Bandwidth Usage’ to mean data that can be transferred from South African based Internet Protocol addresses’. Most importantly, Notice 1112 clearly states that ‘local bandwidth usage shall not be subject to any cap’.”
The Free Bandwidth Campaign are planning a day of action on the 30th June whereby a piece of software that they are asking us to install will download “as much local content as possible” from South African websites. This is to prove that Telkom have indeed got the local capacity to provide this local bandwidth.
I’m not convinced they will have much success with the campaign as most ADSL users I know battle to stay within their monthly cap already. Personally, I haven’t decided whether I will take part or not.
There seems to be a bit of a riot going on over a Digg over a decision to remove a story that included a key that would allow someone to crack the copy protection on an HD-DVD.
Every other story seems to be about the HD-DVD key or Kevin Rose’s removal of the post. The story is also spreading fast - people are writing/blogging about it and the code is popping up all over the place - Slashdot, Youtube, etc.Of course this is not the first time a community has vocally objected to actions of a website - for example, similar things happened in good old web1.0 companies such as ebay. However, this type of action went largely unnoticed whereas with the advent of Blogging and social media small events, such as this, can get blown up much bigger and much faster than they used to.
Microsoft has released Deepfish, a mobile browser for Windows Mobile devices, as a Technology Preview.
The Deepfish Technology Preview enhances existing mobile browsing technologies by displaying content in a view that is closer to the desktop experience. Our zoom-able interface and cue map allow you to quickly access the information you care about over the web without ever losing track of where you are.
The browser is compatible with Windows Mobile Smart Phones, or Pocket PCs running Windows Mobile 5.0 or greater.
Unfortunately they are only releasing to invited individuals but you can register you interest here: http://labs.live.com/Deepfish.
