Paul Jacobson

Yesterday I became a case study. One of my responsibilities at iCommons is to co-ordinate its IT/IS function and that includes sourcing a new Internet access service provider. JC, our techie until the end of March, was dealing with DataPro (I think I even suggested DataPro in the first place) so when JC left, I picked up from where he left off and tried to move things along. Because iCommons is a non-profit we are mindful that we are dependent on donor funding and need to make decisions based on that. Anyway, without getting into details I reached a bit of an impasse with our DataPro sales rep yesterday morning about an issue that was a concern for us. I wasn’t happy with the tension that had entered my budding relationship with the DataPro guy and reached out to my Twitter community for help and asked my community if anyone could recommend someone at IS or MWeb Business that I could speak to about an alternative quote. It also didn’t help DataPro much that my colleagues were also a bit put off by this unforunate development.

I quickly received responses from Andy, Jason and Marc (and shortly afterwards, Jacques) and started making enquiries about alternatives to DataPro. While I can understand that people have bad days and are not always polite, we are under some pretty intense pressure back at the batcave and need a reliable solution pronto. I didn’t have (and still don’t have) a meaningful relationship with DataPro and when I experienced that tension, I felt no hesitation look at other options.

I started discussions with a great referral from Andy about possibly moving to Mweb Business (yes, in spite of Jason’s caution) as the next best of a somewhat dubious bunch (although if I had seen his post about MWeb Business I probably wouldn’t have agreed to consider them so readily) and then headed back to the ongoing session at Nomadic Marketing where I was due to speak in a couple hours. I was listening to Mike Stopforth’s talk an hour or so later when I received a series of calls from DataPro about a complaint that had found its way to DataPro’s CEO who passed it down to the sales director who routed it to the sales guy I had been talking to. Anyway, the sales guy was most apologetic and we were able to reach agreement on an arrangement that works for iCommons once we were passed all the tension.

At first the sales guy thought that I had called the CEO and was confused when I told him I hadn’t spoken to anyone else at DataPro. When he checked back with his director he was told that the complaint was “on a website … Twitter …”. I confirmed that I had posted my gripe and explained that where I receive good service, I can be almost fanatically loyal and when I don’t, like most people, I reach out to my community for alternatives. It turns out that all the wonderful people on Twitter I am connected to are a pretty responsive bunch and often my first port of call. I wasn’t sure how the message got to DataPro and was, quite frankly, stunned that someone actually heard what I said and then conveyed that to the CEO of DataPro. This is the stuff of presentation case studies for goodness sake! I found out this morning that Pam Sykes knows DataPro’s PR people and passed the message on to them. Pam was sitting about 5 meters away from me in Nomadic Marketing to boot! If it weren’t for Pam, I wonder if my tweet would have been noticed by anyone connected to DataPro and dealt with. The emphatic response from DataPro’s CEO is a clear indication of how important it is to them to give better service and they deserve some credit for making an effort to respond to my indirect complaint about them.

(In the event I still have their attention, they may also want to do something about the page http://datapro.co.za resolves to – it isn’t the home page and “www” is so 2007!)

Technorati Tags:
twitter, datapro, listening, pam sykes, complaint, feedback, case study

Ah, the controversy over at Avusa over its (former) … again! You probably know by now that Bullard has been fired due to an apparently racist column which basically said that were it not for the brutal and racist (white) colonialists, the indigenous population would only just be discovering fire and other wonderful things. While there is a clear implication that were it not for the somewhat dubious influence of the white folk, black South Africans would not only be undisturbed by their less savoury influences but would have just barely made it out of their caves.

If anything, Bullard’s underlying assumption that the locals of a couple centuries ago would have simply stagnated and not developed in any meaningful way, whether that be technologically, culturally or socially is the most objectionable aspect of the column. It suggests that black South Africans were (and perhaps still are) fundamentally inferior. Bullard may as well have been writing 20 to 30 years ago when bizarre evolutionary theories were being used to support Apartheid. That being said, his column raises a couple interesting questions and issues for me.

(As a complete thought experiment I find myself what would have happened if the Dutch East India Company and the British had skipped the Cape altogether. How would the local population have developed in the last few centuries? What would an organically African society look like in the 21st century. At some point the local population would have interfaced with the more developed world so I have to wonder if our teens still wouldn’t be trying to pass themselves off as US basketball players and ghetto hoodlums. At the same time how would a truly African society look? Would Ubuntu be the basis of everything that society does? What would its systems of government look like? Would they be tyrannical like we see in our northern neighbour or more communal and participatory?)

Back to Bullard … what did Avusa expect? They appointed him to be controversial. What did they expect when he is required to generate enough controversy to sell papers every week? The last major controversy was about his perception of bloggers and that really generated a firestorm. I remember Colin Daniels celebrating the tremendous amount of traffic the first Bullardgate brought to the then fledgling Times (I believe it was in a presentation at a 27 Dinner). Then it was great to be controversial despite the people he offended then (namely local bloggers) and his association of bloggers with college students in the US who kill their fellow students in their classrooms. Man, I was incensed when I read his columns and watched his videos. I almost backed out of writing for The Times as one of the first blogumists. But he was celebrated as a kind of hero and everyone had a good laugh. Not so much this time around. In fact, The Times hasn’t said a lot about Bullard except a short article, a link to the column and some inane musings about whether The Times will lose money because Bullard isn’t writing for them anymore.

I dislike the man (and have since his blogger stunt last year) and I disagree with his post. I don’t see him as a victim in this or a free speech hero. I think Avusa had this coming after years of playing with fire, pushing the edge through his columns to sell more papers and generate more buzz. It was a matter of time before they got burnt themselves.

Some bloggers have been asking about Bullard’s freedom to express himself (it is a Constitutional right, after all) and I guess it is going to come down to whether his comments constitute hate speech or fall foul of some more pressing right in the Bill of Rights. Either way, his post is offensive even though it isn’t overtly racist. What is a bigger issue for me is how this column highlights what a touchy subject race is in the not-so-new South Africa. I think Saul hits the nail on the head when he posted this:

Here’s a thought: If the editor of the Sunday Times felt that this was racist then why did he have the article published? I’m so sick of South Africans being so uptight about “racism”. We’re so scared as a nation to discuss racism and actually deal with it so we react to anything that might be misconstrued as racism. As a nation until we deal with the past and the present issue we will never get any further.

Given our history it is perfectly understandable that race is a sensitive issue but almost a decade and a half after the first truly democratic elections in this country and race is being used to bludgeon political opposition, social commentary and any kind of meaningful discourse about a range of topics from empowerment to who gets to be in a press conference. We are at a point where all you need to do to cut off an opposing view is to raise the racism card and the white people avert their eyes in shared guilt and the non-whites get to say and do what they want. Maybe us whiteys need to wear some kind of badge and arm-band and be restricted to only trading with each other … Maybe, just maybe, it is time to build that multi-racial society Nelson Mandela promised us a decade ago and which Mbeki and his party quickly forgot when Mandela walked out the door at the end of his presidency. When was the last time you heard the phrase “rainbow nation”?

I do find myself wondering if there isn’t a grain of truth in his conclusion somewhere:

Then something happens that will change this undisturbed South Africa forever. Huge metal ships land on the coast and big metal flying birds are sent to explore the sparsely populated hinterland. They are full of men from a place called China and they are looking for coal, metal, oil, platinum, farmland, fresh water and cheap labour and lots of it. Suddenly the indigenous population realise what they have been missing all along: someone to blame. At last their prayers have been answered.

When are our politicians going to stop the blame game and get on with some real nation-building?

Update: As usual, Ivo and Candice say it better than I did.

Update 2: Bullard has apologised for causing offence and in his apology, posted to Business Day, he talks about his history and his approach to his columns. It is also worth reading Ivo’s continued coverage of this story. Turns out Ivo is a pretty insightful writer himself …

Technorati Tags:
david bullard, bullard, racism, the times, avusa, column, south africa, colonialism, colonists

I have been involved in the local debate about whether to certify Microsoft’s Office Open XML document format as a South African and international standard. Although I represented a local non-profit called The African Commons Project, this post represents my own views and not necessarily the TACP’s. For those who don’t know what this whole thing is about, I’ll present a simplified version.

Microsoft has a new document standard which emerged in Office 2007. You may already be using it without knowing it (.docx, .xlsx etc). Anyway, Microsoft wanted that document format to be certified as an ISO standard which is a pretty important certification as far as standards go. To get there it had the document format certified by a smaller standards body called ECMA (which was done) and then, through ECMA, it was placed on a fast track process. The idea behind the fast track process in this case was to push the document format through as quickly as possible.

The whole process was controversial and attracted a fortune of interest from multinationals like IBM and Sun (both companies argued vigorously against certification). The document format specification was extremely long (over 6 000 pages) and was incomplete. There was a fortune of legacy code in the format which didn’t seem to make all that much sense to the more technical people. To me the debate came down to an open access/public benefit issue. Was certification of Office Open XML good for communities like our rural poor and the developing world as a whole? Of course my response was (and remains) “no”. I gave a presentation at one of the early meetings of the taskforce convened to debate the issue at South African National Standards which I’d like to share. There is a lot of talking behind the scenes but you’ll get the gist of my arguments.

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ISO announced the result of the international voting process a couple days ago and while there were hopes that Microsoft would be defeated, its application was successful. One of the contributing factors is almost certainly Microsoft’s somewhat questionable tactics in securing countries’ support for its format and where I was mildly indifferent to Microsoft before the debate, this experience has on polarised me against Microsoft on these sorts of issues.

There has been talk about how this process reflects what is right and “what needs to be done”. Mostly this talk is from people and organisations who seem to me to be closely aligned with Microsoft (at best) or firmly in Microsoft’s pocket (at worst). This has been an important issue for Microsoft because certification as an ISO standard is the key to big procurement contracts by governments around the world, to name one customer base. It has been a high stakes game in which Microsoft has fought hard to protect its interests.

The Oracle, writing on Lockergnome, makes an appropriate point in a brief discussion about a ZDNet article about the vote:

The article doesn’t have anything to say about the methods used to convince the voters, but in the first and second rounds allegations of payoffs and ‘deals’ were leveled at the Redmond giant. The resultant investigations proved nothing about outright bribery, but details of dealing were shown. Since the ’standard’ could not garner a simple majority before, yet amazingly achieves a 75% share of the votes this time, with few changes to the standard, it does make the thoughtful person wonder.

It does indeed.

Technorati Tags:
iso, microsoft, office open xml, ooxml, open access

The featured business today is Engineer Simplicity, an engineering business run by Duncan Drennan.  Duncan sent me an email about his business and I thought it was worth repeating here:

At the heart of it, Engineer Simplicity is about creating better products. Unfortunately that is quite broad, but that is my real desire. I want to create products that improve the quality of our lives. Technology is really quite complicated and I do my best to try to make technology an enabler – rather than complicating peoples’ lives with my products I want to simplify them. I want people to be able to spend more time with their wife(husband) and kids, not trying to figure out how to programme their VCR.

That’s all very lofty and the goal that I’m working towards. At the moment most of my time is spent consulting and helping other companies develop their products. In parallel with this I’m beginning to develop my own products (that will hopefully help change the world, even if just in a small way).

I find the whole notion of an engineering finding solutions for everyday issues as well as the bigger things really interesting.  I found a post on Duncan’s blog (yup, an engineering who blogs too – what better way to get to know Duncan and his work better) about some work he did on a BMW motor bike which really seemed to just make the bike’s rider’s life easier.  What a great service to provide.

Duncan is based in Cape Town and you can reach him at the following:

Engineer Simplicity (Pty) Ltd
57 Cornwell Street
Oakdale, Bellville
South Africa
7530

Tel : +27 21 948 4100
Fax : +27 88 021 948 4100

You may have noticed that there is no Featured Business of the Week this week.  The reason for this is that no-one submitted their business to be featured.  This has been an interesting experiment and I was curious, at the outset, whether people would submit their businesses to be featured for free on this blog.  The challenge with offering something for free is that there is generally little perceived value so people don’t take advantage of the service.  I will keep this service available so if anyone would like to have their business featured then drop me a line and I’ll do a post on your business.

I would also like to know from you, my readers, if there is something you would like to see on this blog?  The purpose of this blog is to be a blog that focuses on solo and small businesses and issues that are relevant to those businesses so this blog is really about you and your business.

Tags: featured business, focus, changes, feedback requested

This week’s featured business is a business which I have started to become familiar with.  It wasn’t submitted to me.  Rather it is a business I would like to highlight simply because of the personality behind it and the work it is doing.

I first met Mike Stopforth a month or so ago to throw a few ideas around and look at where there may be scope for us to work together in the local new media space.  The two things I quickly noticed were how young he looks (certainly compared to me) and how dynamic he is.  Here is a little info about Mike:

I am a consultant, writer and speaker.  I help companies translate real value from Web 2.0 trends and technologies for better business.  I’m privileged to have the opportunity to write a weekly op-ed column for the Citizen newspaper and am a technology commentator for popular business and marketing websites including Moneyweb and Biz-Community. I lecture at the Vega School of Branding in Johannesburg and feature as a guest lecturer on executive programs at the Graduate School of Business in Cape Town.

Mike’s company is called Cerebra and his company has a pretty interesting focus:

Much of my work involves meeting corporate clients, initiating internal communications audits and diagnosing areas of pain that social software may (or may not) assist with. Once we’ve figured out the pain, we match a software solution to that specific need. This is quite a refreshing approach for most corporates as they’re typically used to speaking to IT consultants (read: reps) who are punting one product as the ‘be all and end all’ solution.

The new media space (what I call the Web 2.0 space) is a pretty exciting and constantly evolving space on the Web with a fortune of potential for local businesses.  So much so that I also run a blog called chilibean which is dedicated to new media and what it has to offer the local market.

Cerebra’s clients include some large corporates and when I talk to him he just seems to be way ahead of anyone else working in this space.  To add to all of this, Mike comes across as a genuine and grounded guy with great intentions.  If you would like to contact Mike, you can find all his contact details here.

Seebots Distributors CC is a small family business that draws on member Johan van Staden’s considerable experience in the energy industry (oil and gas) to apply world class, corporate principles to SMEs in South Africa:

We supply a wide range of fittings to gas installers, gas companies, resellers, the DIY market and gas equipment builders throughout South Africa and neighbouring states. We just completed a consignment of gas burners and rotisserie motors for a manufacturer in Dubai, our biggest large consignment outside the borders of South Africa.

Energy is a hot topic in South Africa and it is becoming increasingly important to find alternatives to electricity, both to cater for the increasing number of power failures we are experiencing as well as to begin to wean ourselves off limited, fossil fuels (if you have had the opportunity to see An Inconvenient Truth or have been exposed to similar materials, you will be nodding with me right about now).

I remember Johan telling me about his brisk trade when the rolling blackouts started in Cape Town.  His trade is a symptom of a growing awareness of the need to become more self-sufficient in the face of an ageing infrastructure and diminishing or increasingly expensive fuel sources.  Buying gas canisters to deal with an electricity blackout may not be a cheap option but it sure is a way you can take proactive steps to meet your energy requirements.  So is moving on to municipal gas if it is available and if you can afford it.  What we need now are businesses like Johan’s which supply efficient solar panels and alternative forms of renewable energy to homes and businesses throughout South Africa.  Then we will see a revolution start to take root.

If you would like to discuss your energy needs with Johan, you can reach him at the following:

PO Box 44086, Linden 2104 South Africa.

81 First Avenue, Linden 2195, Johannesburg

Tel: +27 11 888-3050 Fax: +27 11 782-0338 Cel: +27 82 492-9254

e-mail: seebots (at) worldonline (dot) co (dot) za

Web site: http://www.seebots.sa.gs

Tags: seebots distributors, gas applicances, gas supplies, gas equipment, energy industry