The Randolf Jorberg Blog

Google’s approach of rolling out their technology gradually throughout the world showed great success when conquering western markets and seemed to work OK for africa aswell. No other search engine had it’s user interface translated to Zulu, Afrikaans and Xhosa years before they opened an office in South Africa or any other African country and still today there’s no competition within sight.

Back in the very early Google years using voluntary user contributions with their Google in your Language service and is constantly adding new languages. But there seemed to be weak spots where Google was not able to roll out it’s infrastructure on a global level in other fields, because they involve too much professional local knowledge and infrastructure and this is where I was delighted to see some real progress in the last months:

Google Mapmaker allows people to edit and contribute to maps in countries where no professional map making company has gone before. The (infrastructural and marketing) power that honorable open source map projects like openstreetmap did not have meets usability and the result is great map data for all countries in Africa.

Today there was now the big news (via TC): Google launches SMS based services for the ugandan internet community. Some of these services like Google Trader (think of Craigslist/gumtree/kijiji simplified and via SMS only) are build exclusively for Google Africa and I’m sure we’ll see them rolled out and succeed in many african markets soon. The initiative carries the Google logo, but was initiatiated by the Grameen Foundation and MTN and they describe it as:

“The suite of five mobile services, provided using Google SMS Search technology and the MTN network, includes Farmer’s Friend, a searchable database with both agricultural advice and targeted weather forecasts; Health Tips which provides sexual and reproductive health information, paired with Clinic Finder, which helps to locate nearby health clinics and services; and Google Trader, which matches buyers and sellers of agricultural produce and commodities as well as other products. The services are SMS-based and designed to work with basic mobile phones to reach the broadest possible audience.”

My personal perspective is that education driven by technology is going to be the THE MAIN source of development in Africa and I love seeing google use it’s market power to help development to those who need it most. I’m looking for ways how I can personally contribute my knowledge to efficient projects in this area and I urge anyone with the killer idea how to bring knowledge to Africa to share his ideas… Not only this video shows that it’s going to be the mobile phone that’s going to bring development to Africa:

It’s along time since we last updated anything on weather.co.za but today I’m happy to add the most-requested feature:

Weather widgets are here! You can finally add a button to your homepage with the weather forecast for tomorrow. This means that your visitors don’t need to visit weather.co.za anymore to see but stay on your site. You can add this image to any site you wish and we offer you three different versions (Image, PHP and Javascript). While we strive to add customization (color, size and style) in the future, we settled for one default style for now that is very simple and does not add any logo or advertisement to the weather information. The image on the left is actually just the life forecast that you can add to your homepage or blog right now!

That is not everything yet – you can also add weather.co.za data to your iGoogle homepage. Just click on this button and you’ll be taken to your Google homepage where you can customize your weather feed:

As our old company logo (as seen on the left) needed a redesign we just started a competition on logotournament.com where we got 91 Entries until today. While we don’t like all of them, we were pleasantly surprised by many of the others and would like to hear your feedback and suggestions on them.

Copy of our brief:

Company Name:

Fliks

Slogan:

What We Do:

We are an internet company creating, operating and marketing own, mostly community-based, web projects.

Our Industry:

Internet

Formats Accepted

.EPS only

Top Three Things to Communicate through our Logo:

#1 – Passion for internet projects
#2 – Internal unity
#3 – We’re skilled and always strive for the technological lead

Our Target Audience:

Internet experts looking for the guys running this cool site/service.

Styles that we are interested in:

Wordmark
A wordmark consists of the company name in a stylized type and may include small asbstract or pictorial elements. Famous examples include:

Pictoral Mark
A pictorial mark uses literal or representative imagery to symbolize the brand. Famous examples include:

Please note that the above brands are in no way, shape, or form associated with LogoTournament. They are cited as examples under Fair Use for the enrichment of the general public’s knowledge of the graphic arts.

Color Preferences:

Our company color is a bright red (RAL 3020, CMYK 0, 100, 100, 10) which should at least appear in the logo. Contrasting colours could be white, grey and/or black tones.

Our Ideas and Additional Information:

Our Ideas and additional information: Fliks has two divisions: “Fliks GmbH” in Germany, “GmbH meaning the kind of legal entity of our company in Germany. In South Africa, its “Fliks Media (Pty) Ltd.” Fliks is a company that has very few customers and whose projects do mostly have their own branding/logo. Therefore, the fliks logo represents our company itself alone. The logo will appear on the web mostly on contact information pages, offline on businesscards and letters. Therefore it should be readable in small sizes, too. “Fliks” is a made up word resembling the german words “flink” or “fix”, wich associates to “quick”, “alert”, “fast”. Therefore the logo should represent a dynamic, fast acting, leading company in a rapidly developing IT/mediabased business field, competence as well als open-mindedness. Internally, it also should stand for our unity/community/alliance. Our core competences are SEO, Community Management, Web2.0, PHP/MySQL. We’re hosting optimized, high traffic websites like the redirector service anonym.to as well as specialist (news)sites like the german mac magazine macnotes.de. As recognized by the company names, we also operate international the non-virtual way in germany as well as in south africa. Finally, we’re in the internet business for more than 10 years now, therefore we don’t want to be associated with new startups from the web2.0-boom. Ideas and recent logos: We always used “brackets” or symbols reminding brackets in our recent logos, symbolizing internal unity. Recent logo: visible on http://www.fliks.com Very old logo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/21075605@N00/3561930285/