Disclaimer: I write this as the owner of weather.co.za - a privately held weather forecasting site that has definite plans to extend it's offerings to launch and produce it's own weather forecasts and warning data very soon. The weather bill can and will be used by the South African Weather Service (SAWS) and it's heavily connected private sister-company Weather Intelligence Systems  (Pty) Ltd. to fight off private competition as my site could become.

Less than a week before the final hearings, the proposed SA weather service amendment bill, 2011 does finally make some headlines and gets attention by the DA MP Gareth Morgan, FW De Clerk Foundation and many other affected parties.

"Only the Weather Service may issue severe weather-related warnings over South Africa in order to ensure that there is a single authoritative voice in this regard." 

is what the South African Weather Service Act already says since 2001. As if this questionable decision, that lacks any legally binding definition of a 'severe weather-related warning' isn't enough the new amendment is now supposed to add the following section 30A that reads:

(1) No person may
(a) issue a severe weather or air pollution-related warning without the necessary written permission from the Weather Service;
(b) supply false or misleading information about the Weather Service;
(c) unlawfully, intentionally or negligently commit any act or omission which detrimentally affects or is likely to detrimentally affect the Weather Service.

(2) A person who contravenes any provisions of subsection (1), is guilty of an offence and is liable, in the case of a first conviction, to a fine not exceeding five million rand or imprisonment for a period not exceeding five years, and in the case of a second or subsequent conviction, to a fine not exceeding ten million rand or imprisonment for a period not exceeding 10 years, or in both instances to both such fine and such imprisonment, respectively.

As the SA weather service amendment bill is so outrageous and wrong, I just sent the following letter to the parliament, just in time for the public hearing, that I will attend January 17 and 18:

I heavily object to the new weather service amendment bill and ask parliament to review essential clauses to understand what this bill does to any legitimate competitor to South African Weather Service (SAWS) or their licensing customers:

• South African might become the first country in the world where there is a state guaranteed monopoly for weather services. In my humble opinion does South Africa not need less, but more competition to guarantee a better forecasting quality, than we currently get.
• The SAWS must by law adhere to The World Meteorological Organization Resolution 40 that urges Members to: "Strengthen their commitment to the free and unrestricted exchange of meteorological and related data and products" and specially states in Annex 3 "The purpose of these guidelines is to further improve the relationship between NMSs and the commercial sector. The development of the exchange of meteorological and related information depends greatly upon sound, fair, transparent, and stable relations between these two sectors.". This bill clearly does NOT help fair relations between SAWS and private competition!
• The bill does not define "Severe weather warning". SAWS can use to scare clients by way of fine if they use any other forecast service other than SAWS and thereby creating a monopoly. Also, what would be considered "false" information? There is no 100% accurate weather forecast.
• SAWS already acts and markets themselves as "The ONLY accurate source of SA weather" and take a very similar stance when negotiating with third parties over licensing terms. Their self-conception is NOT matched by their accuracy and I hope to bring some fresh competitive comparison with me to the parliamentary hearing next week.
• The insertion of Clause 28A is also of great concern. The minister can change the act without going through parliment. Really not fair since this can change legislation even further to keep competitors out.

The offenses clause and clause 28A in the Bill needs to be removed and I ask parliament to rethink the current policy on "one single authoritative voice" in regards to severe weather warnings.

kind regards,
Randolf Jorberg
owner of weather.co.za

People who know me, know that I'm 1. into domain names (owning quite some .co.za them, not only weather.co.za, (fly-)nationwide.co.za and runner.co.za and 2. into stats so I wanted to share some findings that I found to be pretty interesting.

Previous stats on SA webhosting marketshare had a serious flaw: it covered only 70,000 COM, NET, ORG, BIZ, INFO domains, that were hosted in South Africa while my research covers all 643,453 .co.za domain names, that are registered as of June 1st, 2011. My research does also include .co.za domains hosted overseas, as many clients avoid local companies and use cheap international webhosting companies with unlimited bandwidth offerings.

See the 50 biggest co.za domain hosting Companies:

I published the full list of the 50 biggest domain hosting companies / nameservers on http://randolf.jorberg.com/web-hosting-south-africa/ and I intend to update it regularly.

Methodology: This research is based on the number of .co.za domains registered to your nameservers. If you are a reseller or you are using someone elses nameservers I have no way of finding out about you. While my research covered the 100 most frequently used nameservers, I might have missed some nameservers from companies whose aggregated numbers would've made it to the list. I found companies with up to five nameserver-sets but I can't guarantee completeness of my current list. I ask companies or clients who notice that there's a discrepancy to their own count that you contact me and I'll update the data ASAP.

Through Alex Fraser and Roger Norton from the awesome Silicon Cape initiative I received an invitation to an Angel Groups seminar by Craig Mullett from the Branison Group at the UCT Graduate School of Business in Cape Town. The seminar focused on the research topic of bridging the missing middle in entrepreneurial finance in South Africa through developing angel investor networks. It gave an overview of the research on how these groups work in the USA as well as research ideas on how this could be done in South Africa and I'm happy that I was given permission to publish it here on my blog:

Angel groups in South Africa (PDF Download)

CHICAGO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Groupon (http://www.groupon.com) announces the launch of Groupon India, Groupon Israel and Groupon South Africa via acquisition of daily deal sites SoSasta (http://www.sosasta.com), Grouper (http://www.grouper.co.il) and Twangoo (http://www.twangoo.co.za), respectively. Terms of the deals were not disclosed. [...]
The acquisitions continue Groupon’s rapid global growth and extend its reach across India, the Middle East and South Africa. In just three months since launch, SoSasta has grown to run daily deals in 11 Indian cities. Serving Tel Aviv and surrounding cities since March 2010, Grouper is widely recognized as the first and largest deal site in Israel. Twangoo has rapidly grown to serve the most cities of any deal site in South Africa. All three sites will transition to the Groupon brand name and site design in coming months, and will serve deals in the local communities’ primary languages: English in India and South Africa and Hebrew in Israel.

To my best knowledge my blog post "Groupon to launch in South Africa in cooperation with Twangoo" dated December 17th was the first public posting about the Twangoo/Groupon connection and I got quite some interesting follow-up conversation with industry people that indicated the takeover deal that was finally announced today.

Groupon South Africa now looks at a launch from a market leader position, but they might face special problems, they yet have to solve:

- groupon.co.za is currently owned by competiting dailydeal-site wicount and they might face the same problem they're currently facing in Australia: they offered the local domain owners "about $286,000 for the Groupon.com.au domain and trademark" but only got a counter-offer to buy the whole competing business in a package deal. Now that Groupon was stupid enough to publicly value their own brand-typo-domain, I'm interested to hear what might happen if Wicount goes the same route. Will Groupon go to court about the very essential domain name groupon.co.za or will they simply put cash on the table and possibly buy the whole Wicount business ending up with two local companies?

The launch of Groupon in South Africa was to be expected, as there are currently many Groupon clones starting up on the South African market. While the whole technology is operated by Groupon Europe GmbH out of Berlin, there is one surprise to be found:

mycitydeal.co.za is a service of:
Groupon South Africa
office at Boulevard Office Park, Block G, Ground Floor
Searle Street, Woodstock
Cape Town 8001

Phone: 0844 879 2888
e-mail: info(at)mycitydeal.co.za

Director: Christopher Muhr

Responsible for the content of this website: Twangoo South Africa PTY Ltd.

Groupon seems to cooperate with one of their clones when it comes to the sales side of operations instead of setting up their own local sales force: To me this is somehow surprising, as Twangoo (part of a group of global groupon clones) is a direct competitor to Groupon in the South African market and I wonder who's going to get the better deals or if both platforms will see identical deals every day... Maybe this is also a sign that Groupon and Groupon Europe (that started as citydeal.de and were just aquired by Groupon a few months ago) are getting closer to other clones and think about aquiring Twangoo soon?

Just some thoughts for clarity: Do you really think Groupon is a viable business model and yet another clone is going to succeed? Livingsocial CEO clarifies the real cost of building your own Dailydeal site in this video and I think that a quick exit may be the only really profitable way out. But seeing that Google did NOT buy Groupon (and I highly doubt that 6 billion was ever offered by them!) there may be less options than you hope there are...

There are many group buying sites that were started in the last few months in South Africa. I don't think that many of them will be live a few months down the road...

I spoke to an officer in charge and he told me the whale is a Southern right whale, weighting 'only' 15 tons and he had between 9-10 meters in length, before he broke into three pieces when they initially tried lifting him out of the water. The whale was dead for a couple of days already, which you could certainly smell, when you were close as we were...

Reportedly brokering 50,000 flight bookings a month on the South African Travelstart platform alone, Travelstart is a travel giant on the tiny e-commerce market of South Africa and I do seriously hope that this is not the last positive news we hear from this travel powerhouse, operating from Cape Town.

Update: after receiving confirmation and further details from Stephan via this comment, I rewrote the posting and clarified the separation between Travelstart Europe and Travelstart South Africa. Official confirmation can be found on the Travelstart blog where they confirm: "The deal means that Travelstart.co.za will own the rights to the global Travelstart brand, and that eTraveli takes over the European brand management and all its operations there."

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:

If you can't make it I'm sure I'll see at least all Online Marketing Junkies of you at this months 27dinner

This site is just a semi-temporary solution while we're taking time to develop the final Weather site with international weather data, mobile access, widgets, email subscriptions, RSS feeds, and much more but this will take some months and we wanted to build a useful site until we're ready with the final site. Weather.co.za is already visited by more than 400 Visitors every day. This is why we bought the site saweather.co.za and used their code and developed it into the current site.

We'd be happy to see you using and liking our first Weather site and welcome feedback in the comments or on the weather.co.za WeatherSA Facebook page.

We've currently got the weather data for these cities and places in South Africa:

Alexander Bay, Aliwal North, Badplaas, Beaufort West, Bela-Bela, Bethlehem, Bhisho, Bloemfontein, Calvinia, Cape Point, Cape Town, Cape Town International Airport, Clanwilliam, Cradock, De Aar, Durban, London Airport, East London, Ermelo, Excelsior, Fauresmith, Ficksburg, Fort Beaufort, George, Giants Castle, Graaff-Reinet, Grabouw, Grahamstown, Graskop, Groblersdal, Hermanus, Ixopo, Johannesburg, Johannesburg OR Tambo Airport, Joubertina, Kimberley, Klerksdorp, Kokstad, Komatidraai, Kroonstad, Kuruman, Ladysmith, Lephalale, Levubu, Lydenburg, Mafikeng, Malmesbury, Margate, Mokopane, Mooiriver, Mthatha, Musina, Nelspruit, Newcastle, Ngqura, Oudtshoorn, Paarl, Phalaborwa, Piet Retief, Pietermaritzburg, Plettenberg Bay, Polokwane, Port Elizabeth, Postmasburg, Potchefstroom, Pretoria, Queenstown, Richards Bay, Riversdale, Rustenburg, Sasolburg, Skukuza, Slangkop, Springbok, St. Lucia Estuary, Standerton, Stilbaai, Strand, Sutherland, Taung, Thabazimbi, Thohoyandou, Tzaneen, Uitenhage, Ulundi, Underberg, Upington, Vereeniging, Vredendal, Vryburg, Vryheid, Welkom, Witbank, Worcester.

Please report if your place is missing in this list.