I’ve always enjoyed change, they say two of life’s most stressful events are changing jobs and moving house- personally I’ve always enjoyed doing both.
We have been through some changes here at labs and I think the time has come for me to reflect on what I have personally learned from my time at 20fourlabs and 24.com in general
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It’s been a long time coming but Letterdash Phase 2 has finally arrived!
I must start off by saying that Phase 2 was really the brainchild of the great Alistair Fairweather (whose shoes have proved REALLY big to fill) and Matthew. I just had the honour of putting the wheels in motion and getting what has turned out to be a huge and wonderful improvement to our blogs, launched. … Continue Reading

Following on the success of Afridoctor winning the Nokia innovations competition, the labrats have done some planning to take the application to the next level.

Below is an edited version (for we cannot reveal all :)) of a powerpoint presentation, by myself and Blueworld’s Bradley Voges, which describes our future strategy. The original idea for Afridoctor came from wizz-kid Werner Erasmus — his idea beating 12 others in an “ideas” competition we had internally in 20FourLabs.
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It’s a funny thing about celebrities. Upon inspection their composition appears as a hybrid mix of paranormal hype, unnatural alien-like beauty and enormous amounts of purple ego goop. Furthermore, they all seem saturated in an over-abundance of wealth and fame, both of which appear to legally allow for a constant state of inebriation or raucous moments of paparazzi eye-candy. Celebs live off media coverage often exploiting their positions in society and as recent scandals have shown, I really don’t need to joostify my argument
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It’s been on the cards for a while now, and will take a while to roll out - but we are in the process of re-launching all of our mobile publishing sites, along with adding a nifty personalization layer on top.

What this means is that once you are on the site (m.news24.com) you can, by using a simple log in, choose what content you would like to have displayed on your home page.
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We’ve been busy at 20FourLabs. The division was created about 200 days ago to build new web applications, with a particular focus on social and mobile applications. There are around 30 major projects on the go, some of them mentioned here — of which around about 14 have been completed. Labs now consists of 34 talented web professionals, with a product manager and developer-centric focus, with key roles played by community managers.
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Last month at the Mobile Web Africa conference, Brett Loubser (Samsung Electronics SA product technical and support manager) did a presentation entitled: “Mobile Internet - The African Status. Device availability and Technology Considerations.”

In it he spoke about Open Mobile operating systems - such as Android and LiMo (Linux Mobile) as being key drivers for growth and innovation in Africa.
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Eran writes… In Social Media, strategy is 90% of the engagement.

There is often this type of “shotgun” approach by new people entering into the field and thinking : well it’s free! I’ll just do a bit of it all.
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You only get one shot at building your innovation into a successful business.You have to deliver something people want, need and love first time. And you have to deliver it fast.

Sketching makes that one shot really count. It adds a little time up front, but massively reduces the overall time, cost and risk of launching something new. … Continue Reading

Great news for those working  in the mobile industry in Cape Town. The Cape Town chapter of Mobile Monday - the world’s leading mobile community - launches on Monday the 9th of November and you’re invited!
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