I remember once, out with a friend for dinner, ranting about the hectic day I’ve had. About the different difficult users I’ve had to deal with, when they suddenly jumped in and asked: “Do these people actually pay to use your site?”

I must say, this was rather deflating. I mean, why was I doing what I do, when there is no direct monetary value attached to it? But it’s a very simple business equation really: Traffic = Advertisers = Profit.

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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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One thing the 20fourLabs team is great at is moaning, the other thing they are even better at is delivering results. So after much whining (Marian) and whingeing (Marquin) – five of our guys once again presented interesting and informative sites and applications and got the rest of us all fired up for another month of creating cool sh*t!
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Any article on the transition from print media to digital is bound to have mixed responses. I myself am slightly more inclined toward print, mainly because I’m a book and comic book geek. I enjoy the crispness of the a good book or magazine or even the weekend newspaper.
Coupled with woolly socks, donuts and my cuppa jo on a cold Sunday morning on the couch, and it’s pure literary bliss. … Continue Reading

So it was THAT time of the month again when a few hapless victims were dragged onto the sacrificial speaking stone to share with us what has inspired and motivated them lately.

Our speakers this week, by choice or coercion… were
Niekie, Guy, Charl and Abubakr
The topics ranged from visual data representation to methodologies to clever search tools and cunning communication applications
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We recently celebrated a birth at 20FourLabs - the birth of our newly revamped and rebranded blogging engine, Letterdash.

The launch was a culmination of an intensive gestation period, during which Letterdash’s much loved but now outdated predecessor (24.com Blogs) was completely overhauled. Our emphasis was on maintaining the functionality that our blogging community had come to love while giving them more freedom to customise their pages.
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http://chemistry.20fourlabs.com

20fourLabs is an R&D division, and as part of the R in R&D we decided to play around with Social Engine to see what the leading networking applications are offering and how users interact with them.

So we purchased a license and some plug-ins and started playing.
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The mad scientists at 20FourLabs have given the 24.com blogging system a complete facelift, a new name and snuck in some tasty new features as well.

Feast your eyes on the new logo for the 24.com blogs, now named Letterdash

Launching tonight!
LAUNCHED!!!
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in the next few months we’re going to be delivering on a really cool Project.
i am not going to mention the name or what we are doing etc, because i think it is still a “secret”.
part of the process for the Project is that we need to decide on a technology/technologies that will we use in delivering what the Business needs (aka wants).

the hard part about making such decisions is that they tend to be biased by your own experience or preferences. a very real example of this would be: “let’s use Python for the system because it is … (you can fill in your own reason here)”. … Continue Reading