Mandy de Waal

*Have you seen our client's new blog?

*AKA: The Buzz Saw Slices into (rhymes with anecdotal but has only two syllables) Media... "Mmmmeeeeeeeooooooooowww!"

Ah. Just imagine THE SCENE: A chi chi office some where in the shadow of Table Mountain.

THE PLAYERS: Account executives scratching their heads about how to rationalise the big budget the client is paying for their services.

PR1: "Um. Laaaaik. Sheesh. Um."

PR2: "Cough. Cough."

PR3: "Why don't we just make them a blag site?"

PR1: "Nooit. Like a dinkum, full on interactive blag? Man, that's like revolutionary!"

PR2: "Holy shit PR3... a blag launch release could mean at least 20 billable hours."

PR3: "And we could charge them for creating and maintaining the blag at Wordpress.com."

PR1: "Nooit. You're a friggin' genius. We can now call ourselves us social networking media blagging experts and afford that holiday in Plett."

THE PUNCHLINE: The release. Below. Hold the presses folks...

PRESS RELEASE - BLOG SUSTAINS OUT OF HOME ADVERTISING CONVERSATION

Cape Town, 26 October 2009: Advertising professionals need to be on top of their game by being kept strategically informed on the likes of trends, tips and global campaigns in out of home advertising. xxxxxxxxxxx South Africa have done this with their interactive blog, www.oohsa.co.za , that not only inspires creative professionals by showcasing their latest work but gives insights to consumer responses to many of the 500 types of out of home advertising methods used in South Africa. 

Consumers spend over half of their days away from their homes according to OCS, the recent out of home consumer survey, thus entrenching the importance of out of home advertising, especially when it comes to getting it right first time.

“Much has been written about out of home advertising but the industry is dynamic and is constantly evolving,” said Ms Isigntheretainercheques Client, Managing Director, xxxxxxxxxxx South Africa, “Social media is a platform that everyone is using as a communication stream and this is by far the best source of current information that everyone can rely on. Our out of home advertising blog is an area where knowledge and learnings (sic) can be shared between marketing professionals.”

xxxxxxxxxxx South Africa is the leader in OOH in the country and has uniquely developed tools that add insight and value to the OOH industry. OOH includes billboards, digital networks, commuter media, brand activation, point of sale and sampling amongst others. It excludes TV, radio, print, online and cinema.

- ends -

For more information contact: PR1, PR2 or or PR 3 at rhymes with anecdotal but has only two syllables)Media.

Notes to Editors [MdW comment. Wow guys. You gotta love that optimisim. You really think a newspaper editor will read this far?]. xxxxxxxxxxx is the world’s largest out-of-home communications agency, with offices in 21 countries.  As a division of Xxxx Group PLC, the world’s leading marketing communications group, xxxxxxxxxxx is at the vanguard of cutting edge developments in out-of-home (OOH) such as digital, interactivity and experiential. In South Africa, xxxxxxxxxxx’s mission is to grow OOH to 10% market share of total advertising spend in the next 5 years (currently sitting at 4.6%). At present, the company has approximately 20% of South Africa’s OOH spend under its management, positioning xxxxxxxxxxx as an influential leader in this fast growing category. By helping clients understand what consumers are thinking and how they are spending their time, and by enabling them to communicate with consumers at the right moments and in the best way, xxxxxxxxxxx leads the way in enhancing the effectiveness of campaigns and increasing the media value that advertisers achieve. Furthermore, xxxxxxxxxxx has developed PRISM Benchmark, Forecast and Creative, a proprietary set of tools that ensures that xxxxxxxxxxx delivers the best price against tracked market movements gaining further advantage for their clients, whilst allowing them the opportunity of seeing their “Creative Design” in situ, pre-campaign. No one in this sector offers greater accountability than xxxxxxxxxxx.

Ms Isigntheretainercheques Client – Managing Director: Ms I. Client has unsurpassed experience and expertise in the marketing, advertising and media industries in South Africa. In 2003 she founded xxxxxxxxxxx – South Africa’s Out of Home communications agency – which she later sold to Xxxx, who own xxxxxxxxxxxe. Following xxxxxxxxxxx’s conversion to xxxxxxxxxxx South Africa, Isigntheretainercheques maintained her helm as the Managing Director. Prior to this, she was a founding partner in Big Name Agency (South Africa’s most successful strategy agency). Isigntheretainercheques’ other achievements include running the XYZ Media School in Cape Town, the role of Media Director of Another Big Name Agency South Africa, and the Head of Strategy for Biggest Name Agency Cape Town. Ms Client has continuously shown exceptional abilities as a leader in the OOH sector of the media industry and as one of South Africa’s top businesswomen, receiving numerous awards, which have further entrenched her prominence in the media/advertising trade.

A year of writing

As expected Jarred Cinman pulled no punches during his talk at the 24.com's bloggers workshop. Speaking about "the fetishising of reality" Cinman's talk in part explored the epidemic of narcissism that's been fueled by social media. Also great to meet Saul Kropman and Vincent Maher for the first time. Kropman's talk on podcasting was very useful and basically gave bloggers all the information they needed to set up for podcasts on the fly. Kropman swears by Audacity and The Levelator. I've saved my presentation on SlideShare and it is free for download for anyone who's interested:

"My Year Of Writing" Media24 Blog Workshop

View more presentations from mandydewaal.

The secret to joyful living

I don’t get people who say they don’t want to get hurt. Who close themselves off to pain. Who do this because they maintain the only way to live a life that is scary and dangerous is to find safety in shelter and protection from risk. Who live an avoidance that amounts to a small, harbored existence.

To hell with that! Johnny Cash is singing right now and he knew. Although he was a Christian he understood a lot about life and suffering, more so when he was singing Nine Inch Nails:

“I hurt myself today
To see if I still feel
I focus on the pain
The only thing that's real.”

Lately I have been obsessed with Nietzsche who said: "The secret of a joyful life is to live dangerously." Imagine that. Joy. Bliss. Easily found out there in the darkness, on the edge, strewn abundantly across a pioneering path. That happiness lives breathing deeply in discovery. That you meet it again and again in great adventure where there is no full stop because you never see the end. In heroic gnosis where one wades ever fully into perpetual experience to encounter deepening truths.

My friend and fellow writer Alasdair Cameron can’t sleep so he’s been reading “A Devil's Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love”. This is a book of remarkable essays written by Richard Dawkins. Al tells me of one called “The Joy of Living Dangerously: Sanderson of Oundle.” In this essay Dawkins tells us to forget about the exams and the league tables. He says that real education is about: “the power of knowledge and the thrill of discovery.”

In this essay Frederick William Sanderson (1857-1922) who intuitively knew how the best life was lived is quoted by Dawkins as saying:

"I agree with Nietzsche that 'The secret of a joyful life is to live dangerously.' A joyful life is an active life - it is not a dull, static state of so-called happiness. Full of the burning fire of enthusiasm, anarchic, revolutionary, energetic, daemonic, Dionysian, filled to overflowing with the terrific urge to create - such is the life of the man who risks safety and happiness for the sake of growth and happiness."

Sanderson’s own words are a living and liberating tribute to a headmaster who demanded that laboratories be left unlocked so the boys at Oundle School could explore unfettered and unsupervised. During Sanderson’s time the school library was never locked. One of the school boys – now a man – speaks about being discovered in that library in the dead of the night by his headmaster.

Instead of booming admonishment Sanderson sat down next to him and nudged him deeper into adventure: “He began to talk to me of discovery and the values of discovery, the incessant reaching out of men towards knowledge and power, the significance of this desire to know and make and what we in the school were doing in that process. We talked, he talked for nearly an hour in that still nocturnal room. It was one of the greatest, most formative hours in my life...”

As I read Dawkin’s essay and marvel at Sanderson, Johnny Cash is singing:

“Everyone I know
Goes away in the end
You could have it all
My empire of dirt
I will let you down
I will make you hurt”

This song, Sanderson and Dawkin’s essay is a reminder of how little we know about life. How the most dangerous people are the most certain. Those who would have us believe or have faith in how the story should unravel or end. That the most foolish people are those who keep themselves in the dark for fear of pain or suffering or experiencing disappointment. This despite the startling truth that all of life’s inevitable miseries will find us all, no matter where we seek to hide.

It makes me certain that great men and women are those who live fearlessly knowing that their hearts will be broken countless times as they wade deeper and deeper into delicious discovery. That the greatest people are those who know this secret and inspire others to live its indisputable truth. The libertarians who encourage bright young minds to recklessly ransack the world’s wisdom and burn their fingers on the blistering heat of experience.

For who can sincerely and authentically offer another protection from hurt? It is coming to get us all regardless of whether we hide or live fully with courage and curiosity, craving the great adventure.

“Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.” Let’s run into truth, wisdom and experience and live like heroes before we’re dead.

Free for all brawl

When Chris Anderson launched his book Free – The Past and Future of a Radical Price, it sparked a 'clash of the titans'. The world's top intellects thrashed out the 'freeconomics' debate in what was little more than a civilised brawl. A lot was at stake given that the debate centred on the Internet and its influence on economics as we know it.

The Wired editor and author of New York Times bestseller The Long Tail believes giving consumers something free can be a great moneymaking business model. In Free, he supports this by advising that anything digital is on a direct glide path to being free.

“In many instances, businesses can profit more from giving things away than they can by charging for them,” says Anderson, who adds: “Google offers nearly a hundred products... almost all of them are free of charge. Really free – no trick. It does it the way any modern digital company should: by handing out a lot of things to make money on a few.”

Not so simple
Malcolm Gladwell didn't agree and delivered a very public blow in his book review for The New Yorker:

“There are four strands of argument here: a technological claim (digital infrastructure is effectively free), a psychological claim (consumers love free), a procedural claim (free means never having to make a judgment), and a commercial claim (the market created by the technological free and the psychological free can make you a lot of money). The only problem is that in the middle of laying out what he sees as the new business model of the digital age, Anderson is forced to admit that one of his main case studies, YouTube, 'has so far failed to make any money for Google'.

“Why is that? Because of the very principles of free that Anderson so energetically celebrates. When you let people upload and download as many videos as they want, lots of them will take you up on the offer. That's the magic of free psychology: an estimated seventy-five billion videos will be served up by YouTube this year. Although the magic of free technology means that the cost of serving up each video is “close enough to free to round down”, “close enough to free” multiplied by seventy-five billion is still a very large number. A recent report by Credit Suisse estimates that YouTube's bandwidth costs in 2009 will be three hundred and sixty million dollars. In the case of YouTube, the effects of technological free and psychological free work against each other.”

The spat played out in the media, with Anderson striking back at Gladwell through his blog at Wired Magazine and on The Charlie Rose Show. Here Anderson flat out said that Gladwell didn't understand Google's business model:

“Malcolm would say it's all a Ponzi scheme, it's all a bubble, and that sooner or later, bandwidth bills are going to come in and all these companies are going to go bust.

“Malcolm doesn't understand that Google doesn't buy bandwidth retail. They have wholesale, they're buying dark fibre. They have server farms the size of printing plants. They're massive... They're losing a lot less money than people think and I suspect they'll break even with YouTube this year.

“So, not only is it not a bubble, but I think that as the advertising industry learns to take the video ads that work so well on television and fine slice them so they're super granular, the way the video is on YouTube, that we're going to see an economic engine that's powerful.”

Taking sides
Seth Godin added his weight to Anderson's camp with a blog called “Malcolm is wrong”, saying that "like all dying industries, the old perfect businesses will whine, criticise, demonise and, most of all, lobby for relief. It won't work. The big reason is simple: In a world of free, everyone can play.”

So who's wrong and who's right?

The Times Online declared Gladwell the overall winner, but said Gladwell's review was more of a demolition job. The media then astutely stated that both men are journalists, successful authors and are vying for the same audience. Gladwell and Anderson are the storytellers for our time, and have captured the popular and business imagination to make them the world's leading theorists.

Regardless of Gladwell's attack and apparent subjugation of Anderson, Free is worth the read, and not only because you can get Free for free in various formats (iTunes audio, Kindle and Google Books) or by going to Anderson's blog The Long Tail.

Buckland's second act

Matthew Buckland commands envy and respect. Envy because he's created a remarkable career for himself, captured the limelight, and been a driving force behind some of South Africa's more spectacular Web stories. More often he's respected because of a steady stream of successes, and the contribution he's made to the local industry during the past 15 years.

And the hard work is paying off. The former Mail & Guardian poster boy has stepped onto a global platform at Naspers, with the kind of mandate any member of the local digerati would have given their right arm for.

As the head of 20FourLabs, a division he founded, Buckland has his greatest opportunity in what will also be his biggest challenge to date. Buckland will be pressed to deliver if his career at Naspers will flourish. Not shy about bringing down the axe on non-performing human resource, Naspers has a ruthless reputation for culling staff when they get in the way of profitability and shareholder returns.
Fresh-faced

I caught up with Buckland as he edged towards his 200th day in his 'new' job. The first thing we chatted about was 20FourLabs, which has amalgamated of some of 24.com's top talent into an inventive, entrepreneurial hub, as well as bringing in fresh new talent.

“We recognised that as a major player in the Web industry, we needed to be more agile and nimbler when it came to developing Web applications and Web sites. Big organisations tend to generate quite a bit of bureaucracy that is often a necessary evil, but limits a business' ability to innovate and be experimental. However, in this market, you see a lot of innovation coming from start-ups. At 20FourLabs, we want to capture some of that mindset and culture.”

Not adverse to risk, Naspers' investment strategy in emerging markets like China is yielding strong results, with the likes of Tencent contributing R1.2 billion to the group's earnings for 2009. However, recent discussions with Internet division head Antonie Roux shows that the pipeline for growth by acquisition or investment has been badly affected by the recession. Although share prices have dropped, good companies are sweating out the storm. In view of this, an internal hub that can spark start-ups, seed inventions and inject innovation into the wider group makes great sense if it delivers to mandate.
Fear factor

“Innovation is all about not having a fear to experiment and not having a fear to fail,” says Buckland. “From a business perspective, you need an environment where the cost of failure is low. If the cost of failure is high, this stifles innovation. If the cost of failure is low, then you have much more experimental activity. The focus we use is to create Web applications where the process is not over-complicated. We're using open source resources; we don't over plan, and build iteratively. We're not afraid of plugging into another Web site's API, and don't shy away from aggregating content from other sites,” says Buckland.

Since creating 20FourLabs, Buckland's biggest lesson has been the benefit of simplicity, and understanding the different phases that products go through. “Fewer people are more effective in the emergent phases of products, so we start off with a small team to incubate. Only when we see traction do we take the decision to build the start-up into a much bigger business. The philosophy here is less is more.”

The team of 30 people, which includes the 'wunderkids' from Naspers' Blueworld Communities acquisition, has been mandated to ignite the start-up flair and entrepreneurial culture within the bigger media group. The lab is also busy building apps and extensions for existing Naspers offerings.

“The Web is levelling the playing field, and it's cheaper and easier than ever to create your own business and to create your own media online,” says Buckland. “What this means is that the Web – more than any other industry – is an entrepreneurial medium. Here you often find smaller and nimbler start-ups beating slower corporations because they lack agility.”

A key focus for the lab will be mobile, given the reach of this medium. “We're looking at local and international products and start-ups, and our focus is on social projects, because these enable us to build audience in a viral manner. We're working on aggregation and user generation content projects, as well as multi-media projects, because this is the next phase of the local Web, which has, up until now, been an under-performing area,” adds Buckland.
Flirting for fun

What has Buckland delivered in the past four months?

One of the lab's first start-ups is a mobile flirting and dating site called Flirtaroo.mobi. “Flirting and dating sites are social networks where there is a settled business model, and users actually want payment mechanisms to keep the quality of the social network up. The business model is a 'freemium' model, with micro payments that are SMS-based. What's interesting about the offering is that it is locative.” Buckland says on Flirtaroo.mobi, people can find friends within a certain location. “The offering includes messaging, profiling and will be cross-platform. It was launched for mobile but a Web version is imminent.”

iPhone apps and a Nokia widget has been built for News24, while an Android App was launched for News24, Sport24 and other related content sites. Then 24.com blogs were relaunched, getting a much-needed upgrade. “24.com's blogs had become dated and were very basic. They needed a complete overhaul. We introduced LetterDash.com with templating for users, more intuitive navigation, and features where users can promote their blog. In the pipeline, a more sophisticated dashboard and the ability to combine social networking with blogging. The aim here is to add a social networking layer onto LetterDash, and develop relationships between bloggers and their readers. We have made some revenue off the platform, but it hasn't been significant. We'll only aggressively pursue a business model once we're happy with usability and audience numbers. When we do look at monetising blogs, this will include giving users a cut.”

Buckland says the biggest project they've tackled is an aggregator-cum-social network called “The Hub”.

“This is essentially a social network wrapped around a content site, which is currently in development. Content publications have natural networks around them, but traditionally do a bad job of formalising those networks. For example, Facebook and I have a sophisticated relationship because it knows all about me, but if I go to CNN.com they don't know who I am, and when or why I was there. The idea is to build a social network around content sites that capture and formalise that network, allowing us to provide a richer experience with targeted content and services, but also to allow users to connect with each other. Our initial focus will be to create a better experience for the user who will be able to broadcast and interact with other users more meaningfully. The second will be to monetise the relationship with these communities.”

Other projects include j2me apps, a new mobile portal, revamping 24.com's mobile offerings, a local Twitter aggregator, a niche social network maker, and a personalised homepage offering.

Given Naspers' online and mobile focus in key emerging markets, this creates a much bigger platform for Buckland to step up to the plate. Creating an innovation hub at Naspers was his first clever move. Delivering quickly and smartly, his second.

Originally commissioned by ITWeb.

The Copyright Wars

"We, as a society, can't kill this new form of creativity. We can only criminalize it. We can't stop our kids from using the technologies we give them to remix the culture around them. We can only drive that remix underground." – Laurence Lessig

You’ve got to love Lawrence Lessig. Academic, activist and founding member of Creative Commons, Lessig’s book - “Remix. Making art and commerce thrive in the hybrid economy” – speaks to how copyright law and lawyers are killing professional and amateur art. It’s about how antiquated legalese that has no appreciation of social networks, is threatening to destroy the cultural wave driven by the digital tsunami.

Lessig calls for copyright law to be updated given the birth and rise of the remix culture. In remix culture music, movies, photographs and other arts form the spark for creativity, collaboration, integration and sharing. A term coined by copyright activists ‘remix culture’ is the concept used to describe a community that encourages derivative work. According to Lessig remix drives growth, his mantra being that the assimilation and transformation of thoughts and ideas drive progress and wealth creation in societies.

The proof of this lives in China’s massive economy. A thriving example of remix culture in action, the Chinese government has aggressively promoted the ideology of ‘harmony’ in recent years. This in stark contrast to Japan, a country that is staunchly nationalist and insular. Leveraging an old Confucius teaching, valuing harmony speaks to a respect and acceptance of other’s differences, and the promotion of diversity. Professor Sun Shijin from Fudan University Mentality Research Centre explains this notion of ‘harmony’ by saying: “Chinese culture is soft and resilient, we absorb and digest what is good from other countries and yet we synthesize it with Chinese fundamentals…. Harmony is how we enhance ourselves by synthesizing one another’s differences.”

Magdalena Wong, CEO of Added Value, China says the reason why China is more successful than Korea or Japan is because the Chinese are very receptive to the outside world. The marketing insight specialist maintains that because of this sense of ‘harmony’ the Chinese are not protectionist. They feel that many products, services and ideas from the West are better than those found in China. As a nation they try to get what is good from other countries, and better it. Wong says China has a culture of ‘copy and learn’. “If you are not good at something, you throw it away,” says Wong. “We have a copy mentality. We don’t see taking ideas and bettering them as fake. We just see it as copying and improving. We don’t feel a shame in copying, or feel that we are not creating or innovating.”

China holds many lessons for the West, and a copying or remix culture is just one of them. This as the West declares war on younger generations because they sample or take, remake and share. Western capitalism has created a ‘read-only’ culture where media monoliths sell in a one way stream to an audience they think are passive consumers. The digital revolution has turned this on its head and spawned a new bread of creative consumer activists that download and manipulate, giving birth to viral sensations.

Lessig contends that the lawyers and the artists can make peace in a hybrid economy, the likes of which is being pioneered by Youtube. However this means that lawyers may make less money from huge corporations that threaten teenagers who mash up the latest manga sensation or post a picture of Harry Potter on their Web site. The fact that lawyers will be earning less - I’m sure that’s something we’ll all learn to live with.

Remix
Making art and commerce thrive in the hybrid economy
By Lawrence Lessig
Publication: October 2008
Paperback: 352 pages
ISBN: 978-1408113479
Download a free PDF of this book

Fearless & peerless

One of the most relevant, credible and real voices in South Africa today. The FM's Barney Mthombothi:

"What's lacking in our public discourse is any attempt to explain how power, or the exercise of it, has changed so many of the activists who went into government hoping to use power to better the lot of their people. Instead, power has in fact alienated them from that constituency. How can they continue to speak on behalf of the poor even as they run away from them to live behind boomed gates in the suburbs?"

Regulatory Rot - The Icasa Crisis

As communications technology becomes more complex and regulatory processes more dense, Icasa is in more of a mess than ever.

Walking into the Sandton offices of the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (Icasa) tells you more than you need to know about the regulator. There are dead flowers at reception and the distinct smell of stale food infused with industrial cleaner at the stairwell.

Upstairs, litter lies on the lobby floor, below a notice board haphazardly plastered with government notices. Before reaching Paris Mashile’s office, we pass yet another dying bouquet.

Mashile looks weather-beaten. Lately he’s battled cellular operators about shoddy service levels, faced fallout from the Vodacom debacle, and had a scuffle with the media over being ‘quoted out of context’.

“Business is nothing but warfare,” says Mashile. “How do I defeat my enemy? How can I achieve my objectives? How am I going to win the war?”

If it’s been war, Icasa is licking its wounds. A sustained period of talent poaching has left the regulator weak, with industry pointing fingers at delays, missed time frames, a lack of capacity and exhausting regulatory processes.

“Look at all of the delays and incomplete processes. These reflect a lack of institutional capacity created by the regulator’s revolving door,” says Alison Gillwald, associate director of economic policy centre The Edge Institute. “The lateness of the turnaround on the Vodacom listing leaves a clear impression of an organisation without all of its ducks in a row.”

A strongly outspoken critic of Icasa’s performance, Gillwald points to a number of incomplete regulatory processes. These include the regulator’s public hearing processes, interconnection rates, essential facilities, and licensing components that are incomplete because of delays.

“I don’t think the telecommunications operators deliberately poach talent to make it difficult for the regulator, but it would be crazy for them not to exploit any kind of strategic advantage to improve their bottom line. This has hurt the regulator and is certainly one of the contributing factors to the lack of institutional capacity and ability to regulate effectively.”

Delays, delays and more delays
Former Icasa councillor and executive head of regulatory affairs for Neotel, Dr Tracy Cohen, begs to differ: “It is a well-known global strategy to poach and delay. This yields certain benefits, but we have got to a point where the delay is only of benefit to certain larger companies. Most in industry would rather have matters finalised so that there is regulatory certainty.”

Cohen, who was poached from Icasa last August, talks about a ‘four d’ strategy in the industry which goes: ‘Delay. Deny. Debate. Deliver.’ “If the environment does not benefit you, then part of your strategy would be to delay the environment. Only if it benefits you, would you seek resolution,” she says.

Icasa has suffered badly by being a training ground for industry. The regulator haemorrhaged talent in 2006 when a mass exodus of senior staff saw more than half of its top brass leave. The same year witnessed the suspension of CEO Jackie Manche, who was charged with transgressing the Public Finance Management Act. Charges were dropped after her resignation in 2007. Icasa head-hunted Karabo Motlana from Cell C with the specific mandate to clean up the mess.

“We stemmed the tide. We used to haemorrhage but the turnover has minimised,” says Mashile, who adds that staff turnover is less than 20 percent, which compares well with the industry average. “The salary structures have been reviewed and the environment is more conducive to people wanting to work for the organisation,” he says.

Icasa also invests more heavily in training now, with three percent of employee salaries earmarked for up-skilling. The problem is systemic

“There was a problem that Icasa couldn’t retain staff because salaries were low, but my understanding is that the salaries have benchmarked equal to, or above, what industry is paying,” says Cohen. “It can’t be a salary issue but rather about an issue of creating a work environment or career path conducive to retaining talent. It may also have to do with job satisfaction.

“There are some incredibly skilled individuals at Icasa, so the question must be around work fl ow design and systems. There are no frameworks for turnaround times or operating levels, which has always been a problem. This is a public sector issue, and quite frankly it is not good enough to say the organisation is based on ‘Batho Pele Principles’. Sometimes processes take so long they get bypassed in terms of relevance.”

Cohen adds that by simply targeting quick wins the regulator could make major strides:

“The regulator has to decide which processes must be prioritised. There are a number of processes which, if brought to resolution, would be major wins. If it just resolved the interconnection fees and access regime it would have a huge impact on the industry and on consumers. What is needed is a smarter, leaner operation. I don’t buy the lack of skills argument; it is about how the skills meet with the systems, or lack there of, at the regulator.”

Tough life
Life isn’t going to get easier for Icasa. The increasing complexity of communications technology has contributed directly to regulatory density at a time when Icasa has lurched into a reputation crisis. The Vodacom disaster saw industry allegations of government meddling with the regulator, while economists and analysts called for heads to roll.

“Regulation and policy is becoming increasingly complex,” says Dr Andrew Barendse, group executive of regulatory affairs at Telkom and an associate professor at the LINK Centre at Wits University. “In South Africa you were very lucky five years ago if you got one draft regulation every six months. Now you are dealing with four regulations every month out of the Electronic Communications Act alone that you need to have written and oral submissions for. Often this requires technical analysis, legal analysis, financial analysis and consultation with a range of specialists, including engineers and specialist regulatory economists.”

“The environment is complex, changing and the demands are going to grow,” says Luci Abrahams, director of the LINK Centre. “Delays are unacceptable because they have a stifling effect on our economy in many, many ways. They have a crippling effect on the small enterprise sector.

All sectors rely on ICT in the same way that they rely on electricity or roads, so when Icasa adopts a certain position it is not only the ICT sector that suffers, but the broader economy. There are knock-on effects all the way down to the banking, finance, automotive, commercial and retail sectors. Each is affected by the decisions the regulator makes. What is certain is that Icasa needs to be reinvented.”

Barendse says that capacity problems at Icasa have directly affected investment in the ICT sector. “The regulator has two fundamental roles. To stimulate competition and enable sufficient investment in the sector, and when the regulator does not have the resources it generally affects the second role. Because there is no clarity, no consistency and no certainty for operators we tend to invest less.”

Capacity is not just a problem at Icasa, says Barendse, who believes the chaos starts upstream. “This whole thing starts with portfolio committee in parliament. Icasa can only implement what is pursuant to the ECA. If the members of parliament that formulate the policy framework are not empowered and competent then you are going to have a problem.”

Back at Icasa, Mashile spends much of his interview time detailing new systems that have been put into place to enhance efficacy and capacity.

“Whatever we do will be done non-discriminately, objectively, transparently, effectively and speedily,” says Mashile. “And we will do so without fear of favour, either from commercial interests or even from the government.”

On delays and efficiency, he says: “We are certainly flooded and we are doing our level best in that kind of environment. There are challenges there. But you cannot just have a bloated organisation, so you have to put systems in place, automate, and streamline things… you know. You can look at technological means by which you can fast-track issues.”

He declines to comment on the Vodacom process, the most damaging reputational crisis Icasa has faced this year. “The post mortem may flush out some of the challenges we have been having.”

Interview over, Mashile fiddles with his phone, saying he doesn’t know how to work the device, and leads the way out of his office, past the dead flowers.

Originally commissioned for the August issue of Brainstorm Magazine.

Dirty rotten scoundrels

The recession, lay offs and ease of accessing information drives up cyber crime.

It’s happened to someone you know. Like your friend who wanted to transfer some money out of the country to a relative. Used a money transfer service and next thing she knew all her funds were cleared out of the credit card.

Jenny Dugmore, CEO of FireID has heard quite a few of these stories and says they are becoming more commonplace: “I know of a person who had their whole access bond cleared out. They had a one time password that was sent to them by email that was intercepted. While this person was logged on they watched their money being transferred out of their account and there was nothing that could be done to stop it,” she says.

Like most industries, the global financial meltdown is affecting the cyber crime sector as well. Except what the recession is doing is feeding in more and more people who have the potential to commit fraud online. Bankers, financiers and computer experts are being laid off in droves and given they have lifestyles to maintain are using their skills for nefarious means.

No surprise then that the Internet Crime Complaint Center, a partnership between the FBI and the National White Collar Crime Center in the US, report that online crime hit a record high in 2008, increasing by 33.1% increase over the previous year.

Dino Covocsos, Founder and CEO of information security provider Telspace says that local fraud figures are likely to be higher. “At the moment it is a lot easier to commit a crime online than it is to physically commit a crime. Our clients are noticing that criminals are moving from physical robbery to the online robberies because it is easier and they are a lot less likely to be caught.”

Aside from the vast number of financial and technology experts now without jobs, another factor driving crime is the ease and pervasiveness of information. The internet’s liberation of knowledge also means that books, information, networks and shared resources on launching attacks are more readily available online. “People who have been retrenched can access this information fairly easily, it is just a matter of learning the techniques,” says Covocsos.

The biggest challenge in South Africa is trying to apprehend and bring criminals to book, and the lack of a regulator come emergency response team that helps when attacks take place. “It is extremely difficult to catch the criminals because it costs so much money, and time is needed to interact with ISPs, pick up logs and get subpoenas.” Covocsos says by that time the logs have been recycled or the criminal has moved on.

Locally there are no laws that stipulate that if a company gets broken into, this has to be declared. “This will change with new legislation and international laws that will come into effect soon. If there is a break in that affects users, organizations will be compelled to declare that the user’s information is at risk and may have been compromised. Up until now many companies haven’t disclosed breaches of security to save face.”

And until such time as those laws are passed and our country organizes a better response to online crime, the cyber fraudsters are getting away with millions.

ORIGINALLY COMMISSIONED BY BRAINSTORM MAGAZINE.

Kill Buzz slices Ramsay Media

When it comes publishing Ramsay Media are genius. The publishers of Car, Getaway and Popular Mechanics understand their audience and how to deliver a product that sells.

Sadly when it comes to spin doctoring and working with journalists they could be doing a whole lot better.

The latest Buzz to be hacked to pieces by The Buzz Saw is a little missive sent by Ramsay Media to promote the growth of one of their sites Compleat Golfer. I must say the lead paragraph of the release raised a wry smile, but for all the wrong reasons:

"There are many words to describe it: incredible, extraordinary and unparalleled are just a few that come to mind. Whatever the term, the increase in traffic to compleatgolfer.co.za  over the past two months is, quite simply, phenomenal."

Now "incredible, extraordinary and unparalleled" may describe a meteor shower hitting earth, something akin to the second coming or news just in that lasting peace has been achieved in the Middle East. But, the only thing that's "incredible, extraordinary and unparalleled" about this media release is how badly it has been written.

THE BUZZ SAW: A tribute to a couple of journalists who banded together to get their own back on public relations people and their over-love of meaningless adjectives like "leading"; "cutting edge"; "bleeding edge"; "forward thinking" and other crappy words which basically mean their clients are such boring dead beats they have to use tired, meaningless descriptors to try and buoy their brands.