by Arthur Goldstuck Celebrity CEO Meg Whitman grabbed the headlines at last week’s HP Global Partner Summit, but the key moment was presided over by Jim Zafarana, head of workstations. We ask him about the company’s rebirth.

From his temporary suite on the top floor of the Vdara Hotel in Las Vegas, Jim Zafarana has a clear view, not over the famed Strip, but over McCarran International Import. It is as if the excessively bright lights of Las Vegas are less of a priority than monitoring the arrivals and departures of more than 3000 HP channel partners who are descending on the city.

The Global Partner Summit 2012 represents the first time the pioneers of Silicon Valley have brought together their sales partners from across the world. And Zafarana gets to preside over the early climax of the event: the unveiling of the all-in-one, big-screen, sexy-as-big-machines-get Z1 workstation.

The event also hosts the first public address as new HP boss by celebrity CEO Meg Whitman, former head of eBay and one-time candidate for governor of California.

The key line in Whitman’s address – “We’ve got our swagger back” – says much about the company’s newfound confidence and the market’s reignited expectations. While Whitman delivers the swagger, one of the men at the heart of meeting these expectations is Zafarana, Vice President and General Manager, Commercial Solutions Business Unit.

And he wants no one to be under any illusion about the robust health of the workstation market, even as ordinary PCs face an onslaught from the tablet format.

“The workstation market has two pieces, desktop and mobile workstations,” Zafarana spells it out. “Both have been very healthy and growing very fast over last couple of years. In particular, desktop workstations make up about 73% of all units, mobile 25% of the market. That has been constant.

“The overall workstation market has been growing 18% a year in unit volumes. Our growth has in fact been driving the market. HP is growing at two to three times the rate of the rest of the market.”

The significant trend underpinning this growth is its regional spread.

“Our growth has been both in very mature markets and developing markets. In the Middle East and emerging markets, in some countries we have 60-70% market share. In Brazil, we might have invested in a factory, in India and China, the dynamics are to a certain extent a case of, ‘the ocean rises and we benefit’. But we are more successful because we focus on those countries.”

Zafarana doesn’t have local break-out numbers for South Africa or even Africa. The continent falls under HP’s Europe, Middle-East and African (EMEA) region, and his eyes light up as he talks about its performance.

“This market is amazing. We just got results for the 4th Quarter of 2011. For the first time in the history of our business and industry, we exceeded 50% market share for both desktop and mobile, as well as the total. That includes Eastern and Western Europe, the Middle-East and Africa. That means we’re strong everywhere.”

And it’s not a temporary peak before the trough: “Both volume and market share are still rising steeply.”

This brings Zafarana to the Z1, a workstation that he believes will storm the small and medium enterprise market. On its announcement, a stream of predictable criticism was leveled at HP. One of these was in response to the innovative suitcase design of the back of the machine, which opens up to allow any parts to be slotted in or out without the use of tools.

This feature was characterised by some as putting an emphasis on serviceability, rather than on the ability to re-configure and upgrade. Zafarana says that misses the point.

“We’re trying to empower the industry, to make these very configurable, very serviceable. There are some PC platforms that are locked tight, and the real person who needs to get inside is probably the IT person or service person. But in a small company, it would be the video editor or mechanical designer.“

And then there is the matter of the hard drive, which many workstations hide as far from the user as possible.

“Many customers want to remove the hard drive and keep it locked away due to the sensitivity or importance of the data, or to move it to a new user, and do it quickly. It could be the Bandito Brothers doing a movie, or the military people who, if a helicopter goes down and they have to destroy it, first need to take out the hard drive. The information is that important.

“We are empowering our customers to do what they need to do in a professional environment. I set the direction that the Z1 needs to be serviceable because customers need that feature too.

“It has to have a support model that’s global and reflects what a workstation user needs. You don’t want to send it to an HP store to get it fixed. So we give a three-year next day on site, as part of a global support package. That’s huge. It’s even more important if you’re a small company. If you have two designers and one system is shipped off somewhere, you’re in trouble.”

Zafarana also does not shy away from inevitable comparisons with Apple’s iMac 27” workstation, which introduced the concept of an all-in-one workstation.

“We designed the Z1 for the professional user. We decided we weren’t going to build a consumer technology product, but a professional technology product. We targeted professional applications. When you think that way, now you have to think Adobe has optimised software for NVIDIA graphics, and so has Autodesk. Those users need reliability, so we decided on ECC memory and Intel Xeon chips, which give you that performance edge. These users also need high performance, highly reliable disk access, so we put in a RAID configuration. They need to burn Blu-ray DVDs in real time, so we put in Blu-Ray writers. Professional sound engineers want professional sound, so we built in that capability.

“Add it up: ECC memory, enterprise class hard drives, Blu-ray writing, professional graphics, professional audio in and out. The market can say whether we are competing, but in fact we have a different product.”

A hallmark of HP’s workstations is the extent to which they are developed in partnership with component suppliers. Part of the strength of those partnerships, he says, is that on a technical level, it is a relationship of peers.

“Thirty years ago we didn’t have standard components; we had to develop our own CPU, graphics drivers, motherboards, chassis. This was a vertical business, demanding very high investment.

“As the industry moved, and Intel, NVIDIA, Microsoft came into the market, we could move our business. But we still have the people who know how that all works, so when we’re working with NVIDIA, I have somebody who works as a peer with NVIDIA, and has deep knowledge. We do testing with applications on a graphics card, and are able to give feedback to NVIDIA six months before they launch that card. Same with Intel.

“If you ask both companies who their most technically deep technology partner is, it’s my team. I have a deep core competence here. My people have been through many transitions, many technologies, and I hope it shows in the products.”

There was a time, of course, when it was all about performance, with little focus on the user experience. That is still sometimes reflected in the bulky design of the devices the company produces in several categories. It is in fact the sensibility behind the new slogan unveiled with the Z1, “Power without the tower”. It is not only the competition that has tried to embarrass HP about this one.

“Ten years ago we were considering a new platform, and showed it to General Motors, then one of our biggest customers. Their executive walked in, and the first thing he said he didn’t like was the acoustics. Then he held a piece of paper up to the front of the workstation, and the fan sucked it in. That told him the air was moving too fast. My team was very embarrassed.

“That was a single moment in time when we said we needed to focus on issues like acoustic design. Before that, the focus was only on performance. We invented liquid cooling of the workstation, and the technology to control fan speed matured to manage airflows.”

So, while performance remains at the core, other priorities go along with it:

“When you see the systems we design, the cooling, layout, systems and innovation, we start with quality and performance as the base. Another reason you will see we’re serious, is that we’ve been leading on executing the Intel and NVIDIA roadmaps. We’re never late; our customers expect us to be first.”

HP may not have been a start-up for decades now, but the company’s experience, and its continued market-leading results in the workstation arena, says Zafarana, provides some object lessons to start-ups.

“If you’re in a business that’s starting out, or that’s struggling, the way to grow faster or recover is to innovate, change your business, make better products, make new product categories.”

And, within his most practical nugget of advice, unsurprisingly, lurks a hidden message about how workstations can help ramp up your business:

“If you pay someone $100 000, and you want them to work faster, upgrade their infrastructure – it’s the cheapest thing you can do. Its one of the smartest things you can do. ”

* Arthur Goldstuck heads up World Wide Worx (www.worldwideworx.com) and is editor-in-chief of Gadget. Follow him on Twitter on @art2gee. Reprinted from Gadget.

by Herman Manson Lowe Bull is rebranding as Lowe + Partners South Africa after the international parent company acquired a majority share in the local agency. Its two offices become Lowe Johannesburg and Lowe Cape Town.

Lowe + Partners (an Interpublic Group company) bought out Matthew Bull’s shares in the local agency when it took up its call option on the shares at the end of last year. Bull (@stixbull) recently teamed up with another South African, Andrew Whitehouse (@andrewerdna), to launch a New-York-based agency, The Bull-White House.

Always been a minority shareholder

Lowe + Partners had always been a minority shareholder in Lowe Bull, where it played an important strategic role, says Lowe + Partners South Africa CEO Wayne Naidoo (@WNaidoo). The local agency had always been one of the top five agencies in the Lowe network and, with increased client attention on emerging markets and Africa, it made sense for the global network to consolidate and beef up its presence here.

The rebranding takes Lowe + Partners SA closer to the ID and positioning of the global network and is being rolled out over the course of the next month.

Naidoo also announced that Peter Badenhorst has joined the agency as its new ECD for the Johannesburg agency. Badenhorst was the former chief creative partner of M&C Saatchi Abel, of which he was a founding member, for a short time, and before that chief creative officer at Ogilvy Cape Town. He takes up his contract at the beginning of March 2012.

In practical terms, the new majority shareholding doesn’t change the client-facing side of the local business, although changes have been made to its financial reporting system, says Naidoo. The local agency will continue to enjoy access to the people at the top of the network, which Naidoo describes as medium-sized with agencies in only key cities, which gives it scale but also helps retain an intimate work environment, and will continue working on global briefs put into the network.

Global and collaborative approach to client work

“We fly local staff all over the world to work on jobs for the network, which is great for them and for us,” says Naidoo, who says he knows of few agencies with such a global and collaborative approach to client work.

Lowe + Partners SA works extensively across Africa for key clients Unilever and SAB-Miller through affiliate agencies but, as part of the global network’s long-term strategy, the agency will be investigating acquisitions in key African markets, depending upon client needs and local agency environments. Naidoo says that, over the years, his agency has built up a strong foundation for taking work into Africa beyond South Africa, and it knows the rules of engagement well, but they are looking at ways of beefing up that capacity.

In the shorter term, the agency is looking at bulking up its operations in the SA market, with possible acquisitions in the digital and below-the-line segments to deliver on its contemporary integrated client offering. Naidoo says announcements will follow in the coming months.

Badenhorst, meanwhile, has been tasked with bringing the local agency closer to the global Lowe + Partners positioning of “Populist Creativity.” According to Naidoo, this positioning is all about results for clients, storytelling and work that engages the many, rather than the few.

Intention to shake things up, grow

Naidoo says the SA agency enters the year in a stable position, having retained all its key clients through the past couple of years and a tough economy. Its transformation into Lowe + Partners SA signals its intention to shake things up and to grow.

The SA group head count stands at around a 100, while its revenue falls in the R60-80 million band. A BEE trust and local management retain their shareholding in the SA agency.

Lowe + Partners is headquartered in London. The network is owned by New York-based Interpublic, a group that employs approximately 41 800 people and in 2010 had revenues of US$6.5 billion. Apart from Lowe + Partners, it is also the parent company of McCann Erickson and Draftfcb.

Originally published on Bizcommunity.com Marketing & Media | South Africa – click to see more comments.

by Arthur Goldstuck During a round-table interview with a group of South African journalists, Nokia CEO Stephen Elop dropped strong hints about the company’s entry into the tablet market.

Nokia CEO Stephen Elop is less guarded than most CEOs in confirming product secrets that the market has already guessed. Taking questions during a round-table session with five South African technology journalists, he is expected to be cagey.

But when he is asked about Nokia’s possible entry into the tablet market, there is none of the expected evasion and refusal to comment.

Instead, he acknowledges that when you add up Nokia’s embrace of the Windows Phone operating system, plus the fact that it draws on the same user experience being built into the forthcoming Windows 8 operating system, plus the fact that Windows 8 is especially well-suited to tablets, the conclusion is inescapable.

“Microsoft has shown in a couple of venues their plans around Windows 8, the big version of windows,” he pointed out. “What they essentially showed was that the standard user experience and also the convergence of development experience over time is what you see here on the Lumia devices. They call this the metro user experience, this idea that there are tiles that are constantly presenting you with new and useful information and it’s a fluid and a live environment.

“That same user experience will be turbocharged on a tablet, on a PC, on an Xbox: that will become the standard user experience across the Microsoft family of platforms. To the benefit of Nokia.”

Clearly, Elop sees no point in beating about the bush. His candour makes a refreshing change from technology sector CEOs who would place such topics off limits. Not only does he welcome it with good humour, but he drops tantalising hints about a timeline, and about such a tablet’s place in the device ecosystem:

“If you fast-forward let’s say a year – we don’t know when Windows 8 will ship – there will be hundreds of millions of people who on a tablet, on a PC, on a gaming platform, in an automobile, wherever, they will be seeing this style of user experience. It will instantly give them the promise of a combined experience across all of the digital parts of someone’s world.

“From our point of view, we knew this when we made the decision to go Windows Phone. We had an appreciation that it wouldn’t be just us alone trying to introduce an entirely different point of view, that there would be a lot of energy and push more broadly. That was something we couldn’t say a year ago but now its like, ‘we get it now, its clearly part of a much larger story’.

“When we look at that therefore, the opportunity to have a point of view that spans not just smartphones but also other devices from Nokia is very apparent to us, it is definitely an opportunity for us.”

Elop stresses that Nokia has not announced specific plans in this space, but also does not offer even a hint of denial. On the contrary: “Very clearly we look at that and say there’s an opportunity there.”

Elop is even willing to articulate a reason for a tablet: it is what Nokia’s customers will expect.

“I think our consumers would look at that and say we can imagine Nokia doing some interesting things and not just in the obvious parts. But there’s a lot of digital experience still to go, we’re all in the early stages of this so there’s an opportunity for us for sure.”

The suggestion then, between the lines, is that a Nokia tablet is likely to be ready around the same time that Windows 8 ships. Nokia would clearly be privy to such timings, and will have been working closely with Microsoft to ensure the Windows 8 software integrates tightly with Nokia’s hardware. It may even turn out to be one of the key elements of the Windows 8 launch. The long wait for the release also means Nokia has had the luxury of time spent ensuing the device works flawlessly. But Elop is not drawn further.

“That’s what we’re not announcing today. We just keep highlighting the opportunity. Tablets have come into the mainstream, but that situation is still in the very early stages.

“With what Microsoft is doing as it relates to the user experience, whether it’s on the PC, whether it’s on the tablet, to have a unified experience that says here’s a new point of view for tablets as well, I think that’s really going to change the industry, broaden the opportunities, so we’re very excited about that.”

A final hint at Nokia’s intended embrace of Windows 8 – and therefore of a tablet option – is Elop’s enthusiasm for the platform. It is infectious.

“If you have not seen the Windows 8 experience, take a look on YouTube,” he says. “It will really affect your thinking about how the industry is going to evolve. In terms of the degree that they’re changing their point of view and what they’re presenting, this isn’t a minor step; it’s a fundamental shift in their approach to Windows.

* Arthur Goldstuck heads up World Wide Worx (www.worldwideworx.com) and is editor-in-chief of Gadget. Follow him on Twitter on @art2gee. Reprinted from Gadget.

MarkLives.com runs a regular slot featuring the best local and international magazine covers every week. We recognise well thought out, powerful and interesting (and hopefully all three in one) magazine covers and celebrate the mix of pragmatism, creativity and personal taste that created each of them. By media bloggerMediaSlutZA.

I’m loving the fact that Art Departments are increasingly ‘writing’ the cover lines instead of using the same old fonts. I’m seeing it more and more and I’m hoping that this trend will be picked up sooner rather than later by the South African magazine industry. So below are three international titles showing off their cover line creativity.

INTERNATIONAL
Attitude, March 2012

Not only do I love the two primary colours on the cover but the use of ‘handwritten’ cover lines is very smart! Attitude, a gay magazine out of the UK, is moving away from its normal staple of bare chested guys on the cover, to something more playful. It’s a great new look!

Status (Asia), February 2012

This “Youth Culture Magazine” took a different approach with the Black & White cover photo while using  striking and colourful colours for the cover lines. It’s definitely targeted at a specific market and wouldn’t work on many titles.

Bloomsberg Businessweek, February 2012

Even ‘conservative’ magazines and getting more playful. It’s one of those covers that will make you look a bit longer than usual. I can just imagine people trying to read all the text and turning the cover from side to side.

LOCAL
ELLE, March 2012

The ELLE girls are definitely getting more adventurous and rightly so having scooped “Consumer Magazine of the Year” at the 2011 PICA awards! After some research, I was so happy to see that this wasn’t just a “Copy and Paste” cover from an International ELLE cover. Lady Gaga appeared on the January 2012 cover of ELLE UK, and this image was inside in the feature spread. Hats off the ELLE girls for not just copy and pasting, but rather trying something different, and according to me, it actually works better than what was done in the UK. I’m sure the International editions of ELLE are all now jealous of not thinking of this one first.

- The (for now anonymous) blogger behind MediaSlutZA knows way too much for his own good about media in South Africa. Magazines in particular. His mission is to show when South African magazines might fail, but most importantly, succeed. If you’re looking for a library about South African magazines and news, your one-stop pitstop is MediaSlutZA. #MagazinesForTheWin

- Find a cover we should know about? Tweet us @marklives and @mediaslutza

Omar Sosa co-founded the magazine Apartamento, which bills itself as “an everyday life interiors magazine” but which the New York Times’ T Magazine called “The burgeoning indie design movement’s official international look book”, with business partner Nacho Alegre.

Sosa has a history with editorial design – he has worked on projects with magazines like Metal, Kilimanjaro and Fanzine 137.  As Art Director for Apartamento Sosa won a Yellow Pencil Award in 2010 when Apartamento was awarded in the ‘Magazine & Newspaper Design / Entire Magazines’ category by the Designers and Art Directors Association (UK).

Sosa is visiting South Africa as a guest and participant of the Toffie Pop Culture Festival scheduled to take place in Cape Town, 30 March through 1 April 2012. The festival is a three-day conference and festival focusing on contemporary pop culture, design, music, magazine publishing, art, and everything else that relates to everyday pop culture. It takes place in the Cape Town City Hall.

Q: Looking at your design career you seem to have always had an interest in magazine design. What draws you to magazines?
Omar Sosa: To be honest I have always been attracted to editorial design as a way to explore the possibilities of the object – it’s not simply about the layout. After a period designing almost only artists books I started experimenting with magazine design and I have found the periodical factor and the fact you spread your creation to so many people fascinating.

Q: Do digital platforms hold the same appeal for you as print?
Sosa: Not at all. I wish to be as interested as I am with print one day soon though. But to me the object is very important and although tablets like the iPad is great it still have not the same appeal as printing on and reading a paper product.

Q: How would you describe your design style?
Sosa: I work with the material that is given to me. I wouldn’t describe myself as a minimalistic but I really build the whole thing around the material that I have available, almost only with typography and photography, playing with the format and the materials of the object. I love objects and I wouldn’t mind to go into industrial design one day, that’s why I’m so attracted by printer matter.

Q: To what extent is design a collaborative process for you?
Sosa: I think design is a totally collaborative; it begins with the client ideas, feedback and taste and ends with the printer skills. Then there are all the photographers, writers and illustrators in between, so it’s a 100% collaborative work, or at least that’s how I see my work.

Q: What are the magazines you read regularly and why?
Sosa: This is always a tricky question, I don’t read that many if I have to be honest, but I really like some well thought out and produced magazines such as Bloomsberg Newsweek, Monocle, Fantastic Man, Pin-up, old Purple Fashion and Casa Vogue.

by Herman Manson Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide has announced the rollout of Social@Ogilvy (@SocialOgilvy), a unit that promises to deliver social media solutions to Ogilvy clients, and which will operate across numerous marketing disciplines such as advertising, direct marketing and public relations.

The new unit promises to offer brands a broader and more strategically integrated approach to social media than has previously been the case, or it claims, can be offered by specialist social media agencies.

Speciality offering

The new unit builds on Ogilvy’s global social media capabilities, much of it derived from a speciality offering housed inside Ogilvy Public Relations, into an international network of 550 dedicated social media experts and another 4000 digital experts across 35 markets.

The new practice is also being introduced into Ogilvy’s South African operations, with the local team headed by Joanna Oosthuizen (@joopr24), MD of Ogilvy PR, and Amanda Sevasti Whitehouse (@AmandaSevasti), social media account director, both in Johannesburg, and Gavin Levinsohn (@gavlevie), MD of Ogilvy Cape Town in the mother city.

“The headline here is that it’s a worldwide practice that connects all the agencies,” John Bell, the global MD of Social@Ogilvy, told the New York Times’ Media Decoder blog yesterday, Monday, 13 February 2012. Media Decoder reports that Bell believes that integrated social solutions matter because, by some estimates, brands will spend as much as 18% of their total marketing communications budget on social media within the next few years [in developed economies, at least].

Whitehouse says Ogilvy South Africa has seen an increase in the demand for social strategy solutions by clients since mid-last year, so much so that demand now goes well beyond simple ‘community management’ (managing brands’ social media platforms such as their Facebook or Twitter pages) to solutions integrating social media properly into the broader marketing mix.

Upfront mandate

Social@Ogilvy takes a traditional agency into the social space and gives social media an upfront mandate to be part of brand strategy discussions. Whitehouse says Ogilvy’s SA social team are already being pulled into pitches and brand strategy planning for 2012/13.

The SA market isn’t yet as sophisticated as some markets in developed economies but there is a genuine interest in social media amongst SA brands, says Whitehouse. Even while some brands are only testing the water right now, others – especially in the FMCG sector – are quickly becoming comfortable with social media as an integral part of their overall brand strategy.

The opportunity in social media does not reside in controlling the message but in being more accountable to consumers, says Whitehouse. If they take the trouble to engage with a brand, brands owe them engagement in return.

Social@Ogilvy promises to “design integrated social solutions that combine deep disciplines like CRM, public relations and shopper marketing and rooted in what drives behaviour”.

The local unit already services global Social@Ogilvy clients in SA, including KFC and Miller.

Commitment to integrating digital skills companywide

Ogilvy in SA has been lauded for its commitment to integrating digital skills companywide. Last year, it launched the Ogilvy Digital Marketing Academy (ODMA), first in Cape Town, but later expanded into Johannesburg, under the leadership of lecturer and digital strategist Dave Duarte (@DaveDuarte).

 Originally published on Bizcommunity.com Marketing & Media | South Africa – click to see more comments.

by Arthur Goldstuck At a conference in Amsterdam and a launch in South Africa last week, BlackBerry and Nokia respectively revealed that they would remain a formidable force in Africa.

Africa is an unlikely high-tech battleground for the future of the smartphone market.

While most Western markets are locked in a fight between Apple’s iPhone on the one side and a range of brands using the Android operating system (OS) on the other, the picture across the African continent is entirely different.

It is a market dominated by Nokia, but in which BlackBerry has become the aspirational phone of choice for the tiny elite at the top of the economic pile. In South Africa itself, BlackBerry has broken out into the mass market, to become the biggest smartphone brand and second biggest overall.

Yet, in Western markets, both of these brands were having their obituaries written at various times during 2011. Nokia had announced it was ditching its Symbian OS in favour of Microsoft’s Windows Phone, and BlackBerry’s entry into the tablet market, the PlayBook, was all but dead on arrival as it failed to meet user needs.

Now, the most unlikely pair of revivals are under way. This week, Nokia released the first of its new Windows Phone-based devices in South Africa. Physically, the Lumia 800 looks almost exactly like the Nokia N9, which was released to wild acclaim late last-year, but which uses a once-off OS that Nokia does not intend to maintain.

The key difference, aside from a range of new colour options, lies in the way the devices are being sold: a Vodacom contract on the Lumia costs R279, compared to R299 for the N9, and includes 100MB of data per month for 24 months, compared to the N9’s three month data allowance. The pricing sends a clear message: Nokia wants customers to come on over.

The Windows Phone OS will initially be unfamiliar to most Nokia loyalists, but it will grow on them – especially when they discover a mobile version of Micosoft Office on the device, enabling a surprisingly extensive range of Word and Excel functions. If that’s not enough, the sharp, vibrantly bright screen uses a cutting edge screen technology called AMOLED. The phone is beautiful to the eyes and the touch.

Several Lumia models will follow, at various price points, along with a low-cost Nokia range called the Asha – Hindi for “hope”.

The hope is, of course, that it will give the massive Nokia user base throughout the developing world a reason to stay with the brand. The Lumia, on the other hand, is designed to give smartphone users a reason to go back to Nokia. Between the two, they signal the rebirth of the world’s most powerful phone brand outside North America.

A similar resurrection is under way at BlackBerry and its manufacturer, RIM, which has been entirely written off by American analysts. This week, RIM chose Europe to herald its comeback. New CEO Thorsten Heins delivered his debut address at DevCon Europe, BlackBerry’s developer conference in Amsterdam.

While he did not make dramatic announcements, he reminded the audience that BlackBerry was still the number one smartphone brand in the Netherlands, United Kingdom, South Africa, Nigeria, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates

He also led a string of RIM executives through demonstrations of the capabilities of the new OS, BlackBerry 10, which is expected to allow BlackBerry to compete with the functionality of Android and Apple phones for the first time. The most important of these demos, arguably, was of the PlayBook 2.0 tablet computer, which provides a foretaste of the BlackBerry 10 experience.

Not only does it repair the damage of the first PlayBook by including e-mail on the device, but it takes it to new levels by providing a rich range of messaging and contact options, along with performance improvements. The much-maligned Bridge, which previously was used to connect to a phone’s e-mail, now becomes a remote control tool between the two devices.

The PlayBook 2.0 will be released this month, and BlackBerry 10 phones will appear later in the year.

That may be just in time to catch the wave of South African BlackBerry users who began embracing the phone from late 2010, and who would otherwise be falling to the allure of Android and Windows Phone when their upgrades are due.

* Arthur Goldstuck heads up World Wide Worx (www.worldwideworx.com) and is editor-in-chief of Gadget. Follow him on Twitter on @art2gee. Reprinted from Gadget.

by Arthur Goldstuck Still using a custom phone number that lets callers key in a word instead of a number? Well, your number is obsolete, along with several other innovations you thought were cutting edge.

In the coming decade, we will witness and mourn the passing of the record store and the bookstore. The newspaper as we know it won’t be far behind. A combination of evolving technology, easy access and sane cost structures will sweep away physical distribution of content.

But it is not only low-tech that dies when technology moves on. Right now, we are witnessing the slow death of a number of one-time hi-tech innovations we have come to take for granted.

Take SMS. In the last month of 2011, the use of SMS to send holiday greetings rose almost 10% over the previous year. Evidence that SMS was still alive and well, right?

Wrong. The use of data services for instant messaging – instant text messages that use the data layer of the network and cost a tiny fraction of SMS greetings – increased by more than 200% over the same period. And considering that the rate of growth in SMS use had been far higher in previous holiday seasons, we can conclude that December 2011 saw the peak of the SMS era before it begins its long decline down the other side of the bell curve.

The decline may last as much as ten years, and will go hand-in-hand with many arguments that SMS is still alive and well. We hear the same arguments for the fax machine, which is really a dead machine walking. More fax spam is sent to these devices than any useful document.

The argument that we need faxes in order to sign physical documents falls away when one considers the ease with which a scanned signature can be added to an electronic document – as long as it is e-mailed in an editable format. The accountants and lawyers quibble about the forgery risks in such documents, but it is no different from the ability to paste copied signatures onto a document before faxing it.

So far, so obvious. Other hi-tech innovations will not have the luxury of a decade to contemplate their own demise.

The next dead tech walking is the customised business phone number. Operators have created a useful revenue stream in charging a premium for numbers in the format of 0861 TECH-R-US, where each letter corresponds with a number on a standard dial of a desk phone or of a traditional “feature” cellphone.

In the era of smartphones, though, the custom number becomes not only meaningless, but useless.

Go on, look around for a custom number that uses a descriptive word or brand name instead of a number. You’ll find it in many ads in those 20th century objects called magazines, or the 18th century invention known as a newspaper.

Now try calling that number on your smartphone with its QWERTY keyboard or virtual touchscreen phone. You guessed it: it isn’t even a number. It doesn’t work.

Why are companies still using them?

For the same reason that their web sites contain the bare minimum of contact details, are designed either like brochures or Christmas trees, and refer customers to call centres with interactive voice response (IVR) menus that offer more irritation than information.

Most companies are not only clueless about how customers would prefer to communicate; they are clueless about how to keep up with communications.

It’s not that it’s difficult. It’s that people are allowed to get away with mindless excuses like “I’m useless with technology”, or “I leave the hi-tech stuff to the kids”.

By next year, more South Africans will be buying smartphones than “feature phones”. If you only give them a custom number to call, they can’t call.

This isn’t hi-tech; this is common sense. And here’s a message from the past: in business, you don’t have a right to be stupid.

* Arthur Goldstuck heads up World Wide Worx (www.worldwideworx.com) and is editor-in-chief of Gadget. Follow him on Twitter on @art2gee. Reprinted from Gadget.

By Herman Manson Adrian Hewlett, CEO and founder of the Habari Group, has combined his group’s significant through-the-line, below-the-line, research, digital and social businesses to launch a major new independent advertising agency called Machine.

Machine launches as a significant player in the market, with a staff of 80 and revenue of R45 million.

Machine swallows former Habari Group agencies Habari Direct, a BTL promotions business (as a division within Machine it gets rebranded ‘Creature’); Habari Answered, a market research business; Big Wednesday, a through-the-line agency and Domino, the digital and social media agency. The agencies all become divisions of Machine.

The Habari Group has always been best known for its online sales arm Habari Media, a company Hewlett is himself closely associated with, being the first of the companies Hewlett launched that would eventually make up the Habari Group in the relatively early stages of online advertising in South Africa some eight years ago.

Hewlett‘s reorganisation of Habari Group, which currently comprises of six different businesses, will split it into Machine on the agency side, and media solutions business Habari Media (which will include mass-market media business XL), on the other.

Considerable confusion

Hewlett says there was considerable confusion in the market as to the communications solutions his group could provide, through the various specialist entities, due to the strong brand recognition and positioning of Habari Media.

The new name for his agency, and Hewlett’s own move away from the day-to-day management role at Habari Media into the CEO position of Machine, means that confusion will disappear. Hewlett also says it made sense to bring together the specialist agencies as divisions within a more integrated agency, as each had been showing considerable organic growth, requiring more management time, even as they struggled getting onto pitch lists, due to the brand confusion with Habari Media.

“We used to be ‘the Facebook guys,’ says Hewlett, and Machine is set to change all that.

Broadly integrated BTL agency

Machine is being pitched as a broadly integrated BTL agency with a key digital competency. Its current client list includes Motorola and different aspects of accounts such as Appletizer, Nedbank and Tiger Brands.

According to Hewlett, the market is seeing budget moving away from ATL to BTL and digital, hence the BTL/digital positioning of the agency, but these have also been the areas in which the companies that make up the new agency traditionally drew their core competencies. “We are not trying to be anything we are not,” says Hewlett, “and we will continue to do what we are best at.”

Machine’s senior client services team will sit atop the various specialist units (such as research, digital, BTL etc) and work across channels, with specialist project teams below them.

The new agency grew up digital, so to speak, according to Jake Bester, group creative director at Machine and, unlike other agencies, won’t have to scramble to build digital competencies into their offering. Instead, it will be beefing up its creative offering.

Habari Media, under the leadership of its recently appointed MD Wayne Bischoff, continues with its South African and African sales activities on brands such as Facebook, LinkedIn, BDFM and BBC Worldwide.

Machine and Habari Media will continue to share office space, due to the competitive advantage inherent in positioning Machine’s strategic and creative thinkers close to Facebook’s SA sales operation.

Other senior team members

Other senior members of the Machine team includes Teri Fynn as client service director, Marc Horne as business director, Andy Gilder as group digital strategist and Anoka Makhan as new business director. Machine is also finalising the appointments of a lead strategy director and a senior channel insights director that will be announced soon.

 Originally published on Bizcommunity.com Marketing & Media | South Africa – click to see more comments.

Jamie Meyer, freelance illustrator: Although Jamie Meyer’s background is predominantly digital, he has always had a love of illustration and drawn all his life. After spending 11 years in London working both full time and freelancing as a digital designer and Art Director at some of London’s top digital agencies, he returned to Cape Town working at M&C Saatchi Abel as a Digital Art Director. He recently took the plunge and is finally pursuing a freelance illustration career on a full time basis. He works primarily in Photoshop (utilizing the brush tool as much as possible) but he is also equally comfortable working with both Vectors in Illustrator and the drawing tools in Flash.

Specialist skills:
Drawing, digital painting, Vector illustration, Flash character animation & Flash digital illustration, digital design and Art Direction.

Website:
www.jamiemeyer.com

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