One of the major achievements has been to work around the fact that we don’t have access to location data in Nigeria, so the location-based element of The Grid has taken a back-seat for a while and we have refitted the functionality with more emphasis on chat and social interaction around content. This is where our new .mobi site comes into play. Unfortunately it has taken us a long time to get around to rebuilding the old one – it was the first platform The Grid launched with and the last to be rebuilt.

Like our web site the mobi site is built on top of our API using PHP and so far its performing really well. At last there are no more of the old GRID (Groups, Radar, Identity, Dropzone) menus and the new site has been tightly focused on what users actually want with an emphasis on speed and economy.

The goal was to keep each page very small and tidy and focus the user on the task at hand. This is the third iteration of the site after having gone through several processes of changing the colours and the overall layout and navigation.

One of the most important interpretations of our API was that we decided to make chat conversations persistent across multiple sessions. This means that users can log in, see offline messages in a thread and reply without the other user being online. In this sense it works similar to normal asynchronous messaging like Facebook but can be done between the IM environment on the Java application and the mobi site as if it was a normal IM session. This greatly increases the usability of the IM and makes conversations longer lasting and less dependent on your friends being online.

The content creation process has also been streamlined so that users no longer have to choose the type of content they want to create as an additional step before they get to upload files.

SMS Twitter Integration

If Grid users have their Twitter account set up (in the settings on The Grid app or mobi site), they can now SMS their status to 31536 in South Africa and we will automatically update their Twitter stream and append their location (near Bryanston). There are a few more of these type of things on their way but we figured we’d start with the easy stuff first

As always, well done to my team, they really are awesome.

To see the new mobi site go to http://onthegrid.mobi on your phone or SMS grid to 33313 to get a link. Best viewed with Opera Mini.

This one shows the distribution of anger across the country.

This one show the distribution of happiness across the country.

I will be using these in my presentation at Mobile Web Africa today as part of my presentation on location-based advertising.

1. Location – radius from a point, or suburb/city/province boundary, or user-defined polygon
2. Time of day – define visibility by hour
3. Gender
4. Age
5. Mood

You could put together some fairly complex combinations, e.g.
Just before lunch, show my ad to women within 10km of Fourways Mall, between the age of 25 and 30, who are feeling sad, sleepy, angry or irritated

(Thursday 10 Sept 10AM)

Realistically what will happen right now is that campaigns targeted this tightly will not yield enough volume, but this is a long-term strategy as the industry moves towards CPA and CPSA and the Grid continues to grow its user base. Over the past 12 months we have grown to half the size of Facebook in South Africa, so the plan seems to be working.

The work we’re doing on the advertising side of The Grid makes digital advertising relevant to small businesses again because it removes the problems of geographic wastage and low penetration-levels inherent in the Web accessed via PC. The thing that really excites me about the scenario where the local Yoga class or hairdresser uses location-targeted advertising is the potential to deliver paying customers into a physical location. Overlapping targeting and low volumes within a small radius are a blessing in a way -the average hairdresser would probably buckle if you tried delivering more than ten new customers a day for longer than a week. I’ll be happy when we’re delivering clicks that create life-long walk-in customers.

Not only does the speaker line-up represent the top tier of mobile influencers in South Africa, we have some great guests like Marc Smith from Telligent, Stephane Boyera from the W3C and Herman Heunis, the CEO of MXit.

The Grid is the platinum sponsor of the event and I will be presenting some of the more exciting stuff we have been working on like spatial-temporal mood-based advertising targeting during a session about the future of Location-based mobile and web advertising.

If you haven’t registered yet, sign up now.

I dislike the smell and feel of books intensely and its not particularly politically correct to be the guy who thinks all books should rightfully be burned and their contents archived digitally. Bookshelves give me the creeps, I find their chaos profoundly distasteful and I think its a major failing of the publishing industry that they never developed proper standards for the size and length of books.

So you can imagine my joy when electronic paper came about. Electronic paper is not a screen, in the way a PDA or computer screen is. What you see on the surface of these readers is not being projected, it is being reflected. The colour of the surface and the text is its actual colour at that time. This means that the device does not use power to keep the pixels in place once they have been arranged. It also means that when you sit in the sun to read it looks better rather than worse.

Pay attention to this part because its normally the hardest part for non-geeks and geeks alike to understand. The “paper” is what is called an electrophoretic display and the way it works is that some charged coloured particles are put into a very thin sheet of oil. This sheet is put between two very thing plates alternatively charged plates and the pixels (the coloured particles) rearrange themselves in the oil based on whether they are positively or negatively charged. This is how the text is formed on the page and the particles stay there until the plates rearrange them to form another page. Read about this in more detail on Wikipedia.

The two new Sony devices are designed for different reading habits. The Pocket edition is slightly smaller and can be operated using one hand with the buttons for paging forward and back. The Touch edition has a touch screen and is a little bit bigger, suitable for people who mostly reach in bed or on the couch. Both are cool and I still can’t make up my mind which one to get next. The touch screen version will be a little less crisp because of the touch screens slight opacity, but the bigger screen means you can make the text bigger. As always its a tradeoff between portability and the luxury of size.

Since I got my 505 model I have read six or seven books and the experience and convenience of it has been phenomenal. Because the pages are not projected there is no strain your eyes and it feels exactly like reading printed words on paper. You can put about 350 books on the thing without extending it with a memory card and the battery life is brilliant. I read for about an hour and a half every day and I need to charge the device once a month.

To get books on it you plug it into a PC or Mac and use the Sony reader software to copy books onto it and it supports a lot of different formats including PDF and MS Word files and its pretty easy to convert MS Lit files if you need to. Read more about the Sony reader here and go out and buy one if you can, it will change your life.

How it works: As a user on The Grid surfs the web site it locates her phone and sends the latitude and longitude details back to Marbil, our ad server. Marbil has advertising campaigns loaded that are location-targeted and it picks ads based on how close the user is to the physical location being advertised.

The ads can also be targeted by age, gender and time of day, which makes them pretty relevant. Advertisers could advertise boutiques that sell specific brands of cosmetics to women between the age of 25 and 30 and who live in Sandton. And only if they access the site before their lunch break, so between 10 and 12 in the morning.

This is definitely going to change the way digital advertising works, especially for small businesses who currently have few options other than the yellow pages and community newspapers.

As is always the case with social networks, you’re never going to be the only one a person uses so it helps to play nicely and allow people to interact with their friends across all their other SN or IM services too. Users of our new Java app can now import their contacts from 5 other networks (Google Talk, MSN, AIM, Yahoo, ICQ) and chat to them using their mobile phones. I would have liked to have this integration sooner because the walled garden approach to social networking is a dead end in the long term. In our case it was just a matter of resource management and juggling priorities more than anything else.

One of my favourite new additions is the high quality aerial photography we added on the maps for the major urban areas. Now when users browse maps they can turn the satellite view on and off using the menu. This will no doubt only appeal to those users who are less bandwidth conscious but hey, its awesome so we put it in. Something that I think is often missed is that our maps give you driving directions between where you are and a piece of content created by our users, and there is also a detailed directions option in the menu that gives you turn-by-turn instructions as well as the distances to travel.

Changes on the Desktop

Besides these changes to the Java application, we have also released 3 new versions of our desktop chat application: one for Windows Vista, one for Ubuntu and one for Fedora. Included in this version is the ability to push your status updates to Twitter with location and several bug fixes and stability enhancements.

Changes on the server

In preparation for the 1 million user milestone coming in the next month or so we have been working hard to get our back-end adjusted for the kind of volumes of traffic we’re getting. As most people with some geek skills will know, whatever you thought a million users would do to your servers when you were on 50 000 is not what happens when you actually get there, so we’ve had to relax a little and rely on the fact that we can be agile.

Side note: In the 14 months since I joined we have released 5 versions of the main Java application, 3 versions of the lite application, 2 versions of our web site, 2 versions of our mobi site (one not yet released but coming soon), an iPhone application, an Android application, 2 releases of the desktop application, a widget for the Nokia N97, 3 version releases of our API and we launched in Tanzania which has its own set of servers and applications. In addition to that we have made two fairly substantial sets of server architecture changes at the 300 000 user mark and at the 800 000 user mark to allow for faster growth. So even though we’re part of a much larger entity, we’re still pretty agile (just not bullet proof unfortunately).

Location-Based Advertising

In addition to all of this we are starting the engines on the location-based advertising aspect of the business. There is no longer any doubt in my mind that LBA is the killer app because it provides a much-needed solution for small businesses who simply can’t use Web advertising because of wastage. While the Web is global, hairdressers and plumbers still need to advertise local and they have been neglected by everyone except local newspapers and community business directories.

The show goes on

Now that I have expanded my product management team to two (Safraz Saib and Nic Haralambous) I am getting more time to provide quality input into new development initiatives around the Grid, the fruits of which you will see towards the end of the year. One is a major new set of additions to The Grid and the other is something completely, insanely ambitious and hopefully equally as cool.

As always, we’re keen to work with everyone else in the industry so if you’re looking to do some integration via our API or bounce some ideas off us give me a shout. Here are some ideas – location-based journalism, product hunts (if you can find it you can have it), zone-based variable billing (if you pay for it here it will cost you less than it will over there), anything you can think of that involves location.

What I need from you:

– 40 characters (including spaces) text advertisng your business
– Name of your business/shop
– 1 paragraph description of your serviuces
– Physical address
– Mobile web site URL if you have one
– Telephone number (for potential customers to call)
– Latitude and longitude if you have it