TECH4AFRICA is a web and emerging technology conference, bringing global perspective to the African context. The conference took place last month, and featured several leading industry thought leaders.

The keynote speaker was Clay Shirky, a provocative new voice on all things Internet: economics and culture, media and community, and the open source movement.

We thoroughly enjoyed his talk, and thought we would share it with you.

For the past four years the Facebook wave has been breaking over South Africa, bringing a deluge of excitement, controversy and hype with it. During that time the user base has grown from less than 10 000 to well over three-million people. To put it in context, if our population had grown at the same rate as our Facebook users, there would now be 15-billion South Africans on the planet.

That’s great for Mark Zuckerberg and his crew of teenage gazillionaires, but what does it mean for South African brands? In theory the platform gives marketers an unparallelled opportunity to interact with three-million of South Africa’s most sought-after customers. But is anyone actually getting any traction?

Read the full article HERE

Facebook has recently launched “Facebook Places” a  mobile application that allows you to see where your friends are and share your physical location. You can check in to nearby Places to tell your friends where you are, tag your friends in the Places you visit, and view comments your friends have made about the Places you visit. Use Places to experience Facebook in a completely new way by connecting with your friends in the real world.

This allows Facebook to truly call themselves a “Geosocial-networking” application, rivaling the steadily growing networks such as Foursquare and Gowala.

Facebook places has not yet launched worldwide – it can only be used in the USA for the moment, and access from different mobile handsets is limited.

It will just be a matter of time before this feature launches worldwide..and across all handsets and other devices.

Certain individuals may have concerns regarding Places – Here is a great article that looks into some important points.

There are also many great opportunities Places will uncover, especially for business and in relation to the baitbox conversation: Recruitment.

Just a couple of initial thoughts related to Places for recruitment:

• Advertising your organisation’s location(s)
• Linking locations used in Job Title to Places – allowing users to view & search job postings on Places maps
• Searching for suitable candidates in specific locations
• Joining conversations happening close-by & searching for relevant passive candidates…

There are many many more and we shall discuss these as the tool opens up to the worldwide audience.

In the meantime, here is a great PDF with more information for businesses interested in the tool…

One of the important trends that occurred in 2009 was the rise of the new “job” specific search engines. The most popular of these engines was Indeed and SimplyHired . There are many others as well, such as Juju, Oodle …but these two engines are far ahead of the others in terms of raw traffic. I recall a webinar I attended in December of last year that said Indeed was now the largest job board globally, with over 10 million searches a month. That’s a LOT of traffic..and you have to believe it’s having a direct impact on the traditional job boards bottom line. After all, these engines index your jobs for FREE….just like Google Indexes your webpages for free.

We simply calculated the average number of clicks each job received from each board across those 3000 jobs. The results?

For the full article, click here

Twitter is staffing up, in a big way. To help entice candidate applications they have created a “Meet the Class of Twitter HQ” video which supports their call to action in terms of “Joining the flock”

What a great clip, bound to inspire many an applicant!

Two-and-a-half years ago, we described eight technology-enabled business trends that were profoundly reshaping strategy across a wide swath of industries. We showed how the combined effects of emerging Internet technologies, increased computing power, and fast, pervasive digital communications were spawning new ways to manage talent and assets as well as new thinking about organizational structures.

Since then, the technology landscape has continued to evolve rapidly. Facebook, in just over two short years, has quintupled in size to a network that touches more than 500 million users. More than 4 billion people around the world now use cell phones, and for 450 million of those people the Web is a fully mobile experience. The ways information technologies are deployed are changing too, as new developments such as virtualization and cloud computing reallocate technology costs and usage patterns while creating new ways for individuals to consume goods and services and for entrepreneurs and enterprises to dream up viable business models. The dizzying pace of change has affected our original eight trends, which have continued to spread (though often at a more rapid pace than we anticipated), morph in unexpected ways, and grow in number to an even ten.

The rapidly shifting technology environment raises serious questions for executives about how to help their companies capitalize on the transformation under way. Exploiting these trends typically doesn’t fall to any one executive—and as change accelerates, the odds of missing a beat rise significantly. For senior executives, therefore, merely understanding the ten trends outlined here isn’t enough. They also need to think strategically about how to adapt management and organizational structures to meet these new demands.

Read the full article here

Thanks to mybroadband.co.za for the article, original here

Research by BMI-TechKnowledge reveals that South Africa is showing steady growth in Internet access and usage

Whilst some countries have made internet access a basic human right, South Africa is yet to go that far, but internet users are continuing to grow rapidly, with an expected annual increase of 16% in the base of individual PC internet users this year.

According to the latest research by BMI-TechKnowledge, the number of PC internet users in South Africa at the end of 2009 was approximately 4.9 million, and is set to grow to 5.9 million by the end of 2010.

Findings indicate that the primary place of access is the workplace, followed by the home, and then other locations such as places of education.

According to Ryan Smit, author of the report, the PC growth will pale beside the growth of handset internet usage, where the number of consumers that actively use the mobile internet browsers on their cellphones is expected to increase from around 7.1 million to over 18 million in the next 5 years.

This is facilitated by the observation that by 2014, 36.5 million people in South Africa will have at least a GPRS enabled cellphone, giving them the option to actively use the mobile internet.

“In terms of PC internet usage, activities such as watching television online and video calling are still in the early adoption stages, whilst other activities such as online dating and online gambling have started to experience strong growth as they move up the growth curve. With the introduction of uncapped ADSL accounts aimed at residential users, the rate of increase of high-bandwidth applications is likely to accelerate, meaning that broadband networks will start to strain under increasing pressure”, says Smit.

Much of the growth in certain internet activities will come through the increase in the internet user base, rather than an increase in the range of activities of users.

For example, while most internet users are already using social networking, we still expect social networking users to grow by 31% year-on-year as more South Africans become internet users.

Original article here

Results from an independent survey with leading employers in South Africa shows that more than four-fifths of graduates consider the training & development and overall reputation of their new employer as being ‘very important’ in their decision making. The SAGRA Candidate Survey 2010
is based on responses from 1,521 candidates who are joining 64 of the largest and most well known graduate employers in South Africa.

Three-fifths of candidates had multiple offers to choose from for their first job upon graduation from university. Along with training & development and the overall reputation of an employer, threequarters said that long term career prospects and the organisation’s reputation for ethical behaviour were ‘very important’ in their decision making.

Three-fifths of candidates said that the selection and assessment process that they have experienced with an employer was ‘very important’ when deciding who to join. Candidates reported an average of two months from submitting an application of receiving an offer and a fifth said they had received their job offer within 24 hours of completing the final-round assessment.

For the full PDF article, click HERE

Great Article from the Forbes website.

The Great Recession has resulted in a cease-fire in the war for talent–or so goes the thinking of many executives and managers, as economic uncertainty and unemployment remain high in the U.S. and throughout much of the world. On the surface, you might think employers have the upper hand and can hire and retain all the talent they need while spending less developing employees.

But the reality is anything but that easy. A prolonged period of cutbacks, reductions in human capital investment and extreme reliance on existing top performers–all in an atmosphere of uncertainty and scarcity–can easily undermine an organization’s ability to attract, develop, retain and engage skilled, valuable employees.

The organizational pipeline of key people and future leaders is more important now than ever. Yet the talent management processes in many companies are missing the mark. They see talent management as something done to and for high-potential employees, in service of the organization’s needs. But another emerging perspective is the key to effective talent management: the view from inside the pipe.

The employees and managers who are inside the leadership pipeline don’t see themselves as a stream of talent to be funneled and directed by the organization. They bring their own perspectives, desires and experiences to the process. You need to understand and appreciate what’s going on with your people if you expect to have the talent you will need 2, 5 and 10 years down the road. Paying attention to the view from the pipe will not only pay dividends in the future but also increase the engagement of key talent immediately.

Even today high-potential employees can and will go elsewhere when it suits their needs. Although 95% of high potentials say they are committed to their organizations, 21% are actively looking for another job anyway. If a fifth of your best people are looking to leave and many more could be persuaded, what are you to do? Here are three main things.

Clearly identify your high potentials. Who is your top talent? How do you identify these people, and what does it mean for them and your company when you do? How effectively is this communicated to them, and by whom? The transparency and formality of your high potential identification will affect how employees see themselves and the organization.

This is an excerpt above, for the full Article HERE

Results from an independent survey of leading employers in South Africa shows that these organisations are set to increase the number of graduate vacancies in 2011 by 17 per cent compared to 2010.

The SAGRA Graduate Recruitment Survey 2010 is based on responses from 70 of the largest and most well known graduate employers in South Africa. It provides good news for university students as vacancies for those graduating this summer look set to rise despite difficult economic conditions.

The SAGRA Graduate Recruitment Survey 2010 is produced by The South African Graduate Recruiters Association (SAGRA) and is based on feedback from 70 employers in April 2010.

Nine of the twelve industries that are tracked will see an increase in graduate vacancies for 2011 with one of the largest recruiters of graduates – the accountancy and professional services industry – set for an 18 per cent increase in graduate positions.

The research will also alleviate some graduates’ fears over starting salaries – nearly two-thirds of employers expect a ‘cost of living’ increase to graduate salaries.

For the full PDF article click HERE