There’s a single smartphone app that will save you a lot of money, especially if you’re on a pricey contract with a limited data bundle.
Onavo Extend could save you as much as 80% on your data bill. It’s available for iPhone, iPad (Onavo in App Store), and (from earlier this year) certain Android devices on version 4.0/ice Cream Sandwich (Onavo in Google Play).
And it’s free.
(Many readers will have this app already. It’s the automatic suggestion on tons of websites of which app to install when you get an iPhone. If you have it, you’ve already saving money and don’t need to read on).
Onavo Extend relies on data compression technology between the connection to your mobile network and the internet (or apps). The major saving comes through far better compression of images on the web and within apps.
The Opera Mini browser for mobile phones works in a similar way, but with the link to the compression layer built into the app. BlackBerry devices use a proprietary global APN to achieve similar compression and efficiency.
Onavo installs a configuration profile to iOS devices (which includes your network’s original APN settings, with some modifications). The app walks you through the whole install process.
Onavo
But is it safe? The type of data moving through Onavo’s servers is the exact same as that routing through your mobile operator’s network. “Onavo Extend does not store any content of the data, and cannot read encrypted SSL (HTTPS) traffic.”
Any encrypted or secure data is inaccessible to Onavo. So, sessions on my FNB Banking App aren’t routed through its servers (fine print about the service and exactly what is routed where is available here).
In the past fortnight, I’ve saved 34% of my total data usage. Some of the savings per app:
- 70% on Maps
- 62% on Instagram
- 43% on Mobile Safari (web)
- 35% on Tweetbot
These are significant numbers, especially considering that I regularly use around 1GB of mobile data in a month. Across the two week period, I’ve saved 110MB of a total of 325MB (34%), which is nothing short of impressive.
Onavo data savings
Practically, if you’re rationing yourself down to 500MB (or even 250MB!) per month, you’re going to be able to use twice as much data or reduce your bundle size.
It doesn’t work while you’re connected on a Wi-Fi network (the assumption is you don’t need to, even though these connections are also pricey in South Africa!). While Onavo is probably not that popular on iPads overseas, given the widespread availability of (mostly free) Wi-Fi networks, it’s invaluable in this market.
For now, the apps are free, although Onavo cautions that “in the future, some apps may come at a cost”. At a low price, it’ll be worth paying for.
It’s launched a second app for Android (supports most versions from 2.2 upwards) called Onavo Count. This app is a simple monitor which will alert you to the apps which hog data (you can restrict these to Wi-Fi only, for example).
Expect additional innovation from Onavo around these kinds of apps/features which provide additional insight into and control over your usage.
Get the app. It’s that simple.
Telkom Business announced today (22 June 2012) that its subscribers will get greater value on their uncapped offerings with significant price adjustments to the internet product portfolio.
South African Small to Medium Enterprises (SMEs) can look forward to bandwidth increases on the entry-level offerings, and up to 27% reduction in prices on the higher-end usage offerings.
Telkom Business ADSL subscribers on entry level 384kbps and 1024kbps uncapped Internet usage products will be upgraded to 1024kbps and 2048kbps uncapped Internet respectively at no additional cost.
The new prices on usage products and value bundles are effective immediately while speed upgrades will commence automatically from 24 August 2012.
“Telkom Business remains committed to enabling small and medium business customers with high quality internet services. Today, we have not only increased value but we have also slashed prices,” said Thami Magazi, Managing Executive: SME Services.
“Over the last six months, we’ve recorded a 105% increase in internet usage from our retail customers over Telkom Internet. This includes increased activity by small and medium enterprises customers who are integrating high speed Internet into their daily operations.”
Magazi suggested that the increase in fixed bandwidth was enabled by the introduction of high quality uncapped Internet last year which has facilitated the uptake of more sophisticated business applications such as collaborative e-mail, document sharing and web-hosting or cloud storage tools.
These product updates follow the recent announcement by the company on the upgrade of entry-level ADSL speeds to enable new generation consumer content and business applications in a more cost effective manner.
Steve Lewis, Managing Executive of Product House said “based on our customers’ responses, we are improving our uncapped offerings while remaining responsible to the core network products through which we deliver our customer traffic.”
“We are passing on benefits of improved bandwidth pricing and increased value in entry level products into our uncapped usage products,” Lewis added.
New pricing
Telkom’s shaped uncapped offerings have been re-priced as follows:
| Usage Product |
New Price |
| Basic (1Mbps) |
R 420 |
| Advanced (2Mbps) |
R 895 |
| Premium (4Mbps) |
R 1 695 |
| Premium+ (10Mbps) |
R 3 295 |
Value and pricing on TBiz Uncapped Bundles have been adjusted as follows:
| Usage Product |
ADSL |
Usage |
VAS |
Old Price |
New Price |
| Basic |
Up to 384kbps* |
1 Mbps |
Starter |
R 595 |
R 595 |
| Advanced |
Up to 1Mbps* |
2 Mbps |
Starter |
R 1 224 |
R 995 |
| Premium |
Up to 10Mbps |
4 Mbps |
Starter |
R 2 359 |
R 1 995 |
| Premium+ |
Up to 10Mbps |
10 Mbps |
Starter |
R 4 224 |
R 3 495 |
* To be upgraded automatically from 24 August 2012 to higher speeds
Exchange is one of the cornerstones of communication and collaboration in Office. Over the past few years, we have seen significant changes in the way people communicate – a multitude of devices, an explosion of information, complex compliance requirements, social networks, and a multi-generational workforce. This world of communication challenges has been accompanied by a major shift towards cloud services.
The Exchange team has been hard at work in building a product and service that helps to address these challenges and better prepare our customers for the future of communications and productivity. We are excited to announce an important milestone on this journey – the preview of the next version of Exchange is now available!
With Exchange 2010, we redesigned the product with low-cost large mailboxes and cloud services in mind. We then extended this vision through Office 365 where tens of thousands of organizations with millions of users have accompanied us on this journey to the cloud. Now, customers can look forward to the new release of Exchange which offers a wide variety of exciting benefits:
Remain in control, online and on-premises, by tailoring your solution based on your unique needs and ensuring your communications are always available on your terms.
Keep the organization safe by protecting business communications and sensitive information in order to meet internal and regulatory compliance requirements.
Increase productivity by helping users manage increasing volumes of communications across multiple devices.
As of last week the new version of Office, including Exchange and Office 365, has been made available to customers. I would encourage everyone to download the preview version of Exchange Server 2013 and try out the service preview of Office 365 Enterprise. As with pre-release versions, please use them to preview but not for production use.
Here are some of the great benefits you get with the next release of Exchange:
Reduced costs by optimizing for next generation of hardware
Exchange can now support up to 8TB disks, by reducing database IOPS by +50% and optimizing for multiple databases per volume to increase aggregate disk utilization while maintaining reasonable database sizes. Ever growing memory capacity is used to improve search query performance and reduce IOPS. All this allows you and your end users to have larger mailboxes at lower costs.
Significantly reduced operational overhead for high availability
DAG management is simplified via automatic DAG network configuration, enhancements to DAG management cmdlets, support for multiple databases per disk, and enhancements to lagged copies. Auto-recovery capabilities – inherently built into DAGs – are now extended to the rest of Exchange and all protocols. Client-initiated, automatic recovery allows you to reduce recovery time for site failures from hours to under a minute.
Decrease the amount of time spent managing your system while maintaining control
Exchange now provides a single, easy-to-use, Web-based administration interface – the Exchange Administration Center (EAC). Role based access control (RBAC) empowers your helpdesk and specialist users to perform specific tasks which are surfaced appropriately in the EAC – without requiring full administrative permissions. This streamlined and intuitive experience helps you manage Exchange efficiently, delegate tasks, and focus on driving your business forward.
Figure 1: The Exchange Administration Center (EAC) in the next release of Exchange
Automatically protect Exchange availability from surges in traffic
Exchange now offers easy to administer controls to protect against unexpected surges in traffic. System work that is not interactive is automatically deferred to non-peak hours in order to preserve the end user experience and higher priority tasks. This improved overall system through-put leads to reduced costs by saving you from planning capacity for those infrequent, unexpected peaks.
Cloud on your terms
Exchange provides you tools to move to the cloud on your terms – whether that’s onboarding to the cloud overnight or easily managing a hybrid deployment with mailboxes on-premises and online to meet your business needs. Provide your end users with a seamless experience including sharing calendars and scheduling meetings between on-premises and online users and have minimal user disruption when user mailboxes are smoothly moved across environments. Remain in control in the cloud by testing out upcoming enhancements via previews.
Automatically protect your email from malware
Exchange now offers built in basic anti-malware protection. Administrators can configure and manage their protection settings right from within the Exchange Administration Center. Integrated reporting provides visibility into emerging trends. This capability can be turned off, replaced, or paired with premium services such as Exchange Online Protection for layered protection.
Protect your sensitive data and inform users of internal compliance policies with Data Loss Prevention (DLP) capabilities
Keep your organization safe from users accidentally sharing sensitive information with unauthorized people. The new Exchange DLP features identify, monitor, and protect sensitive data through deep content analysis. Exchange offers built-in DLP policies based on regulatory standards such as PII and PCI, and is extensible to support other policies important to your business. New Policy Tips in the new release of Outlook inform users about policy violations as content is being created and about how information should be handled according to organizational standards.
Figure 2: Protect your sensitive data with Data Loss Prevention (DLP) capabilities
Allow compliance officers to run In-Place eDiscovery across Exchange, SharePoint, and Lync – from a single interface
The ability to immutably preserve and discover data across your entire organization is essential to ensuring internal and regulatory compliance. Allow your compliance officers to autonomously use the new eDiscovery Center to identify, hold, and analyze your organization’s data from Exchange, SharePoint, and Lync. And, the data always remains in-place, so you never have to manage a separate store. With the eDiscovery Center, you can reduce the cost of managing complex compliance needs, while ensuring you are prepared for the unexpected.
Figure 3: Run In-Place eDiscovery across Exchange, SharePoint and Lync from a single interface
Allow users to naturally work together – while compliance is applied behind the scenes
Site Mailboxes bring Exchange emails and SharePoint documents together. Like a filing cabinet, they provide a place to file project emails and documents and can only be seen by project members. Document storage, co-authoring, and versioning is provided by SharePoint while messaging is handled by Exchange – with a complete user experience within the new release of Outlook. Compliance policies are applied at the site mailbox level and are transparent to the users – thus preserving their productivity.
Figure 4: Site Mailboxes bring Exchange emails and SharePoint documents together
Modern public folders provide a great way of managing and storing shared conversations and discussions
Public folders are now available in Exchange Online. Both on-premise as well as online, public folders provide the same capabilities customers are already familiar with. And more – they now share the same storage, indexing, and HA capabilities of regular mailboxes and public folder content can now be found via end-user search.
Give your users an intuitive, gorgeous, touch-optimized experience on all screens
Your end users will get more done from anywhere with a clean and uncluttered experience. Users can now take advantage of the fresh, easy, and intuitive Windows 8 style experience across Outlook and OWA. OWA user experience scales beautifully for any form factor and size – PC or slate or phone – and has a modern user experience voice with great support for touch and motion. OWA now offers three different UI layouts optimized for desktop, slate, and phone browsers.
Figure 5: An intuitive, gorgeous, touch-optimized experience on all screens
Offline support in OWA allows your users to be productive when offline or on intermittently connected networks
You can now launch OWA in the browser and start working even if there is no network connectivity. Your emails and actions are automatically synchronized the next time connectivity is restored. This allows your users to be productive and have a great OWA experience even from remote locations with slow or intermittently connected networks or no network connection at all.
Bring all of your contacts together and automatically keep them up-to-date
People’s professional networks span many different places. In Office 365, your users can import contact information from LinkedIn (and other networks in the future) so that they have all of their information in one place. Exchange will even find the same person across your personal contacts, GAL, and other networks and consolidate their information into one contact card, avoiding duplication and multiple contact cards with different information.
Figure 6: Bring all your contacts together from Exchange’s GAL, your personal contacts and other networks
Modern people search experience lets you quickly find the right person
People search experience is consistent everywhere – from people hub to nickname cache when composing an email. Search spans across all of your people – personal contacts, GAL, networks. Search results are relevance based and contain rich results – photos, phone number, location, etc.
Figure 7: Quickly find the right person across your personal contacts, GAL and networks
Updated canvas makes calendar more useful for everyone
Like Outlook, OWA now supports simple entry of reminders and to-do’s by typing right on the calendar. Users get quick, glance-able day and item “peeks”. New views for day, week, and month – like the “month + agenda” (or “Mogenda”) view – makes it really easy to manage your time.
Figure 8: Manage your time easily with the new views for day, week, and month
Figure 9: Calendar item “peek” shows useful information
Customize Outlook and OWA easily by integrating apps from the Office marketplace
Help your users be more productive via 3rd party apps for Outlook adding contextual information and functionality to emails and calendar. Apps for Outlook are easy to develop using the new cloud-based extensibility model. The same apps work across the new release of Outlook and OWA – including on OWA’s slate and phone optimized layouts. Users and Exchange administrators can easily discover and install apps via the Office marketplace. You can control which apps different end users can use.
Figure 10: Customize Outlook and OWA with 3rd party apps from the Office marketplace
This is the first of a series of blog posts which will cover the next release of Exchange. In future posts, we will cover the full set of capabilities, including all of the features mentioned above, in more detail.
Too many South African brands embarking on social media marketing campaigns believe that the number of ‘friends’ or ‘likes’ they have on Facebook are a measure of the success of their campaigns and the popularity of their brands. This isn’t the case, say local social media and marketing experts.
Jarred Cinman, chief inventor at Native, points out that brand ‘likes’ on Facebook are generally incentivised and do not necessarily indicate brand support. The success of a social media marketing campaign lies in the spread of the message throughout the right networks, the level of engagement that follows, and the positive sentiments this generates, he says.
“In South Africa, we have a very active social media user base that is very engaged. This isn’t matched on a brand marketing level. South African businesses tend to be very conservative and stuck in the old paradigm, focusing on broadcast and print media. Brands and companies are not fully exploiting social media to their advantage yet,” he says.
Using social media effectively takes a whole new marketing mindset, the experts say.
Numbers not a metric
Walter Pike, founder and leader of PiKE | New Marketing, says: “We suddenly think about the audience and realise that, although it may be great to have 10 000 Facebook ‘likes’, it may be better to have 10. The 10 000 could be the lurkers, or not even actually present – they may have clicked the button never to return, while the 10 may be the bridges or the thought leaders.”
Melissa Attree, business development manager at Cerebra, echoes this sentiment: “I’d far rather have an audience of 100 very engaged people in a social network than a thousand ‘likes’ who only visit the page once,” she says.
Handing over control
What is happening now, thanks to social media, the experts say, is that brands are having to find their voices, customers are becoming the branding agencies, and the conversation is no longer with a customer, but with a chain of that customer’s networks, too. Brands can no longer tightly control their messages.
“We start thinking about strategic brand management and we suddenly see that we no longer control the messages, the brand associations nor the media, and realise that we only control the experience with the brand,” says Pike.
The London 2012 Olympic Games will see several technologies making an appearance for the first time in the event’s history, in areas like communications infrastructure, media and the sporting activities themselves.
Here are five technologies making their debut at the Games, and what they will mean for athletes and spectators alike.
Pay phone
The London Games will be the first to make use of a mobile contactless payment application, being offered by official sponsors, Visa and Samsung. Near-field communications technology has been built into Samsung’s Galaxy S III phone – the “official phone of the Olympics” – which allows users to wave their phones in front of a contactless reader to make a purchase. The app also displays transaction history and account balance, providing customers with greater visibility into what they’re spending and how much money they have left.
The phone, if associated with a Visa card, can be used to pay for items up to the value of £20 anywhere that accepts contactless payments, for any purchases within the Olympic areas. It’s estimated there will be about 140 000 contactless terminals in the country by the time the Games roll around.
