Less than two years after completing the undersea portion of the first system to connect Southern and Eastern Africa to the rest of the world via India and Europe, Convergence Partners’ investee company SEACOM continues to drive the growth of the African Internet by rolling-out an Internet Protocol, IP, Platform into its international core network.

The IP Platform project involves the design, deployment and operation of nine land-based Internet access points that will store popular web content closer to where the Internet is accessed, thereby enabling a richer and faster Internet browsing experience for end users. Six of these IP network nodes are already live including Dar es Salaam, Johannesburg, Maputo, Marseille, Mombasa and Mtunzini.

SEACOM’s IP platform will allow direct routing between African countries through a single seamless network. As a result, customers are able to reach multiple countries using the shortest path to final destination without Internet traffic being transferred via Europe. Local continuity through direct routing combined with increased resilience through SEACOM’s recent acquisition of east and west coast submarine cable capacity greatly reduces the exposure to data losses in the event of outages elsewhere on the network.

Brian Herlihy, SEACOM CEO, said: “Today, the majority of Internet content consumed in Africa is non-African, flowing from Europe and North America into Africa. We believe that the growth of the African ICT market, including mobile penetration and the eager adoption of social networking, coupled with the development of cloud services will result in a rapid increase in content on African soil.

“In the near future, the rest of the world will be viewing media generated in and stored on the African continent and SEACOM will remain at the forefront of developing the African Internet to support this trend.”

CISCO, Dimension Data and Interoute were closely involved in the design, procurement, logistics and deployment of the SEACOM IP network. This approach of partnering with established players to provide broadband services will continue as SEACOM develops its products and services based on resiliency, service quality and flexibility in line with customers’ evolving needs.

SEACOM truly believes in a world where the African Internet experience is characterised by abundant local content, minimal latency, fast download and streaming speeds, and interconnected African markets. Today, over a dozen countries across the African continent have access to SEACOM’s low cost products and services via its extended network.

SEACOM Press Release

“If the first month of 2011 is anything to go by, then the rest of the year is going to be an incredible one” according to Mark van Diggelen – CEO of online and mobile casual gaming business, SkillPod Media, in which Convergence Partners has a strategic equity investment. “We’ve just completed a 7 month period of R&D, where we redeveloped our online and Facebook casual games platforms, adding a host of new features targeted at personalisation, customisation and monetisation.” As a result of this development the response from new and existing clients has been incredibly positive, with 20 new projects already confirmed. These include a number of new casual games portal deployments in the Middle East (these sites have been fully customised to cater for the Arabic language and the reading of content from right to left), UK, USA, Vietnam, Europe and South Africa.

He adds that the uptake and response from new and existing clients has been incredibly positive, with 20 new projects already confirmed. These include a number of new casual games portal deployments in the Middle East (these sites have been fully customised to cater for the Arabic language and the reading of content from right to left), UK, USA, Vietnam, Europe and South Africa.

The new platform caters for publishers wishing to quickly and cost effectively deploy a casual games offering either onto their existing portal or as a new standalone solution, this can either be a full white label solution or a full featured Facebook application. The platform allows publishers to customise the “Look and Feel” of the site, import logo’s, add tracking scripts (such as Google Analytics), add banner tags, customise backgrounds, manage the message of the day, change themes, setup tournaments, translate the site and the most popular games.

The added benefit of the platform is that publishers, large or small, can immediately start earning revenues from their user base, these revenues are derived from traditional advertising and from micro payments. The platform is fully integrated into PayPal and Moneybookers, additional payment mechanisms will be added on an ongoing basis. Micropayments are earned when users use their virtual currency credits (Pods) to buy in-game power-ups, customise games, when virtual gifts are bought and sent to friends, when users create contests and enter tournaments, micro payments are also used when users customise or pimp their avatars. Other revenue earning opportunities include: sponsorship of site backgrounds, backgrounds in the avatar platform, pre-roll ads, surveys, sponsorship of merchandise in the avatar and virtual gifts store and finally revenues can be earned from in-game advertising.

SkillPod has developed a number of API’s for their games, these include secure high score API’s, post game screens, power-ups, translation and game customisation API’s. The intention is to make these API’s available to the greater game development community, the developers will need to integrate the API’s and then submit their games for approval, where after they’ll be published across our global network of games portals. The upside being that the game developers share in the revenues earned from the various API’s that make use of the micro payments platform. SkillPod is already working with a number of 3rd party game developers across the globe, interested developers should get into contact with SkillPod to discuss the partnership opportunity.

Content is king and we know full well that we need to create unique titles, to not only add value to our publishing clients games offerings, but stand out in the various mobile app stores, and have thus embarked on the creation of a number of exiting new game titles, these games have been built from the ground up and aren’t clones of existing titles. We’re very excited about these titles and will be publishing them across multiple platforms, including: online, mobile web, PC download and more importantly they’ll be published and formatted for distribution through the Nokia Ovi Store, Android Market and the Apple App Store.

The ongoing growth and success of SkillPod Media has received a lot of attention from local and international investors, as one US based venture fund said, “SkillPod continually pops up on the radar”. This interest has resulted in SkillPod’s management team partaking in discussions with a number of parties that have expressed an interest in investing in the business, some of these discussions are already at an advanced stage. SkillPod’s current shareholders (Mark van Diggelen and Convergence Partners) are looking for a strategic partner that not only has access to financial resources but more importantly would be well positioned to assist with the strategic growth and expansion of the SkillPod games network, across the globe.

Publishers can contact SkillPod to discuss their casual games requirements, we’re able to offer publishers a turnkey solution or an out of the box option, with a self service solution currently in development, this offering will allow publishers to register, download the games solution and immediately access the backend to start setting up and customising their new casual games portal, all in a matter of minutes.

See attached link

The Group recorded a sound trading performance for the quarter ended 31 December 2009. Reported turnover reflected an approximately 6% increase in relation to the three months to 31 December 2008.

View the Full Statement