In the latest edition of Communications Africa Magazine, the technical and commercial benefits of geostationary communications satellites are assessed, contrasting them to both the failed high profile experimental satellite technologies of the previous decade, as well as to other communications technologies in Africa, notably fibre, as it arrives on the continent’s shores in abundance. In particular profiling the New Dawn satellite.

See attached article

Integrat has launched myTXT Mobile product – a free desktop bulk messaging application ideal for marketing campaigns. myTXT allows a user to send single messages or bulk SMSes to your group of contacts that you import from Microsoft Outlook.

The simplicity of the application is that a user can write their messages now, save and send them even while being off-line. myTXT will store messages in the outbox and automatically send it when a user is reconnected to the Internet. In addition, myTXT spoils delivery reports, ideal for tracking the safe delivery of messages. Message templates can be stored and retrieved when using a specific message often. This saves time and effort in writing or saving a message elsewhere.

The recipients may reply to your message, and their replies will appear in your myTXT Mobile application’s inbox.

Corrie Henn, product manager of myTXT Mobile, says: “This desktop application supports bulk messaging, ideal for marketing campaigns. Creating a myTXT account requires no set-up fees, monthly fees or contracts. Users only need to pay for their SMS bundle, and the beauty is that SMS messages will never expire. Bulk messages can be imported from Microsoft Excel or any other delimited text file at your own convenience.”

“A user may also use custom fields to store their specific information about a contact. When sending messages, they simply refer to the custom field, and myTXT will automatically substitute it with the store data in a contact database. Setting up reminders, alerts and meetings via SMS is as simple as clicking a button. You may use this feature not only to notify your clients, but even yourself, so myTXT can remind you of anything from meetings, which will send an SMS to your client as a reminder, to birthdays and anniversaries. Your customised calendar can, in addition, manage staff timetables, preventing meeting schedules that may clash, and can create repeating events that occur on regular intervals,” adds Henn.

The myTXT desktop application will notify a user by means of a visual alert every time an automatic SMS is sent.

For more information, visit http://www.myTXT.co.za

See attached link

Having attended the Mobile World Congress, the largest global telecoms conference (attended by 49,000 visitors from 200 countries) in Barcelona this year, the following 10 key trends and developments came to the fore.

The 10 major developments at MWC were:

1. Groupe Speciale Mobile Association (“GSMA”) and about 15 major operators have signed up to create an application planet where there will be a common platform that will allow application developers in the Symbian world to operate across networks and geographies (i.e. a challenge to Apple’s dominance in the apps space);
2. The affordability of smartphones are becoming a reality, with estimates that by 2015 approximately 50% of mobile phones will be smartphones. This will require larger amounts of backhaul bandwidth for the mobile networks. Once smart phones reach 70% of the market, they will be the single largest access device to the internet;
3. Mobile operators see device-to-device connectivity as the next revenue opportunity in the mobile space. These data flows are viewed as a mechanism to bolster declining voice ARPUs;
4. Green technology, especially in the data centre environment and the growth of cloud computing, is a major trend that will accelerate in the coming years;
5. The growth of smart devices on one side and sophisticated cloud computing on the other will drive growth in “intelligent pipes” in between them. This reinforces the case for increased access to fibre optic networks;
6. Here is a thought, as you go to a restaurant to have coffee or food when you pay with your credit card and you are given a receipt. Use your smartphone with high-resolution camera to take a photo of the receipt and store it or send it to your private data vault. Intelligent systems in the cloud will then collate and reconcile receipts and expense claims automatically.
7. In my view LTE is 3+ years away. No handsets are widely available. While people are talking about LTE trials, large scale deployments are still some way off, however, the hype is here. This is another reason why we need backhaul bandwidth now so that when LTE is implemented there are enough pipes to support this infrastructure;
8. Africa will continue to use mobile devices as the primary means to access the cloud;
9. Africa must develop its own applications that are specific to Africa’s needs. Including its own social network platforms that will address Africa’s unique lifestyles;
10. In conclusion, the communications ecosystem is evolving, but it is not clear which organisations will be absorbed by black holes or collide with each other to create new planets in our ecosystem. The ICT ecosystem at one level and the DNA of organisations and companies at another, will fundamentally change in the next ten years.