Rico du Pessis, Chief Operating Officer of Communications Solutions (Comsol), argues that local loop unbundling will contribute to improving the competitive communications landscape in South Africa, but the process to ensure this happens may be through the courts and not the regulator.

This is important not only for wireless companies, but all South Africans passionate about getting cheaper connectivity to all.  Rico says: “the legislative framework exists for ECS and ECNS license holders to get wholesale and non-discriminatory access to the local loop, as well as other facilities, (like masts, poles and radio apparatus) yet I feel that it will take a court action before we will see broad application of this process.”

Article from ITNewsAfrica

Article from MyBroadband

Convergence Partners investee company, Seacom has signed a master services agreement with Telecomunicações de Moçambique (TDM), the leading telecommunications service provider in Mozambique, which gives it access to the largest and most distributed fibre optic network in Mozambique as well as a diverse route into Zimbabwe and additional border presence into Malawi and South Africa.

Through this agreement, customers in Zimbabwe are able to interconnect to the Seacom system in Maputo via Mutare. This additional route through Mozambique complements Seacom’s existing route through South Africa via Beit Bridge and provides Zimbabwean customers with resiliency and redundancy.

Brian Herlihy, Seacom CEO, comments: “This agreement with TDM demonstrates our commitment to partner with established players to improve the range of service to customers while continuously expanding the reach of Seacom’s low cost services into land-locked countries across the region.”

Currently, more than a dozen countries across the African continent have access to Seacom’s low cost products and services via its extended network.

Article in Seacom website

Article in ItOnline

Convergence investee FibreCo is pleased to announce that its new website is live! Please visit them on www.fibreco.co.za

Established in 2009 as a joint venture between Convergence Partners, Cell C, and Internet Solutions, FibreCo is deploying a state-of-the-art fully managed long-haul fibre optic terrestrial network across South Africa. Construction of the network will follow a three-phase approach and ultimately cover a total of 14,000km.

FibreCo will offer a fully managed monitoring and maintenance service of the network on a 24/7 basis for its tenants. A range of additional value-added services will also be available, dependent on customer requirements.

The Hopeville feature film, which was released nationally in South Africa in September 2010, has been making in-roads at the international film festivals and awards events.

Hopeville is a film produced by Heartlines, which is a beneficiary of the Convergence Partners Foundation.

The Hopeville feature film won two SAFTA Awards for Best Production Design (Karel Flint) and Best Lead Actor (Themba Ndaba).  Other nominations included Best Cinematography, Best Editor, Best Hair/Make-up and Best Music composition.

In addition, Hopeville has received nine nominations for the AMAA, (African Movie Academy Awards) including:

• Best Production Design;
• Best Cinematography;
• Best Screenplay;
• Best Editing;
• Best Young Actor- Junior Singo;
• Best Actress in Supporting Role- Mary Twala;
• Best Actor in Supporting Role- Desmond Dube;
• Best Actor in Leading Role- Themba Ndaba; and
• Best Film.

The 2011 Africa Movie Academy Awards, now in its 7^th year, will take place from March 21 to 27 in Yenagoa, Nigeria.

Hopeville was first developed by HEARTLINES, Curious Pictures and SABC Education as a six part mini-series which was broadcast on SABC.  The mini series went on to win a Rose’Dor in Switzerland and a coveted nomination at the International Emmy’s in New York City.

Hopeville will also be screening at the Pan African Film Festival in Los Angeles, FESPACO in Burkina Faso, Afrika Film Festival in Belgium and Tiburon Film Festival in California.

HEARTLINES CEO, Dr Garth Japhet, said that he was thrilled that the film, which has a compelling message of ordinary citizens taking action for the good of the community, was reaching audiences worldwide. “With this film, and the previous series of eight award-winning values-based films, HEARTLINES is making a significant contribution to building the social fabric, not only of South Africa, but internationally as well.”

Hopeville Press Release

On Friday 25 February 2011, Communications Minister Roy Padayachie met with the leaders of 30 of SA’s top ICT players to discuss cooperation between government and private sector in order to create jobs and enhance growth. Chairman of Convergence Partners and Dimension Data, Andile Ngcaba, attended the roundtable discussions, which were aimed at developing a 2020 vision for the South African ICT sector.  Andile noted that applications and software are central to the ICT ecosystem and that opportunities exist for innovation and development in these fields. The potential for job creation opportunities would also arise from the production of new set top boxes, required for migration to digital television signal distribution in South Africa.

Andile Ngcaba said: “The conversation that has been started between the Ministry and the ICT industry is encouraging and key in building a strong ICT industry in South Africa.  Out of this dialogue, it became clear that in order for South Africa to meet the challenges and opportunities presented by the emergence of the new ICT ecosystem, it would be critical to have in place pervasive and accessible broadband infrastructure and undertake a concerted effort to up skill our human resources to ensure sustainable and quality job creation in South Africa.”

Vacancies to be filled in six months

Who attend Padayachie Roundtable

ICT panel to tackle jobs

The R250bn pot

“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

Convergence Partners gets into the fever of the soccer world cup and supports Bafana Bafana 100% – Ke Nako. Ever since its announcement as host nation on the 15th of May 2004, the country has been busy preparing itself to host thousands of players and supporters from all over the world. Convergence Partners has been counting down the days and is 100% behind Bafana Bafana. The entire Convergence Partners team has caught a dose of Fifanitis and simply can’t wait for kick-off. We all have the supporters kit and implemented consortium buying tactics for ticket acquisitions early on in the ticket sales process, coupled with strict hedging strategies to ensure the correct acquisitions!
The atmosphere around the country is electric with nearly every car and pedestrian proudly carrying some version of the South African flag or other supporters’ gear. We can’t wait to be blowing vuvuzelas and waving flags for all the games to be held on South African soil.
The tournament kicks-off on the 11th of June 2010 with the opening game between South Africa and Mexico. Our prediction for the opening game is for South Africa to beat Mexico 2 – 1.
However, the smart money is on Spain and Brazil to lift the trophy with the next outsiders being England and Argentina. The chances of South Africa winning the first World Cup on African soil are smaller but we expect them to put in a good showing at the World Cup and beat some highly ranked teams.

Read attached article for more info

Seacom, the first undersea cable providing fibre connectivity to the East Africa, is enabling affordable access to the internet to millions of people. Recently, a key contributor to the development of fibre optics technology, Charles K Kao, was one of the winners of the 2009 Physics Nobel Prize. 

View the report