But have you seen the 3D View? Yup, how insane is that?

Click for bigger image

How do you activate it?
- Well, firstly you go to maps.google.com
- Search for the street in Cape Town you’re looking for.
- Then Drag the orange “Pegman” onto your street.
- Voila! Streetview (Or click here for an example )
- Then for the 3D, it’s as easy as right clicking on the image in Google Maps and selecting “3D on”. Easy Peasy!
But you’ll need a pair of these:

Will be weird walking in on someone scanning Google Maps wearing a pair of those..
-A-

I’m actually really excited
-A-

On Tuesday I joined a group of bloggers on a tour of Fire ID and Mxit, who are both based in the Stellenbosch Techno Park. The Tour was arranged byDave Duarte, known for amongst other  things the hugely popular 27 Dinners

FireID are a hugely successful and proudly South African Startup mentored by Justin Stanford of Silicon Cape Fame.

Second on the list of Startups we visited was the  now infamous Mxit.

Some interesting points about the Mxit Service I picked up:
- Currently has a 19Million User Base
- Approx. 20 000 registrations per day
- Has a vested interest in education, the launch of “Tixi” shows that Mxit is serious about this.
- Mxit Xchange, the new classified section has 1.7 Million subscribers
- Mxit Evo is the first PC Client that CEO Herman Heunis deems  ”Decent”

Mxit Offices with Herman Neunis

Mxit Future

2010/2011 Outlook

Mxit monitoring screens

An Age old Strategy is the Competition Model where customers are rewarded for taking the time and/or effort to look at the products the Retailer has.

Online competitions are great as they also allow Retailers to begin a basic Customer Relationship Management strategy by collecting contact details of people entering these competitions.
Today I visited winstuff.co.za who not only list current online competitions in South Africa, but also reward visitors to their site and Facebook group.

I see this Marketing Model as a win win situation for both Retailer and Customer and recommend you check out:

click to visit...

Another good site

Rafiq Phillips your Cape Town Web AddiCT has also been delivering great posts on Andriod Mobile advancement and it’s adoption by Cellphone Manufacturers.
His recent post to win a Android phone comes as a godsend as I’ve been considering Andriod as a replacement to my disfigured HTC S740.

Shoulda gotten a case... I know

I mean really, how is a self-confessed Geek supposed to enjoy my mobile online fix with such a device. Even had the screen not have been cracked the Windows Mobile 6.1 experience alone makes this a undesirable device (Dont know why I thought WinMo was a good idea)

For More on the OpenMoko FreeRunner check Rafiq’s post here.
-A-

Blu-ray has been available for about three years now. Despite being the replacement to DVD I’ve not seen a big shift toward this technology, which I expected with Stores such as Hi-Fi Corporation and Game offering more “affordable” Full-HD Ready TV’s

The format battle with HD-DVD seems to have stunted the growth of Blu-ray as it spent it’s infant years proving it’s the superior technology. HD-DVD lost. End of the story? I don’t think so, into the picture steps the soon to be released USB 3.0 aka “USB Super Speed”, which will offer Flash media a major boost in Data Transfer. I would have loved to add Video streaming/Download but this transfer technology can really only be comparable in the US and Euro regions, we have some way to go here in South Africa.

The argument I  forward is that the next generation of hardware devices will should look to the Flash Media format to replace the now aging optical reader options. The Apple Macbook is a good example of how Hard Drive technology has moved to Solid State Drives (SSD).

Teardown any Blu-ray player or Game Console and you’ll see that other than the motherboard the optical drive takes up prime space. Annoyingly with optical media are the delays and noise associated with spin up as the drive reads data from the disk. Sony made a good move with Blu-ray in it’s release of the PS3, Microsoft it seems has lucked out by sticking with the now dying DVD Format. So the we look again to the Game Console manufacturers for when they release their specification of their next generations, albeit 3 years away. For now the Sony Fanboys will continue to bash the xbox die-hards over at LazyGamer.

My money’s on Flash Media For The Win, here’s a summarised breakdown why Flash Media will own Blu-ray at some point:
- Faster Data Transfer:  Bluray = 54 Mbit/s  | USB3 = 3.2 GBit/s
- Smaller Form Factor both for Media and Reader
- Capacity: Bluray = 50Gb | USB = 128Gb

How many of you already have USB flash drives anyway?
-A-

Edit: I’ve updated this article to correct some errors, USB is a BUS Technology where Bluray is a STORAGE Technology. I put forward that USB 3.0 will give Flash Media the edge over Bluray Optical media. Perhaps this was not clearly described in the original post, my apologies