Cell C has announced that starting from today prepaid and Controll Chat customers will have the abillity to buy all-in-one vouchers that will provide them with better value for their money.

How it usually works for prepaid customers is you buy an airtime voucher that has a value of say R100 and then you can buy sms or data bundles that gets subtracted from your airtime, but with the new all-in-one vouchers from Cell C customers can now buy one vouchers that offers them airtime, data and sms bundles.

The new Cell C all-in-one vouchers are not only convenient but they offer customers better value for their money with data prices between 40c and 50c per megabyte and on network call rates of between 40c and 50c per minute.

Simon Camerer, Cell C’s Executive Head of Marketing said:  “We want our prepaid customers to experience ‘Woooooooshh’, we want them to see what the network can deliver, and we wanted to do this together with other benefits that our customers enjoy, and of course continuing to provide our customers with great savings.”

Currently there are three vouchers available to prepaid customers ranging from R49 to R199.

Cell C customers can obtain the all-in-one vouchers from 1 June 2011 at Cell C stores, for more information visit the Cell C website.

Web Africa has just launched a new Home ADSL product range that is sure to shake up the local South African ADSL market. The new product called Home Connect gives users double the bandwidth for the same prices compared to other ADSL providers.

Having analysed home user ADSL bandwidth trends, Web Africa have come up with the Home Connect product that offers users peak and off-peak usage allowances, resulting in low prices starting from R29 for 2GB of ADSL bandwidth.

I have to point out that the off-peak usage allowances is not like other broadband providers’ where you only get to use the bandwidth when you would normally be asleep, but rather when you would use the internet most as a home user, between 7pm and 7am.

Head of Product and Marketing, Cliff Hazell, says: “We have specifically designed this product for home users who are looking for good value for their money and don’t want to spend a fortune on quality ADSL. The majority of home users’ bandwidth is utilised outside of business hours or on weekends, allowing us to offer ‘off peak’ usage at much lower rates, whilst still providing sufficient bandwidth for normal peak-time usage and pass the value on to our customers.”

Web Africa Home Connect pricing

For more details visit the Web Africa Home Connect ADSL product page.

There comes a time in every blog’s existence when you have no choice but to start serving ads to cover costs, I started serving ads since day one as I was hosting local and had to cover the cost of the very expensive local hosting bill monthly.

Unfortunately for me I did not see great returns on my Google Adsense units and was almost at the point where I wanted to pull the whole idea as I was forced to pay the local hosting bill out of my own pocket, but instead of dropping Google Adsense I started playing around with different sizes and the placement of the ads and it paid off withing a few weeks.

Naturally you can’t expect much revenue from ads if you do not have loads of traffic, but a comment on iMod, and the good timing of a Google’s Adsense mail package lead me to this post.

So how can you increase your Google Adsense revenue in just a few weeks? With just a few tweaks here and there you could be earning way more than you are already earning from your Google Adsense units.

Go Wide
Not many know this but smaller Google Adsense ads does not perform well, rather then going with the smaller format why not switch over to one of the top performing Google Adsense units? According to Google, wider ad formats tend to perform better as they are easier to read, and they are also preferred by advertisers. Try switching to one of the bellow Google Adsense units:

• 300 x 250 Medium Rectangle
• 336 x 280 Large Rectangle
• 728 x 90 Leaderboard
• 160 x 600 Wide Skyscraper

More is better
Increase the number of Google Adsense units per page to three, this can be particularly successful on pages with allot of text on them. Also place ads near rich content and locations where users may be focusing their attention. Try adding a 300 x 250 Medium Rectangle at the end of your articles or blogposts.

Enable text and image ads
The Google Adsense system automatically shows ads that will deliver the highest earnings for you, setting up your Google Adsense units to show both text and images will increase the number of ads competing to appear on your pages, leading to higher revenue delivering ads.

Make your ads visible
Position your ads where users can actually see them without the need to scroll down, this is called placing them “above the fold”. Above the fold ads are premium locations and are generally more attractive to advertisers who pay for impressions rather than clicks.

Blend you ads in
Google Adsense has this nice feature where you can actually customise the look and feel of your ads, select colours that complements your site, specially for the borders and backgrounds of your ads. Google recommends creating a borderless look by setting the border and background colour to be the same as the colour of the page the ad appears on.

So there you have it, by just tweaking your Google Adsense units and incorporating the above guidelines you can already start earning a bit more. If you have got any tips feel free to leave them in the comments.

HTC, manufacturer of Android smartphones, have announced some good news for Android users wanting to root their phones and load custom operating systems on them.

The company confirmed in an announcement on the official HTC Facebook page that they are saying goodbye to their locked bootloader policy, and from now on will no longer lock the bootloaders on it’s phones.

‎”There has been overwhelmingly customer feedback that people want access to open bootloaders on HTC phones. I want you to know that we’ve listened. Today, I’m confirming we will no longer be locking the bootloaders on our devices. Thanks for your passion, support and patience,” Peter Chou, CEO of HTC

The move by HTC could see the smartphone brand rise to the top of the Android platform, with die hard techies already saying that they will be moving over to HTC because of this announcement.

Opensource communities will also welcome this announcement and I think we should see more of them supporting HTC and developing custom ROMS for the devices.

Users of the popular VoIP and messaging service Skype are reporting that they are unable to make use of the service, this comes only weeks after Microsoft bought Skype for an amount of $8.5 Billion.

With the acquisition of Skype by Microsoft many users raised concern that Microsoft will somehow screw thing up for the service, and it seems like they have indeed.

Twitter are being flooded with messages of users complaining about Skype being down, although unconfirmed it seems that it is only the Windows versions that are affected by the downtime, with some Mac and iOS users reporting that it’s working fine.

The errors occurs everytime users open up Skype, they are then greeted with a Windows error message saying ‘Skype has stopped working’ and asking them if they would like to close the program.

It seems that the Skype website are also affected with either timeouts or very slow loading times.

[UPDATE]

How to fix the Skype crash error http://on.fb.me/m81ORU

It’s no secret that when it comes to innovation and setting standards in the local broadband market, MWEB is at the forefront. MWEB, the company that revolutionised uncapped Internet in South Africa, has now gone and done another first in South Africa by upgrading all 512k customers to 1Mbps.

This news comes after rumours have been doing the rounds that Telkom will be doing away with their 512k ADSL lines and upgrading all customers to 1Mbps, however no promises have been made by Telkom as to when the switchover will happen.

MWEB has taken the lead, and from today the 512k option will be obsolete from their product line. MWEB will be upgrading all current 512k customers to 1Mbps speeds at no extra cost and the new 1Mbps uncapped products will also be priced the same as the previous 512k products.

Users that are already on a 1Mbps data only option will get a price reduction and from now on only pay R299pm, while the new 1Mbps All Inclusive package will be priced at R599pm.

Twitter has rolled out new functionality, starting today Twitter users will now also receive email notification when someone mentions them, retweets or favourites a tweet.

Twitter for long has already sent out email notifications notifying users of new followers and direct message, but with this new feature one can’t help but wonder how many people will actually welcome this new email notification addition.

Although it might sound like it’s convenient to receive email notifications when someone mentions or retweets you, this can become quite spammy for some users, luckily you can opt out to not receive email notifications by clicking unsubscribe on your first email notification. The options to opt out are yet to be added to your Twitter Settings page it seems.

A while back Leaf the local distributor of HTC phones in South Africa announced that South Africa will be getting access to Paid Android Apps, Google last night confirmed this by announcing at their I/O conference that full Android Market access will be coming to South Africa and an additional 98 other countries.

As of last night some South African users have reported to already have access to paid applications on the Android Market, I however checked and could only find one paid application namely QuickOffice Pro that is going for R68.73. I also tried buying apps through the online Android web store, but this did not work either.

In the mean time while we wait for the service to roll out fully to all South Africa users you can set up a Google Checkout Account, as that will be used to pay for your applications.

So quite a few people contacted me with regards to a Invalid Address error they are getting when trying to buy apps on iTunes with an account created using this method, it seems that Apple has introduced address validation and because in that tutorial you make use of Fakenamegenerator the address does not actually exist.

You can however fix the Invalid Address error by just going to your iTunes account, logging in by clicking Account Info and then by clicking on the Edit Payment Information and updating it with a valid address, I suggest you search Google Maps for a valid address, or just use a restaurant’s address that are situated in the US.

You will also need the correct telephone number, or at least the area code must match the location of the address you chose, but this can all be obtained through Google Maps.

It has been a hot topic of debate, when will we see the white iPhone 4? After the successful launch of the iPhone 4 in September 2010 in South Africa, consumers have been asking when they could get their hand on the white iPhone 4.

Apple officially made available the white iPhone 4 last month in the US and it seems that South Africans wanting to get their hand on the device won’t have to wait that long.

MTN which launched the iPhone 4 here in South Africa at really affordable prices last year is again at it by being the first to introduce the white iPhone 4 to South Africa.

“From as little as R309 a month, with a 150MB data bundle included, MTN customers can experience world-class internet in their pockets,” says Serame Taukobong, chief marketing officer at MTN South Africa.

The white iPhone 4 will be available at MTN stores from 20 May 2011 without any pre-registrations.