Web Africa, currently South Africa’s 2^nd biggest hosting provider, has just launched their new range of hosting products – Nitro Unlimited.

Web Africa has just released their new Nitro Unlimited hosting range that promises to be a highly competitive product in the local hosting space by giving clients access to unlimited bandwidth and a fully equipped control panel that makes managing your website and email accounts a breeze.

The new Nitro Unlimited hosting range gives clients the choice of a Linux or Windows hosting environment with the option of hosting locally in South Africa or internationally at no additional charge.

Head of Product and Marketing, Cliff Hazell had this to say about their new offering: “We’re bringing leading international standards home, and giving South Africans the exceptional value and experience they deserve.”

Web Africa’s Nitro Unlimited hosting range starts from as low as R19pm and have a 30 day money back guarantee should you not be satisfied with the product.

Nitro Unlimited Hosting Packages Breakdown

DStv’s much anticipated video on demand movie rental system, DStv BoxOffice, went live this weekend but things did not go as smooth as planned.

The DStv BoxOffice service started becoming available to DStv premium PVR users since early morning Friday 22 July 2011, but since then allot of users are yet still to receive their movie rentals.

Friday evening I set out to test out the new BoxOffice service from DStv, only to be disappointed by the slow registration progress. To sign up you have to SMS your smartcard number and then your DStv BoxOffice account will be set up, I SMS’d my smartcard number through at around 19:00 and only the next morning at around 10:00 I got an SMS telling me that they are experiencing a large demand and are sitting with a backlog of SMS messages that will be attended to. In the SMS DStv also promised an extra free movie rental on the house to make up for the long wait.

Sunday around 12:00 me and the wife decided we wanted to watch a movie, so I set out and followed the rental process by SMSing the unique code to the number onscreen to initiate my movie rental. According to the instructions, shortly after you have SMS’ed the unique code through to the number you will notified via the DStv decoder messaging system that your movie is available to watch.

It is now Monday morning close to 09:00 and I am yet still to receive my movie rental.

For a company operated by Naspers with huge brands behind their name like MWeb one would expect that they would be used to high volume launches by now, I mean DStv knows how many subscribers they have and they know how many of them have PVR decoders, working out the demand would be easy.

Have you tried DStv BoxOffice? If so, tell us about your experience.

Multichoice has launched their much anticipated DStv BoxOffice service last night at an event in Johannesburg. DStv BoxOffice is a video on demand rental service that enable DStv customer to rent the latest Hollywood blockbuster movies for a nominal fee straight from their PVR decoders.

DStv started rolling out the BoxOffice service to premium subscribers from last night and will provide them with 48 hours worth of movie rentals at a price of R25 per movie.

DStv BoxOffice provides subscribers with access to 15 movie rentals at a time that are all stored on their PVR decoders, once a subscriber has then paid for the movie rental the movie will become available to watch.

The big question is will you loose valuable recording space on your PVR now that the BoxOffice movies are downloaded to your device? The answer is no, DStv has reserved space for the BoxOffice service on the PVR decoder since day one so none of your recording will be affected, but due to the limited reserve space you will only have access to 48 hours worth of movies at a time.

New movies will be added to the DStv BoxOffice service every week, with DStv planning to provide up to 150 blockbuster Hollywood movies each year on the service a mere 4 to 6 months after the cinema release.

Payment of the movie rentals can happen via your credit card or via your DStv BoxOffice account that operates almost the same as your DStv account that you can pay monthly the same ways you would pay your DStv account.

For a list of DStv BoxOffice movies currently available or for more information about the service visit http://boxoffice.dstv.com/

Vodacom has been planning a price reduction of their mobile broadband offerings for a while now, and they have finally announced it with savings of up to 43%.

Vodacom recently also launched a 2GB + 2GB for R149 per month special that competes head on with the Cell C special of 2GB for R149, but this is only a promotion and does not offer any value to current Vodacom Standard broadband subscribers.

The company has now taken the wraps of their new mobile broadband data offering prices with lower in-bundle and out-of-bundle pricing, and they have also removed the 600MB, 1.2GB and 2.3GB packages, replacing them with 1GB, 1.5GB, 2GB, 2.5GB and 3GB packages. Out-of-bundle pricing has also been reduced from R2 per MB to R1 per MB.

From 1 August 2011 all Vodacom Standard data packages will be replaced by the packages bellow, all contract customers now also qualify for the Vodacom Nigh Owl service which offers customers extra bandwidth to the same amount as their bundle size during the hours of 00:00 to 05:00.

New Vodacom Mobile Broadband Pricing

It’s no secret that FNB, First National Bank, is at the forefront of innovation at banking in South Africa, and actions are pointing at another first for South African banking from them.

FNB was the first bank that embraced social media, and since then has seen great success with its twitter consultant account, RBJacobs (FNB Guy), that helps FNB customers with quick solutions to problems they are experiencing as well as providing them with advice when they need it.

The last couple of weeks allot of FNB customers started asking about dedicated smartphone apps for the internet banking service, even though FNB gives customers access to mobile banking through their fnb.mobi site and through a USSD service, the company seems to have listened to their customers’ request and yesterday on twitter started asking around at what mobile platforms users would like apps for.

Shortly after users responded, FNB changed their profile picture by adding Apple, Android and BlackBerry logos to it, making it even more obvious that they will be launching smartphone apps. The FNB twitter account also mentioned that they will be announcing something today and questions answered by the account hinted that it may relate to dedicated smartphone apps for internet banking. This morning RBJacobs confirmed that today today they will be talking about the FNB App launch, confirming all the rumours.

Would you make use of a dedicated FNB smartphone app to do you internet banking? If so what platform would you prefer?

Once again Twitter is at the forefront on providing users with the latest on whats happening in the world. South African motorists are using the power of Twitter hashtags to crowdsource information on the currently petrol / fuel crisis in South Africa that relates to the strike of workers in the industry.

After several motorist struggled to get petrol at several service station in Johannesburg and Durban, a new Twitter hashtag was started and is turning out to be a huge success on providing motorist with the latest information on where fuel is available.

Twitter users are using the hashtag #gotpetrol to notify other users on the micro-blogging social network where they got fuel. If you are on Twitter and in an area that has fuel shortage and happened to find a service station that has fuel, why not tweet with the #gotpetrol hashtag and spread the word.

Follow the #gotpetrol hastag below to find service stations with fuel.

DStv today has announced a brand new decoder for their DStv Mobile offering, called the DStv Mobile USB Drifta decoder.

The new USB Drifta decoder just like the WiFi Drifta, functions as a mobile DStv decoder enabling users to connect to the DStv Mobile DVB-H network to view certain channels on the go.

The new USB device is much sleeker than the original DStv Drifta decoder and plugs straight into you USB port on your computer, eliminating the need to pair the device through WiFi like the original WiFi Drifta. “It’s just a matter of loading the Drifta USB application onto your PC,” explains Mark Rayner, general manager: DStv Mobile South Africa. “After that, you simply plug the Drifta USB into your PC and launch the application; within seconds you can then enjoy DStv Mobile content.”

In addition to the launch of the DStv USB Drifta Decoder, DStv Mobile has also announced the addition of the M-Net Series channel to the DStv mobile bouquet, offering popular content such as “The Good Wife” and “CSI: Miami”.

Good news is that the new DStv USB Drifta decoder comes in at a few hundred rand cheaper then the original Drifta, making it now even more affordable for people to subscribe to DStv. The new DStv Mobile USB Drifta decoder is available here for only R399.

It feels like just the other day that Google revamped the Android Market giving it a great new look, but it seems the Google Mobile team has been at it again.

Google yesterday announced in a blog post that they have been working hard at improving the Android Market and has now released a brand new version. The new Android Market not just gives you new ways to find great applications and games, but the company has now also introduced movie rentals and book purchases.

Movie rentals and book purchases will however only be available to U.S. users, but you can see Google has put allot of thought into this as when you rent a movie or purchase a book it gets linked to your Google account making it instantly available across all of your devices - computer, phone, or tablet.

The new Android Market layout overhaul makes it faster, easier, and more fun to discover great apps, movies, and books. Google has not just increased the space to feature some of the most interesting content of the week, but they have also introduced staff picks and editors’ choice sections in addition to new top chart sections that will showcase the most interesting apps of the week.

The new Android Market will only be available to Android handsets running Android 2.2 Froyo and up and will be rolled out to users around the world in the coming weeks.

So everybody has been going on about this Google Chrome extension you can install that basically scrapes your Facebook friends data from Facebook and exports it to you in CSV format, however now Facebook has blocked the scraping techniques and the extension is useless, luckily there is a legal way of getting your Facebook friends contact information.

Yahoo may not be the search giant it used to be back in the day, but it has some awesome tools, and one such tool is its address book. See, Yahoo is a Facebook partner and because of that they get access to certain info users apps using the normal Facebook API can not get hold of, like the email address of your friend.

Exporting your Facebook friends to Google+ is a fairly easy operation, but it does involve a few sites.

1. Create a Yahoo! Address Book account.
2. Log into Yahoo! Address Book and click the Facebook Import Contacts button.
3. Authorise Yahoo! to access your Facebook data.
4. You should now have gotten a message saying x amount of contacts was imported.
5. Log into Google+ and head to the Circles section.
6. Click on the Find and Invite tab and then click on the Find Friends: Yahoo! link.
7. Authorise Google+ to access your Yahoo! contacts and they should now appear in the list.
8. Add them to a new circle called Facebook Friends and then post an update to that circle.

As easy as that and you will have all you Facebook friends in Google+, however they may not receive an invite as Google only opens invites every now and then, but atleast when they join Google+ one day you will be following them already.

If you are on Google+ you can follow me here.

If you are an Apple fanatic then you have by now heard of the Apple TV, if you are not, well the Apple TV is essentially Apple’s answer to the media player in you living room.

The Apple TV is a small device you hook up to your HD (High Definition) television through an HDMI cable and then allow you to access media such as Movies, Music and Podcast through WiFi on you iTunes enabled PC’s and even allows you to use AirPlay, Apple’s proprietary feature that allows you to stream content from your Apple iPod Touch, iPhone or iPad wireless with the single touch of a screen.

Misplaced or lost your Apple TV remove, or are just too lazy to stand up to go get it, no worries. Apple allows you to control the Apple TV from your iPhone or iPad. If you are too lazy to pick up the remote to control the Apple TV, simply get out your iPhone or iPad and then control the Apple TV straight from that, browsing through photos or starting and stopping videos.

But the Apple TV is so much more than just a wireless media player to stream you movies and music from your computer, it also give you access to YouTube content and you can even play your HD podcast videos on your TV. In addition to that you also get access to TV series and Movie rentals through the use of a US iTunes Account, where you can watch the latest TV series the day it gets released for a mere $0.99 or get access to the latest Movies the day they get released on DVD for only $3.99 per movie, all of this in glorious HD right here in South Africa.

Unfortunately, the Apple TV is not officially available in South Africa, but luckily my favourite iTunes Gift Card provider has just informed me that are now also selling the Apple TV with free courier shipping on their site.

The Apple TV is going for about $199 when you import it through them, much cheaper than Kalahari.net is asking for the device, and also offering better value when compared to other media devices such as the XTreamer which sells at the same price here in South Africa and has no WiFi.

You can get the Apple TV at the following South African outlets:
WildTwig (Recommended)
Kalahari.net
Have2Have

Alternatively if you know about someone that lives in the states and will be heading to South Africa soon, you can always ask them to pick you one up for $99 at an Apple Store and bring it back for you.

Remember, to make use of the Apple TV’s TV and Movie rental services in South Africa you will need to have an US iTunes Account, follow this guide to help you set up a US iTunes Account for use in South Africa and then grab some iTunes Gift Cards to buy content from the iTunes store..