World of Avatar, an investment company led by Alan Knott-Craig Jnr, former iBurst CEO and son of former Vodacom CEO, has singed a deal seeing the company buying out 90% of the shares and becoming the holding company for MXit.

World of Avatar which owns shares in an array of local mobile and internet startups such as FSMS and Toodu, has bough out Herman Heunis, and MIH Holdings – a Naspers subsidiary, for a reported unconfirmed R500 million. Knott-Craig Jnr is set to take over the reigns as CEO from Heunis and said that he will not make drastic changes to the popular IM service in the coming few months.  “In the short-term, we want MXit to maintain and grow its position as the largest mobile social network in Africa. This means a focus on consolidating and strengthening the core of the business before we move to implement the long- term strategy.” said Knot-Craig Jnr.

MXit currently has over 45 Million registered users in more than 12o countries making the largest social network in Africa. More MXit message gets send every day than tweets and users spend more time on MXit then they do on Facebook.

Congrats to Herman on selling, and good luck for the future to World Of Avatar.

MXit has started out as a simple instant messaging platform that offered users a cheap way to communicate but since has grown into a network of 27 million users strong with messaging, gaming, media, counseling and library functionality.

Here is a nice infographic put together by Eshaam Rabaney about MXit.

Click to view larger version.

Last week I had a request for help from the guys at RLabs about blogging from mobile phones to a WordPress blog. Now I knew about the WordPress apps available for iPhone, Android and Blackberry, but the problem is these people that wanted to blog did not have access to smartphones.

I eventually helped them set up an Email to WordPress system, but then the idea came to me. Wouldn’t it be nice if these people would be able to blog from MXit. MXit supports almost any mobile phone on the market and in a country like South Africa where the only way most people are able to access the Internet is through their cellphones, this could be the cheapest way for them publish to the web for all to see.

I mentioned the idea on Twitter and then Paul Scott replied that he already has most of the basic code for this seeing as he helped developed the MXit bot RLabs uses for councelling.

Paul quickly put some code together over the weekend and that is how MXitPress was born. MXitPress makes use of the MetaWebLog API to publish posts to WordPress and Chisimba blogs through the use of the XMPP Jabber protocol.

Using MXitPress is real easy, all you need is a XMPP client like MXit or GTalk, add the jabber contact chisimba.mxitpress@gmail.com and that’s it, you are now ready to publish blog posts straight from MXit.

To make posts you will need to enable Remote Publishing on your blog at Settings > Writing and ticking XML-RPC, then you need to register your blog with the bot by issuing the register command like so: register:www.yourdomain.com /xmlrpc.php user pass replacing www.yourdomain.com with your blog url and user and pass with your username and password you use to log into WordPress.

Once you have register your blog you can go ahead and start making posts by using the following command: Blog Post Title#Blog content goes after the #

This new method for blogging from MXit opens up a whole new market to blogging, and with the new MXit API to be released on 29th of October 2010 this could make blogging in Africa accessible to just about everybody. Imaging live blogging from an event from your mobile phone, take a snap with phone of the presentation, add some text and send it straight to your blog.

Up until now the only way for you to run Mxit on your PC was to either to use Pidgin for Windows with Mxit pc support or to use the Mxit Evo PC client.

How nice would it be if you could offer your visitors the comfort of using Mxit straight from your website without installing any software? Well now you can with Mxit’s Evo Web Widget. The Mxit web widget makes use of silverlight technology and enables you to customise the look to suite your sites needs.

How do you get your hand on the Mxit Evo web widget? Just click here and follow the instructions to embet Mxit’s web widget into your site.

Just saw that Chris over at iMod did a post about setting up MXit on your iPhone so I decided I might as well do one about setting up mxit on Android seeing that I just got my HTC Hero yesterday.

So for those of you using a Android based phone, here’s how to get MXit on it.

Open up your browser and head on over to http://www.mxit.com/wap

Follow the link to the Android Market where it will show you the MXit download

Choose MXit from the Android Market

Choose install and wait for the notification that it downloaded successfully then open it up.

Thats it folks, now enjoy MXit on your Android based phone.