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.

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.

Facebook announced their new messaging platform previously only know as project titan yesterday to the world. The new Facebook messaging platform forms an unified inbox tying together your Email, IM and SMS messaged into one place.

Still not sure how this whole thing works? Check out the video bellow.

Facebook is gradually rolling out the new messaging platform to all users by mean of invites, so how do you get an invite to make use of this new next generation messaging system which includes a facebook.com email address?

Simply head over here and request an invitation.

Messaging on websites used to very straight forward, you select your friend compose a message and it ends up in his/her inbox on the website. Facebook however has redefines messaging as a whole with the introduction of their latest messaging platform previously only known as Project Titan.

Facebook is calling it a “Modern Messaging System” that integrates E-Mail, SMS Messaging and Instant Messaging into one unified inbox. The main aim of the new Messaging platform from Facebook is to simplify messaging allowing you to view and send messages from one central places no matter what type of message it is.

One of the new features of the new Facebook message platform is that users will receive @Facebook.com E-Mail address should they wish to and from there they can send E-Mails and SMS messages to other friends. Worried about SPAM? Don’t worry, the new platform allows you to filter messages so that you only receive them from your real friends.

The nice thing about the new Facebook message platform is that you are not bind to one interface for sending and receiving messages, you can even tie in your existing E-Mail account into the system and send and receive messages from your Mail client, IM Messenger, Facebook Webpage or Cellphone.

Facebook will be rolling out the new messaging platform to all its users gradually over the next few weeks in the form of invites so keep an eye out. As soon as I have an invite available I will put it through its paces and tell you about it.

Recently I started working on my own project called TweSMS, the ideas was spawned by Rafiq Phillips after there was a demand for twitter users outside the US to receive their tweets via SMS.

After I started working on TweSMS I eventually saw the great potential there still is in the mobile market, especially in Africa. Think about it this way, how many people own a cellphone? Vodacom reported in their latest financial report that they have 40.5 million mobile users, now this is just Vodacom and what if you add MTN into the equation who dominates the African market. I would say we can look at a figure like 100 million mobile customers in Africa.

Now ask yourself the question, how many of them doesn’t have access to Internet? I would say 90% if not more. This just shows you how much potential there still is in the mobile market.

I am surely starting to shift my attention from web start-ups to mobile start-ups, or at least something that combines the two. In fact I already have plans for a new mobile service in the education arena that involves SMS messaging.

If you have plans or dreams to try and make it big, try shifting it towards the mobile market as there are still plenty of undiscovered opportunities in the market.

If you would like to stay up to date on whats happening in the Mobile Arena check out WebAddiCT(s);

If you haven’t heard of TweSMS, its my new sideline project to bring SMS notifications to countries that twitter does not support for their own SMS notification system.

TweSMS is currently undergoing some major changes week by week with a few testers helping me out. TweSMS currently supports receive of DMs and Metions. Twitter users have the option to either receive all DMs or Mentions or either or only if it is from certain twitter friends.

I’m proud to introduce the latest feature for TweSMS, the Clickatell Gateway. Users can now use their own Clickatell accounts for SMS delivery. To setup a Clickatell gateway do the following.

1. Log in at Clickatell
2. Go to Manage My Products
3. From the Add Connection drop down choose HTTP
4. Enter TweSMS for name
5. Choose HTTP GET from Callback Type
6. Enter a Username
7. Enter a Password
8. Click Submit
9. Log in at TweSMS
10. Go to Clickatell API Settings
11. Enable use own Clickatell account
12. Enter your settings you set up above and save

If you have any problems getting this working please contact info@twesms.com or @TweSMS via twitter.

I few weeks ago I started on a project called TweSMS, a twitter SMS notification system for people that does not have coverage with twitter’s own SMS notification system.

The project was inspired by Rafiq Phillips from Web AddiCT(s); and soon after that I started coding on basic functionality. Today I am proud to say that the system is improving immensely with every new feature being rolled out.

Yesterday saw the release of mention notifications as well as the ability to receive notifications from selected friends only. The changes has been implemented and the testers are testing away and giving feedback along the way.

Features to come include the ability to receive SMS messages only during certain times of the day as well as the ability to use your own Clickatell account to receive SMS messages.

If you are interested in partaking in the TweSMS testing send an email to TweSMS, there is a few places open still.

I have been putting blogging off for a couple of days due to my latest private project taking all my time. A while ago I read a message by Rafiq owner of Web AddiCT(s); where he asked if anybody was willing to write a Twitter notifications to SMS app.

After some investigation I found 2 current services of which one was closed down and the other one really expensive, almost R1 per sms. This lead me to investigating all the viable methods to send out sms messages from South Africa and having played with the twitter api before stared coding on some basic functionality.

I introduce to you TweSMS, TweSMS will allow you to receive SMS messages for different twitter notifications. Currently TweSMS only supports sending SMS messages for Twitter Direct Messages but will soon have functionality to be able to receive replies and even friend updates via SMS.

I am really proud of this project and would like to thank Web Addict(s); for the inspiration and support with this project aswell as Clickatell. I see big things in the pipeline for TweSMS and we are already testing away on the system.

For more info on TweSMS read the Web Addict(s); post, follow @twesms on twitter or visit www.twesms.com