IS Labs well received

Alastair Otter

Alastair Otter is a senior journalist at MyBroadband, and focuses on software and hardware. He has a particular love for Open Source Software (OSS)...

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IS Labs, the Internet Solutions initiative to drive more development of local Internet businesses and technologies, has been met with a positive response from both industry and individuals as a catalyst for Web innovation in South Africa.

Since its launch in July, IS Labs has seen a steady growth in the number of ideas submitted. Many ideas are actively debated with more than 100 comments posted on the site to date, in addition to votes for the most popular ideas. The site has further seen over 3000 "reads" ­ the number of times ideas on the site have been read. At an average of 63 reads per post, this demonstrates the interest that visitors have in the ideas being submitted.

"We’ve received some great ideas so far, although they’ve been different from what we expected. Instead of the Web 2.0 social networking proposals we were expecting, many of the ideas we’ve received have been quite unique. It’s clear that South Africa is not Silicon Valley and our online entrepreneurs think very differently, and have a different sense of what is important or valuable," says Jeff Fletcher, product development manager for Internet Solutions and a founder of IS Labs. "We want ideas that will get more South Africans connected, and bring advantages that are relevant to the local internet user. The ideas we’ve got so far are heading in the right direction, and we’re encouraging more."

The three top-voted ideas to date are split routing, flat rate local hosting  and cyber cafes. IS Labs has also received a number of interesting ideas that were submitted privately. All projects are currently being evaluated to decide on which are the most feasible. The best ideas will be taken forward either by driving support for implementation by others in industry, or by providing entrepreneurs directly with technical and business support.

Two initiatives IS Labs has already committed to include a local gaming portal for a better experience for local gamers, and support for dabba Telecoms, a commercial venture based on the Village Telco project, which aims to use cheap, off-the-shelf wireless and free Voice over IP (VoIP) technology to bring telecoms to under serviced areas.

The gaming portal (www.isgaming.co.za) is an idea by an Internet Solutions employee, Davin Hansen, to set up a community for the 40 000 active gamers in South Africa. Hosting multi-user games locally made a lot of sense to IS Labs as it would see more bandwidth routed locally (saving on international bandwidth costs) and improve the user experience through lower latency. IS Labs is supporting Hansen with technical resources, such as servers and bandwidth, as well as the time to devote some of his work hours to the furthering of this project.

"There’s still a lot of development that has to be done, but the portal should be up in the next few weeks. Working with IS Labs has been fantastic. I don’t think I would have been able to do it any other way really got this far without them," says Hansen.

The second initiative is dabba Telecomms, which aims to promote access to the internet and telephone in under-serviced areas via WiFi networks. This project proved its value when, within a few hours broadcasting a test service set identifier (SSID) in a township, a resident picked up this signal, looked up the domain, did a search on who owned it, looked up the physical address, took a taxi and knocked on the provider’s door to say that he wanted to resell the bandwidth.

IS Labs is currently considering a number of options to support this initiative with a formal announcement to also be made in the next few months.

IS Labs can be found at www.islabs.co.za

IS Labs discussion