Originally posted on iol Business Report. DURBAN – The new President of the The Durban Chamber of Commerce and Industry will be inaugurated at their 163rd Annual Gala Dinner. The new Board and Council of the Durban Chamber will also be announced at the event too. Other highlights of the evening include the launch of special members-only benefits designed to turbo-charge Durban business, as well as the Durban Chamber’s new mobile app that will connect Durban businesses to all the top business and networking opportunities. The mobile app has been developed in partnership with Fabrik, a division of the immedia ecosystem. The Durban Chamber Mobile App will be used as an exclusive communication tool that will notify members of important business-related opportunities, notices, information, documents and communications for ease of access and reference. “The Durban Chamber Mobile App is basically a communication tool that will be of great benefit to members by allowing for greater collaboration between the Durban Chamber and its members,” said Palesa Phili, Chief Executive Officer of the Durban Chamber.

Originally posted on © Radioinfo.com.au. Find out more about our Radio Days Africa 2019 experience. Radio Tomorrow with James Cridland Johannesburg, South Africa, is a place like no other to hold a radio conference, and I was privileged to be at Radiodays Africa recently on their tenth anniversary. Radio is an important part of life in Africa generally. Radio reaches people who cannot read or write; and plays the part of an educator in many parts of the continent. Here’s the excellent Steve Martin from the BBC talking about radio in Africa from 2013. It’s a good overview in how progressive African radio stations are, as well as how they think about radio in a different way to many of us. But radio in Africa is also, partially, stations like 94.7 in Johannesburg (tagline: “You love Johannesburg – we love you”), who sound as polished as the big top 40 stations you’d hear elsewhere. However, it was Bérard Duprès from the Seychelles Broadcasting Company that got me thinking a little. He began by explaining where the Seychelles were – they’re here in case you didn’t know – and spoke about the stations that the SBC run. One of the things Bérard showed was the radio station’s app. Obviously you can listen to the radio station on it, but you can also send a voice message to the station in high quality audio. The station uses a product called Fabrik, made in South Africa, which acts as a kind of private WhatsApp for the station, who are then able to edit and broadcast the messages. It’s a simple and straightforward way to get more voices on the air. They’re not alone. Radio X in the UK is using a rather less private WhatsApp – well, they’re using WhatApp itself – to get messages into the studio for Chris Moyles. And they seem to be having great fun with it, even if most of the callers want just to say the word willy and bum. For radio stations everywhere, though, services like this makes it really easy to remain real and relevant to your audience. For SBC, who run radio stations that broadcast to over a hundred different islands off the coast of East Africa, it’s a great way to hear directly from your audience. For Radio X, it’s a very good way to hear them swear at you. Getting proper, decent audience audio on the air has never been easier. If you don’t have this function in your radio app – what’s stopping you? About The Author James Cridland, the radio futurologist, is a conference speaker, writer and consultant. He runs the media information website media.info and helps organise the yearly Next Radio conference. He also publishes podnews.net, a daily briefing on podcasting and on-demand, and writes a weekly international radio trends newsletter, at james.crid.land. Contact James at james@crid.land or @jamescridland Photograph of Bérard Duprès: @RadioDaysAfrica

We addressed delegates and shared the impact of Fabrik at Radio Days Africa 2019 in Johannesburg from 3 to 5 July 2019, whilst our team demonstrated how technology can elevate radio at our stand. Our Sessions Back to the Future: Anice Hassim The rise of digital has been a quest to be of service to humans through authentic, trusted and intimate engagement, all while maintaining a human and community driven value system. Radio has been on the journey all along. Digital platforms can amplify radio’s core assets as radio learns new tools, but not new values. Anice Hassim (Lead Strategist) tells us how radio’s digital promise is rooted in its human past. Listen to the podcast. Public Broadcasting Reform: Phil Molefe, Bérard Duprès (SBC) Public broadcasting is seen as crucial to democracy but has come under increasing strain recently. At the same time, African public broadcasters in many cases struggle to move out of the shadow of the state. Join Franz Krüger (Director Wits Radio Academy and Head of Journalism), Nada Wotshela (SABC Radio GE), Bérard Duprès (Seychelles Broadcasting Corporation CEO) and Phil Molefe (Southern African Broadcasting Association) as they discuss the current state of public broadcasting in Africa and if there is any sign of reforming these services. Listen to the podcast. Connecting the Islands, and the World, Digitally: Bérard Duprès (SBC) Radio remains a powerful and instant way to communicate news, share knowledge and engage with audiences. Remaining a champion of the people is key in small communities. Bérard Duprès (Seychelles Broadcasting Corporation CEO) tells us more about the SBC and how they have embraced the digital era by modernising their radio broadcast technology whilst remaining engaged with their communities, both locally and internationally. Listen to the podcast.

We have a solution to a key strategic need for broadcast owners. The need to digitise your audience, at scale, as rapidly as possible with complete ownership of your databases and data. Behind that is the exhaust of Storytelling, Services and radio’s real-time choreography – all engaging a high-trust community. The most important ability of a media platform must be the ability to command engagement: ‘I will pause what I am doing and pay attention to YOU’. Such a platform can only be built by master craftspeople of the media trade and by master craftspeople of the digital trade collaborating in a shared quest. By a team that understands the difference between man and machine. That understands convergence. True convergence. Convergence that unleashes the superpower that only radio has: Trust. Radio has always been a high trust medium. It has always operated with a sense of community. It doesn’t have customers, it has an audience. An audience because you broadcast and they receive. The return path offers a very thin feedback loop but, thin as it is, radio has been able to build high-trust communities. What happens if you can massively increase your audience engagement feedback loop intimately to you? And do that within weeks? You would begin to build higher trust communities and, if trust is the commodity in increasingly scarce supply, it would imply that this offers you the chance to reprice this digital radio community. This is the strategic opportunity that Fabrik gives you: to begin digitising your audience while rapidly retooling your workflows within weeks, at costs that move from capex to opex and, as rapidly as you want, to revenue. Now that’s a feedback loop. Fabrik offers media owners the chance to focus on the main challenge ahead of them. How to retool your habits, workflows and operations to a serve a real time audience that is co creating and participatory with you.

It's now easier for you to send, filter and receive messages from your Smashboard engagement dashboard. Some of the new features include: An option enabling you to search for messages from a specific app member. An additional view of unsuccessfully sent messages. A URL preview when you're including links in your composed messages. The ability to see phone numbers of members when you download your chat message history to a CSV file. A weather widget appearing underneath the clock on your dashboard. And, as always, various other performance improvements and bug fixes that should make it possible for you to use Smashboard with more ease. How are you using Smashboard? What would you like to see in Smashboard? Let us know!

Phil Molefe addresses delegates at the Southern African Broadcasting Association (SABA) Broadcasters’ Convention and 26th Annual General Meeting (AGM) on 29 & 30 October 2018, in Cape Town.

Originally posted on the SBC Facebook page. In a major modernisation of its broadcast technology, the Seychelles Broadcasting Corporation (SBC) has launched two new apps for its radio services, bringing audiences for Radyo Sesel and Paradise FM into the digital and social revolution. Available on iOS and Android mobile devices, the apps allow audiences to stream the stations live, catch up on popular content via podcasts seconds after the live transmission and to engage with the stations with opinions, news and participation in real-time. “With the new technology we are deploying, audiences will become co-creators of our broadcasts with us, bringing them into the very heart of our broadcast personality and services,” commented Bérard Duprès, CEO of Seychelles Broadcasting Corporation. “Audiences will be able to participate in the conversation of the day by sending through their voice-notes, photographs or text messages instantly to the station, where producers can curate and mix this feedback into the on-air broadcast in seconds. At Paradise FM and Radyo Sesel, there is tangible excitement around the possibilities for reaching the Seychellois diaspora globally and to engage with them in real-time. The teams are equally enthused on being able to engage better with our local audience, keeping them informed on issues and events and enabling a whole new set of information and content services, all in the palm of their hands. “We invite our listeners to embark on this digital journey together with us as we grow our skills and understanding of what it takes to be a truly modern broadcaster in the 21st Century,” says Mr Duprès. “Not only does the platform ensure a direct and immediate connection with our audience, it will allow us to preserve our radio programmes into a cloud archive that can be available over time to all citizens of the Seychelles as part of our audio cultural heritage,” notes Duprès, referring to other features of the platform. The CEO further noted that this was part of the Corporation’s on-going efforts to ensure that the benefits of the 4th Industrial Revolution were tangible to all Seychellois, Radio and TV audiences alike, following the recent roll-out of DTT. This innovation of SBC’s radio services has been made possible through partnership with a South Africa-based technology firm, immedia. SBC and immedia collaboration started a year ago in Windhoek, Namibia at SABA’s (Southern African Broadcasting Association) annual conference and AGM. “We are particularly proud that this globally revolutionary platform is an African product developed in Durban, South Africa,” comments Mr Phil Molefe, Executive Head of Strategy at immedia, the development team responsible for the Fabrik platform. Mr Molefe, previously Vice-Chairman of the Commonwealth Broadcasting Association, Chairman of the National Film and Video Foundation of South Africa and past Editor-in-Chief of SABC Radio and Television News, is a broadcasting expert who sees the Fabrik platform as being transformative in Africa’s developing economies. “In my thirty years of broadcasting, I have never been more excited at the potential to invert the traditional “We transmit, you receive” model of broadcasting,” says an energised Molefe. The apps are now available live on Apple’s App Store and the Google Play Store respectively and SBC invites its audience to come closer to Paradise and Sesel with these pocket companions.

Here are some new features that make it easier for operators to receive, search for and respond to messages from your Smashboard engagement dashboard. Some of the new features we've added include: An option allowing you to search for messages using an exact search term. A consolidated, historical view and message count for all sent and received messages associated with a particular app member. Messages are now automatically scrolled into view once selected. We've also improved the look and feel of your dashboard in the following ways: We've reworked the look and feel of the elements that display on the Trending section. We've added seconds to the clock that displays at the top of your Smashboard screen. The blue text we were using for the titles of selected side-menu items has been removed. And we fixed a bug preventing the 'Reply Message' option from showing when all engagements were clicked. How are you using Smashboard? What would you like to see in Smashboard? Let us know!

Some new features to the Campaigns functionality in Smashboard. New Features Added option to export messages to CSV Improvements Replaced action buttons with popup menu Winner Selection Reworked winners selection to pull message from elasticsearch Hidden previous winners title when there is no previous winner Bug Fixes Fixed the broken css for winner's selection modal Positioned the title of the previous winner below the unconfirmed winner Fixed the incorrect engagements count for each campaign

Phil Molefe addresses attendees of the Durban International Film Festival on embracing modern technology to stay relevant and produce better content.

It’s no longer appropriate to see customers as transient or meta-data or transactional. We have to be of service and of value to customers and we need to see them as a co-creator of products and services. We have to engage them with intimacy, service and value. Fabrik allows you to leverage the learned behaviour of digital tools and workflows (the entire social revolution) and accelerate your workplace transition with a quickened pace of human activity, focus and intimacy. It broadens accountability, builds compliance and increases transparency with your community and within your community. The previous era of technology reduced people to a “number”, to a “resource”, to a “demographic” – which is all well and good in aggregate but absolute disaster for Mrs Singh, Sowazi or Smith in specific. Today, we know we can do better. We know it in our hearts and souls even if we do not know exactly how. How can we do better when I have no voice to change? It’s time to empower your people to be able to be “of service” to your community without the layers of middlemen and friction that currently exist. For example, why do you need a call centre with minimum paid workers who have no connection to you or your brand? Outsourcing many functions and workflows in a business is fine, but you cannot outsource service. Instead of treating your customers anonymously like “everyone is the same”, how do you filter for trust, integrity etc. A Fabrik-powered community allows you to leverage the speed and intimacy of social but in your own private space. This means that your storytelling can be more conversational, real-time and intimate than it would normally be for the more manufactured and curated public social edge. This is a challenge that is hard for many communities because it means being a bit more expressive digitally in a broader space than would traditionally be the case (your team, your department). It’s harder because you can’t outsource your voice and you shouldn’t be “manufacturing” the content. Think of it as telemetry – and being a reliable and engaging transponder. Think of it as being of “service”. What amplifies the “SHARED CONTEXT” What adds to the “SHARED CONVERSATION” Around which goal are we “CHOREOGRAPHING”

Originally posted in the Sunday Tribune. To promote and support technological innovation, Innovate Durban, has launched a cloud-first app that allows key stakeholders and the public to collaborate, connect and celebrate in a private, secure space. Developed by a local tech company, immedia, the Innovate Durban app provides innovators with a platform on which to find and share information, said Aurelia Albert, chief executive of Innovate Durban, a non-profit company set up by the eThekwini Municipality and other key stakeholders. The app also facilitates direct engagement with Innovate Durban, fellow innovators and their partner ecosystem within private programme-related messaging groups or on public channels. The black MAMBA1! fully electronic vehicle created by a group of five students from the University of KwaZulu-Natal, including Calvin Vanwieringen and Mathew Darko from Ghana, in 2016, is just one of the technological innovations you can access if you download the Innovate Durban app. “This private cloud-first platform truly revolutionises the way in which people securely and confidentially communicate within their communities and collaborate with each other – allowing for relevant, real-time information to be shared without the spam, noise and data-harvesting practices we consistently encounter in other forms of communication,” said Albert. “Innovate Durban has partnered with immedia on a number of exciting and cutting-edge projects for many years and we feel that this platform created by immedia’s proudly-Durban team will really set it apart,” added Albert. Albert said the app would advance their mission to ensure that all projects and programmes create sustainable impact.