Anice shares how community is no longer geography with SmartMonkeyTV.com.

Originally posted on balancing act. Africa’s broadcasters are facing a legion of challenges and need to find new ways to connect with their audiences to build loyalty. In a world awash with mobile internet and social media they need to be able find new ways of working that will change things. Russell Southwood looks at two African innovations – Fabrik and Volume News – that might help breed a better-connected broadcast media. Africa’s TV channels do not have the reach of radio or mobile, although it is probably the latter that poses the greater threat. Africans can sit on buses in the traffic listening to FM radio or watching online content. They can check their phones during the day for breaking news and watch clips recommended by their friends on their lunch break. The speed of social media often means that news is often no longer on the hour but seems to happen in real time. Furthermore the discussion about news and issues of the day – particularly for the young – happens more often than not on social media. These discussions also start trending extremely quickly and often even those with live phone-ins seem to get left behind. In this issue I’m going to focus on two innovations: one is a media platform that helps create social engagement with your audiences and is not as its creator South African Anice Hassim, Immedia puts it:”Fabrik is not just about management and workflows.” For example, it enables a radio station to have a digital presence that can do four things: it has personality; it eliminates time-lag in getting information out; it enhances ways of telling the story; and provides a shared context. Talk radio audiences were social media before social media existed but they were not easily able to track what their most engaged users felt. So whereas analog audiences are “spray and pray”, the platform allows you (through analysing all your social media through an app) to spot sub-sets of people interested in particular issues or topics. Indeed through the app, viewers or listeners can choose to get alerts on particular topics. A regular caller to a talk show can become a contributor:”The audience’s voice begins to blend with the station’s voice.” Audiences can either engage directly through the station’s app or through social media that the app allows the station to see all in one place. Furthermore, the TV or radio station can use it to quantify their online reach:”There are revenue opportunities in the platform. Stations can put their online reach on the rate card and get a share of that revenue. The higher the engagement, the more they can monetise.” I shall return in a future issue to look in greater detail at the Fabrik platform. The second media innovation comes out of the JAMLAB is a programme of Wits Journalism and the Joburg Centre for Software Engineering in partnership with Ryerson University, Toronto and Journalists for Human Rights. The project aims to support more and better innovation in journalism and media on the continent. It is based in one of Africa’s newest innovation hubs, Tshimologong in a downtown area of Johannesburg called Braamfontein. Volume News was one of six start-ups making its first pitch before an invited audience on Wednesday. Its stated goal is to create a new mobile-first news wire service that links community radio journalists with mainstream news outlets to breakthrough the existing metropolitan filter bubble of South African news coverage. It calculates that there are 9 million people who are not getting local news. It wants to do this by creating local stories in local languages. It wants to create local stories that will be broadcast through trusted local community news stations in South Africa. Currently only 14% of the news these stations broadcast despite their rationale being one of addressing local audiences. It wants to create a team of local journalists throughout the country that they will submit using an app and it will supply an app to radio stations (that will also use a simple Raspberry Pi device) that will allow them to easily use the stories generated in an MP3 format. These local journalists become known as the person to go to if you want to get something on air. It is currently generating stories that are reaching 200,000 people but its medium term ambition is to reach 1.5 million listeners through 85 stations. The service potentially has a direct impact on the financial fortunes of community radio stations. Volume News said that community radio stations get 25% of audiences but only 2% of advertising spend. This is partly because the brands and NGOs that might use them have no idea whether their information or ad is transmitted. The station tool it has built allows this to be tracked. Neither of these two ideas are the complete answer to all of the woes of Africa’s radio and TV stations but both contain ideas that might allow channel owners to compete more effectively and build audience loyalty using modern methods.

From 13 – 15 November, the Fabrik business team attend and exhibit the Fabrik product at 2017's AfricaCom conference in Cape Town. Phil Molefe addressed the AfricaCom delegates around Content Distribution At Home and Abroad, and contributed to a panel on the Role of Public Broadcasters.

Phil Molefe addresses delegates at the Southern African Broadcasting Association (SABA) Broadcasters’ Convention and 26th Annual General Meeting (AGM) on 25 to 29 September 2017, in Windhoek.

Originally posted in the Sunday Tribune.

Life in a converged world Technology disruption has created chaos with real-time flow of information into and out of organisations. Together with the old ways of engagement, new and ever evolving digital methods are overwhelming the ability of the organisation to bring structure and accountability to their engagement with customers. Disruption is one side of the coin but convergence is the other, and by adopting a fully convergent, conversational and community-driven cloud platform like Fabrik, organisations can leverage the benefits of real-time, structured engagement that offers intimacy, personality and data insights that deepen and grow over time. With convergence, you and the customer you serve are one community with shared value creation. With the intimacy and expression empowered by Fabrik, the organisation and the humans it serves are truly blended into one community – a community with shared value exchange and respect around the purpose that bonds it. Fabrik brings structure to your community and allows you to harness the power of this technical and human convergence, while leveraging the operational efficiencies, real-time insights and new opportunities digital can bring to your business. Now you can build trust by broadcasting publicly, but engaging privately with no leakage of data, no third party observing and harvesting your community’s information or patterns, and no lag in your engagement. Are you where your customers want you to be? Are you real-time enough? Are you intimate enough? Are you respectful enough? While making engagement easy, Fabrik is also writing a data track to the cloud so that you can leverage the power machine learning, AI and cognitive services for your own organisation – just like the global players can. While making engagement easy, Fabrik is also writing a data track to the cloud so that you can leverage the power machine learning, AI and cognitive services for your own organisation – just like the global players can. Fabrik deploys all of the basic elements to get you started: a cloud backend service to structure data, engagement and integrate with other sources; native app service points in all the major app ecosystems; our “Cloud Concierge” engagement platform; and dashboards and workflows to act quickly on issues as they arrive. You can have your own “data track” to your business that is as accessible or resonant as a sound track. Can you hear the music of your business?

This month, a big version update to Smashboard was rolled out, incorporating the following performance improvements and bug fixes: Improvements Message Scrolling: To avoid confusion, we’ve removed the vertical scroll intercept which translated vertical into horizontal scrolling – so you can now only scroll sideways, either with a trackpad, the left/right keys, the navigation arrows, or via the scroll bar. Provider Toggling: All message providers are selected by default and can now be individually deselected to remove related content from being displayed. If all providers are individually deselected, they will all be automatically reset to enabled. Compose a Tweet: We have added the ability to compose and send a tweet from an already-added ‘Provider’. This can be done from the ‘Profile dropdown’ menu in the top-right of the Smashboard interface. Search: The search functionality has been simplified and you will no longer need to toggle the search with a button as it is now a persistent search bar (minimum 3 characters). Trending filters: Trending terms can now be toggled to filter related messages Displaying Member's Phone Number: The member's phone number is now displayed in the detail screen of the message. Message ‘Velocity’ stats bar: The total message count for the past 3 hours (per provider) has been added to the stats bar in the top-left section of the display. Campaigns: The selected campaign is now displayed in the campaign drop down and styling has been improved. If there are no active campaigns, the dropdown is not displayed. Light Box: The size of the Light Box media viewer has been increased and is now a constant size, irrespective of the displayed content. Any message text is associated with the media is now also displayed here. Date search: The search label is now displayed from ‘start date’ to ‘end date’. The label also correctly reflects when a ‘Lifetime’ search is active. Bug-fixes A bug causing the ‘Lifetime’ button on the date filter dropdown to occasionally need to be clicked twice. A bug causing the Member Profile background to occasionally be displayed incorrectly when viewing ‘All Engagements’.

Since our dev team's first line of Smashboard code on 7 August 2015, we're now live with the Smashboard v1. This first version of Smashboard supports SMS . Coming soon is Twitter and Facebook support, and the much-anticipated direct app messaging.

immedia is proud to have been selected as one of the handful of investment targets for the DTI/Microsoft EEP Programme, an initiative that aligns strongly with our own ambitions as a company. The Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) previously commented that the initiative had the potential to boost transformation within the South African ICT sector – and that it was on track to drive the shared vision of creating a strong home-grown South African software industry. Programmes like the EEP provide real benefit for entrepreneurs like ourselves allowing us to dream beyond our circumstances. We want to foster a new generation of South Africans, animated by the impact we can make on our communities when we are focused on the boundless potential of what we can do together, not alone. After all, this is a new world of everything being a ‘thing’ on the internet transmitting their ‘thoughts’ in real time for other ‘things’ to do something with. At immedia, we are committed to thinking and improving, and becoming better technologists and converged innovators in service to a better future for ourselves, better opportunities for ourselves, and better satisfaction for ourselves in the impact that we have in the world around us. We believe that by changing our community, we change our city, and so our country and so our continent… and if we do that, would we not have changed the world? From a genesis of two people, today immedia Studio employs 20 people in high value jobs and have inspired dozens of ex-immedians who are making an impact on our communities and industry. A small band of people drawn from many of the communities that Durban and South Africa have to offer have pioneered an industry that offers us 21st century jobs and, as entrepreneurs, 21st century opportunities. We believe we can compete with the world. That inspiration is a real, tangible thing here at immedia. We have been told that you feel it when you walk in. We see it when a teenager attending one of our Open Nights thinks, “This could be me.” and “I can do this here!”. And we see it in the space that has been carved on a Silicon Beach in Durban by teams like ourselves, by being relevant in this new age and by creating the careers we want – wherever home happens to be. The DTI/Microsoft EEP programme makes it possible for us to accelerate that process; to shore up the things we aren’t good at, and to pour energy into the things we are great at. As a child of apartheid I could have laid blame for the many challenges that lie at the feet of any entrepreneur there, but true entrepreneurship is about being inspired by the “why not?” At the things that can be done better, not the things that have been done badly. There is a sign in the Intel Museum in Silicon Valley – a quote from Robert Noyce, one of the Valley pioneers: “Don’t be encumbered by history. Go off and do something wonderful.” It’s so important we take teams there every year to see it and see around them, what gets created with that belief, so that they can come back and create something wonderful. What we’ve learnt is that Silicon Valley is not a geography, it’s a state of mind. It’s a state of mind that allows us to believe that, from the green cane fields and blue ocean we gaze on out every day, we can create a future for ourselves that allows us to be a part of the world, to be an actor in our country, to have our labours be of value to our communities. Technology is changing the world. We were fortunate enough to play with a new Microsoft innovation called the HoloLens, a holographic computer that immerses you in virtually created worlds. Microsoft have been polishing it in collaboration with the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory who manage the Mars Rover programme. When JPL team members first tried HoloLens on and ‘walked on Mars’, they often became so emotional they were reduced to tears. In a sense, the first ‘manned’ mission to Mars took place with HoloLens. The promise of technologies like this for science, medicine and education is something we want to bring to life for our people. That’s the future we can see and it’s a future we want to play our part in. We begin this journey with the best generation of talent immedia has ever had and, if we do our jobs right, our greatest generation is yet to come. We are incredibly grateful to DTI and Microsoft for this opportunity and to our families, clients and colleagues in giving us the support and understanding to try to access that future. – anice