We certainly are no strangers to change, as a matter of fact we’ve been evolving ever since our launch, and we’ve just taken another huge step in our evolution story. Some things still haven’t changed though (and probably never will), like Rollins still won’t lose the hair or wear a suit, and still has that weird looking 4-inch mirror (he literally keeps watching himself in) lying around. Junior still has that annoying “Ghana Black stars” T-shirt which probably belonged to his 6-year old kid brother (often wondered how he manages to squeeze himself into it), and Francis may well be on his way to substituting Eddie Murphy in the Nutty Professor.

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So, what has changed?

Quite a lot really. For starters, we’ve had a major make-over. We now have a fresh new look, a really cool new name, and best of all: we are a completely new Revitalized Brand.

If you’re reading this, then the transition is finally complete, and the D-Tech blog is now D-Tech Zone (as in “The-Tech-Zone”). After weeks and months of strategizing, careful planning, and feedback from our readers, we have made a couple of changes to the site, which (we hope) should provide a richer user experience. We have;

• Changed the layout of the site to make it much easier to navigate and find content

• Upped our web hosting, technical, and storage capacity, so we can now provide you with richer and more dynamic content (photos, videos, polls, mobile content, etc)

• Speaking of quality content, we’ve introduced some really exciting “geo-specific” syndicated content to the Sidebar panel. In other words, you should receive different content (or none at all) depending on which part of the world you’re in.

• We’ve introduced the social media corner (top right) to help you follow our activities on the different Social Networking platforms we use

• We have also added the “In-House” category to the mix, so you can now follow what the team are doing (apart from lazying about and watching YouTube videos all day that is). HEY! This article actually falls under In-House.

• We’ve had a lot of feedback and inquiries regarding advertising in the past, so we have decided to introduce 125×125 ad-slots to the blog so you can now promote your business, products or services.

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What hasn’t Changed

- For one, you can still follow us via the usual RSS and Email channels. If you haven’t already done so (wonder why), you may want to subscribe to our Email alerts so we can send updates directly to your mail box.

- We still allow you to promote your company, group or cause on our site, but all ads have to comply with our advertising policy.

- Lastly, we are still committed to providing the most useful, insightful, fresh top quality content.

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Okay, that just about sums it up. Was really beginning to have a headache. Let me use this opportunity on behalf of the Team, to extend an invitation to you to join the discourse and help us build what we hope will grow to become a “location of choice” for web, search, social media, and tech information and resources. Did I mention we are now on Gatorpeeps?
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P/S: If you have any interesting posts or articles you would like to have published here, or maybe you have a suggestion, or would just like to critique something, kindly send same to;

The Zone Keeper,
D-Tech Zone.
admin [at] dtechweb-blog.com

If you submitted a post or article, upon approval and subsequent publication, your work will be fully attributed to you, with your name as the author, as well as a link pointing to your site or blog.

Okay. Don’t let me bore you with all this talk. Happy reading!

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Social networking has changed the face of the web (and indeed everything else) in recent times, with social media sites like Facebook and Twitter spearheading the cause- redefining and giving new meaning to “socialization”.

Social media provide an interactive platform to connect and share with your friends and loved ones, likewise a perfect opportunity to grow your business, and now:
a source for spiritual revival.

The vatican has launched a website at www.pope2you.net, offering an application called “The pope meets you on Facebook,” which allows the faithful to see the Pope’s speeches and messages on their iPhones or iPods.

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The “Pope2You” Facebook app, lets you receive the messages of Pope Benedict XVI through the most important social network of the world. Essentially you can meet the Pope on Facebook, listen to his words, see his pictures, receive his messages of congratulations through “virtual postcards”.

Though you won’t get an email saying Pope Benedict added you as a friend and you can’t “poke” him or write on his wall, but the Vatican is still keen to use the networking site Facebook to woo young people back to church.

Pope2You allows you to share the most wonderful pictures of Benedict XVI with your friends on Facebook, along with his words of hope and peace. You can;

• Send the virtual postcards from the Pope to your friends.

• Download and read the Pope’s Message for the 43th World Communications Day.

• Spread friendship with the Pope and become a witness of Christ in the world through the web.

• Send now your virtual postcards

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I have always heard gators were dangerous, but boy have I had fun playing with this one.

(In case you haven't already figured it out, that's me up there)

I first learnt about Gatorpeeps from Oluniyi David Ajao’s review of Bar Camp Nigeria 2009 (which I really should have attended but for the most inevitable of reasons)- WORK! ..

Anyways, GatorPeeps is essentially a micro-blogging service that provides a platform for Afrigator users to connect with other “like-minded African users” through short updates and community interaction.

It basically works like most other micro-blogging platforms, featuring a status update box and a public timeline.

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The Status Update Box

The status update box allows you keep your friends… err ….  updated with what you are currently doing by Saying It Loud!

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Public Timeline

The public timeline (just below the status update box) allows you view your friends updates, and has a really remarkable “Friends Blogposts” feature which allows you to toggle between your friend’s peeps and their latest blog posts so you can actually keep track of what they’re blogging about.

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It doesn’t end there

Gatorpeeps offers an array of features which make it safer to play with
According to the Afrigator blog, Gatorpeeps would be extended to an SMS-based mobile offering to cater for users who wish to “use their mobile phone as their primary device”.

If only that were all.

They’ve also added some really, really, REALLY cool tools to the mix, my favourite of course being the Post it to Twitter tool which essentially allows you to dual-post to Gatorpeeps and Twitter via a really simple setup process.

HEY! There’s more.

Gatorpeeps is going to be developed at a very fast rate. We have lots of plans for where we want to take it and we’ll be moving like a Boeing to get there. Some of our future development includes:

• Mobile web front-end
• Mobile apps for Symbian, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, iPhone and Android
• SMS integration
• Extending Community functionality
• Smarter ways to share links & photos via Gatorpeeps
• Plugins & Widgets for all environments
• Closer integration with Afrigator
• API Access (oh wait, that’s done)
• API Documentation

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Man I’ve really got to hand it to Justin, Stii, and the rest of the gang.
Gatorpeeps really is the bomb.

And you there! Africa’s talking, Are you? Hit us with a couple of comments and let us know ok?

Don’t forget to follow the D-Tech Blog on Twitter, and yeah Peep me up a line or two. You’d most likely be hitting me up on Twitter as well. Sweeeet !!!!

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Okay. I’m going to do something a bit unsual today. I’ve been in love with AJAX ever since I came across it two years ago, simply because (in my opinion) it makes the web more fun to play with.

The D-tech Blog team unanimously decided to introduce a new category to the blog, exclusively dedicated to AJAX and Adobe AIR® applications. YIPEE!!

I saw this really cool post at NetTuts+ on 20 really amazing AJAX effects and after checking them out, I was really impressed. Though most aren’t really AJAX, they still provide quite amazing functionality.

Let me quickly run you through my top 5 out of the lot. Enjoy;

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1. Image Menu

Image Menu 2.2 is a really impressive script which creates a horizontal menu using a couple of images. Each time you move your mouse over any image, it reveals more of that image. This amazing JavaScript resource was developed by Samuel Birch

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2. Image Flow

Image Flow an unobtrusive and “user friendly” JavaScript image gallery script featuring a scroll-bar which allows users seamlessly browse through the images. It kinda reminds me of what the guys over at XING used for their Guided Tour (which leaves me open-mouthed each time I must add).

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3. Search Field CSS/JS

SearchField is a simple light-weight Auto-Suggest script which guides the user by providing hints to assist them find what they are looking for as they type. It’s actually one of my personal favourites because of the ease of configuration.

Actually, I am a bit biased in favour of this because I found it just about the same time I was battling with a similar thing on one of my projects

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4. jQuery checkbox

jQuery checkbox adds a little flair to checkbox fields in forms. It adds a toggle button very similar to that of the iPhone interface, giving a very distinctive on or off. It’s great for usability, and the dynamic skin can be turned on or off, on the fly.

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5. Control Tabs

Last but by no means least, Control Tabs is a “sweet script” that gives many different ways to configure tabs on a page. It attaches/creates a tabbed interface from an unordered list of links/anchors that point to any elements on your page that have an id attribute.

Since it attaches these behaviors to HTML that already has semantic meaning, it will degrade gracefully for browsers that do not support JavaScript, and is search engine friendly. It attaches in one line of code for simple use cases, but is highly customizable and can be used in a variety of edge cases.

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Quite amazing, I’m sure you’d agree.

Have anything you’d like to share? Feel free to post a comment below. Don’t forget to subscribe to our RSS Feeds….. and yeah,

follow us on Twitter- http://twitter.com/dtechblog

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At the beginning of the year I did a review on Global IT trends for 2009, and in that review I highlighted the growth of social media in 2008, drawing support from Chris Crum’s article on “the year in social media: 2008“. I also echoed the Baseline Mag’s prediction on the expected growth of Social Networking in 2009:

…. Social Networking will continue to expand in customer relationships with brands and corporate team building efforts as ways to help the bottom line. Organizations are increasingly looking to next-generation social networking tools to conduct sophisticated business intelligence and analytics. In many cases, they are mining data and looking for trends and patterns, such as which salesperson has the relationships to pull off a deal or which customers seem to have the biggest influence with others online

It’s only been 4 months since my review, and already it’s pretty clear that social networking is on the rise. Sites like Twitter, Linked In, StumbleUpon, PerfSpot, and of course Facebook have grown even more popular, making major headlines around the globe (sometimes for all the wrong reasons)- not to mention newer social networking tools which have been popping up all over the web.

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Social Media as a brand building tool

Most people still see Social media as just a place to hang out and see what your friends are doing. They just don’t realize what a powerful marketing tool the world of social media offers their businesses.

Social media offer more than just an opportunity to stay in touch with friends and colleagues, they also provide a cost effective platform for product marketing and brand building, and indeed the popular social networking sites, in terms of marketing, offer an extremely large target-audience, often running into hundreds of millions.

Facebook for instance, has seen its membership rise from 175 million in March, to a little over 200 million in May, and it allows you “create a public profile that enables you share your business and products with these 200 million plus users.

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Legacy social media such as blogs, and newsletters also serve as handy marketing tools. Blogs have literally been in existence for over a decade, and still play a huge role in market development. They give you an opportunity to build relationships with customers, and those relationships, of course, can amount to much better sales.

Similarly, online forums- the original social networks- are still extremely relevant. They provide you a perfect opportunity to know exactly what your customers and prospects are thinking. The levels of interaction they provide can assist you in creating a proper direction for your online campaigns, and should be worth considering.

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Making Social Media Work For You

An integrated social media marketing strategy can help your business increase brand visibility, improve customer loyalty, and gain important insights about the markets you serve.

Social media marketing is the possibly the most effective way of generating traffic, and as such the importance of social media as a marketing channel should never be underestimated. It effectively compliments your other marketing strategies, and is highly sustainable.

How so?

“Social communities can be a great source of web traffic on top of any traffic you are already receiving from search engines. While you can’t easily increase your search engine traffic, social media traffic can be very easily controlled through strategic marketing.”

Social Media news sites let users post links to news articles, blog posts, videos, podcasts, and other web content. Then other site users can vote for that content, potentially sending it to the front page of the news site where millions of web goers are likely to see it and click through.

This is particular true for sites like Twitter, where users can access public timelines of other users, without neccessarily having to be friends with them (or follow them in case). Practically all the major news and web content providers are on twitter, including; Google, CNN, and BBC.

Social media channels will help your business grow by creating a community of supporters who (if nothing else) would recommend your products/services. It is common knowledge that word-of-mouth has and always will be crucial to marketing success.

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Are you using social media as a marketing strategy?

Leave a comment and let us know how effective is has been for your business. And hey, don’t forget to follow us on Twitter- http://www.twitter.com/dtechblog

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Mobile telecommunications giant- MTN has announced the launch of
its 3.5 G service in Ghana.

The service, which uses high speed downlink packet access (HSDPA) technology, was announced at an impressive ceremony at the Ghana College of Physicians and Surgeons in Accra.

Speaking at the launching themed
“Go Beyond, Experience our better life today”, Chief Executive Officer, MTN Ghana, Brett Goshen said, “We are very pleased with the significant progress we have made in building an extensive 3.5G network and making it available to a large number of our valued customers”.

“We are launching our 3.5G network with more than 7 times the number of 3.5G base stations than the next competitor. In addition, we are launching with the widest and best connection in Accra, Tema and Kumasi and will be expanding aggressively to all major cities in the months to come.”

MTN currently has the largest market share in the Ghanaian mobile communications industry, and just as chief marketing officer, George Kojo Andah said in an earlier announcement in February;

this new 3.5G service is meant to enhance the overall network experience for its customers, and provide more efficient systems for the transmission of existing voice, text and data services.

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The development will pitch MTN against rival Zain, which launched its 3.5 service in December 2008 and both operators will also soon face competition from Globacom, which bought a 3G licence for Ghana in mid-2008, and is expected to start services soon.

The HSDPA based 3G service, offers several advantages over the existing circuit-switched techniques used for carrying mobile voice, and utilizes a number of techniques in parallel to increase the efficiency and reduce the latency.

This allows higher call volumes and support for new and exciting multimedia data applications such as broadband access to the internet, emailing, mobile TV, video telephony and video conferencing from a mobile phone, PDA, or laptop.

The company also plans to host a carnival and demo fair in Kumasi, on saturday, 9th may, which is meant to further expose its customers to the service.

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