20Fourlabs and BWCOM decided to enter the Nokia ‘Calling all Innovators’ Africa application competition a few weeks ago – more on that here.  We received great news two days ago that we won 1st prize and $85 000 in cash! Mega congrats to everyone in Labs and BWCOM!!

Here is my business partner Bradley accepting the cheque with Werner (developer/designer from Blueworld who conceptualized the original idea) and Ronald (mobile expert from 20FourLabs). Pic by Gaby

The cheque landed on my desk yesterday

About Afridoctor

“Afridoctor is Africa’s first personal mobile health clinic, turning your device into a powerful first aid information kit, a doctor-location service, and an emergency distress notifier. Its revolutionary “SnapDiagnosis” system allows users to submit photos of their ailments and remotely receive advice from a panel of professionals. Afridoctor’s mapping feature enables users to find doctors, clinics and all health industry related services within their proximity. The emergency feature notifies next of kin of their distress and location. Features include symptom checkers, first-aid information, health calculators and quizzes. Afridoctor helps make healthcare affordable and accessible to the people of Africa.”

You can download it from the Nokia OVI app store here and follow Afridoctor on Twitter.

Runner ups in the competition -

The runners-up are: Roach Game – South Africa by Breakdesign (in second place), Sasol e.Birds by Coolideas (3), MrSNAKE by Simon Botes (4) and Thumbtribe widget by Thumbtribe (5), LiveMobile by LiveMobile (6), Countdown 2010 by Christian Reeve (7), Surfing Safari by Aqua Online (8), Turn Left at the Barrel by Turn Left at the Giraffe (9) and Mall-Buddy by Paul Hinrichsen (10).

A new innovation unit has launched within 24.com called 20FourLabs. My company Blueworld Communities will be working together with Matt Buckland (lab master) and his team to build audiences and technologies for 24.com.

20FourLabs is a start-up research and development division within 24.com focusing efforts on rapid, agile web development and innovation.

Our aim is to hire people who think big and think fast and to give them the resources with which to create innovative products within the mobile and social media spheres.

We are looking for rockstar php/.net coders to join Labs – if you feel like moving to a high profile division within the biggest media company in Africa – Naspers – or if you know of anyone please get in touch with us.

I had a thought on Twitter a few days ago: Could a Google acquisition of Twitter help the service scale? Or is it not an infrastructure issue but more a platform issue? Twitter has suffered from serious downtime over the last few weeks, trying to keep their service live during peak usage periods. They managed a 97% uptime during the WWDC keynote, which is’good’ by Twitters standards.

Would a Google acquisition be healthy for Twitter? One can’t help but to think about what has happened to other startups gobbled up by the search giant. Since the acquisition of similar life streaming service Jaiku, the community has suffered from negligence on Google’s behalf, much like the Dodgeball acquisition, an acquisition Google made in 2005 and never really did anything with. Some Jaiku users have even revolted and moved over to Twitter. Google’s strategy to gobble up small startups and then do nothing with them is an interesting one.

Really enjoying Friend Feed and the services they allow you to aggregate – subscribe to my friend feed

I’m aggregating my shared items on google reader, my tweets, delicious bookmarks, youtube favourites, diggs and a few others.

It was not planned – thanks to Rafiq (chilling at my pad as I type) and Justin for submitting the posts.

Ignore all requests -

Suggesting friends to newly accepted friends -

Also found this on Delicious yesterday – The shy Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook

My Facebook profile, add me!

Some blogs that blogged my post over the last two days

Betshopboy.net, Peek Inside Offices of Leading Internet Companies, The offices of today’s leading internet companies, JohnChow, A peak into the offices of web 2.0 companies, Matt Cutts, Internet Companies, Entrepreneurs and Search, Offices of leading internet companies – DesignersTalk,

The Alexa traffic chart for Bandwidth Blog – spikey!

My Google analytics chart – indicating good growth after Digg effect

UPDATE – My article made it to the front page of Digg – it smashed my server to pieces – trying to get it back up now – 01:55am. Did all the prepping I could, just not enough. Lesson learnt!

I just published a post on Bandwidth Blog about office photos from hot internet companies. The post was my shot at creating a link bait list to submit to delicious, digg and muti. Please Digg the post here if you think it’s worthy.