These are Good Okes

Many many Thank Yous to the following people who in one night not only helped spread community wireless, but ALSO donated money to iCommons, a charity that promotes free culture and internet society.

Jacques Marneweck (Deep PHP Diver) - R900
Nikki Friedman (aka The Lush) - R850
Ian Gilfillan (Greenman and Wikipedia Translator) - R550

They each get a Skyrove Hotspot-to-Go!

That's a total of R2300 going to iCommons, who are promoting my favorite message: "Less Control leads to More Innovation"

More Kudos to Jacques, who decided to throw in an extra R50 AFTER the bidding had stopped!

Thank you to Graham and Chris from Stormhoek for sponsoring some wine that helped the bids go up.

Big thanks to Mike Scott for some awesome cartoons that capture the essence of community wireless!

Bru and Boegie Join the Wi-Fi Community

I'm glad to say that Bru and Boegie have a very good understanding of Wireless technology!

I met the amazing cartoonist Mike Scott at 27 Dinner last night, and asked him if he wouldn't mind doing a doodle on the back of one of my Skyrove business cards, related to wireless technology. He did 5! Here they are:

It's about sharing, stupid!

I was massively inspired after meeting Creative Commons chair Larry Lessig! His message is focused around 'Read/Write culture' and the "freedom" of online content.

He gave countless examples of how less control leads to more innovation! I constantly talk about building a worldwide community of Wi-Fi hotspots that is almost totally out of control, allowing entrepreneurs to earn a living by reselling bandwidth, while at the same time bringing down the total cost to end-users.

To say thanks to Heather Ford and iCommons for bringing Larry Lessig and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales to South African shores and their work in promoting free society, Skyrove will be sponsoring 3 Skyrove routers to be auctioned at the upcoming 27 Dinner, the proceeds of which will go to iCommons.



These babies will earn you money, while giving your neighbours cheap Wi-Fi access!

If you're not convinced about how cool sharing your internet is, go check out
the Skyrove movie at www.skyrove.com.

Also see this post by Mike Stopforth and this post by Dave Duarte and this post by Jared Cinman and this post by Esther Dyson and this post by Glen Verran and this post by Dave Gale and this post by Chris Rawlinson! *phew*

Skyrove on The ZA Show

DJ Glen Virran spoke about Skyrove this week on The ZA Show!

If you'd like to listen, go get the MP3 here.

Mate of the Week - Eye Candy

Chris Rawlinson from Stormhoek yesterday introduced me the Windows XP Zune theme.

I've never been a fan of Windows themes, as they always seemed to slow down everything and were often clunky around the edges, but Zune is simply stunning:


(Click on image to enlarge)

What's even better about Zune is that it comes direct from Microsoft, not a 3rd party.

If you're like me and you're a bit fed up with looking at the same XP desktop for the last 6 years, click here to download the Zune theme (only 1.6 MB), this week's Mate of the Week.

Wireless isn't Always Best...

The above cartoon is by Mike Scott, check out www.bruandboegie.co.za for more hilarity.

Open Coffee Club

Cape Town Super Connector Eric Edelstein is starting up a Cape Town chapter of the Open Coffee Club!

From the website :

The OpenCoffee Club was started to encourage entrepreneurs, developers and investors to organise real-world informal meetups to chat, network and grow.

The first meet up is going to be at the MIND-ALTERING Extreme Hotel. Click here to see Jon Cherry's fantastic photos

I know the Cape Town Web & Geek crowd have some phenomenal ideas. I think Eric is the right man to start introducing South Africa's risk averse investor crowd to the 'new' internet revolution!

See Eric's post here if you would like to attend or know more.

Mate of the Week - Highrise CRM

There once was a children's program on TV called 'Zet', and every episode they would choose a 'Mate of the Week', typically some 6 year old kid who drew a bad picture of Zet himself, who was some form of South African Sasquatch.

I thought I would start doing some product reviews on Yeah!Fi about products that make my working life better. I hereby introduce to you 'Mate of the Week'!

My mate this week is called Highrise CRM, the latest super Web 2.0 product from 37signals, well known for Basecamp, a Web 2.0 project management app, and for inventing Ruby on Rails.

I have tried a few different Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools: ZohoCRM (too slow), Salesforce.com (too pricey) and most recently SugarCRM (too complex).

Nonetheless, the 3 mentioned above are pretty much clones of each other with nothing original offered by any of them. All of them are too cumbersome for a small business to use and not in the least bit intuitive.

You will need to train your staff about the differences between leads, opportunities, contacts, accounts and cases while simultaneously beating them with a whip to motivate them enough to actually use the software on a frequent basis.

37signals decided to bugger all known wisdom and develop a CRM application from scratch. And it is simply brilliant. It took me about 10 minutes to set up and completely understand how it works.

The interface is simple, uncluttered and incredibly intuitive: (Click picture to enlarge)



The coolest feature is definitely the Email Dropbox. When I get an email from someone, I can simply forward the mail to my Highrise Dropbox email address. It will automatically attach it to the correct contact. If I haven't yet created that contact in Highrise, it will be created for me!



If you have a small business with a handful of employees and a growing customer base, I strongly recommend you give Highrise a spin. It could really make your life better, and therefore deserves this week 'Mate of the Week' award.

Let Me Backrub Him

Did you know that Google was originally called Backrub?

I wonder how that would have worked. Imagine someone sending you a Resume and you ask the chick in HR if she's given him a Backrub?

The key to a good name is to choose something that is not too generic. If you combine two words, try and shorten one or both of them. Do a Google (Backrub?) for your name and make sure it doesn't have a hundred other meanings.

We thought of dozens of names for Skyrove (initially called SkyWi) before we got the one that was just right. 'Rove' is defined as "move about aimlessly or without any destination", which is exactly what our Wi-Fi hotspot users (Skyrovers) do, in the Wi-Fi sense in any case. And 'Sky' alludes to the fact that it's wireless and implies freedom of not being connected using a 'fixed' line.

We immediately liked the name. What cinched it was the fact that a Google search on 'Skyrove' did not return one single entry. No domain registrations, no products, no confusion.

A Google search on 'Skyrove' today returns a mere 755 results, but all of them are related to us.

It's difficult to choose a proper name for your company, especially one that has meaning and which has not been used before.

Also ask a few foreigners if your new name means anything funny in their language. I feel sorry for the Stanford boys who decided to call their 'online career community' Doostang. (Not a good word in Afrikaans, though I'm gonna ask Nikki Friedman next time I see her: "Het jy al Doostang getraai?")