internet

[Johannesburg, 24 April 2008] - Value-added network service providers (VANS) wanting to self-provide national backhaul networks through an individual electronic communications network service (I-ECNS) licence face the same financial and social obligations as major telecoms operators.

This is according to Independent Communications Authority of SA (ICASA) chairman Paris Mashile.

He spoke in response to a presentation by Uninet CFO Mulwell Rebelo, at the sixth annual Digital Africa Summit, in Sandton, this week.

The issue arose during a discussion on the High Court proceedings instituted by the Wireless Access Providers' Association (WAPA) asking for clarity on the right of VANS to self-provide networks.

WAPA believes VANS have held this right since 2006, but there has been conflicting messages on the issue, said Rebelo.

In response, Mashile said licences that ICASA issues to operators under the same group have to be similar in every respect.

This means that, in theory, VANs issued with I-ECNS licences have similar financial and social obligations as major players like Telkom, Neotel and the mobile network providers. “If there are differences, they must be justifiable,” he said.

Mashile also argued that the Electronic Communications (EC) Act already provided that VANS can self-provide networks through the class ECNS licence system.

A class ECNS licence allows telecoms providers to roll-out regional telecoms networks, but they cannot establish national backhaul infrastructure. “The terms and conditions are clear,” Mashile said.

No limit

ICASA previously argued that it is not trying to exclude VANS from gaining access to I-ECNS licences.

The regulator said it would convert current licences, and then ask VANS to present their business and technical plans to be considered for I-ECNS licences.

ICASA did not set a limit on the number of I-ECNS licences it would issue, said the official. The number of VANS gaining a licence will depend entirely on the number of VANS that qualify, he noted.

The Internet Service Providers Association of SA says it is watching the WAPA proceedings with interest. However, it neither approved nor disapproved of the legal action.

ICASA is also facing legal action from Altech Autopage Cellular on the issue of whether VANS have the right to self-provide networks.

The company launched an urgent application with the Transvaal High Court to interdict the ICASA process to convert licences to be in line with the EC Act.

The application also cites communications minister Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri, Mashile and the 24 VANS that either participated, or indicated their willingness to participate, in the ICASA licence conversion hearings, as respondents.

ICASA says it is aware of media reports on the case, but would not comment further.

http://money.cnn.com/

Sheryl Sandberg has held high-profile jobs at the World Bank, the Treasury Department and Google. Her latest challenge? Making Facebook as profitable as it is popular.

By Jessi Hempel, writer

PALO ALTO, Calif. (Fortune) -- This is only day 13 on the job for Sheryl Sandberg, so forgive her if she doesn't have everything figured out just yet. She pulls her legs up beneath her into a white Eames chair.

"This feels like Google when I started," she says of her new employer. It's a Wednesday afternoon in downtown Palo Alto and she has agreed to her first interview since she turned in her security badge at the Googleplex last month, packed six years of belongings into her car, and drove over to meet her colleagues at Facebook. As Facebook's chief operating officer, she is now number two to 23-year-old founder Mark Zuckerberg.

Sandberg, 38, is in charge of helping the Valley's most popular startup grow up. Over the past four years, Zuckerberg has built the social-networking site he started in his Harvard dorm room into a 550-person business that sprawls across seven buildings in downtown Palo Alto. A Microsoft investment has valued the company at $15 billion. The number of visitors to the site jumped 300% to 100 million in February, up from 24.8 million in February 2007.

More than one Valley luminary has held Zuckerberg's name up alongside that of Steve Jobs (proving that the only thing more plentiful than business plans there is hype). Engineers from Google (GOOG, Fortune 500) and Yahoo (YHOO, Fortune 500) are defecting to the company for a bit of that startup fairy dust. Facebook even recently hired Google's top chef.

But for all the success, the company has hit a critical point. Even though Facebook is seen as the embodiment of Web 2.0, it has the quintessential Web 1.0 problem: No one has figured out how to make real money off it. Facebook pulled in revenues of just $150 million in 2007. In short, Zuckerberg et. al have yet to hammer out a business model. Oh, that.

Facebook is betting that, if anyone can figure out how to turn social networking into cash, it's Sandberg. As vice president of global online sales and operations at Google, she built the operations to support Google's international strategy, and she ran its lucrative AdWords program. She managed the division that handled sales for nearly all of Google's online advertisers.

In growing a business unit from just a few employees to thousands, she learned a great deal about how to nurture companies as they develop. That will be important in her new roll at Facebook, where she's in charge of expanding operations, revenue and international reach. She's also responsible for sales, business development, public policy and communication. "It feels like a great thing that is starting to happen but really at the very, very beginning," she says.

No one is more jazzed that she's joining the company than Zuckerberg. Since their first meeting at a December Christmas party, he estimates they've spent more than 100 hours together, mostly over lengthy dinners at Sandberg's Atherton home.

"Sheryl has a lot of experience, probably the best and most relevant experience of anyone we could find, to help us scale our business," says Zuckerberg. But that's only part of the reason he's excited. In creating Facebook, Zuckerberg has social ambitions. He thinks helping people connect to other people on the Web will make the world a better place. As he puts it, "her values aligned very well with my own."

Sandberg has made a career out of helping exceptional individuals realize their aspirations. It started with her favorite college professor, Larry Summers, who taught her public economics at Harvard. Not that it was obvious at first.

"She sat in right field with a few friends with whom she always seemed to be having a terrific time," Summers remembers. "So I was a little surprised when she had the best midterm and then she also had the best final." Summers would become her mentor, serving first as her thesis adviser and then upon her graduation in 1991, hiring her to work with him at the World Bank.

This wasn't what Sandberg had originally intended. She figured she'd go to law school and ended up foregoing Harvard Law, which had accepted her. But Sandberg's career path has always taken unexpected turns.

"I want to do things that matter," she explains over a lunch at the University Café in Palo Alto. At the World Bank, Sandberg assisted Summers and also traveled to India for a project to curb the spread of leprosy. After getting her MBA in 1995 (yes, Harvard again) she spent a year at McKinsey before becoming Summer's chief of staff at the Treasury Department during the Clinton administration. There, she gained a reputation for her intellect, organizational abilities and her skills in managing personal relationships.

"She was one of the people who kept [the Treasury] together," said Lee Sachs, who served as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Financial Markets at the time. Summers concurs: "She never let an event go without a resolution. It made my job easier, and it also made me perform better."

As the Clinton administration drew to a close, Sandberg was courted by a number of investment banks but chose instead to go to Google, which was then a valley startup with fewer than 300 people. There she took charge of AdWords, which lets Web publishers place text ads on their Web sites and managed four employees. Early on, she thought about how to lay the foundation for a massive global business.

"I don't think there is a business in the world that was getting users at that pace," remembers Adam Freed, whom Sandberg hired to launch AdWords internationally. Sandberg created divisions and hired people to manage them when her staff was still tiny, Freed recalls: "We were a ten-person team and we were thinking, 'why are you going to hire that?' And she said, 'trust me, you need to think not about now, but where are we going to be in five steps and ten steps?' "

Google's David Fischer, who worked with her from the start and recently moved into the position she vacated at the company, calls this quality her ability to look around corners. "While the rest of us are planning three quarters ahead, she was thinking about how we jump ahead a number of years," he says

In keeping with her focus on social issues, Sandberg also drove Google's billion-dollar philanthropy endeavor, Google.org. She started the Google grants program to provide free search to nonprofits, and she helped develop plans for Google.org and was instrumental in hiring Larry Brilliant to run the company's philanthropic arm.

Sandberg will bring all of these experiences to bear in her new roll at Facebook. It's now up to her to add a dash of corporate structure without destroying the creative chaos that allows the company to innovate quickly. "One of the things I'm certainly focused on is tying things together," she says. "That's not just making a one-off decision, but seeing how it fits into a bigger picture."

First up, she'll tackle international growth. She's also focused on hiring. Facebook needs to find a couple more senior managers. The company is searching for a general counsel and a vice president in charge of policy and communications to round out the leadership team. And Sandberg will help her team come up with a process for identifying and recruiting talented people at every level of the organization.

Sandberg also hopes Facebook will figure out new advertising models for social networks. The company's launch last Fall of Beacon, a tool that lets users share their purchases with friends, was a spectacular failure. Beacon was highly anticipated by marketers, who hoped it would be to social networking what Google's AdWords tool was to search - a way to quickly and efficiently make money off the technology. But many users objected that Beacon revealed personal information, such as what videos they'd rented or gifts they'd bought, without asking.

Six months later, Zuckerberg admits the company messed up. "We made mistakes in communicating about it," he says. "We made mistakes in the user interface. We made mistakes in responding to it after it was out there. But the intent of what we were doing is still good."

Within 30 days, Zuckerberg apologized to users for launching a product that didn't adequately address their privacy concerns and adjusted Beacon to give users more control over what pops up on their profiles. He also now distinguishes Beacon from Facebook's ad strategy, which relaunched at the same time. Beacon, he explains, is part of the platform and just another way for users to use Facebook. The ad service is a different division of the company entirely.

Whatever you call it, though, the bottom line remains stark: Facebook has not yet found a way for using personal connections to advertise. Sandberg acknowledges that there won't be one silver-bullet technology that will make Facebook as profitable as it is popular.

"You can think about it more in terms of form, which is usually banners, pictures, things like that, or you can think about it how I think about it, which is, it's awareness building. If that's what we mean by brand advertising, I'm very hopeful that we play a significant role in pushing the envelope," she says. "How we get there, I don't think we know yet. In terms of what brand really is we could be enormously important in the market and that's a long-term goal I have."

But on day 13, that seems a very long way off. Sandberg's immediate challenge is to meet her employees, and she has spent the better part of the first two weeks checking in with them. Enthusiasm about her arrival emanates. Outside the glass-walled conference room, her head of human resources, a 2004 Stanford grad named Christopher Cox, ripsticks across the floor. (It's kind of like a skateboard, but cooler.) Earlier he stopped in to say how excited he was that Sandberg had arrived. "It was like Sheryl came and kicked everybody in the ass and said this is going to be hard," he said. "And then gave everybody a hug."

Telkom (JSE:TKG) this morning announced that it had declined an offer from Oger Telecoms as it was not in the interests of shareholders. It added that the disposal of the company "or its subsidiaries, joint ventures or any parts thereof will not be considered by Telkom without a compelling strategic rationale".

The company also announced the intention to invest in a fixed-wireless voice and data network as well as a mobile data network. It says it will unveil these plans in due course. Telkom spent R2,6bn last year on capital expenditure and is expected to spend R7bn during this year.

Previously the company's CEO Reuben September has repeatedly stated Telkom's intentions in the mobile space, saying that it wanted to "achieve a fixed-mobile service provider model across the fixed and mobile value chain". Speaking at the company's analyst day presentation today, September said that Telkom's core strategy of defending and growing profitable revenue "remains on track".

The company is continuing with its rollout of a WiMAX network, enabling consumers to connect to high-speed data services wirelessly. One would expect this to form the backbone of its planned network. The company said in June last year it planned to launch a voice service on WiMAX in the last quarter of this financial year (by March 2008), however this offering seems to have been delayed. Irnest Kaplan, MD of Kaplan Equity Analysts, says that he imagines the fixed-wireless deployment has "to do with using wireless to connect the last mile". Telkom is targeting the corporate market, townships and villages, gated communities and the youth/young adults with its wireless push. In its analyst presentation, the company says fixed-wireless solutions are cost-effective, scalable and a viable alternative when considering the effect of cable theft.

Telkom says that copper theft is responsible for 70% of the faults in its access network. This, the company says, causes "unacceptable delays in service provisioning, restoration" and "unacceptable contact centre queues and answer time". It says it will continue lobbying government to declare cable theft as sabotage and it will invest in the "alarming of cable routes and deploying armed response teams".

Its goal of investing in a mobile data network puts it head-to-head with 50% subsidiary Vodacom, which has spent billions on its 3G network. Data revenue from 3G and HSDPA services is still a small percentage of overall data revenue at mobile networks in South Africa, but this portion is growing. Neotel has also said it will offer fixed-wireless services. Telkom says it will offer a "3G interim service whilst ADSL is being installed". Telkom says it has access to GSM spectrum through the new Electronic Communications Act.

While the move may have surprised some, Kaplan says "the little players must never underestimate the incumbent's power". He adds that its obvious Telkom is "going to take the data side" of its business "more aggressively".

As to the mechanics of how Telkom aims to "selectively" roll out a fixed-wireless and a mobile network, it says it will consider existing co-location synergies and network sharing/roaming arrangements with mobile operators. One could naturally expect Telkom and Vodacom to work closely in this regard.

As to the future of its 50% stake in Vodacom, Telkom says the "disposal of Vodacom will be considered but only if compelling strategic rationale convinces" it to do so. It will measure all alternatives "against the full value of Vodacom". However, Telkom says it is pragmatic about its interest in Vodacom and that it has "identified a number of attractive alternative opportunities".

Telkom also said it will "substantially reduce its investment in Telkom Media". The company says peak funding of 100% of Telkom Media will now be R5,3bn. Telkom had planned to invest R7,5bn in Telkom Media.

After Telkom and MTN called off talks regarding a possible buyout in November 2007, Citigroup analysts suggested Telkom's "plan to enter the pay-TV market in South Africa should be scrapped because Naspers's Multichoice unit is well established". Other analysts were also opposed to the sizable investment in pay-TV which Telkom said it would make. Irnest Kaplan says this move comes because of "massive analyst criticism".

One analyst, who declined to be named, said that the changing economic environment in South Africa with higher interest rates and lower consumer demand could be one of the reasons for Telkom seemingly abandoning its pay-TV effort. Telkom, however, still maintains the Telkom Media "business model is sound". The analyst wondered whether with Telkom's reduced investment, the venture would be viable at all.

Telkom also offered guidance for its two African operations: Multi-Links in Nigeria and ISP-business Africa Online.

Multi-Links holds almost a quarter of the Nigerian CDMA market. It also has no restriction on the choice of technology used, plus the use of an international gateway. Telkom aims to invest heavily in marketing this operation (R105m in 2008/2009), and expects the number of CDMA subscribers to jump from around 800 000 to 3,5m. It also expects growth of in the leased line (data) as well as corporate and wholesale internet segments. Telkom also notes that the "data market in Nigeria is virtually green-fields". It will lay 3 100km fibre during 2008/09.

Telkom will build a landing station in 2008/09 financial year as well as a national network operations centre. When comparing this strategy to MTN's entry into the Nigerian market, the similarities are clear. MTN knew how to run a mobile network and it applied this knowledge to its entry. Telkom knows how to run a fixed-line network, especially a next generation network which it has been busy building in SA. It targets revenue of $1,5bn by 2010/11, with an EBITDA margin in excess of 20% (currently below 20%).

Africa Online, under the leadership of John Joseph, will double dial-up and wireless subscribers this year (15 000 to 34 000), and it will double that number again next year (to 67 400). This business is targeting revenue of $70m by 2009/2010 (currently slightly under $20m) and Telkom says Africa Online will be cash flow positive in the 2009/10 financial year.

http://www.itweb.co.za/sections/business/2008/0803201100.asp

[Johannesburg, 20 March 2008] - The integration of Transtel into Neotel begins on 1 April, following yesterday's approval of the R230 million transaction by the Competition Tribunal, says Neotel spokesman Fani Zulu.

Neotel first announced its plans to acquire Transtel as a going concern in April last year. The acquisition allows Neotel to compete more aggressively with Telkom in the enterprise space.

“Neotel views the acquisition of Transtel as a strategic move to address a broader enterprise market. Transtel, with over 100 locations nationwide, will enable Neotel to deliver and support telecommunications services to address this market sooner than otherwise possible,” says Neotel MD and CEO Ajay Pandey in a media statement.

The acquisition also gives Neotel faster entry into the enterprise markets, and provides it with a platform to introduce its next-generation services for businesses, he says.

Transtel also brings an existing customer base, which is said to generate in excess of R600 million per annum, he adds.

One of the customers is Transtel's former holding company Transnet, which has told the Competition Tribunal that it intends to appoint Neotel as the sole and exclusive provider of electronic communications services to Transnet for a period of five years.

Integration roadmap

Pandey says Neotel will, over the next month, contact Transtel customers, suppliers and other associates directly to communicate how the transaction affects them.

Zulu says one of the major tasks will be to integrate Transtel's network into Neotel's next-generation network (NGN).

This includes “some level of investment” to upgrade the Transtel network and enable smooth and efficient connectivity with the NGN, he says.

It is unlikely that Transtel customers will be heavily impacted by the transaction, as the company will remain a subsidiary of Neotel, and not be swallowed up as part of the integration process, he says.

“Transtel customers will remain clients of that company, with the added benefit of gaining access to Neotel's NGN,” he says.

There will be no job losses as a result of the alignment of the companies' business processes, as some of the 550 Transtel employees have scarce skills that Neotel needs, he says.

“Neotel currently employs 20 to 30 new people per month and there is work to be done.”

Gaining traction

Zulu notes that Neotel has become a significant player in the enterprise market since it launched its offering in November last year.

Neotel has signed a number of blue-chip companies, and is seeing a lot of repeat business and clients taking on additional services, he says. Business revenue is also growing and new solutions are being added, he says.

The company is also moving at a brisk pace with its fibre roll-out, having already covered Sandton, Rosebank, downtown Johannesburg, downtown Pretoria, Cape Town and Durban. Companies that want fibre can effectively get it within 72 hours, he says.

“Those fibre roll-out plans that you usually see on PowerPoint presentations have become reality for Neotel,” he adds.

Greg Davis, Vice President and General Manager of Dell's Americas Channels Group.
Gary Bixler, AMD Director of Worldwide Channel Development
Allison Watson, Microsoft Worldwide Channel Chief
Adrian Jones, HP Americas Channel Chief
Bill Amelio, Lenovo President and CEO
Mark Shuttleworth, Ubuntu Project Founder
Christopher Blizzard, Mozilla Open Source Evangelist
Larry Ellison, Oracle CEO
Steve Jobs, Apple CEO
John Thompson, Symantec CEO and Chairman

December 20, 2007 (Computerworld) There's little doubt that Google Inc. is indeed king of online media. In August 2007 alone, Google captured 57% of worldwide market share among search engines, with more than 37 billion search inquiries, according to analyst firm comScore Inc. in Reston, Va. Add to that a mind-boggling stock price of $711 per share on Nov. 5. Not surprisingly, this dominance has led to endless rumors about where Google is headed next.

Dozens of blogs feed the rumor mill daily, and speculation about Google's next move ranges from stories of an undersea cable to Asia to talk about the upcoming gPhone, new data centers and a Google virtual world.

Only Google knows for sure -- but Google watchers have their own educated guesses on the company's next business maneuver. They're going out on a limb with some bold predictions for 2008 and beyond.

• 'You're Watching ABC Google'

  In its quest for more advertising revenue, the company might acquire more-traditional media properties.

  "They'll move into radio and television at some point," says Rob Enderle, principle analyst at Enderle Group in San Jose. And if that happens, media buyers would take their advertising dollars to Google first to leverage its multimedia offerings. "I'm not yet convinced that they'll buy a network," Enderle adds, "but that's a possibility" -- as is the purchase of a group of radio stations that Google could aggressively shift to an online delivery model that could enhance the value of its advertising package. At the very least, he says, Google will partner with media outlets for exclusive relationships to secure its revenue stream.

  "Their end goal, if they're successful, is to become bigger and more powerful than the combination of Microsoft, IBM and AT&T in their heyday," Enderle says. "And they actually have a strategy that could do it ... by either taking the [ad] money or trivializing the contributions by the other companies."

• Get Your Free Google PC

  In 2008 and beyond, most of the hardware and services that we now pay for are going to be available from Google for free -- or at drastically reduced prices, says Chris Winfield, president of 10e20 LLC, a global search marketing company based in New York. Cell phones, wireless Internet access and even laptops will all be completely ad-supported. "A lot of people would gladly take a free laptop [in return for watching] some ads every now and then," he adds.

  Google has already started down this path. It bought Urchin Web analytics software in March 2005 and then offered portions of it for free to users as Google Analytics. It also rebranded Keyhole 3-D satellite imagery as Google Earth and offered it up for free.

  "They do that to get more control and more eyeballs and more people using their products," Winfield says. "It would be the same with a laptop or cell phone."

• 'Come See the Softer Side of Google'

  What better way to tout a high-profile company than to advertise during a high-profile sporting event? Look for Google to run a feel-good commercial plugging its virtues during a future Super Bowl. "We might see their first entry into true advertising," says Rand Fishkin, president and CEO of SEOmoz, a search engine optimization firm in Seattle. "They have observed what Microsoft has done [in TV ads]. It can make an impact."

  A commercial depicting Google as making the world a better place might help its image, Enderle suggests. "They're reaching a scale much like Microsoft did a decade ago, where people were getting very concerned about their motives and power," he says. "That's when you need an overarching brand campaign to make people more comfortable with who you are and where you're going."

• Google Buys an Ad Agency

  A Google ad campaign might even spark a play for one of the world's best advertising agencies. "There are a lot of folks that would love to have that Budweiser ad team, Enderle says. "With the amount of money that Google's got, they could probably do it. Google is positioning itself as an überagency anyway; I wouldn't be surprised if they bought an ad agency."

• Google Applications Finally Take Off

  Google has had relatively little success in getting users to adopt services outside of its core search offering. Less than 5% of Google's users use its home page for anything other than search, says Peter Hershberg, managing partner at Reprise Media, a search engine marketing firm in New York. But that will change in 2008, when Google is reportedly set to launch its gPhone.

  "This may be the true rationale behind the launch of mobile gPhones -- which is convenience," Hershberg says. "The gPhone will undoubtedly have out-of-the-box integration with every Google application that's out there. The value in having all that information under the Google cloud in your pocket at any time may be the reason why people finally start to adopt these applications."

  Users could sit in a doctor's office and pull up their medical records. Or they could use the phone to check out at a retailer rather than carrying credit cards. With Bluetooth technology, users could beam presentations and documents to desktop computers from their phones without carrying storage. They could upload mobile pictures to Picasa, Google's photo software, and blog directly to Blogger from their phones. "It will integrate all of these services together," Hershberg says.

  Google's $3.1 billion acquisition of online advertising company DoubleClick Inc. will drive its application strategy even further, he adds. "When the DoubleClick acquisition closes, then they've got a real targeting layer to put on top of everything else, where they'll have demographic information, your IP address and the level of specificity where ad-targeting becomes that much more sophisticated as well." 6. Google Offers Local Reviews

  Some 63% of U.S. Internet users performed local searches online in July 2006, up 43% from a year earlier, according to a comScore study. With local content growing in popularity, "I think [Google] will get into local reviews," Fishkin says.

  "Google is one of the weakest when it comes to having content around local search and user reviews," he says. Given the popularity of local services from Yahoo, Yelp and Citysearch, Fishkin says he expects the company to invest in or partner with a local review provider or a large travel portal. "Google is going to want to serve more and complete data to users with their searches," he predicts.

• Google Takes Another Stab at Social Networking

  Google tanked in the U.S. with its Orkut social network, though the network is widely popular in Brazil and India. Look for Google to take another, bolder run at this important market in 2008.

  "Right now, they don't have any real strong presence, and they know it's the Holy Grail for them," Winfield says. "A site like Facebook controls so much of users' activities, just like Google wants to do. So it's very important to have a foothold in there."

  In October, Microsoft announced that it would pay $240 million for a 1.6% stake in social networking upstart Facebook after a high-profile battle with Google and Yahoo Inc. The investment boosted Facebook's valuation to $15 billion and positions Microsoft as Google's biggest competitor in the search advertising market.

  "That's why they're going to make major moves in that category -- after losing that to Microsoft," Winfield says. "I see them either making a huge play [to acquire another social network] or building their own."

  An internal project reportedly under way at Google encompasses a grand plan to build a social layer across all of its applications. According to TechCrunch.com co-editor Erick Schonfeld's blog, Google plans to use the feed engine that powers Google Reader (known internally as Reactor) to create "activity streams" for other applications, akin to Facebook's news and mini feeds.

  With Facebook valued at $15 billion and MySpace already owned by big rival News Corp., Google will have to set its sights on smaller or foreign social networks if it wants an acquisition target, Winfield says.

• Get ready for the Google Operating System

  "It would not shock me if there was an announcement next year that Google was going to put into beta an operating system on Linux, an open-source system, or something like it," Fishkin says.

Editor's note: See "Google touts 'Android,' its new open mobile platform" for information about Google's Linux-based platform, announced in November.

Collett is a Computerworld contributing writer. Contact her at Stcollett@aol.com.

More Americans are Googling themselves — and many are checking out their friends, co-workers and romantic interests, too.

In a report Sunday, the Pew Internet and American Life Project said 47 percent of U.S. adult Internet users have looked for information about themselves through Google or another search engine.

That is more than twice the 22 percent of users who did in 2002, but Pew senior research specialist Mary Madden was surprised the growth wasn't higher.

"Yes it's doubled, but it's still the case that there's a big chunk of Internet users who have never done this simple act of plugging their name with search engines," she said. "Certainly awareness has increased, but I don't know it's necessarily kept pace with the amount of content we post about ourselves or what others post about us."

About 60 percent of Internet users said they aren't worried about the extent of information about themselves online, despite increasing concern over how that data can be used.

Americans under 50 and those with more education and income were more likely to self-Google — in some cases because their jobs demand a certain online persona.

Meanwhile, Pew found that 53 percent of adult Internet users admit to looking up information about someone else, celebrities excluded.

Often, it's to find someone they've lost touch with. But looking up information about friends, relatives, colleagues and neighbors also was common.

Although men and women equally searched for online information about themselves, women were slightly more likely to look up information about someone they are dating.

In many cases, the search is innocuous, done to find someone's contact information. But a third of those who have conducted searches on others have looked for public records, such as bankruptcies and divorce proceedings. A similar number have searched for someone else's photo.

Few Internet users say they Google themselves regularly — about three-quarters of self-searchers say they have done so only once or twice. And most who have done so consider what they find accurate. Only 4 percent of Internet users said embarrassing or inaccurate information online resulted in a bad experience.

Pew also found that teens were more likely than adults to restrict who can see their profiles at an online hangout like Facebook or News Corp.'s MySpace, contrary to conventional wisdom.

"Teens are more comfortable with the applications in some ways, (but) I also think they have their parents and teachers telling them to be very careful about what they post and who they share it with," Madden said.

The telephone survey of 1,623 Internet users was conducted between Nov. 30 and Dec. 30 last year and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

Microsoft (MSFT) has invested $240 million in Facebook at a valuation of $15 billion and gets the rights to sell third-party ads on the Facebook network. That’s about 2 percent stake. Not as crazy as the $900 million that MySpace (NWS) pried out of Google (GOOG), but still pretty steep. I thought the deal was for $500 million, so I am guessing there is another shoe to drop here. (Looks like Microsoft is going to be to Facebook what Yahoo was for Google… transition strategy!)

Today Facebook also launched an application for BlackBerry, and got RIM and T-Mobile USA on stage with Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskowitz to announce it today. Facebook already has an iPhone app that early adopters everywhere love to brag about. Moskowitz also announced the Facebook platform was expanding to all web-enabled phones, with apps appearing on mobile Facebook profiles and getting access to SMS to communicate with users.

Press call live blogging below the fold:

• The call was supposed to start at 2 pm, its already 2.04. Bad muzak playing!
• Mark Zuckerberg , if you want to play Steve Jobs, learn to be punctual like Steve.
• Maybe they are getting their stories right, and haven’t figured out how to put the obscene finger gesture to Google in polite/politically correct language.
• 2.10 pm, and still terrible music and no sign of anyone.
• 2.12 pm: It’s on. Vivek Verma and Kevin Johnson, president of the Platforms & Services Division at Microsoft, are on the call. Brandee Barker (spokesperson) and Owen Van Natta, vice president of operations and chief revenue officer at Facebook. are on the call.
• Mark is beyond all these PR things ;-) He got peeps it seems who are handling this!
• There is an error in the press release, and will be reissued.
• Owen is speaking. He is saying stuff which could be spoken by any executive on any conference call.
• Kevin - major win for Microsoft in advertising and strong signal from our biggest partner. Facebook is a strategic win for us. We are very pleased with the depth and the scope of this deal. Seems like Facebook is going to work on newer ads for social environment.
• Kevin says the equity stake is a strong statement of confidence in this partnership. Blah blah! 200 million users is in realm of possibility and combine that with monetization opportunity.
• Kevin - there are certain elements we won’t disclose about this deal. We have strong alignment around technology. Lot more we will do together.
• Owen says: lot of folks wanted to partner with us over advertising, and relationship has been great for us. We are now expanding our relationship beyond U.S. borders.
• Owen says: no restriction on 3rd party developers. I think they can tap into Microsoft ad center and other technologies.
• (Arrington asks) Any other investors in this round? Not announcing any other investors in this round for now. Just Microsoft.
• Kevin says - we are expanding our advertising relationship internationally and that is what we are announcing right now.
• In response to Josh Quittner’s question about who else were they talking to, Owen says not commenting on who were others they were talking to.
• Owen says lot of rumors about financing but this is the best set of terms we came up with this deal.
• Not talking about Facebook IPO.
• Is this deal just for banner ads? Will it be expanding to Internet Search deal and will it be separate deal? We are not announcing anything related to Web Search. This is only about advertising.
• Question Mine: Kevin Johnson (what we are seeing so far) we continue to see monetization which continues to improve. We will drive hire. Continues to improve… both parties are not disclosing the metrics. Part two - in terms of what we are using the capital for, our innovation and growth we are seeing today. Expanding our employee base. 700 employees in 2008 (wow). International growth and there is a lot of technical infrastructure we can build around the. Allow people to experience better Facebook. (I will expand on this point later)
• Building your own (FB) salesforce? Microsoft is an exclusive advertising platform partner. The two companies work together today and going forward - there are different needs advertisers have. Socialization of the Internet needs innovation.
• Does Microsoft have access to Facebook user data? User trust is core to what we focus on and we both are going to provide highly relevant advertising and focus on that. We don’t want to violate user trust… There are certain parts of the partnership we are not announcing. I think they are dodging a very relevant question.

Hitwise just sent me over some data that helps put the deal in perspective. According to the Internet monitoring firm, for the week ended 10/20/07:

• Facebook.com was the 9th most visited web site in the U.S., with .96 percent of all Internet visits.
• U.S traffic to Facebook.com has risen 102 percent year-over-year when compared with the week ended 10/21/06.
• Among a custom category of leading social networking web sites, Facebook.com received 15 percent of U.S. visits, putting it at No. 2 behind MySpace.com, which received 76 percent. Windows Live Spaces received 0.4 percent.
• Facebook.com received 9.9 percent of its U.S. traffic from search engines. Of that traffic, MSN Search and Live Search combined for .46 percent to Facebook.com. Google sent 6.82 percent of U.S. traffic while Yahoo! Search sent 1.34 percent of traffic.
• U.S. visits for Facebook.com among users ages 35 and over have increased 19 percent when compared with the week ended 10/21/06.

[itweb]

[Johannesburg, 4 October 2007] - Internet Solutions (IS) will upgrade its international bandwidth to 2Gbps to cater for growing capacity demand.

Alan Bacher, business unit manager of access solutions at IS, says: “We are showing growth in the amount of bandwidth customers are using, as well as in the number of clients we have.”

He says IS's client base in the DSL space has grown from around 22 000 to 40 000 clients, an increase of just under 50% over the last financial year.

“Having increased our international bandwidth by 843Mbps over the last 12 months, and with current bandwidth at over 1.7Gbps, we need to keep ahead of demand.”

According to Bacher, the increased capacity should reach the 2Gbps mark by the end of November.

Bacher says the company is looking at various tenders that will see it connecting to several other international backbone links over the next few months.

“This will up the capacity even more, which is an ongoing process for IS.”

Broadband boom

MyADSL founder Rudolph Muller says there has been a significant increase in the number of broadband users across the country. “We are currently looking at around 600 000 broadband users in SA. I predict this number to grow to 700 000 over the next few months.”

He says increases in international bandwidth should be and are continuous for all providers.

To accommodate the increase, IS has started to upgrade its international transit links to 1Gbps, and its links between London and New York to 4 x 155Mbps, says Bacher.

IS uses the undersea SAT3, SAT2 and SAFE cables, together with satellite access mediums, to connect to its international points of presence.

“We are looking at buying into a new undersea cable. All ISPs [Internet service providers] will need to in order to compete fairly with Telkom,” he notes.

Microsoft Wants A Piece Of Facebook? - How much is a 5 percent stake in Facebook worth? $300 million? $500 million? $750 million? It all depends on how desperate the buyer is and how well Mark Zuckerberg can play a game of corporate poker. Rational thinking long ago flew out the window when it comes to anything Facebook.

[gigaOM]