Botswana

After all those preparations, we were ready for Botswana. Armed with our cellphones and Elmo we took off with no problems at all. We met some ladies from UP and UNISA at the airport, what a relief it was to see some familiar faces. When we arrived in Botswana we did the normal customs story and went to collect our luggage, bags were there but Elmo was not there, since we had him put with fragile luggage we went to the friendly man and enquired about our precious luggage. The friendly man told us not to worry Elmo was not lost just coming with the next flight. Needless to say we didn't believe him, does he have any idea that our necks were on the line should anything happen to Elmo, well we went to the hotel checked in and went back to the airport to fetch Elmo. The trip back to the airport was an interesting one (thanks to our navigator - excuse me I must blame someone) we turned early and ended up exploring Gaborone:-) (no we didn't get lost). Fortunately we found Elmo waiting for us, now all was well and ready for the workshop knowing that nothing can go wrong or so we thought.

Preparations

With all the information, we had to prepare for the workshop;

• Testing some technologies
• Preparing powerpoint presentation
• Putting together the workshop programm
• Creating a web presence (blog, twitter, slideshare, Google talk, etc etc!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)
• Dry run sessions with colleagues
• Travel and accomodation logistics (what a nightmare)

All this was done in a period of two weeks (we are smart after all :-) we have Adele to back us up). Other projects and duties we had to put on hold just to concentrate on the workshop. At the last week, the count down began, it was now excitement and anxiety all the way.

Getting help

We came across an article by (Ellyssa, 2009) which was very informative. Martie arranged a meeting with Bettie de Kock from the University of Pretoria, who shared some of her experience with us and also helped with what we already had. Still in high spirits, we met with Adele Botha from Meraka. On our previous post we mentioned our smart idea to create a website. Well it turned out there was nothing smart about it *sob*. Yes it was necessary. The point is there is much more to mobile services than having a website that can be accessed using a mobile phone web browser, though not limited to these, out there are SMS services, MMS, USSD etc 

What Adele did was to correct our misconception of the idea behind going mobile, "it is not about exporting the entire website to a cell phone" she said. Feeling a bit discouraged, Adele threated us to some of her magic coffee. With our cups in our hands, Adele took us through some of the work she was doing and also showed us what Meraka HLT group was investigating in regard to mobile services.

The penny dropped

While we were still excited feeling good about ourselves, Martie dropped a bomb on us, "girls the workshop presenter  wont  make it, are you  up for doing the workshop". Excitement turned to panic *red lights everywhere* a classic sink or swim situation.

Before we could do or say anything we had to calm down unfortunately deep breaths were not helping at all, plan B was Gran's salt, sugar and water solution (it never disappoints). Now that we were calm (thanks Gran) the question was "now what?" One of the things we noticed was that our information centre did not have a website only an intraweb. We asked in-house ICT to design a website not from scratch but to take content from our intraweb of course being the "smart" people that we are we removed content that was not 'applicable'. With that sorted we asked friends, colleagues, family "General members of the public" to refer us to people with expertise and skills, fortunately the people we were refered to were eager to help...

How it all started

It all started with an email from our manager (Martie van Deventer) asking if we would be available to help out at the Botswana conference's mobile technology workshop. The requirements were simply (so we thought), lots of reading (what's new) and experimenting (bring it on). We were so excited, we started browsing the web for existing projects and literature.


The most important reason for us doing all that reading was to know enough to ask smart question :-) Needless to say our excitement grew as we got more information and just could not wait to come back from the conference and apply our knowledge - "think bonus"!

Project Lwazi promotional video

iPhone 2d barcode reader

Digital Doorway.flv

Interactive Mobile using USSD