Hectic! Awesome! Wicked!
I believe "sick!" is also a term used to mean "good"...or "cool". And "cool" means, well, "good" to us old folk who were born before 1980. What is with that? How did "cool" become "sick"? Wtf? (What the flip)
I spent a lot of time feeling old lately because Cozahost turned 10 years old in July. To put that in perspective:
In 1990 Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau proposed the hypertext protocol we call the web today.
In 1991 Tim wrote the first web browser.
In 1996 the South African public could connect to the internet for the first time.
In 1999 we closed down our software development and consulting business and re-named our company "Cozahost" to concentrate exclusively on hosting South African businesses.
In just 10 years the internet changed the shape of society: Hundreds of millions use social networking web sites like Facebook, Myspace and Twitter.
In 2008 there were approximately 600 million permanent servers on the internet.
Last month the Seacom cable went live to signal start of faster and cheaper bandwidth in South Africa. Seacom and the cables to follow over the next two years will change the internet landscape in South Africa as surely as electricity changed the physical landscape. A revolution is looming.
Mean time, in the rest of the world, just about any question you can think of can be answered by Google, or the (brilliant) new Microsoft search engine "Bing".
A new generation "Answer engine" to "make all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone" saw the light in the guise of Wolfram Alpha: You can ask this engine questions, and, instead of pointing you to web sites, will actually give you an answer.
Ask it: "Where is Afrikaans spoken?" and get an answer.
Ask it: "Why did the chicken cross the road" and get an answer, or "what is the answer to life" (answer) or "how fast is light" (answer), or "how much does it rain in Cape Town" (Answer), or or just tune it "Hello."
(Sidebar: when you wake up afer a particularly heavy night, stay in bed, stick your head under the covers and use your cell phone to surreptitiously ask Wolfram Alpha: "Where am I?")
It's still a bit rough around the edges, but you'll get the point. Imagine the internet ten years from now?!
But relax. As they say on the cover of Hitchikers guide to the galaxy - Don't panic: God / SARS / the universe / nature / the Tokelosh willing you and I will be here 10 years from now reminiscing about the good old days before computers could understand what people wanted. You know: the days before we had chips embedded in our brains and before stupidity was declared a dangerous and communicable disease.
To celebrate our decade birthday, we launched the first incarnation of a new client service portal where our clients can mange their accounts, get statements, copies of invoices and so on. We also launched a new affiliate program where we thank our clients for recommending us by giving them a commission. We replaced all our office furniture. We employed more staff. We installed (or are in the process of) installing a new PABX (phone system) that allows any of our staff to make, take or transfer calls anywhere in the word...as if they were in the office. True global mobility. Untethered productivity. Telkom Free. Praise the gods.
Not only that, the new phone system can do sexy stuff like report (read in a human voice) current network and server status and perform just about any process you can think of...including making you groove on elevator music while on hold. How much did all this cost? Well, zero actually - if you exclude the mental pain and anguish of installing a Linux system. (Will tell you much more about this PABX in a future issue...it IS the future of telephony)
We refined our long term vision for Cozahost - complete with an integrated systems plan with some James Bond-esq, shiny new systems.
We will innovate and creatively deploy technology to empower our clients to compete with the best. We will build services and relationships so that our clients choose to stay with us for another ten years...and beyond.
The last ten years was wicked, awsum, hectic and sick. But the next ten...whowee! It's gonna be gezact!
