Do you know the amazing power of FREE?

A tribute to Netscape Navigator - a superior product who practically vanished in time because it did not realize the amazing power of Free

Here is a story, in which the characters will only be remembered by older internet users.

Once upon a time, not so long ago in a world before this one, there used to be two internet browsers. One was called Internet Explorer and the other's name was Netscape Navigator. Both were required to browse the internet, and soon there was a struggle for world domination between them. That was how the world's first browser war began.

As the battle raged, the creator of both browsers fought back hard and bitterly on all fronts. Netscape Navigator was often considered to be the superior of the two products, but in price and functionality the two were in a deadly race, made more difficult by the fact that the two products were roughly similar.

But then one of the two contestants pulled the ultimate trick: it made its product free. The effect was that of detonating an atomic bomb on a medieval battlefield. It simply wiped out the opposition within months. Who can ever win a sales war if the opposing party is giving its product away at no charge? By the time the court cases were over, it was too late already. Internet Explorer emerged the undisputed winner, and it remains the world's dominant web browser to this day. It wasn't the better of the two products. Only its business model was. And that's all that counted.

As for Netscape Navigator - when was the last you heard its name? Probably not in a long, long time...

This little story already illustrates the amazing power of Free.

But there are more facts to consider: How much does Google charge for a service which has streamlined the internet beyond comparison? The answer? Nothing. How much does the most popular social media service of all time - Facebook - charge for hours of entertainment? Nothing at all. The same goes for MySpace, and Twitter.

Or what about one of the world's most popular email service, Gmail? And have you considered the incredible amount of content that millions of users receive via YouTube or the unbelievable magic of Google Earth and Skype? What do these companies charge for their immensely useful content? You guessed it. Nada. Zero. Zilch. One hundred percent nothing!

But have the companies behind these services made millions, or even billions of dollars? The answer to that question is an unhesitating yes.

So how is it possible that businesses can make oceans of money by giving things away for free?

The answer to that question lies in the simply fact that they create revenues streams that accompany the main benefits that they give away for free. Historically, this kind of an economic model is rather rare. But not entirely. In a way, it as always been practised. And the proof of it can be found from any fisherman who will tell you: if need bait if you want to catch fish. You need to give in order to get. And if you want to get much, you have to be prepared to give a lot.

The question then is, can you think how your business can use the amazing power of Free?

Perhaps your business cannot benefit from the power of Free, but I do suspect that that kind of a business would be a very rare one indeed. It may not be practical to give away luxury cars for free, which would run on a proprietary fuel, from which the manufacturer would over time make much more money than he would ever make from mere car sales.

But there is a principle involved. Can you see that at least? If you can, then you may just be holding the key to your next million - or billion.

In our company's case, we deliver future technology to today's world. But in our industry, as in many others, there is also currently a war raging. It is called the "Bandwidth war." Everywhere in the world internet is getting faster and cheaper as different service providers are continuously forced to try and outdo each other in a competitive market.

So we have to ask ourselves - in dealing with a commodity of constantly declining profit, what will happen when somebody figures out a way to give away bandwidth for free? Or, as often happens, at a price that is so low that it is almost free?

Sometimes it is easier to predict the outcome of wars than people might think. And we believe that the outcome of his war would be something along the line of internet that costs so little that it is almost regarded as free. We are already planning of that world today. The power of Free can be your enemy or it can be the difference between owning a mill or owning a market. In the end, it is every  business' own choice whether he wishes to make use of the principle of free or not. Free is fun, but it is not for the feint-hearted.

I wonder how many people have ever thought about it this way.

The success story of how one maths teacher changed the lives of many

How one South African school is bringing the benefit of first class maths tuition to less sophisticated schools, using standard technology

Nobody can deny that mathematics is a key that unlocks some of the greatest career possibilities in the world. A good mathematical grounding can literally be a ladder to sky: the better the understanding, the more rungs in your ladder. The more rungs, the higher you can climb. And the higher you can climb - the more stars you can pick from future worlds.

Stars are like diamonds. And diamonds are money.

So how seriously is maths taken in schools? The sad answer is - not very. Unfortunately mathematics is often regarded like taking your car for a service. It is merely the unpleasant thing you have to go through in order to get good results further down the road.

Like millions of other kids around the world, I was in a good school who battled to get good maths teachers. And so for years we were taught maths by frustrated biology teachers, physical education teachers and even a language teacher. For the most part, these substitute teachers had very little love or appreciation for the beauty of mathematics, struggled to understand it themselves, and certainly did not manage to instil any kind of passion in us.

It stands to good reason that as the years went by our results became less and less inspiring. By the second-last year of school our results were in tatters. We had sunk to a hopeless depth. We were tired, uninspired and despirited. Mathematics had become a slow-motion nightmare from which we saw no escape. It was a quicksand of despair which was in the process of sabotaging our career dreams.

In my last exam I scored 37%. It looked hopeless.

But then something changed. Only about one in 2,000 oysters contains a pearl. And among a hundred teachers, there always seems to be one that is different. In my last year it was our good fortune to end up with such a teacher. Her name was Riana van Heerden - a very small, soft-spoken woman with a soft heart and an iron will.

When we walked into our classroom that first day, she told us these words that were inscribed on my mind:

"I know your records are dismal and that you probably have no hope of passing your final examinations. But I will make you a deal: If you do everything I say, and work very hard, then I will make sure that you will pass. Whatever it takes, you will pass mathematics - and you will very likely do well too. But I must warn you - you will work harder than you have ever worked before in your lives."

I never forgot those words. They haunted my mind for months as the last year of high school dissolved into endless nights of homework and extra classes. When the final examinations drew closer, we had done practically every exercise in the very thick standard issue maths handbook. We also did all the exercises in the old one from previous years. We had done all the exercises in all past examination papers. We did more exercises from other textbooks. And then we did some that the teacher invented herself. We did them all.

By the time the final examination dawned, we were more ready for it than for any other subject in our entire lives. Every problem seemed like an old friend - we recognized its type and nature, smiled, and solved it with quiet confidence. As far as I know, we all passed mathematics with exceedingly good grades. We walked out of school with grades that yielded bursaries and unlocked careers.

In one year one teacher took us from a class of spectacular losers to a class of impressive winners. Even those who had no mathematical talent at all.

And she taught us a lesson which has guided and shaped my life ever since: you can achieve almost anything in life - if you are prepared to work hard. But you may just have to work a lot harder than you can possibly imagine.

What this has given me over the years, is an unshakable belief that the unlikely is possible to those who believe. It is a matter of will, more than a matter of ability. It has enabled me to take on bigger challenges in life with self-confidence, because of that one lesson.

But she did more than that. By giving us a solid grounding in mathematics, she made it possible for us to become what we dreamed of becoming. How many people can claim to have dramatically changed the careers and future lives of a child?

This was my story. But every school has its own story. Most children still suffer with maths. And many teachers even struggle to either fully understand mathematics, or to teach it effectively and in a away that will inspire.

When I was at university a professor of hydraulic engineering made us first do exercises with chemical calculations. We could not understand why we had to do chemical calculations in a first year physical engineering class. His explanation was: I want to see if you understand the principle of percentages. Not one of us did. The system was trying to build walls where there were on foundations.

What the professor tried to show us, was that there are principles of mathematics upon which the entire universe is built - even life itself. If you understand the principles, then there is so much less you have to learn in life. You can figure a lot of it out yourself as you go along.

I have been in technological careers all my life. I have since seen that that everything in life is underpinned by mathematics: work, business, banking, personal finances. To the extent that children are equipped with good mathematical backgrounds, their lives can improve. Poverty can become prosperity. Struggling countries can become winning nations. And ailing economies can be made robust again.

But what do you do if only 1 in 100 teachers are unusually gifted in passing on the knowledge and inspiration of mathematics? The answer lies in technology. Today technology enables that one in a hundred teachers to be cloned and shared with dozens, or even hundreds of classrooms around the world. Through the use of video conferencing technology, a teacher like I had could rescue the grades, and turn around the lives of many other young minds.

Fortunately that kind of technology is already in use, it is affordable, and it is effective. And companies such as ours are excited at being able to help deliver it to school and learning institutions. Because that is the way to connect this world with the future, one bit and one byte at a time. Today a child can sit in a rural farm school classroom, and ask a question to a live teacher in another city. And a hundred other scholars in five other schools can benefit from the explanation given by the teacher.

With smart technology, the teacher can save the whiteboard solution with the click of a mouse, store in in the Cloud for future download, email it to her students, or let them copy it on flash disks. At home these children can replay the solution one step at a time - and refresh their minds to the logical progression of problem solving.

This is the future today. And for schools to have it now is not a matter of ability. It is a matter of will. All they need to do is ask for it. It may take a little bit of work and planning. But that was the lesson after all - almost anything is possible if you are prepared to put in a bit of work.

An example of how a maths lesson could be delivered with standard technology in use today. This is the kind of tools I wish I had when I was a kid.

How British schools are outsourcing maths tuition for better results

Further reading:
South African teachers battle to understand maths.
How online teaching is changing lives

How our company started: over a cup of coffee

Premium wireless telephony offers so much more than old-fashioned landlines. Here  we have a webcam's live video feed streaming onto our receptionist's touch screen display on her office phone. Have you taken your phone to the Cloud yet?

How do new business ideas start? This morning I heard the story of a multi-million dollar business that was started because a customer simply wanted to take revenge for having been humiliated. Another million dollar a year business started when someone bet a friend that he wouldn't be able to sell something useless.

Our company started in a coffee shop. Visit Coloroso coffee shop in Meade Street, George - and you will always find a selection of businessmen who are meeting to discuss some idea or project. It seems there is always someone demonstrating something to a customer or a partner on an iPad, or pointing to a graph on a laptop.

I had been frustrated by bad connectivity on the Garden Route for years. When I sold my previous business I was left with a few months to decide what I wanted to do next. I really did not feel like being bound to a traditional office environment again. I was looking for something new. I wanted my office to be wherever I was.

But there was a problem. Connectivity in George as slow and expensive, and aside from cell phone telephony, communication was still land-based. I wanted a customer to phone a switchboard and reach me on my cell phone as a phone extension, just as if I was in the office next door. Added to that, I have always been techno-fascinated. I like information. I consume large amounts of it. I needed a next generation of connectivity. Unfortunately that kind of solution did not exist.

I had been discussing this problem with everyone who had ears to listen. Even though the terms were hardly known back then, what I really wanted was cloud connectivity - and cloud-based telephony. The technology itself wasn't new. It had all been done before. Just not in our local market. I knew that if I wanted it, others would want it too. I knew it so strongly that I could not stop thinking about it.

One afternoon I meet for one of our friendly technology talks with one of the most experienced brains in the local IT industry. Francois Redelinghuys had been involved in wireless communication since the early days when he pioneered a long distance wireless solution between international drilling platforms at sea. And he had by far the most knowledge and experience of wireless telephony. He was also a businessman who had an unusually good imagination.

As we drank our Coloroso's superb South American coffee, we kept pouring out our frustrations.
"The market is being screwed," Francois grumbled.
"I know," I replied. "We all are. Why isn't somebody doing anything?"
I hesitated for a while and then pitched a question that had long been on my mind.
"Don't laugh now," I said, "just hear me out before you say something, even if it sounds dumb."
Francois listened keenly. I still remember it well because that conversation became engraved on my mind later. I have replayed it many times since.
Then I asked: "If money or regulatory restrictions were not an obstacle, what would it take to somehow uninstall and fix the  internet, and then roll out something that would be of international standard?"
Francois thought it over for a while, and then gave a surprising answer: "You needn't even go that far. The essentials are already in place."
I smiled. Francois smiled. And then we finished our coffee.

That might have been the end of that matter as many brainstorming sessions go. But ideas are like stars. Some streak through the night and leave but a brief show of light before burning out into a puff of gas. But some ideas are destined to live. They are the ones who actually reach earth and sometimes punch great big craters into the landscape. Two days later Francois called.

I can still hear his voice: "I have been thinking about it. We can do it..."

That is how our company started. Over a cup of coffee.

Since then, we have rolled out the most sophisticated network on the Garden Route, offering by far the fastest and most stable connectivity available. And it is delivered at the lowest cost in the market. We built the business on one pivotal principle: Give the market the kind of deal and the kind of services that we would have wanted ourselves. And that has worked ever since.

So where does a business that started over a cup of coffee end up one day? The sky is no limit. We are living in times of opportunity. It is a time in which the world is thirsting for ever more advanced ways to communicate and use the internet.

We still brainstorm business ideas at Coloroso. And there is no doubt that coffee will continue to fuel them to higher and higher levels. Beyond the stratosphere of today's limitations lie the stars. And we aim to be among them for a long time to come.

Where 14 Of The Top Internet Businesses Got Started