Yesterday a new personal financial management service was launched in South Africa called 22seven. The service allows you to track your personal spending and savings with tools for financial planning. The interface is slick and the intention of the developers, who I have spent some time in conversation with, is to make people more aware of their habits surrounding money. It’s a great service in my experience, but has been met with some backlash from South Africans concerned about handing over their internet banking details. I don’t blame people for being concerned, but they really have nothing to worry about. Here’s why…

First off, let me state for the record that I have no affiliation to 22seven. I have met the founder, Christo Davel, and enjoyed many chats with him about behavioural economics and his plans for the business – but as my readers and listeners should know by now, I put emotions aside when it comes to giving people the best possible advice. Especially when it comes to their money.

Personal financial management (PFM) tools have been around for a long time. One of the leading examples of this kind of service is Mint that launched in the USA in 2006. Mint does some of the things that 22seven can, and was met with similar criticism in terms of security when it first launched. But Mint was, and is, very safe to use – and for the same reason that 22seven is.

22seven uses a third-party service provider, called Yodlee, that interfaces with banking systems to extract transactional data. Mint used to use Yodlee too, but has since switched to a system called Intuit.

22seven doesn’t actually log in to your bank account, Yodlee does. The necessary data is then extracted and passed on to 22seven’s servers.

22seven does not store your usernames and passwords either – in fact, 22seven’s systems can’t even see them. When you provide your banking details on the 22seven website, you are actually entering them directly into Yodlee’s secure servers over an encrypted connection.

The above has been confirmed to me by the Managing Director of Yodlee, Jason O’Shaughnessy, who I met last year, and Christo Davel.

So 22seven can’t see and doesn’t store your online banking credentials. But what about Yodlee?

Yodlee is an international company that has been doing this stuff for 11 years. It claims to have over 30 million users worldwide and has not had a security breach. Yodlee has a better track-record of protecting banking credentials than any South African bank.

Yodlee is also officially partnered with some of the world’s top banks. HSBC, for example, who I bank with for my offshore needs, is an official client, supplying data to Yodlee. The big international banks all play ball with the system in developing their own PFM tools and making sure that their customers are supported when using third-party systems.

Does that mean that Yodlee is 100% foolproof? Of course not. No system is perfect. We take some degree of risk every time we interface with financial systems. That’s life.

I was recently a victim of credit card fraud. Thousands of rands were stolen from my account by someone who had managed to capture my card details. The experience made me very wary of security surrounding my banking. But I’m not worried about 22seven. I take much more of a risk every time I let a waiter swipe my credit card in a restaurant.

I don’t blame South Africans for being concerned about handing over sensitive details. You should think twice about doing it and research the people who are asking for it. There is no way I would sign up for a service like 22seven without doing my homework.

What does surprise me is how South African banks – instead of partnering with Yodlee like their leading international counterparts have done – are advising customers not to use the system. It’s just another example of how backward our banks are in their thinking about personal finances, even if they are improving on the service front.

I signed up for 22seven and gave them my details. After chatting to Mr. O’Shaughnessy and researching the Yodlee system I am satisfied that my information is much safer with 22seven than it is with my own bank.

I challenge our South African banks to start thinking about personal finances and how they can empower their customers to make better decisions. It’s 2012. Ripping people off by keeping them in the dark about their own money isn’t cool. Why don’t they want to partner with Yodlee? Why are they warning you against using a system that helps you to make better financial decisions? Those are the real questions to be asking. And you won’t like the answers.

UPDATE: As has been pointed out elsewhere, one consideration with Yodlee is that your bank will not support you in fraud cases. So if Yodlee is compromised, your bank has no liability – unlike in the case of credit card fraud. It’s a good thing Yodlee has never been compromised then.

In the Web 2.0 echo-chamber  bad ideas spread fast. This time nodal sparks came from web celebs like entrepreneur Jason Calacanis and online broadcasting demigod Leo Laporte – both of which I have the utmost respect for, and both of which are proponents of the anti-Facebook movement.

I also respectively believe they’re taking things too far.

Calacanis is known for jumping to conclusions and he’s been wrong before. A great example of this was his Twitter attack on the New York Times’ David Pogue for daring to publish books on products from companies he writes about in the ‘Times. He attacked Pogue’s integrity and my opinion that he was wrong in doing so isn’t just an assertion – but listen to Pogue defend himself in TWiT episode 213 and decide for yourself.

Calacanis is clearly a principled guy who feels strongly about things. I’m the same and have made bad calls on that basis before too, so it would be hypocrisy for me to criticise him too harshly. But I believe he’s wrong about Facebook.

That Zuckerberg is an awkward kid with a track record of doucheness is undoubtable. He has been presented as such from all quarters and even the movie about the birth and rise of Facebook apparently casts him as ruthless and untrustworthy, amongst other things.

But so what? I’ve met some hard hitters in the tech space, including CEOs of large companies, and I can assure you that being ruthless is a common trait amongst almost all of them. Being untrustworthy, on the other hand, is a common trait with young men in general and Zuckerberg was very young indeed when he allegedly knifed business partners in the back. Raise your hand if you went through your teens without doing anything stupid… I didn’t think so.

If you’re going to quit Facebook because its leader is an arrogant know-it-all with weird preoccupations and because the company isn’t in full adoption of the open approach to privacy and technology in general then I would tender that you should be selling all your Apple products, deleting Windows off your PC and getting rid of all your gaming consoles. No more Kindle books, and you should probably sift through Google’s user agreements too. And good luck finding a mobile phone and network to use it on.

The fact is that Facebook is a great and useful service irrespective of its CEO being a douchebag (which may or may not be true). The privacy thing also isn’t as big a deal as some will tell you.

I’ve always been very wary of online privacy and have implemented advanced controls on my Facebook account since it was possible to do so. I have groups of users and I control who can see what. For example, I don’t let anyone except really close friends and family see most of the pictures and videos of my kids. Those settings have persisted and Facebook hasn’t changed them. My account is still as secure as it was this time last year.

The problem Facebook has is that it does privacy too well. It allows for advanced control of your personal content and I’m yet to see another service come close in terms of the granularity it allows. As with any feature in technology, if you don’t apply these controls then it’s you that has the problem, not Facebook. The user is still in control of what the public gets and what stays private in terms of specified user groups and networks.

Because it does this better than most, people expect Facebook to shine at privacy. They don’t care that Twitter is completely open because it’s always been that way, unless you have a locked account.

I am not suggesting that Facebook is faultless, however. The company certainly has played hard and fast with the information of people who do not lock down their information and accept the default settings. It also clearly plans to leverage its situation to make money. But I’m not sure those are malicious actions. God forbid anyone makes a profit, right?

My suggestion is that everyone takes a deep breath and calms down. Facebook is no more or less evil than any other company trying to drive a profit. We could pick out individuals from any organisation and form opinions of the company as a whole based on that one person – but this is shortsighted and infantile as far as I’m concerned. Zuckerberg is the baby and Facebook is the bathwater. Let’s not throw them both out – even if Mark has been peeing in the bath.

There are way more people involved in the creation and running of the company than just the CEO.

I’m all for open software and networks. I believe the guys over at the Diaspora project are on the right track with their plans for a “privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network” and I can’t wait to see the fruits of their effort and funding. But for now Facebook is still a useful tool to me. I have no privacy concerns because I’ve taken the time to set things up properly. I don’t approve of everything the company does, but I could say the same for all the other providers whose products I use on a daily basis including Twitter, Sony, Apple, etcetera.

And, it bears repeating: if you accept the default settings then you can’t complain too loudly when they change. Lock it down like I did.

I had an enlightening discussion with science fiction author and digital rights activist Cory Doctorow in Croatia in 2008 where we discussed his abandonment of the Mac, amongst other things. Cory, who has a tattoo of a Mac on his right bicep, found himself at odds with Apple as a company in recent years and switched to Linux. I asked Cory how he was enjoying Ubuntu Linux, which he runs on a Lenovo laptop.

“I’m extremely impressed with Ubuntu,” he said. “But less impressed with Lenovo as a company.”

The problem? Lenovo’s user agreement for their laptops. The reality is that if you look at most technology companies closely enough you’ll find something to disapprove of. Sometimes you just need to consolidate that in terms of the advantages offered by the technology itself. Cory still uses Lenovo products. And I still use Facebook.

And no, I won’t be deleting my account today. Spare me the hype. I’d go so far as to say that most of the people who have been swept up in the anti-Facebook togetherness are ignorant as to exactly what it is they’re protesting.

But, if you do want to get rid of your Facebook account, check out Seppukoo – a service that aids you in your virtual suicide. And ra-ra for taking a stand.

CNN says the app is part of its ‘My South Africa’ brand campaign that was launched two years ago to raise the profile of South Africa to business and leisure travellers in the lead up to World Cup 2010.

The app allows users to view South African city guides, maps, travel tips and World Cup information and view photographs, send messages to friends, find weather and financial information and a range of other things. It’s clearly geared for tourists but should be useful for local users too.

Rani R Raad, senior vice president for advertising sales at CNN International said that the release of the app signified a change in how CNN engages with advertisers and their audience.

“As an in-house commercial team, it’s great to be able to take on the most creative of agencies and capitalise on harnessing the My South Africa concept into a highly relevant application around the biggest football event in the world. We look forward to seeing this App take the brand engagement potential to new heights,” said Raad.

William Prince, global manager of e-marketing for South African Tourism said, “This new iPhone application allows South African Tourism  to offer rich, engaging content that is very specific to the users and presented in a new and dynamic way. The content is fresh, accurate and appropriate for those traveling to South Africa for the 2010 FIFA World Cup™, and allows the users to share all their stories and experiences straight from the iPhone.”

“The City Guide, the FIFA information and all of the additional functionality that the application offers, takes our brand to a whole new level. We’re very pleased and excited about the opportunity to do this with CNN Ad Sales and to extend the campaign into the pockets of our consumers,” he added.

The CNN iPhone app was created in conjunction with Turner Commercial Productions and Creative Spark Interactive in South Africa.

The app is linked to the My South Africa website, where there is a link to the free download.

On Wednesday I met with FNB’s GM for complimentary online services Chris Savides who explained that PayPal would be a boon for local businesses who now had a cost effective way of receiving funds internationally. Savides was joined by PayPal representatives Sara Gorman and Oded Zehavi who were in South Africa for the launch.

PayPal in South Africa requires that users have an FNB bank account. The PayPal system has been embedded into FNB’s online banking environment, whereas in other territories PayPal is bank agnostic.

FNB also charges a flat 1.5% transactional commission on top of PayPal’s fees. The latter aligns to the fees charged for the service in other countries, but FNB’s commission is unique and is simply being charged for providing the service.

Savides said that business users could negotiate reduced commission rates with FNB on a case-by-case basis.

Existing PayPal users in South Africa can link their accounts to FNB bank accounts too.

Gorman and Zehavi confirmed my suspicion that South Africa is the only country in the world where PayPal is so beholden to a financial institution – but it was suggested that meeting regulatory requirements in South Africa are part of what makes the territory so restrictive.

Savides said that FNB and PayPal had been in talks for about two years in preparing the solution – I suspect much of that time was spent negotiating the former’s requirements.

He also made the point that the introduction of PayPal would make the use of online auction service eBay a reality for South Africans. eBay has largely become dependent on PayPal, which eBay owns, as a system for transferring funds between online buyers and sellers.

Funds transferred from a PayPal account will appear in the user’s FNB account almost immediately and access is granted 24 hours a day, as is to be expected, with daily exchange rates fixed to accommodate for transactions that take place after trading hours.

PayPal transactions can only be conducted in US dollars at this time, but payments can be made into 35 foreign currencies.

A little known fact is that when PayPal originally launched internationally it was available in South Africa for both receiving and sending funds, but only for a brief time. I asked Gorman and Zehavi why it was subsequently stopped and they suggested that this all took place before they joined the company, but that it may have had to do with regulatory compliance in the local environment.

PayPal isn’t the first service of its kind to enable payment to South African accounts, with services like UK-based Moneybookers being available to South Africans in the past, although PayPal is the only service of its kind that integrates with a South African bank account.

Savides added that compliance with the requirements of tthe Exchange Control Department of the South African Reserve Bank is key and that other services should be judged on that basis.

South Africans can also make use of PayPal’s famous donations button that is a quick and easy way to receive donations via the internet and has become a de facto standard with charities online.

The PayPal irony is that the service originated from a company owned by South African expat Elon Musk when his company X.com merged with Confinity in 2000 and presented the service to eBay.

The group would not comment on how long FNB would maintain exclusivity of the service for, but I wouldn’t expect it to be available to account holders at other banks anytime soon, if ever.

Cost and ordering
The international Kindle sells for $279 (around R2100) and shipping to South Africa is billed at an additional $20 (about R130). Delivery to SA, says Amazon, should take 2 to 7 days. However, be aware that you are likely to be billed for VAT and customs duties when the device lands in your country. The total price of the Kindle is therefore likely to be around the R2600 mark once everything has been factored in – Amazon says it should not cost more than that.

The only way to get a new international Kindle is to buy it from Amazon and have it shipped to you.

Wireless delivery of books, newspapers and other content is included in the price of publications (about $9.99 or R75 for newly released books) and will work in any country that supports it, so you can buy books while traveling and not have to worry about data costs. This is exclusive to international Kindle users – the American, CDMA-version Kindle’s wireless connection only allows for free delivery in the US. An additional $1.99 is charged elsewhere.

Here is an interactive map of countries that have support for Kindle Wireless.

Localisation
The international Kindle ships with a US plug adapter, so you will need a converter to use this in South Africa. However, the Kindle also ships with a USB cable that is used to both transfer data to and from the device and charge it. The Kindle uses a standard USB ‘micro-b’ adapter, so you can also use any standard-compliant third-party plug or adapter.

At time of writing the Kindle is only available with an English user interface, but you can transfer files in any language that supports the Roman alphabet (more on transferring files below).

The US Kindle uses CDMA technology for its wireless connectivity, while the international version uses GSM with 3G. If you have an American Kindle account and you purchase the international version of the device you will get all of the features of the American Kindle on the GSM version (including web browsing). Americans therefore have the choice to buy either, but nobody outside of the US should want the US version. The Kindle does not have Wifi – it’s connectivity relies on AT&T and partnering cellular networks.

Books, subscriptions and files
The Kindle stores around 1500 ebooks. There are currently over 350000 books available for the Kindle, of which about 230000, including most bestsellers, are available outside of the US. Books are priced between $5.99 and $11.99 (R35 to R90) and most new releases are $9.99 (R75).

You can also subscribe to magazines, newspapers and other publications that are automatically updated on the device using its wireless connection. New publications are added all the time and Amazon says that it is in talks with some South African magazines and newspapers that should soon be added to the store.

You can also send and read any PDF or Word document to the international Kindle by either emailing it to the device or transferring it with the USB cable. Each Kindle has a unique email address and you can only send it files from approved addresses that you add yourself, which prevents spam. Emailing files to your Kindle is billed at $1 per megabyte.

Everything else
The American Kindle has experimental web browsing support which is provided free of charge, but the international Kindle will not support this feature. It does allow for notes to be taken and includes experimental text-to-speech that will read books to you, as with the American version. Amazon says it might add web browsing to the international Kindle at a later stage, but there are no plans at present.

The international Kindle is also an mp3 player and you can email or transfer audio files to it for playback, including audio books and music.

If you have an American iTunes Store account and you download the Kindle app for your iPhone or iPod Touch it will sync with your international Kindle account. However, the app is not available in Apple app stores outside of the US.

The Kindle will also allow you to download the first chapter of books for free so you can read them before deciding to buy the rest of the book.

The Kindle DX, that has a larger screen than the normal Kindle, is not available internationally, but Amazon says it plans to release the DX to international customers soon.

Can I drop it in the bath?
Surprisingly, this is the first question I get from many of my friends and colleagues when discussing the Kindle. The answer is “you shouldn’t drop it in the bath”. However, the Kindle is water resistant (not proof) and is powered off most of the time while you’re reading, only turning on when you turn a page or do something else requiring the battery. So if you do drop it in the bath take it out immediately, make sure it is off and leave it to dry for two weeks and it should survive. That said, I accept no responsibility for anyone who actually tries this. Keep your Kindle dry!

Can I read it on take-off and landing?
When you are reading a static page on the Kindle it is actually powered off, leaving the imprint on the special e-ink screen for you to read. So you can absolutely read it on take-off and landing. If the air hostess tells you to turn off your Kindle, simply tell them that it is already off and you’re just looking at it. Which is perfectly true. Of course, it is virtually impossible for devices like mobile phones and Kindles to interfere with any part of an airplane’s electronics – but that is a discussion for another time. Paper’s killer application is still reading during take off without being bothered.

And that covers most of the facts about the international Kindle. If there’s something I haven’t added please ask about it in the comments below and I’ll do my best to answer your question.

The server is also resolving to a host in the 165.165.*.* range, which is allocated to South Africa. The only logical explanation I can think of is that Apple must be making MobileMe available to South African customers on local bandwidth – possibly from the same datacentre used to host the local App Store for iPhone.

It’s a little late to do any investigating, but I’ll be calling the local representatives of Apple in South Africa in the morning to find out if this is the case. What I have managed to do is conduct a look-up on the IP and establish its ownership – it’s owned by Telkom. Is Apple a Telkom Business customer?

inetnum:        165.165.0.0 - 165.165.63.255
netname:        IPNET-SAIX-HOSTING-1
descr:          Telkom SA Limited

If Apple does have local servers it would be ahead of competing international cloud providers, such as Google, which is yet to go live with its local servers.

That said, Google is making a big announcement in Johannesburg on Tuesday, 1 September 2009. Will we finally see the local Google data-centre go live?

Things are certainly heating up in the SA cloud space. Or are they?

The truth is that Amazon did not stop shipping to South Africa. While its US store temporarily stopped shipping to the region using standard delivery, you could still make use of expedited shipping. Amazon’s UK store always has shipped to South Africa using standard postal delivery.

The US store has now changed its policy again and will once again ship to South Africa using standard shipping, affirming what I said in the first place: there is nothing wrong with the South African postal system.

Funny how the media (especially internationally) were quick to jump on the story of Amazon stopping its shipping, but is yet to report on the fact that it has started again. And that, in fact, it never stopped. As a journalist I find it worrying that none of my counterparts seems to have applied due diligence on this one.

The competition is heating up for Apple in the phone space. Most of the touch-phone products that claim to compete with the iPhone are rubbish, but Palm recently unveiled its Pre, complete with new operating system WebOS and implementation of some of the features, like copy and paste, that the iPhone doesn’t have.

Apple was recently awarded a patent for multi-touch however, and it may be able to use this to block the Pre from going to market. I hope that doesn’t happen because competition is a good thing.

Herewith my list of must-have features that the iPhone lacks. With these features the iPhone would be the perfect smartphone for me:

• Copy and Paste: This is something you either need or you don’t. And I do. I use my iPhone for Twitter, Facebook and a range of other services where it would be incredibly handy to use copy and paste – for example, for snipping a URL and pasting it into a Twitter message. It would also help getting around the fact that you can’t forward contacts from your address book, which brings me to my next salient quibble:
• Forwarding contacts from Address Book: On just about every other phone I have owned (even the really old ones) it has been possible to forward contacts from my Address Book as SMS messages. The iPhone just doesn’t do it. Perhaps the whole question of what format to send the contact details in has put Apple off, but vcard is a widely accepted standard, and I would even settle for just plain text with a name and number. It could even ask which number I wanted to send if more than one is saved for a contact.
• Forwarding text messages: The iPhone also does not allow users to forward SMS messages from their inbox – another feature most other phones support. I personally wouldn’t use this feature much, but I feel it should be there.
• Flagging email: I use the iPhone’s email client extensively. I think it rocks. Using an IMAP connection to my Gmail account means I am always up to date on my Macbook, phone and anything else I choose to view my mail with. But I can’t flag mail on the phone – and I wish I could.
• Trial applications: The App Store is the best thing about the iPhone and the prices are more than reasonable for the most part. But I really need to try out applications before I buy them, especially for the more expensive products. Sure there are ratings, but just because 10 other people thought this was a four-star application doesn’t make it the right one for me. Even a 24-hour trial would be OK – but I must be able to try before I buy.
• Respect for South African users: This is my biggest gripe. We can’t use Google Maps for navigation or directions in South Africa because Google doesn’t have good data for our road network. There are no games in the South African App Store because Apple refuses to pay the relevant licensing costs to make them available in the country. The podcast directory is also blocked to South African store accounts – there is no reason for this, it is just an error that Apple can’t be bothered to fix. And yet I have it on good authority that Vodacom has sold almost 50 000 iPhones in the country and the iPod does better in SA than it does in some European territories. I’m tired of being treated like a second-rate citizen because Apple can’t get its act together in developing markets. Apple: we love your products and we buy them en mass. It’s high-time you gave us some love. And while you’re at it, can we please have music in the iTunes Store too?

My only other gripe is with iPhone application developers who don’t use notification and push services to keep the apps on my phone up to date. This is a brilliant solution that Apple has offered developers, unless I’m missing something. The Facebook application, for example, could receive updates from my account and push these down to my device where I would be notified, instead of me having to open the application to see if I have new notifications. Perhaps any app developers reading this could explain to me why nobody uses the service? Fring? TwitterFon?

It’s only fair to also include a list of things I DON’T miss. Some people complain about these, but I regard them as non-issues:

• MMS: Get over it kids – you don’t need MMS. You might think you do, but you don’t. If you take a picture with your phone I’d rather that you email it to me. The iPhone has a great email application and I can’t understand why you would want to use MMS instead. MMS is a horrible standard that hardly ever works properly and is used to send annoying adverts from network operators. Not only do I not miss it, I don’t want it. And if your phone can’t do email then it’s time for an upgrade anyway.
• Better camera: As cellphone cameras go, the iPhone’s is good. Megapixels don’t mean much if you have a crap lens and the 2 megapixel camera on the iPhone will take better pictures than many other phones with 3.2 or even 5 megapixel cameras that have shoddy lenses. The lack of a flash doesn’t bother me either as I am yet to see a decent implementation of a flash on a phone – they’re usually little LED lights that achieve very little besides perhaps giving snipers something to aim at.
• Persistent applications: There isn’t much to say here. I don’t really need to run more than one application at the same time – but I do need iPhone app developers to start using notification and push services from Apple that would allow for notifications to be provided even if the application isn’t running. Windows Mobile phones let you run more than one app at a time, as does Symbian – and it’s messy. Memory is constantly full, it makes the phone run slower and remembering to terminate applications which otherwise stay resident is a ballache.

I’ll be at the Mobile World Conference in Barcelona next month and look forward to hunting down the Palm Pre and comparing it to the iPhone. For now, however, I’ll stick with Apple. I love BlackBerry devices and the Nokia E71 is one of the hottest phones I have ever used, but the iPhone still reigns supreme in my universe. Each to their own.

Anyone with a WordPress blog, for example, will know the ‘Incoming Links’ section on their dashboard that displays information on who is linking to your blog. I checked the dashboard on one of my sites today and noticed a link that was quite obviously spam.

What the spammer does is create a page with a link to your site on it. If you visit that page it displays momentarily before redirecting to the spammer’s target site.

The in-between site displays for just a moment. It’s too quick for me to even get a screen grab of.

I haven’t seen this before, but perhaps I’m alone in that. Has anyone else been a victim of Incoming link spam? I guess the race is now on to develop a WordPress plugin that filters it out. Of course, not many people follow all their incoming links, which shows exactly how desperate spammers are getting. WordPress isn’t the only CMS with the abusable functionality, I’m just using it as an example because all my sites are powered by it.