John Lamb's Week: Africa, entrepreneurs and Bluetooth comes to Palms

Monday
Alec Erwin, South Africa's Minister of Trade & Industry, will be kicking off the African Computing & Telecommunications Summit in Pretoria, South Africa. Among sessions at the four-day event are how to avoid a 'dot-bomb', going global in 20 minutes and the cost effectiveness of adopting Linux.

Keynote presentations include: IT in banking - the challenges and opportunities facing African banks; wireless Africa - hype or reality; policy models that work and Africa ignores at its peril; nurturing Africa's entry into the Information Age

The UK's Department for International Development is funding 90 scholarships that will allow representatives from African internet service providers to attend an ISP Forum. The UK is also backing research into ways of reducing bandwidth costs for African ISPs.

At the other end of the investment scale, serial entrepreneur Martin Mazner is in town for the London Business School's first Entrepreneurship Summer School. Mazner launched PC World magazine, is a partner in several venture capital funds and pens a column called Inside Silicon Valley.

He will be running his slide rule over the business plans of 40 students from around the world and helping them develop ideas for other companies including Oxford Biosensors and Invensys.

"It's seriously hardcore. These people are not young graduates," said a spokesperson for the business school. "They are in their thirties and forties and already work in business." The programme culminates with participants presenting their business plans to VCs and investors.

Integration is getting easier - slowly. Another brick in the wall is due to be laid this week by Taviz Technology. The latest version of the company's eIntegration Suite, out on Monday, contains an adapter development tool with over 250 pre-built intelligent adapters for leading ERP, CRM, SCM, proprietary and vertical applications. Previously companies looking to integrate these applications had to hard code adapters for each system.

According to Taviz, enterprises are spending a large percentage of their integration budgets on developers who hard code adapters, resulting in a costly and labour intensive process.

"Taviz is the last mile in automating integration by providing the ability to automate adapter development and maintenance which saves our customers up to 50 to 75 per cent in cost and time over typical hard-coded integration solutions," claims Cheryl Traverse, president and CEO of Taviz Technology.

Tuesday
Local councils will be scrambling to make today's deadline for submitting their plans for implementing electronic government. The Tony Blair inspired shift into ebusiness will mean that Town Halls will have to find additional funds for websites, kiosks and software. Many are struggling just to keep their existing systems - especially those dealing with housing benefits - on an even keel.

Wednesday
Red-M, the Madge Networks spin off, will be launching a charm offensive and dishing out review copies of a device that clips on to the back of a Palm Vx to turn it into a Bluetooth device.

Users will be able to use the short range Bluetooth standard radio link to communicate with Bluetooth networks, send and receive data via a Bluetooth phone and exchange 'hellos' with other nearby users of Bluetooth devices.

Although the US version of Palm VII has a radio aerial, the Red-M clip-on is currently the only means of connecting Palms using Bluetooth communications.

At the same time, Microsoft will be announcing further developments in its plan to make its Stinger operating system a standard for phones. The Microserfs, more used to increasing the lines of code that go into Microsoft products, are going to have their work cut out to shrink it for telephone use.