This as an initial roll out will give organisations access to the JamiiX Education and Health portals providing an opportunity to communicate and engage with their userbase via mobile chat platforms and instant messengers (e.g. Mxit). “With more than 30 million South Africans using mobile chat, social networks and instant messengers its provides a unique opportunity for organisations to leverage these new platforms of communication amongst youth” according to RLabs Founder, Marlon Parker.

This opportunity is currently only open to organisations operating in the Western Cape and RLabs will also provide workshops at NO COST on the platform and the concepts of mobile counselling and support. We hope that through these partnerships and offering that many more communities can be reached through the use of mobile technologies and the organisations being empowered will be able to increase their channels of support to serving the people in need.

If your organisation is interested in being able to provide value added services via Mxit and other mobile platforms, please contact us for more information. Please note that there will be an expansion to other provinces with this offer later this year and we will keep you updated on its progress.

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RLabs Membership Programme

The aim of this program is to encourage collaboration, co-creation, learning, innovation and provide our members from the community, students, entrepreneurs and those in need an inspiration space. The program will offer a variety of membership packages based on the needs of the members.

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Silver Membership (FREE)

Members will have access to a maximum of 5 sessions a month to a “hot desk” with internet (30min each) *

You will have first preference on ALL courses being offered at RLabs.

Receives a 10% discount on ALL professional workshops and events hosted by RLabs.

48 hour advanced booking required

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Gold Membership ($20 per month)

Members will have access to a maximum of 5 sessions a month to a “hot desk” with internet (60min each) *

You will have first preference on ALL courses being offered at the RLabs Academy.

Receives a 20% discount on ALL professional workshops and events hosted by RLabs.

24 hour advanced booking required for hotdesk

FREE coffee

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Platinum Membership ($40 per month)

Members will have access to maximum of 10 sessions a month to a “hot desk” with internet (60min each) *

You will have first preference on ALL courses being offered at the RLabs Academy.

Receives a 30% discount on ALL professional workshops and events hosted by RLabs.

24 hour advanced booking required for hot desk

Joint membership (allow one other person to use your membership benefits)

1 hour access to board room and audio/visual facilities every quarter

Tech. support while at RLabs

Printing facilities (limited to 100 pages)

FREE coffee

Seats are limited and if you are interested in registration for the RLabs membership programme please contact us and we will get back to you about your application. Please note that the membership is only valid with the local RLabs where you registered and plans to allow global access will be announced soon. Special arrangements can be made if you are traveling and the local RLabs have space available for you to access.

* While seats are available. Gold and Platinum members get first preference on available seats.

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“Who’s your Social Media Valentine?”

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She’s The Geek will be incubated (watch short interview with Co-founder Monique Ross above) as it will develop a number of innovative programmes focusing on women empowerment and technology entrepreneurship. RLabs will continue introducing the various projects over the next few weeks that will be hosted in the Innovation Incubator and Accelerator and excited to see these Social Enterprises going from strength to strength.

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“Uusi” – meaning New in Finnish

After 18 months of conceptualizing, testing and getting community members to engage with it on different platforms, Uusi the brain-child of one of the RLabs champions, Terence Hendricks, finally was privately released to the public only on the MXit platform. Using MXit as the launchpad was an obvious choice in the South African market with an estimated user base of over 37 Million users.

It was also amazing to see the overwhelming response from our users that we had more than 40,000 active job seekers searching via Uusi and over 1,200 mobile CVs created in 72 hours.

Uusi is a mobile social network that provides its community members access to employment, business and educational opportunities through its network. It was also presented at the World Wide Web conference in September 2010 (see abstract) when the first version of the idea was being tested in the Western Cape region of South Africa. This first phase release of Uusi allows a MXit user to signup and search for relevant jobs according to their needs and criteria.

Uusi is also one of the start-up social enterprises that will be incubated and accelerated through the RLabs Innovation Incubator and Accelerator programme. Additional expansion to the project is under development and will be released over the next few weeks as part of the build-up to the official launch of Uusi end of 2011 truly giving its members their “New Beginning”.

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This is testament to the power of mobile phones and the benefit of using a variety of digital platforms. Over the last few years we’ve ensured that mobile become a key component to our strategy for social change. Realising that it is the one technology that most of the world has access to and by leveraging it will assist us in reaching our goal of reaching the world through a Social Revolution.

We will share a more detailed report soon on how we’ve reached the milestone but some of the core technologies used are:

1) MXit Information Portals
2) JamiiX and multiple Mobile Chat services
3) Mobi web portals
4) Mobile Applications
5) Mobile Social networks

At RLabs we will continue pursuing possibilities of maximizing the use of mobile phones to make a difference and to spread the movement of Hope. Thank you to everyone who has contributed towards this journey and we hope together that we can now look forward to the next Million.

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This week RLabs will be working in partnership with Silulo Technologies in 6 previously disadvantaged communities in Cape Town empowering learners with Social and New Media skills. Some of the topics that will be covered include:

- Google and Google Applications
- Social Networking (Facebook)
- Blogging (Blogger)
- Micro-blogging (Twitter)
- File-sharing (Youtube and Picasa)

Our team has really been doing great today and we excited seeing the progress over the next few days.

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The visit by Marlon and Rene gave RLabs the opportunity meet with other like-minded individuals who want to be part of the Social Revolution in Portugal. The University of Porto hosted a public talk about RLabs and its plans for initiatives in Portugal. The title of the talk was ICT for Social Change and three key aspects of ICT4D was discussed:

1) Appropriate Technology
2) Be Relevant
3) Sustainability

The response by students was overwhelming and many indicated that they would be joining the RLabs Portugal team providing engineering support. Another reason for the visit was to meet with other key stakeholders who will be working with our champions in Porto. The stakeholder meeting brought a variety of people together from Academia, Industry, Corporate and Civil Society and Healthcare. The session ended with a buzz in the air and we are surely looking forward to possible collaborations with a number of interested stakeholders. It was also here where the first RLabs Portugal project was announced that will be a Crowd sourced SMS-based counseling service (based on the JamiiX concepts) that is developed by our team in Porto. We are surely excited to see the growth by the champions and the next few months we will keep our finger on the pulse as we see the Social Revolution spreading across Portugal changing the lives of citizens.

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At RLabs we use mobile technologies in the following areas:

1) Information Portals

In partnership with MXit (Mobile Social Network), we’ve been able to distribute relevant social content to users via this platform and have more than 140,000 dedicated subscribers to this service with more than a million interactions per month.
We also use mobi-web to distribute similar content where we get over 400,000 visits a month via our mobile web properties. Most of the content deals with issues related to substance abuse, depression, abuse, career advice etc.

2) Information Gathering

We’ve developed different applications and methods to acquire information from users via their mobile phones. It is a low-cost way of accessing data and allows us to constantly know which of our services we can improve to serve our communities better.

3) Mobile Chat

Using the JamiiX platform we’ve been able to engage with more than a million people in 3 years at a grassroots level. We’ve sent more than 50 million messages of hope through these services and we’ve seen the change and transformation in thousands of people.

4) Mobile Social Networking

At RLabs the use of Social networking is crucial and through using it via mobile phones is important. We’ve used mobile social networks for building communities of support where citizens themselves leverage the power of these technologies to uplift and encourage one another.

Looking back we cannot see RLabs without the use of Mobile Technology as the brief descriptions above has revealed that it does make a difference. In total we’ve achieved more than a 100 Million interactions via mobile technology with citizens around the world and if this is only the beginning then we excited about the future as this is after all A SOCIAL REVOLUTION.

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