What are your thoughts on the current state of the African Blogosphere?

The African blogosphere is booming, but luckily you don’t have to take my word for it. For over two years now we’ve been tracking blogs from all over Africa and what we’ve noticed is that since October last year blog growth has been phenomenal.

This is not surprising either because for a long time Africa has been on the verge of mass penetration and while we’re not there yet we can clearly see a trend emerging with more and more Africans going online.

Over the last year we’ve seen a much higher adoption rate of blogging than ever before and this is growing at a rapid pace.

What do you think might be the impact of the new Seacom cable on the SA Internet in regards to content and usage?

While Seacom is almost ready for launch I don’t believe that South Africans will see or experience the real benefits until late 2010, early 2011. That said, Seacom will help drive costs down, increase speeds and all of this allows for greater penetration and usage in the country.

Until now the Internet in this country has been a costly affair, preventing true mass penetration. With the introduction of Seacom my hope is that the Internet becomes a commodity and no longer a luxury and this will enable us to use and engage with the Internet in new, exciting ways such as video creation.

Gatorpeeps was launched recently. What is the response like?

We’re one of the few Internet companies to be lucky enough to launch a product with more than 14,000 users from day one – all thanks to our single sign on between Afrigator and Gatorpeeps.

In South Africa the response has been mixed but generally positive while in the rest of Africa, in countries such as Nigeria, Tanzania, Kenya and Egypt, the response has been overwhelmingly amazing.

Countries outside of SA love Gatorpeeps as it fills a much-needed gap for them and this was part of strategy prior to launching as we realized Twitter penetration in Africa is extremely low.

How long did it take to bring the idea to launch?

At Afrigator we don’t waste time and it took us ten working days from concept to product launch. Since our inception we’ve been developing products at a rapid pace, launching quickly and then developing and enhancing the product thereafter. It’s a very agile development process that has worked for us and I believe if you want to play online you need to be fast or risk losing out.

What’s the business model?

We don’t have one for Gatorpeeps. It is our position that we need to create value through innovation and more often than not business models can mess with this. We didn’t have a business model for Afrigator when we launched but we managed to figure that out as we went along with the launch of our blog ad network - Adgator.

Through Adgator we now make money and still create value to bloggers and I have complete faith that we’ll work out a model for Gatorpeeps that makes sense to us and our users.

Why should I switch from Twitter to Gatorpeeps?

Well the short answer is that you shouldn’t. Our strategy with Gatorpeeps is not to compete with Twitter at all. While it may look and function a lot like Twitter we’re using Gatorpeeps to help connect our 14,000 users and allow them to engage with an audience that don’t even have Twitter accounts.

If you consider that less than 5% of Afrigator/Gatorpeeps users have Twitter accounts then you’ll start to see why we launched it in the first place. As a Twitter user myself I know the value in the service and it just makes sense for us to try and focus on penetrating Africa in a way that Twitter simply can’t.

What’s next for the Afrigator team?

The biggest problem we have is that we have so many ideas and very little time to implement them. We are currently working on five projects simultaneously however Gatorpeeps has now taken priority over all of them. What people see now is our very first version of Gatorpeeps and we have a long way to go to get it to the product that we’re comfortable with. So, watch this space for what we come up with next!

How much time do you spend online each day?

Sadly I spend far too much time online. In fact, I’m always connected either via Internet or via my phone. On average though I spend around 14 hours a day online – it is my life and my business relies on me being active online.

Three sites you can’t do without visiting each day?

Excluding all the Afrigator products I use daily my next three sites I visit are Twitter.com, Arseblog.com (I’m a big Arsenal football fan) and Google (it’s my source of inspiration).

Favourite SA Blogger?

My favourite SA Blogger is Darren Gorton who runs the blog OutThink (outthink.co.za). Darren is an extremely smart guy who I respect a lot and he writes about business and technology issues that really make me think and evaluate my life on daily basis. Really a good read if you like to be challenged.

Favourite game of all time?

When I was younger I spent a lot of time playing all the Space Quest games on an old XT computer. I have fond memories of Roger Wilco and those early days on a computer!

Favourite gadget of all time?

It is without doubt my iPhone. I’ve been an Apple fan-boy for many years now so when the iPhone came out it integrated perfectly into my lifestyle.

Image: Finweek