Assabi maintains that there is still a genuine need in the African market for mobile connectivity. According to Cellular.co.za, some 32 million calls are made per month from 2,135 of Vodacom's rural and township public handsets, which means that there is a potential market for businesses to offer data services to these traditionally under serviced areas.

'The trick with the technology,' Assabi says, 'is that with the diversity in handsets, OSes, platforms and banking systems, technology needs to deliver multiple presentation layers to a single communications source.'

Underutilized

It is not a matter of the past mindset, where you either had 'e-business or were out of business', but of making use of the Web as an enabler for business, and that is where most of the dotcoms went horribly wrong.