A letter from TechCentral’s editor

To say the last few weeks at TechCentral have been busy is to put it mildly. But what you’re looking at today is the fruit of that industry, and months of planning that came before it.

In recent days, I have been sharing an analogy, which – while a stretch – describes quite well, in layman’s terms, what we’ve been attempting (and have now achieved): taking the passengers on a rusty old passenger plane that was struggling to stay airborne, and transferring them with great care to a sleek, modern passenger jet flying directly overhead – all this without any casualties. It was a lot of work!

The result is our new website design and, perhaps more importantly, the technology underpinnings that position TechCentral for the future and allow us to cement and grow our position as the leading business-to-business technology publication in South Africa. And, boy, do we have big plans!

I encourage you to have a look around – don’t be shy now! We’ve gone for a cleaner, more modern design. Our new homepage packs in tons of information “above the fold” – to use old newspaper industry terminology – so you, the reader, get a view, immediately, of the most important technology stories in South Africa and around the world.

Scroll down a bit and you’ll see we’re emphasising our podcasts more than we used to. That’s because we’re going to be doing more of them, bringing you top-class interviews with industry leaders, decision makers, innovators, technologists and, well, anyone interesting in the fast-growing world of technology – local or international. We have much more planned, but I can’t give away too much just yet (our competitors read us voraciously, too). But watch this space!

Class above the rest

TechCentral will continue to bring you a dynamic mix of local breaking news, world news, in-depth analysis and the best technology columnists in the country. We know you, our valued readers, are a class above the rest and that we reach the business technology decision makers that matter. We intend to keep it that way — and grow from that position.

I must also thank the amazing group of people I have the privilege of working with daily. Nic Boerma has done incredible work on the new website, putting in very long hours (especially in the final days before today’s accelerated “go-live”) and fighting insanely difficult technical challenges in the process. I might have heard one or two cuss words from him in recent days, but he’s never once lost his sense of humour, even in the most trying of circumstances.

TechCentral will continue to bring you a dynamic mix of local breaking news, world news, in-depth analysis and the best technology columnists in the country

Then there’s our brilliant digital director, Michelle Losco, and her super-efficient Publishared sales and CRM team (Natalie Kock, Candice Long, Levine Ambrose, Kate Thompson, Hedy Gorton, Avantika Ramsoomair, Rachel Nebulaudzi, Bridget Nebulaudzi and Annemarie Kotze), who have assisted under incredible time pressures to have the website ready to showcase this publication’s valued clients. Working with this team of people, I can say this with confidence: TechCentral has a bright future ahead of it.

So, with all that said, welcome to the new-look TechCentral, and a big thank you for being a loyal reader – and please do keep a regular eye on us; there’s plenty more to come, and soon, too. I hope you like the new look. You can, of course, expect more than a few gremlins – they will crop up frequently in the days ahead and, hopefully less frequently in the weeks to come as we get things bedded down. We’ll stomp on any bugs as soon as we find them and continue to make tweaks to the design.

Best wishes, and have a great weekend,

Duncan McLeod
Editor