Wireless Internet HotspotsPh: 0861-BUTTON

(0861-288866)

Monday, December 14, 2009

Connectivity with a Cuppa

RedButton appeared in the news recently, read more about RedButton's growing partnership with WebAfrica here: Connectivity with a Cuppa

Monday, October 26, 2009

Product offering - Summer Special

Summer has arrived and so too have the new Summer Slam credit purchasing options. Believe it or not but you will now have the ability to purchase credit from as little as R10 at a time!

Teaser Packages
Where else can you buy credit for as little as R10? Need to quickly check an email? Want to catch up on the latest news? Buy from our two fantastic teaser packages. These are the first in the market and are made available especially for you.


Summer Slam Starts November 2nd
The on-line purchasing range will be made available from 2 November 2009 so be ready. This is also your last chance to take advantage of the highly successful Spring Special product promotion.

The Summer Slam product range will be as follows:



Welcome Summer! Its getting hot in here!

Happy surfing,
RedButton

Thursday, October 15, 2009

Team RedButton Putt-Putting 2009

Once in a while we break away from the office to do a bit of good old fashioned team building. On this occasion, we went to the Vodacom World of Golf in Tygervalley, near Cape Town, and it all ended in a putt-off between Barry & Shafiqa, with Shafiqa taking the honours.

Another winner that has emerged from the event is the Pitch & Putter restaurant at the Vodacom World of Golf who now have a RedButton hotspot to serve their patrons before or after a hard round of driving, chipping and putting.


In the picture above, we have, from left to right, Shafiqa Toefy, Hanro van Tonder, Barry Steyn, Divyesh Patel, Neal Tosefky, Nico de Wet, Ryan van Aarde and Jalal Ghiassi-Razavi.

Happy surfing,
Nico

Saturday, October 10, 2009

Improve your web experience with a faster browser

A major factor in the quality of your web experience is the response time between a link being clicked and the result being displayed. This response time is dependent on various factors, the health of your computer, the quality of your link to the Internet and also how "fast" your web browser is.

As a RedButton user you would most likely connect from a Windows based machine, in which case the recent "The fastest Web browser" article published on MyBroadband.co.za may be of particular interest to you. In summary their results show Google Chrome to be the fastest, followed by Apple Safari and with the final podium spot being taken up by Firefox. Using one of these browsers may just improve your web experience.

If want to give any of the winners a test drive, here are the links:

  1. Google Chrome
  2. Apple Safari
  3. Mozilla Firefox
Happy surfing,
Nico

Tuesday, September 1, 2009

New & Improved Hotspot Site Listing



We've been grinding away at various efforts to improve our services over the last few months. Some of these efforts are now coming into fruition and the first of these is the updated and standardized Hotspot Site Listing.

If you point your browser to www.redbutton.co.za and click on the Sites button you'll see something completely different to before.

Some of the enhancements include the following:

  • Uniformity in display (e.g. logos have standard dimensions).
  • The end user rate & any free wifi allowance is displayed (please see further commentary on this below).
  • Essentials are displayed, such as the address, including city, province & country.
  • Each store in a chain is individually displayed along with its above mentioned essentials.
  • The status is displayed - this is whether the hotspot is online or not, note hotspots that are offline for longer than 3 days are automatically removed from RedButton Hotspot Site Listing to avoid pointing end users to locations they temporarily cannot use.
  • Powered By field - RedButton uses the services of a variety of selected companies to provide you with the quality of service you deserve, in some cases we list some of these companies.
Some aspects to note:
  • We only list publicly accessible hotspots, that is hotspots where you could realistically access the venue and use the service within the venue. We have many private hotspots but choose only to market their availability to residents that live within these sites.
  • We have a limited number of authorized third party companies that use RedButton's services to power their hotspots, such sites are currently not listed.
Further commentary on end user rate - average cost per Megabyte

Please note that when a free wifi privilege is enabled at a hotspot, your average cost per Megabyte will never match the advertised end user rate, it will be lower.

Let's consider a particular example, at Constantia Village Mall you get 10MB free per day, so the first 10MB costs you nothing, thereafter you pay 60c per Megabyte. Now let's say on a particular day you use 20MB, given that the first 10MB was free, you would have used a total of 20MB and used up 600c worth of credit, so your effective average rate for that session is 600c / 20MB = 30c per MB. Similarly, if you only used 1MB after your first 10MB, your effective average cost per Megabyte is 60c / 11MB = 5.5c per Megabyte. Naturally your effective cost per Megabyte is a figure that changes over time.

Now all this may be confusing, and it is, so in the near future we will be providing you with a report in the Account Manager that calculates your average cost per Megabyte in real time. If you have ever used one of our hotspots with free wifi privileges, you might be surprised to find that you are paying a lot less than you think.

Thanks for listening,
Nico

Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Change in Discount Offering

Dear RedButton user,

We would like to inform you that our discount offering for credit card purchases has changed slightly as of Wednesday 15th July. Please note, we have not changed the usage costs at your favourite venue. These rates remain the same. We have however implemented a different range of credit card purchasing options.

The times are a changing and RedButton has had to make some improvements to our system which will be put into effect over the next few weeks, the first of which is the credit card purchasing options. These new changes will provide you with more accurate and up to the minute reporting on your usage in real time which will keep you more informed each time you log-in. Additionally, a new splash page/login window will also be implemented and we are sure that the additional convenience this will provide will make your experience with RedButton even more fulfilling.

Regarding our billing, you will notice that we have included new purchase options. Please remember though that the discount offering is only available through credit card purchases. We would also like to inform you that we are going to begin a series of "1-time discount specials" so please keep an eye on these in the future as we would not want you to miss out on them.

For further information on our new discount purchase offering please visit our website or login to the RedButton Account Manager. The new discount structure and purchase offering is as follows:

5, 000 credits - R 50

10, 000 credits - R 100

25, 000 credits - R 244 (2.5% discount)

50, 000 credits - R 475 (5% discount)

75, 000 credits - R 694 (7.5% discount)

100, 000 credits - R 900 (10% discount)

150, 000 credits - R 1275 (15% discount)

Thank you for the wonderful support. We thank you for your much valued loyalty. Loyalty, which will not go unrewarded (keep an eye on this space).

Kind regards,
RedButton

Wednesday, July 8, 2009

Team RedButton Mountaineering - 2006 & 2009

We have grown quite a bit in the last three years, and the following pictures show Team RedButton on the top of Lion's Head and Kilimanjaro respectively. The more recent 2009 picture was taken at our recent team social at the end of June, while the 2006 picture was taken back in September 2006 on a more extensive trip.

You might wonder why we put these pictures up here, well its not just for posterity or to shoot for fame, at the very least you know what we look like.

June 2009

Missing from this picture is Barry, also this was Kilian's last full time month and in July 2009 Hanro joined the team.



September 2006

We were just three then in Team RedButton, proud and excited. Note we are more now, and still proud and excited.

Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Ubuntu powered Dell Vostro laptops

It's been a while since we've blogged, and this will also be a quick note.

We run most of our business on Ubuntu, its a platform that keeps us productive and competitive. In the past we generally purchased entry level laptops with in effect no operating system on it, we would then load Ubuntu on it but with the second last laptop we purchased it back fired horribly, we found out that it took hours on end to get it limping along and in the end gave up on running Ubuntu on the platform, we simply couldn't waste more time on it.

So, when it came to the next laptop, we decided that it would be far more prudent to spend a bit extra on a laptop where the manufacturer took the time to load exactly what we want on it, and implicitly did all the hardware checks themselves. One of our clients recently purchased an Ubuntu powered Dell Vostro and we had it in our offices for a while to turn it into an internet terminal, we loved it of course, for many reasons but in particular since this was a hotel that independently chose an Ubuntu powered laptop.

So when it came to our next laptop purchase, we decided that we'd make the smart choice and get a laptop that already sports Ubuntu, and with a name like Dell, we felt it would be a safe assumption that they did their homework and it will work out of the box - we did look at some online reviews of course. Well so far it works just fine, its not battle tested yet, so to speak, but given the time we've saved its already a hit with us.

About the Ubuntu vs Vista debate and price comparisons, we've got our mind set on Ubuntu, it works for us and not having viruses, trojans and whatever else on our machines keeps us working hard and efficiently.

Finally, have a look at the Ubuntu powered Dell Vostro here on PC Direct.

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

RedButton Free WiFi Pitch



In this clip Kilian Hagemann delivers RedButton Free WiFi pitch as a part of our initiative to spread the service to all of South Africa and the world beyond.

We would like to thank the team at Blue Catalyst for the production of this video clip.

Monday, March 9, 2009

Sinns Restaurant & Bar

There are a few restaurants in Cape Town that have become synonymous with Free WiFi over the last few years and Sinns, based in trendy Wembley Square, is one of them.

Sinns have recently chosen to switch their service, which has been available for a number of years, over to RedButton Free WiFi and are we are naturally delighted. So when you are next in the mood for some fine dining, a cocktail or two, or a corporate lunch coupled with a dose of Free WiFi, head on over to Sinns.

On an unrelated note, when you hover over the Sinns and Wembley Square links above you'll notice that we've installed SnapShots on this blog which basically gives you a website preview. If you don't like it, please let us know. Note its possible to turn it off, if you hover over the little cog symbol in the pop-up window, you can click on disable.

Friday, January 30, 2009

New Account Manager Features

A belated happy new year!

This is just a quick announcement, as an end user, in addition to being able to check your recent sessions using the Account Manager, you can now also check up on the status of a voucher and also see what privileges you have at various hotspots.

When you log into the Account Manager, you will see the links "Hotspot privileges" and "Voucher status" in the panel on the left hand side in the Reports section. This is shown in the image below, look in the bottom left hand corner:


The "Voucher status" functionality gives you the ability to check up on whether a voucher is valid, whether it has been used in any way and what type of voucher it is. We have two types of vouchers, Prepaid WiFi Vouchers with a Rand value, these are ordinarily sold by venues, and also Free WiFi Vouchers that give you an Internet allowance, or privilege, at a specific hotspot.

As hinted above, the "Hotspot privileges" functionality gives you a report on all the allowances you have across the RedButton network. These allowances can only be used at the specific hotspots indicated in the report.

As always, we'd appreciate your feedback, either here or by contacting us.