Press Release – Third World E Commerce (TWEC)

A revolutionary global project is starting, and its seed has germinated in Zimbabwe. TWEC (Third World E-Commerce) Project gives free global and local advertising to Businesses, Freelancers, and Employees throughout Zimbabwe, throughout SADCC, Comesa, EAC, ECOWAS, the Mahgreb, Africa, the Middle East, South America, South Asia, South East Asia, China, and the entire Third World.

This is one giant market, which includes the following categories:

- A Global CV/resume Databank – Janitors, Security, Catering, Drivers, Loaders, Cleaners, Welders, Machine Operators, Receptionists, Accountants, IT Staff, Marketing People, Lawyers, Telesales, Call Centre Staff, CEO’s, brain surgeons, nurses, rocket scientists etc.

- Company Profiles, including product listings where appropriate

- Product Profiles where appropriate

- Product or Stock Listings, with or without quantities and/or prices (in excel or .csv format)

- Investment Wanted and Investment Offered, Microfinance, Loans and Grants wanted and offered

- Machinery, Technology and technical advice wanted and offered

- Jobs Offered and Jobs Wanted

- Goods and services for sale, goods and services wanted

- Industrial and Commercial Property for rent or sale, wanted and offered

- Houses, Apartments, rooms, floors for rent or sale, wanted and offered

- Hotels, Guest Houses, Bed & Breakfast, Game Lodges, Tented Camps etc..

- Cars and other Vehicles for sale, wanted and offered

- Tourism – Guides, Tours etc

- Car Hire, Taxi Services etc

- Restaurants, Bars, Clubs, Live Music, Dancing, Cafes, Takeaway Food, Catering Services

- DVD Hire and Sales

- Bus Services and Schedules, Trains, Airlines and Schedules, Ferries, Boat Hire, Car-Sharing Schemes

- Etc..

Its workings are amazingly simple – the person, company or organisation placing an entry prepares a text, word, excel, pdf or htm (webpage) document on a PC, connects to the internet, goes to the website, and uploads the document to the system. Persons, companies or organisations looking for employees, freelancers, goods, services, investment etc connect to the internet, go to the website, and search on the documents using the free google search engine with one or several keywords which describe what they are looking for and where they want it. Whatever they find they can view online or download to examine in more detail. They contact the companies or individuals which seem to have what they want. Searching can often be done using a mobile phone with internet capability – a PC or cybercafé is not really necessary.

If the document has a title then the text of that title will appear in the google search page, and if the title is decently written then it will indicate whether in fact a good or a false search result exists, thereby saving the searcher’s time and effort. Note of course that word, pdf and htm documents can contain photos, sketches, drawings etc., which can be very useful for some categories, e.g. hotels.

There is no charge for placing entries or for searching, viewing or downloading, or for contacting the people and companies listed – only normal internet costs are incurred.

When placing an entry, the person has an option to specify how many days the entry should remain on the system before being automatically deleted or archived. The person is also given a code which will enable them (and no one else) to delete their own entry at any time. Each file is renamed by the system as it is being uploaded. The original filename, the new filename and location, and the deletion password appear on the webpage at the end of the upload process. There may be provided on TWEC a provision to upload a number of files at one time.... There will also be a maximum permissible upload file size, which may be 500k bytes.

People are encouraged to use standardised keywords to indicate to TWEC and to searchers what category the placement falls into. These (few) keywords are listed on the main system, upload and search pages as guidance.

The system can cope not only with English Language entries, but with French, Portuguese, Swahili, Fulani, Zulu, Lingala, Tagalog, Thai, Bahasa, Spanish, Chinese, Arabic etc.. Of course placements with international, regional or global potential should if possible be entered in English (or in local language and also in English).

In order to guard against internet vandalism, then the IP address, date and time of placement will be logged for every document, and that info will be open to all, including of course police and intelligence services from every country. We anticipate that that will not be any problem to 99.99% of users.

Thus TWEC is essentially one big relatively unstructured marketplace which is free for placement and for search. This lack of structure is a strength but potentially also a weakness. We expect that as TWEC develops, it may expose the need for more specialised services, for example a price comparison website for goods and services, both wholesale and retail (although some of the (relatively unknown) advanced but simple-to-use features of google search may enable it to be used directly for price comparison).

We also have plans for a parallel system which is very heavily oriented towards placement and search by mobile phone sms (text), and which will be much more a C2C (consumer-to-consumer) and B2C (business-to-consumer) system – we see the core TWEC system being discussed in this document as being very business oriented and strongly B2B (business-to-business).

Who finances TWEC? The cost of TWEC is at the start very low – IT and the internet are surprisingly low-cost. The brains behind TWEC is Mr Alex Weir, who is a Scottish freelance software developer based in Harare Zimbabwe. Because he runs a third world development technical information project (www.cd3wd.com) then the company (www.brinkster.com) who host his website (in the USA) have kindly agreed to make his site free of storage and traffic charges. We start with 500 Gigabytes storage and 6000 Gigabytes per month traffic – that should be enough to hold 3 million documents at any time. As TWEC grows exponentially, it should be fundable by advertising revenue from the twec website. Alternatively, we expect (hope) that capitalist- and market-oriented international aid donors will fund all or part of the operational costs. Thus you can say that TWEC is a socialist initiative designed to promote capitalism, growth and development.

Q. How long does it take for documents to be indexed by google search?

A. Maybe as much as 2 weeks – it depends on how often the automatic googlebot robot spider visits the TWEC website. We will see as the system gets underway. Thus there may be 2 weeks after placing a document before it starts to appear in matches and is viewed. Because of this, the system is of little use for adverts which require immediate action. Therefore complementary system(s) for instant adverts which utilise conventional search techniques will also be required. Clients may decide to place and to search in both of these systems.

Q. Isnt the resulting system just really a different version of everyone having a website?

A. There are a lot of similarities, but all the extraneous material will be excluded. We fully expect that a lot of clients will have their own website but will still also use this system in parallel with their website. Those who cannot afford the cost or time of having their own website will welcome the free nature of TWEC.

Mr Alex Weir

Marlborough

Harare

Alexweir1949@gmail.com

www.cd3wd.com/contactus/

12 November 2008

Addendum – Technicalities

Note that the system has to create a (static or dynamic) menu system which is modified every time a document is added or deleted. This is required by the search engine robot – without this, the documents will never be indexed.

There will probably be 3 levels of directories for the storage of these documents, each with 999 sub-directories, and the bottom level having up to 999 documents each. That makes it possible to store up to 1 billion documents simultaneously (if space permits). Filenames will be reused as documents are deleted or archived from the system, but probably only after a 4 week or longer period, to avoid the google search indicating false matches.

Mr Alex Weir, November 2008