July 22, 2011
By Richard McCormack

The Daily Maverick is one of South Africa’s best known online publications, covering the latest news and in-depth analysis of current affairs in business and politics both locally and worldwide.  Known for both their hard-hitting journalism, and their leadership in the South African media industry for embracing the latest trends in digital, the Daily Maverick app has now arrived on Nokia Ovi app store.

We recently interviewed Styli Charalambous, CEO of the Daily Maverick, to chat about the launch of the app.

According to Charalambous, the Daily Maverick wanted to expand its mobile presence and plug into the massive Nokia user base in South Africa and Africa. The simplest way of doing this was to use the Nokia App Wizard and create a mobile application for the Daily Maverick. This would give Nokia users convenient and free access to the Daily Maverick website through their mobile phones once the application had been downloaded.

Charalambous and the Daily Maverick chose the Nokia Ovi Store because of its global and local reach and the short and convenient app creation process, and this meant it was a natural choice for the Daily Maverick in the mobile news market.

The Daily Maverick has 100 000 readers on its site, and its email newsletter goes to 9,000 subscribers daily. The site also has 12,000 Twitter followers. Charalambous says using the App Wizard as a conversion tool for the Daily Maverick’s RSS feed was a quick and convenient process.

Interestingly 20 percent of the readers of the Daily Maverick are based overseas. These are usually expatriate South Africans primarily based in the UK and the US but also including the rest of Europe, Australia and Canada. Charalambous says global ‘expats’ are interested in in-depth news of what is happening locally in SA from a dedicated team of journalists and the free Ovi Store application now makes this quick and easy for Nokia mobile users.

While it is still early days for statistics, Charalambous expects a rapid adoption rate for this application because of Nokia’s extensive global handheld device footprint. The Daily Maverick will also be launching an iPad version of the newspaper on the 15th of August.

He concludes that The Daily Maverick will also be marketing the news application on its own website at www.thedailymaverick.co.za and he expects a popular response and digital enhancement to the Daily Maverick brand through Nokia’s Ovi Store.

Download the app here and keep up to date with the latest local and international news.