IN olden-day Africa, getting the message was a matter of listening carefully for the rhythms of pounding pigskin.
Nowadays it's a matter of surfing the Web - all the way to Scarborough.
Compupack, the CD storage specialist on Scarborough's Eastfield industrial estate no sooner set up its website when it got its first virtual order - from rocky Botswana.
Yusef Mussa, director of a print shop in Garbarone, logged on to Compupack's solution for organising the company's compact discs and ordered two binders for his own use, then placed a further order for 100 binders which he realised that he could easily sell on to other Botswanan business people.
The deal was not worth a fortune, given that the binders are £17.99 each, but it illustrated the power of e-commerce for Brian Snowdon, Compack's IUT director and Leanne Foster, the despatch supervisor.
Mr Snowdon said: "Product sales via the Internet are beginning to gain momentum. Encouragingly, orders are coming in from Georgia in the US to as far away as Romania. However, the African contract is our most
exotic."
Compupack's parent company Duraweld, also based in Scarborough, developed the product as part of its range of presentation and packaging products targeted at the printing industry.
But because of general consumer demand the CD storage binders was put on to the Internet for general public consumption.
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