MIKESTOPFORTH

I’ve had this review saved in my WordPress drafts for some time now, but after I noticed that Saul was kind enough to mention my blog in his post I felt a bit guilty that I hadn’t published it yet. So here goes… Saul Kropman authors The Outlet – “Interesting commentary for interesting people” – [...]

Congratulations to the following three suggestions for improvements to Afrigator, which according to my records, where the leading submissions on the Muti Hot page last night at 22h00: Nic Haralambous Nic suggested that we bring competitive rankings back to Afrigator. In my honest opinion I think Afrigator has lost some fight since it decided not [...]

It’s our first birthday and in keeping with the spirit of innovation and community we’d like to ask you – the dudes who actually make Afrigator tick – to help us come up with some innovative new ideas for improving the experience, look, feel or whatever of the site… Announcing the ‘1 TH1NG‘ Afrigator birthday [...]

While the blogosphere has it’s conflicting opinions about the Springleap SEO competition Eric Edelstein has watched his new baby’s rankings soar up the charts. Springleap.com, for those of you who don’t know, is a site that showcases the T-shirt designs of artists (or just ordinary budding designers like you maybe) on a monthly basis – [...]

To all that attended the 27dinner in Jozi tonight, thanks for making it an awesome success. Special thanks goes to the speakers – Gareth from Buzzfuse (congrats on the recent growth guys!), Jonathan Miller from ForgeBusiness (viva Las Vegas!), Jo Duxbury from Freelancentral (and the Oscar for the best PPT slides in history goes to…) [...]

Financial bootstrapping is a term used to cover different methods for avoiding using the financial resources of external investors. Bootstrapping can be defined as “a collection of methods used to minimize the amount of outside debt and equity financing needed from banks and investors” (Ebben and Johnsen, 2006:853) According to Wikipedia, financial or business bootstrapping [...]

Henk Kleynhans (CEO of Skyrove) and I once met for coffee at Sandton City while he was up from Cape Town to talk about our industry, our respective businesses and life in general. We hit it off straight away – he’s a smart, likable guy. Somewhere during our chat, he has since reminded me, I [...]

As you know I’m lucky enough to be in Las Vegas at the Microsoft MIX08 conference. Last night I joined the Microsoft guys for a superb meal at Morel’s, after which Grant Shippey decided to try our luck at a little gambling. We hit the roulette table, and to cut a long story short I [...]

This video of the Web 2.0 business model panel was taken by Duncan Riley from TechCrunch yesterday. It’s well worth a watch with interesting discussion and comments from Australian Chris Saad (incredibly smart founder of dataportability.org), Tim Kendall from Facebook, Loic Le Meur of Seesmic and Bryan Biniak, founder of Jacked. What are your comments [...]

A couple of weeks back I wrote a post expressing a desire to see more of South Africa’s (possibly) lesser known blogs and bloggers in the ‘limelight’. It’s high time we saw some new talent coming to the fore in the SA blogosphere – it certainly is out there. I’ve had a few people write [...]

The highlight of Bloggerati Jo’burg (thanks to Matt and Vincent for hosting it) last night was meeting Andy Higgins, founder of BidorBuy – Africa’s largest online auction site. For an entrepreneur as successful and well-established as Andy is, he was completely unassuming. In fact I wouldn’t have known who he was at all had he [...]

A short post to say thanks for Dave and the rest of the Cape Town geeks for welcoming me at the 27dinner – despite a really negative experience of Kulula (which broke my heart ‘cos I’m a big fan) at O R Tambo, it turned out to be a really awesome evening. I sat at [...]

A while back Justin submitted Afrigator‘s 27dinner Beta launch ‘pitch’ to the Vator.tv / Demand Media Challenge where we stand a chance to win a few really cool prizes, not least of which a trip to pitch the site to some very smart investor type people. If you like what we’ve done with Afrigator, please [...]

In January last year Dave Duarte and I kicked off the 27dinner social networking movement. From the start my idea was to create a space and a culture that encouraged people from diverse sectors – business people, advertising people, geeks, techies, entrepreneurs, investors, artists, etc. – to come together once a month to share ideas [...]

Erik Hersman has found the video of our Africa panel. It is long – over 30 minutes – and watching it again I think I could’ve done better with the opportunity, but hopefully some of what we said got through. The third person on the panel is the lovely Juliana Rotich of Afromusing. I’d love [...]

March 25 – 28 at Gallagher Estate in Midrand marks the dates for the second annual New Media marketing conference, organised and hosted by IQPC. To IQPC’s credit, they’ve put together a very impressive line-up of some of South Africa’s leading thinkers, entrepreneurs, experts and innovators in the New Media space as speakers. The two [...]

Highlights from the 4th session (posted rather late as I thought it had published and alas, it had not), which will be cut short when I need to leave to get ready for our panel w00t! 1. Huddle Huddle is a social collaboration app that runs independently or in Facebook (enabling your work the way [...]

If you’ve found your way here from DEMO – either from our panel discussion or from a random business card exchange – nice to meet you. I have a handful of links you may want to check out… I’m co-founder of Afrigator, Africa’s social media aggregator and the CEO of Cerebra, South Africa’s only dedicated, [...]

Highlights from the 3rd session, first morning session on day 2… 1. BitGravity Affordable, high-definition video live. A Flash-based service for big media and the enterprise. 2. Xtranormal High novelty component animation publishing tool (can create and animate Avatar with text instructions) for a range of uses. 3. HubDub News aggregation meets prediction markets. I [...]

Alright in the interest of saving my energy for the jam session tonight, I’m going to highlight only the products I particularly enjoy in this session… 1. Voyant This self-funded DIY financial planning solution was extremely well presented, without a doubt the most complete presentation so far. Although I don’t see it being something I [...]