MIKESTOPFORTH

Reading through the attendee list at DEMO08 is like reading a who’s who of tech news and innovation and more importantly, venture capital and investment. It is tech/web startup heaven, all jammed into two days. Sitting in front of me are Walt Mossberg, popular columnist for the Wall Street Journal and Stephen Wildstrom from BusinessWeek. [...]

It’s 4am, Tuesday 29 January in Palm Desert, California. Forgive me if I’m getting it wrong but I have seen numerous signs in the last day or so that read Palm Desert, Desert Springs and Palm Springs. Much confusion. The trip here was painfully long, but generally ok. I flew with Virgin Atlantic and despite [...]

Afrigator has finally launched out of private Beta and is looking pretty cool methinks. We’d love your honest and critical feedback as always. Justin has written a more detailed post, with a list of all the new features and things, on the Afrigator blog. Check it out!

DEMO is the premier launch venue for new products, technologies and companies. For more than 16 years, DEMO has established a reputation for identifying and presenting to an elite audience the products most likely to have a significant impact on the marketplace and market trends in the coming year… … and I’m going to it [...]

I’m at Hackle Brooke Estate having just munched a really good breakfast, listening to Aiden Choles telling me about the Narrative Lab, the niche consultancy he recently started with Raymond Salzwedel and Sonja Blignaut. I thought I’d update you on what they have to say… Aiden Choles – “Complexity is the new simplicity” What is [...]

Last night in the semi-darkness of what was arguably the best 27dinner I’ve been to yet (no small thanks to sponsors Stormhoek and Afrihost), we announced the launch of Afrigator Beta. Our primary focus is establishing ourselves as Africa’s primary Social Media Aggregator. We pull content in and splice and dice it into easily consumable [...]

Tomorrow night marks the 15th installment of the 27dinner social networking movement – this time at Melrose Arch in Jozi. There are already over 100 people on the list – it bodes well for a goeie jol. I have on more than one occasion taken the opportunity to shamelessly promote my own self-interests at 27dinner, [...]

Looking at my Twitter account is pretty funny. It’s not unlike my YouTube account, MyBlogLog account and many others like it. I get into these things early, get bored or disillusioned, and then all of a sardine get back into it later. My tweets stopped in March and have restarted now in November. I’m an [...]

This month sees 27-15 Jozi and 27-16 Durban taking place on the 27th November in their respective cities. It’s hard to believe we’re on our 16th dinner countrywide! Congrats and thanks to all who have worked so hard to make 27 a highlight in the tech / marketing calendar. Special thanks must also go to [...]

My loyalty to the many feeds pouring into my RSS reader on a daily space is fragile – if you’re like me you process about a hundred incoming feeds on a daily basis, leaving you with the reality of having to make decisions regarding which of those you’ll give decent attention to. This is not [...]

Gareth Knight got in touch with me the other to let me know that Saul Klein was coming to SA and that I should make a plan to connect with him. At the same time, he gave me a login to his latest creation, Kindo, a family tree-oriented social networking tool. I must confess the [...]

If I consider that 10 months ago at the first 27dinner in Jozi we publicly launched Cerebra (and only really started doing significant business after that), I’m absolutely thrilled at where we’ve grown to. We’ve learned stacks of lessons as a team, not all of them easy, but all of them valuable. Still, I probably [...]

Justin Spratt of Vottle sent me this link from AWS (Amazon Web Services) headquarters. We heard about AWS from the Buzzfuse guys at the last 27dinner in Jozi. From the site: Attention: Start-Ups and Entrepreneurs! Amazon Web Services (AWS) is searching for the next hot start-up that is leveraging AWS to build its infrastructure and [...]

The shoemakers children are poorly shod. Never a truer word has been spoken of the dilemma facing web companies who design their own websites. When Cerebra launched we had a phenomenally ugly Drupal-powered site in place as our ‘corporate’ web presence. It was pretty horrendous (not because of Drupal, because of us), but we had [...]

My good friend Aiden Choles has announced the launch of his new company The Narrative Lab. From his blog: Over the last few months a new focus has emerged for me in my mission to work with narrative in organisations. It is the culmination of discussions and dreaming with Sonja and Raymond and has resulted [...]

Got a great idea? Something that will help people use technology to find out what they want to know and what they need to know to improve their lives? Something that will bring people together in the real world through technology? Think it’s worth up to $5 million? Well then check out the Knight News [...]

Help us out dudes. Cerebra is growing at a rapid rate (by the way, look out for our new website launching soon) and we’ve run out of space in our little office at 101 11th Str, Parkmore. We’re looking to move into some nice, funky space and if we need to share it would be [...]

Check out the Afrigator blog for details on a few new features, they’re pretty small in comparison to some of the stuff we are working on but in the interest of reminding you that we haven’t fallen off the planet, check out our new Trends page and our very own Twitter channel!

The guys at MyADSL were kind enough to invite Justin Hartman, my partner and tech genius at Afrigator, to talk a little about our recent mention in Business 2.0 magazine. Click here to listen to the interview. Nice interview – well done Justin, you did us proud bru :)

Scary question: what if it doesn’t work? Scarier question: what if it does? How much of your planning time is allocated to ‘what to do when it works’? I think too many startups miss out on opportunities to capitalise on successes due to outright shock. When you succeed, how will you prolong / broaden / [...]