MIKESTOPFORTH

Awesome news – Business 2.0 magazine, based in San Francisco, has marked Afrigator as one of the top 31 Web 2.0 startups worldwide to be watching. This is a huge accolade and a testimony to some of the hard work that has already gone in to Afrigator. That said, we have not been sleeping – [...]

For the first time on Friday night Cerebra hosted 27 Dinners in two major South African cities simultaneously (Jozi and Durban). I really hope this is a sign of things to come and that as we hear murmurings and rumours of 27 being taken abroad to London and San Francisco that soon we’ll be hosting [...]

One thing has surprised me more than anything else since diving headfirst into the dodgy world pf self-employment in September 2005; the value of Public Relations. Now I’m at risk writing this because I have been pretty critical (especially at the earliest stage of my consulting career) of PR and secondly because I probably don’t [...]

This just may be the answer to the digital music dilemma those the iPod generation faces. We7, backed by Peter Gabriel, hopes to answer the DRM / download / P2P / Label shambles with a new Web 2.0-ish model that allows you to download tracks for free, with an ad attached to them, that is [...]

Eve Dmochowska has contacted me to let me know that OpenCoffee, an idea originally ‘imported’ by Eric Edelstein, is coming to Jozi. The club was started in the UK in an attempt to “encourage entrepreneurs, developers and investors to organise real-world informal meetups to chat, network and grow…” according to Saul Klein, the founder. I [...]

This photo from White African: Ory Okolloh promoting Afrigator at TED… Thanks Ory!!!

On 16 June we celebrate Youth Day in South Africa – as we pay homage to the young revolutionaries who rose above the crowd to be exceptional, and paid dearly for their passion. Many of you know that. What you don’t know, is that it will also be the launch date for the fourth edition [...]

When Cerebra launched a while back we set up a website that served more as a digital presence than a truly cool asset to us. What I’m trying to say is that it was a bit kak (forthe US readers – kak is crap). Many of you, in the interest of being nice, said nothing, [...]

I rave about Feedburner – it’s one of the most intuitive and powerful Web 2.0 services I’ve come across, is often a case study I cite in preso’s and is the first thing I add to a new blog installation. Basically, Feedburner helps make sense of RSS feeds. Not only does it help you create [...]

On the back of repeat successes in Jozi and Cape Town, the 27 Dinner movement is expanding into Pretoria and Durban. Sign up now!

Check it out…

Buzzword time. Forgive me. Let me explain. I love to create stuff. It’s an obsession. I derive great pleasure from putting ideas out, experimenting with them, and seeing if they take or not. For every success I have hundreds of failures, but fortunately people remember the successes… So I’ve being considering some of the things [...]

Vinny Lingham, the catalyst behind the South Africa’s most successful Search Engine Marketing company, IncuBeta, announced at the recent 27 Dinner in Jozi that he is focusing his energy in the next while on his “Dreamweaver within a Web browser” application Synthasite, while remaining a director at IncuBeta. Read his post with details on the [...]

I attended the inaugural National Speakers Association of South Africa annual convention this past weekend.

It was well worth the investment, and even if watching a multitude of talented, professional overseas and local speakers didn’t result in any life-changing aha-moment (I don’t respond well to motivational talks), there was much self-learning to be done.

The most valuable lesson I’ll take from the weekend is not to underestimate the importance of building your personal brand. This is a difficult one for me, as I feel I need to strike a balance between building a personal brand, not being an egotistical prat and retaining some of what makes me, me.