MIKESTOPFORTH

This blog has been up and running for some time now. Fundamentally it’s a channel to redirect people to other projects I’m involved in – Afrigator, Cerebra, 27dinners and my speaking and writing gigs. The site is up for a bit of a rethink and refresh – one of the key decisions I have to [...]

Without a doubt the coolest part of my ‘job’ is the people I get to meet on a daily basis. Last Thursday I had lunch with Heather Ford, Executive Director of iCommons. She inspired me to not only share with what it is that she does, but also share the many interactions I get to [...]

Congratulations to Melissa Attree, who I think did enough to win the ticket to New Media Marketing 2008. Vincent did the same and as a result Bev is going – very cool! Thanks also to Jonathan Bydendyk for participating.

I must confess I’m pretty excited about the upcoming New Media Marketing conference being held at Gallagher Estate. Not only was this a great event last year, the line up for this year at the networking opportunities presented by the conference are fast positioning it as a highlight on the local Web-related conference circuit. The [...]

The official opening of Google’s South African headquarters made tech news headlines locally and got many of us geeks, I’m happy to admit, pretty excited. However subsequent media briefings have left some of us a bit frustrated. Google is an exciting company – arguably the most intriguing company of my generation – and as my [...]

Well, it wasn’t a keynote, strictly speaking. It was a real conversation between two interesting guys who are passionate about what they do. And as soon as you can go watch it on the MIX08 site. Because it’s worth watching if you’re interested in the Web at all. Guy Kawasaki (who, you must bear in [...]

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 [...]

Everybody wants to know more about Microsoft Surface, but Sarcastic Gamer took it upon themselves to do a parody of the hyped product. Brilliant… Microsoft have consequently adopted sarcastic gamer as product evangelists… well done :)

After a very hearty breakfast and many cups of coffee, Hans Verbeeck (Developer Evangelist for Microsoft EMEA) welcomes us with some opening remarks. MIX08 is about bringing influencers together to share announcements and get feedback. Together@MIX08 (today’s pre-conference event) is a value-added ‘package’ for international MIX08 delegates. w00t – We’ve just been given very sexy [...]

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 [...]

It’s T-9 hours until I board a plane for Las Vegas and MIX08. Some last minute email-answering and news-grabbing led me to Techmeme, where Microsoft and what they might be planning to announce at MIX08 is currently dominating headlines in the blogosphere. Nick Carr has inside information that leads him to believe that the software [...]

It’s less than a week to go before I board a plane for Las Vegas (Viva) and MIX08 – “an intimate opportunity for cutting-edge technical, creative and business strategists to engage Microsoft in a conversation about the future of the web”. I’m going only because the kind folks at Microsoft SA arranged to drag a [...]

We’re at the Forum, The Campus in Bryanston listening to Google SA Country Manager Stafford Massie introducing the morning’s events. Guest speaker is Douglas Merrill, CIO and VP of Engineering for Google. I’ll be updating periodically as the morning progresses. Damn, 3G died on me. Here are my notes: Douglas is giving us a general [...]

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 [...]

I’ve been picking up on a vibe lately (summarised by Jon Bishop in his recent post) that there is a perception that an elitist sect of South African bloggers believe that they are in “some sort of special members only club and ignore people they don’t know”. While I’m sure there is some truth to [...]

Try as I might, I have not been able to get into Twitter. And I believe I should be trying simply because of the significant impact the app has had on the social Web community in the last few months. Most headlines have been dominated either by the explosions of Facebook or Twitter. Facebook I [...]

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 [...]