MIKESTOPFORTH

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 [...]

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!

…will inevitably be documented on this blog :) That’s right – about a month after I get back from DEMO ’08 I’ll be flying out again, this time to Las Vegas, to attend MIX08 – “an intimate opportunity for cutting-edge technical, creative and business strategists to engage Microsoft in a conversation about the future of [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

I’m damn slow sometimes. I seem disproportionately slow when it matters most. I’ve been speaking about a concept in my various presentations to various clients and brands for some time now that has gone unnamed until the recent Nomadic Marketing course we held for FNB and partners here in Jozi. I had finally named the [...]

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 [...]

A few weeks back James Johnson, Site Editor at InternetEvolution.com, contacted me to ask if I’d contribute to ThinkerNet, a moderated blog network of Internet experts (much like our local ThoughtLeader.co.za). I was pretty honoured to be asked, and then when I saw the list of people I’d be writing with I was positively blown [...]

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 [...]

Watching yourself present is always a humbling experience. For some arb reason I was particularly nervouse about speaking at the Business of Magazines Conference in Sandton this week. Here’s the video kindly provided by the fab dudes at Zoopy – brace yourself, it’s clearly not my best.

Dell and I have a bit of history. I’ve never owned a Dell laptop but made a bit of noise a while back when Henk discovered Dell laptops for sale on their website at R 0.00. To cut a long story short the blogosphere spread the message of the error pretty fast, boosting sales so [...]

Cerebra is proud to announce the Brand Building Through Web 2.0 and New Media course – a collaboration with Vega the Brand Communications School, one of South Africa’s leading marketing, branding and advertising schools. The two-day, hands-on course (more like a workshop) will not only get delegates up to scratch with the latest developments in [...]

Yup, we’re drawing closer to the end of 2007 (believe it or not) and that means conferences springing up all over the place. In amongst the inevitable muck that sometimes dominates the industry there are some really cool events lined up which you may be interested in attending. Yes, I’m speaking at them, but that’s [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]