Archive for 'South Africa'

South African Blog Awards 2008

Posted 03 April 2008 | By Mike | Categories: South Africa, Web 2.0 and Social Media | 4 Comments

I flew down to Cape Town yesterday to attend the South African Blog Awards. The event was held at the UCT Tennis Club and was very well attended by folks from all walks of life. Huge congrats go to Jon Cherry and his team for organising the event out of the goodness of his heart [...]

Vote For My Fit-Shan T-Shirt On Springleap.com!

Posted 02 April 2008 | By Mike | Categories: Entrepreneurship, Life, etc., South Africa, Web 2.0 and Social Media | 2 Comments

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 – [...]

My New Media Marketing 08 Presentation

Posted 28 March 2008 | By Mike | Categories: Marketing and Advertising, South Africa, Web 2.0 and Social Media | 1 Comment

Considering I ‘couldn’t get it up’ at New Media Marketing 08 (damn the technical gremlins – my Mac is supposed to just work!), here is the presentation you never got to see… :) | View | Upload your own Your comments, as always, are welcome.

27dinner Jozi 27 March – Thanks And Apologies

Posted 27 March 2008 | By Mike | Categories: Entrepreneurship, Life, etc., Marketing and Advertising, South Africa, Web 2.0 and Social Media | 1 Comment

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…) [...]

2nd Annual New Media Marketing Conference, Gallagher Estate, Day Two

Posted 27 March 2008 | By Mike | Categories: Marketing and Advertising, South Africa, Web 2.0 and Social Media | 3 Comments

I think all round day two of the New Media Marketing conference was a richer, more meaningful one (at least for me) with the exception of one absolutely shocking presenter, to which I’m not even going to give the courtesy of a hyperlink. Huge credit must go to Jason and the rest of Zoopy for [...]

2nd Annual New Media Marketing Conference, Gallagher Estate, Day One

Posted 26 March 2008 | By Mike | Categories: Marketing and Advertising, South Africa, Web 2.0 and Social Media | 3 Comments

We all shuffled in to Gallagher Estate (after navigating Jozi’s worst traffic) this morning in expectation of what we hoped would be a half decent conference… and a lekker kuier to boot. The turnout from actual delegates was slightly underwhelming but generally the standard of the content on the day was above average. My highlights… [...]

Skyrove Starts A Conversation And Saves Thousands!

Posted 21 March 2008 | By Mike | Categories: Entrepreneurship, Marketing and Advertising, South Africa, Web 2.0 and Social Media | 4 Comments

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 [...]

Why I Have A Dodgy Hairdo – Blame Benoni High School

Posted 18 March 2008 | By Mike | Categories: Life, etc., South Africa | 3 Comments

I’m a Benoni boy; born, bred and bloody proud of it. However, it goes without saying that Benoni is not without it’s quirks. I recently picked up a link from the Benoni High Matric class of ’98 Facebook group to the Benoni High School website, and in particular these hilarious boy’s hairstyle guidelines (or regulations [...]

Interesting Innovators Series – Heather Ford Of iCommons.org

Posted 18 March 2008 | By Mike | Categories: Marketing and Advertising, South Africa, Web 2.0 and Social Media | 1 Comment

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 Melissa Attree – See You At New Media Marketing 2008!

Posted 15 March 2008 | By Mike | Categories: Marketing and Advertising, South Africa, Web 2.0 and Social Media | 4 Comments

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.

Free Ticket To The 2nd Annual New Media Marketing Conference

Posted 13 March 2008 | By Mike | Categories: Marketing and Advertising, South Africa, Web 2.0 and Social Media | 3 Comments

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 [...]

Google And Microsoft – A Changing Of The Guard?

Posted 10 March 2008 | By Mike | Categories: Marketing and Advertising, South Africa, Web 2.0 and Social Media | 7 Comments

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 [...]

Suggestions For Muti

Posted 07 March 2008 | By Mike | Categories: South Africa, Web 2.0 and Social Media | 16 Comments

Muti is a social bookmarking website for Africans (it’s currently dominated by South Africans though). Social bookmarking works like this: if I find something on the Web I am particularly intrigued by – be it video, audio, image or an article – I can submit the URL (Web address) for that item to a site [...]

SA Blog Awards – My 2c

Posted 06 March 2008 | By Mike | Categories: Life, etc., South Africa, Web 2.0 and Social Media | 8 Comments

I haven’t had much to say about the South African Blog Awards this year, mostly because it seems apparent that anyone who associates themselves with the damn things gets lambasted by all and sundry in a matter of nanoseconds. Bottom line – in SA facilitating the blog awards is like coaching the Springboks – not [...]

MIX08 Wednesday Morning

Posted 05 March 2008 | By Mike | Categories: South Africa, Web 2.0 and Social Media | 1 Comment

It’s a half hour to go before the opening keynote of MIX08 to be delivered by Ray Ozzie, Scott Guthrie and Dean Hachamovitch (heads up the Internet Explorer team). I’ll be live-tweeting the keynote and will upload a summary of my notes here afterwards. I’m simply blown away by the sheer size of this event. [...]

MIX08 First Impressions

Posted 04 March 2008 | By Mike | Categories: Life, etc., South Africa, Web 2.0 and Social Media | No Comments

If one could ever get used to 24+ hour trips in a plane, I’m starting to. Or at least accept them as a necessary evil. In comparison to Virgin Atlantic, SAA had an inch or two extra legroom (which makes a world of difference to me), but crappier food and nowhere near the variety in [...]

South African Blog Showcase: Beverley Merriman (feistyfemale.com)

Posted 02 March 2008 | By Mike | Categories: Entrepreneurship, Life, etc., Marketing and Advertising, South Africa, Web 2.0 and Social Media | 7 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 [...]

Our PayPal Woes Are Over – PayFast Is Online Payment Processing For South Africa

Posted 02 March 2008 | By Mike | Categories: Entrepreneurship, South Africa | 37 Comments

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 [...]

Cape Town 27dinner At Wild Fig

Posted 28 February 2008 | By Mike | Categories: Entrepreneurship, Life, etc., South Africa, Web 2.0 and Social Media | 10 Comments

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 Super Super14 SuperBru Weekend!

Posted 23 February 2008 | By Mike | Categories: South Africa | 6 Comments

My mate Patrick recently extended me an invite to join his pool in Sport24.co.za‘s brilliant new online sports prediction game SuperBru. Hesitant at first, it took me some time to register my account and get started, but I’m so glad I did. First up it’s an awesome site. Everything works nicely, it’s powerful, easily navigable [...]