MIKESTOPFORTH

Mind The 2.0 Talent Gap

Vincent Maher and I spent a fascinating day in a very sunny Cape Town with the Design Indaba team today. On the way to the session at the gorgeous 12 Apostles Boutique Hotel (kudos to the staff – best service I’ve experienced in ages) we got chatting about the state of the social Web, and [...]

Learning To Juggle

Andre (Ellis), our uber-developer/designer has a set of 3 juggling balls at our offices at the moment. Every now and then I take a moment to learn to juggle. I have an odd desire to learn to do a whole bunch of things, even just a little bit – but that’s for another post. Point [...]

South Africa’s 10 Most Influential Bloggers (According To Mandy)

You gotta hand it to Mandy – she knows how to get read better than the rest of us do. The insatiable Mandy de Waal has made the transition from hard core journalist and real world entrepreneur into the Web 2.0 equivalents in record time and I daresay she’s ruffling a few sensitive feathers in [...]

26th 27dinner In Jozi A Big Success

Or at least I thought so. Sure, we struggled to hear at times as we competed with another party upstairs at Primi Forum Melrose Arch, but all in all I think it was a super evening. Just under 100 people rocked up to the biggest 27dinner so far, we might have even clocked 100 as [...]

27dinner On The 28th In Jozi – Book Your Place!

There are still 25 or so places remaining at this month’s 27dinner in Jozi. Please don’t forget that it’s being held on the 28th do to the fact that the 27th falls on a Sunday. We’re lucky to have Charl Norman and Jason Hobbs presenting, and I’m pushing and prodding another speaker to join us. [...]

LinkedIn And New York Times Partnership

Popular business social network LinkedIn and the New York Times have struck up a content partnership that makes a whole lot of sense to me – in fact the MyGenius blokes should think of integrating something like this into their site… (because none of the other changes I suggested have been implemented, yet). From ReadWriteWeb: [...]

links for 2008-07-22

50 Ways Marketers Can use Social Media to Improve Their Marketing | chrisbrogan.com More succinct, simple guidelines from ChrisBrogan.com – this guy is prolific and a worthy addition to any RSS reader… (tags: marketing socialmedia social web2.0 strategy blogging blog business advertising) TechCult’s Top 100 Web Celebrities Somebody likes making lists. TechCult.com has come up [...]

Inspired By Quirk, It’s Time To Announce…

…my book. But let me first tell you why. Quirk eMarketing have once again firmly established themselves as our country’s leading eMarketing authority with the release of their textbook eMarketing: The essential guide to online marketing. From their blog: eMarketing is a 300 page textbook aimed at tertiary education students, business owners and marketers who [...]

What Surprised Me About Y Combinator’s ‘Startup Ideas We’d Like To Find’

Thanks to Neville‘s Muti link I’ve just picked up on a very intriguing post by Y Combinator, the seed-funding venture firm built around Web 2.0 startups, talking about ideas they’d invest in. Being a bit of an entrepreneur myself I was immediately drawn to the post, and a couple of things surprised me… First of [...]

Band Geek Hero – Brilliant!

Without a doubt the supremely popular Guitar Hero 3 video game has millions of wannabe musicians (and even established musicians) the world over fulfilling their long-held dreams of being an axe-wielding rock star, but what if guitar is not really your thing? What if you’d rather fantasize about being the greatest sitar or accordian player [...]

Wildlife Photographer Captures Leopard Taking A Crocodile In Kruger

I was a fortunate kid – my folks committed to giving my brother and I two good holidays a year, and for over ten years, every year, we made pilgrimages to the Kruger National Park in July (when it’s perfect for game viewing) and to Pennington on the South Coast of KwaZulu Natal in December.  [...]

Report Back From Internetix Cape Town

This is a little late in coming but I’d like to take a moment to share my experience of Internet Solution’s Internetix event in Cape Town with you. I was invited to speak at both events (Jo’burg is still to come, Cape Town was held yesterday) on the subject of Harnessing the Social Web.  To [...]

Tank Lanning Hits The Nail On The Head

Now before you get suspicious, I’m not going to agree with Tank Lanning’s Sports24 column about our win over the All Blacks in Carisbrook this last weekend because his name is Tank (albeit that is a compelling enough reason on it’s own) – I’m agreeing because he is 100% right. You may be wondering why [...]

Knowledge, Perspective and Institutionalism

One of the most inspirational characters I’ve ever met is a guy by the name of Rich Mulholland. Rich runs two companies, Missing Link and Thunk!, the former being a ‘presentation strategy company’ and the latter a ‘perspective lab’.  Rich’s story is an inspiring one – having progressed from rock band roadie to uber-successful entrepreneur [...]

10 Tips For Making The Most Of (My) Your New Digital SLR

So just in case you don’t know yet I got my paws on a shiny new Canon EOS 450D D-SLR camera today. I’m like a kid at Christmas. The only downer is that I know bugger all about how to take advantage of my new toy. So what’s a guy to do? I Twittered my [...]

Lively – New Product From Google

Not So Lively

Carl sent me a link to Lively today – it caught my attention immediately. My first thought was, this is what Second Life should’ve been. The fact that it’s unashamedly a Google product helped a bit too. All the site tells you is that you can “Create an avatar and chat with your friends in [...]

Philip Copeman’s “Bill Gates – My Part In His Downfall”

On the back of the official announcement of Bill Gates’ last day as a full time Microsoft employee, this thought-provoking article by Philip Copeman, who is the Project Leader of TurboCASH Accounting – “the worlds leading Open Source Accounting package.” Regardless of which side of the open source / proprietary software fence you sit, it’s [...]

Exciting Projects On The Go At Cerebra

Jeepers, things are cooking. We’ve had to really step up a gear in the last few months to respond to the demand for social and mobile media interventions from agencies and companies alike. I’d like to brag about two projects in particular. Firstly we’re doing work with Internet Solutions in developing IS Labs, an “initiative [...]

South African Blog Showcase: Neil McCartney (neilmccartney.blogspot.com)

By day a photographer for the Citizen newspaper, Neil McCartney is one of those unsung heroes who bring us the sometimes uplifting, other times devastating images that capture the history of now. I’m not sure what he does at night though. Opting to publish his images on a personal blog too, Neil’s site often tells [...]