Mashing it up...

What Technology Wants - Kevin Kelly, Co-founder Wired Magazine

2012-01-27T17:29:00.000+02:00

...nuff said! ;)

Inspiring old Apple Ad...

2011-09-12T13:48:00.000+02:00

Posits to students done last week...

2011-08-29T19:58:00.004+02:00

Living;

Break the rules!
Fear comfort!
Fear negativity!
Mistakes (well documented and understood) are the most beautiful experiences
Embrace & value integrity!
Build ecosystems, not products!
Derive less value than you create!
Work on stuff that matters!
Explore continuously!
Love what & who you love, passionately!
Learn to play a musical instrument and/or find a homeless adult (at least very 3 months) and buy the person a meal in exchange for their life story...shut up & listen to it all!
Assume, in all things and every day, that you won't live beyond the next 36 months!

Why I do what I do...

2011-08-12T06:18:00.001+02:00

“It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly…who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who have never known neither victory nor defeat.” - Theodore Roosevelt

Salman Khan: Let's use video to reinvent education

2011-08-04T13:41:00.000+02:00

Spoke about a partnership with Khan Academy this morning - very excited about a project in beta in this regard - Woop! :)

Verbatim - "I am a hacker...my city a platform!"

2011-08-02T00:21:00.005+02:00

Here's that quote I typed verbatim and used in my TEDx presso : “City wide REALTIME sensory blankets...not just broadband or wifi blanketing; Let's do REALTIME sensory blanketing. i.e. let's inject verbiage into every object of relevance in our cities... Allow our cities to speak back at us... Change our cities from beautiful mutes we observe with awe and wonder through virtual glass windows and ceilings... to geospatial & logistically verbose and dynamic sensory platforms articulating beautiful messages into our REALTIME SENSORY AWARE hacks of correlation...” ...hey it was around 3am when I scribbled it ;)

Why/How :

*Africa can lead here...we have no legacy!

*Ask/Action : open ecosystems...GOV 2.0... Start basic... Inject intelligence into everything... Meta language definitions for our continent... Expose rich Api's and taxonomies... Create app store modeling and execution...

Targets: transit feeds + healthcare + traffic + mobile companies (they have the herding data - use Vodafone example)

Let's start now! Let's get the support... Let establish two things now: "africa.gov" and "code for africa"...technologist who give a year of their lives...

Let's establish participatory frameworks... Africa needs this more...

Africa has quicker wins... Africa has hackers...

*if we can organize around legislative common frameworks and taxonomy

... Why can't we (CITIZENS...NOT GOVERNMENT) do this?

*All geospatial data public...all city base map data public...all sensory networks public and have an api...

I am a hacker...my city a platform!

Parisian Love

2011-02-17T13:31:00.000+02:00

Jake on You Tube

2010-10-27T12:45:00.000+02:00

Jetman and his new delta wing

2010-07-05T13:14:00.001+02:00

Just absolutely loving what he is doing! I want one...so so so badly! There are three developments to watch; The Tesla Motor Corp's recent ipo + JetMan above + The first FAA approved flying car ;) Too awesome!

Startups and Entrepreneurs...great advice!

2010-04-12T16:34:00.009+02:00

[This post is in draft - I got kicked out of the coffee shop I was typing it in *grin*]

Just read posts on Memeburn by Justin and Sue which are absolutely brilliant stabs at giving advice to those folks with great ideas and looking to start up that company they're envisioning. I am often personally approached by students and various folks in the ICT industry, interested in involving me in their business or ideas and Justin's post is very insightful (one of the best and it's clear he has some great experience) and so is Sue's post.

Allow me to add a few more thoughts;

1. If the founders are younger than 35 years they must involve a successful business person (45 years or older) - experience ensures you're focusing on the fundamentals from the get-go! I've recently started a couple companies and involved an industry silverback (won't mentioned his name now) who's insights/advice/input/assistance/compilation of documents in the following areas are proving invaluable;

* Org structure

* Roles and responsibilities

* P&L assignments per business unit/team

* Shareholder agreement compilation

* Hiring & firing policies

* Disciplinary actions/procedures

* Employee code of business ethics

* Company registration/auditing/reporting/declarations

* Legal rights and policies etc etc.

* Most importantly - Intellectual Property protection/theft!!

Note: this is the boring stuff but ensures you're not sitting in a CCMA court hearing 4 days a week when your company is 3 months old...because your politically incorrect joke offended that DBA!

2. Research - Data beats opinion - numbers numbers numbers - ensure you understand the market and you understand the scope/size. Spend money on gathering official industry stats or commission a reputable orgs to do the research for you. If you're really smart, dredge the web and you'll find tons of valuable data...else...take the CEO or Research Lead from that org out to drinks...get him passionate about your idea/company and he may help get what you need...'wink' Hey, alternatively, get off your backside and do you own research...create the questionnaire and visit those universities, walk through the mall and stop to ask people, ask your family, etc.

3. I am going to state this controversial opinion irrespective of the traditional view(s) out there; Don't always focus on a revenue model FIRST - focus on the user (look at Google's ten things - the first one is the user!) - if your product makes a fundamental difference to the consumer or individual, the revenue model you can figure out later (I am assuming that your funder/VC/angel investor/dad/mum/etc you'll have to sell on this!).

Most times, especially in the online world, aggregation and adoption should be your initial focus - Google just focused on the best search user experience. Adwords came later! Look at Twitter...they didn't have a revenue model - click on these 1 2 3 4 articles to get an idea of the sort history regarding this matter...and then finally this article - people were establishing businesses on top of Twitter before they were making a single cent! Because of their massive adoption the Twitter Firehose api was born and they licensed their real-time traffic to the static search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing!...and further opened it up to all! We could go on about various revenue models; subscription, advertising, blah blah...not now :)

P.S. Must read books; Long Tail & Free by Chris Andersen

BUT - if your deliverable is a physical product or specific service...understand your margins - you may be able to generate tons of revenue but the cost/effort to deliver is not worth the while!

4. Make sure what you build can be atomized and distributed - ensure it's open open open technologically/architecturally! (see above Twitter example for value of this)

5. Start by using as many free platforms and services you can get online - drive down costs in this regard and re-use - besides email, skype and the other obvious business tools...here's an example; your marketing and awareness costs; Viral adoption is huge...whilst ensuring you're open...ensure you have a strong social media strategy - don't spend money on magazine ads, billboards, etc. Social media has never made you more powerful when driving awareness - involve a social media guru and engage folks that understand this world! Facebook, Twitter, blogs, blah blah are free and extremely powerful tools!

6. Run it from your garage first - forget office space, decor and receptionists - don't need to say more! I'm about to get 10-15 folks to occupy the bottom floor/level of my house...bean bags, blow up couches, sleeping bags and free food baby :)

7. Focus focus focus - sniper fire versus shotgunning - get 3-5 clients (if applicable) and go deep...and/or you could build a million derivatives of your application but start with the top 3-5 first!

8. Competition - Why you? Who else could? How long will you have first mover advantage? Stealth versus "Hello World" approach? [to be completed]

9. Your business plan should be data-driven, verbose but no more than 5 pages - the appendixes is where you wax lyrical! If you cannot position your company, present the vision, describe the tangible value/returns, provide a roadmap with clear measurable milestones, describe the risks, and outline the costs/spend...in 5 A4 pages...you're...well...not going to get funding from me ;)

10. You & yours - ok, this is where I'm going to sound a little negative...but it's just an attempt to ensure you're doing the proper personal and situational reality checks! Look at yourself in the mirror and ask yourself whether you are an entrepreneur and/or is the time right now, the right time... Is it and are you really?

Ok, ask yourself these questions; What's my present personal financial situation/analysis? i.e. can I afford to take the risk(s)? Did I or my partner have kids recently or do I have several toddlers hanging on? Am I able to give up all the time and effort required to make it happen? Work/Life Balance will be thrown out the window when you start! Am I able to submit some form of tangible "skin in the game" should an investor ask me to share the risk? What are my personal daily/monthly running costs? These are just some of foundational questions that may lead to you having to give away significant portions of equity to cover the risks you and a potential funder may be willing to take.

Then there's the "you" part of this... Do you have the stomach for it? Can you handle the pressure, accountability and likely failure? Can your crew around you handle it and/or can you support them through the oncoming tough times? Are you able to handle the responsibility of employing people who have families to feed? What's your emotional state of mind and current ability to handle stress? Can you think on your feet and change mid-stream whilst injecting creatively with practicality into everything? Do you need structure and predictability in the workplace? Here I'm simply trying to get you to understand that fish strive in water and birds strive in the air...(remember the proverb about the bird who fell in love with the fish?)...we're not all cut out to be startup founders...and coming to the realization that your great idea may actually require a different personality to personify it...will save lots of tears and frustrations!

P.S. Founders...again...surround yourself with people that are stronger and more competent than you - an echo chamber will be the death of your business!

Lastly, when building your team, try to stick to this; choose insane passion and a perpetually positive attitudes, combined with integrity, over any level of competency!

Most beautiful car...ever?

2010-03-16T11:13:00.004+02:00

This car, the Bertone Pandion, simply blew me away - the design is incredible and I would rank it amongst the top 3 most beautiful super car designs ever conceptualized. Here's a review by UK car mag and also check out this Flickr collection of pics. I created a little Picasa album here.

The car is designed by Bertone, company established by a gentleman called; Guiseppe Nuccio Bertone (actually started by his dad who initiated it's focus on an Italian coach building and design) - the website is in Italian (english link not activated) but here is a rather anemic Wikipedia entry regarding the man and here an awesome embedded/hidden landing page I discovered which gives us some chronological depth related to the man - amazing history and relevance to some of the most iconic automobile designs - great read even if you're not really into this petrolhead stuff :)

The best pictures, videos and brochureware related to the Pandion can be found here - simply the most beautiful car design...ever?!

Social Media Revolution - great video(s)

2010-03-09T11:27:00.005+02:00

I think the vids by Socialnomics are pretty kewl - also check out their YouTube channel - pretty much related to my previous post regarding the latest numbers and stats that the business world is truly underestimating! New media guy Erik Qualman has also published the Socialnomics book - I just purchased the Kindle version for $17...geez, what happened to the $9,99 book pricing strategy folks?!

My Kindle....

2010-03-08T17:51:00.003+02:00

Ok, so here are some random thoughts and things about my Kindle after a couple months of daily usage;

What I don't like

Selection limited for South African's - don't believe the huge library/literature/book download/availability bragging
ie I can't download Wired magazine (not allowed) or purchase most books in the tech genre
South African local content non-existing
Content management is flawed - a lot of content comes across formatted incorrectly
Connectivity in SA pathetic - signal loss means no newspaper (and other daily's) updates
Clippings possible but not granular enough and the management, review of clippings difficult to navigate and manage
Newspaper and Mags update erratically and without limited notification or tracking
Keyboard difficult to type on
Four point "mouse" quick but feels restricted
I HATE THE FACT THAT I HAVE TO SUBSCRIBE TO AN ENTIRE MAG OR NEWSPAPER WHEN I ONLY LIKE 1 1000TH OF THE CONTENT - see the following rant
e-ink easy on eyes but the plastic screen cover reflects overhead lighting (glare)
Content still feels static and limited - it's a simple port of offline content onto an electronic medium
I've already bought so many books I'm yet to read - would be great if I could download those onto Kindle at no cost
Connectivity slow which results in screen display render being slow and frustrating
Tendency to freeze/hang periodically
Amazon's social online destination for Kindle owners is so lame...
Beta web browser on Kindle a joke
Device feels delicate and screen easily scratched
Search sucks and not accurate - the results often hidden if you don't know exactly what you want
Kindle device "Home" page layout needs work - simply listing things sequentially and page by page is archiac
Blogs not accessible to South Africa users

What I like;

Instant gratification
Ease of purchase - 1-click purchase simply awesome!
Archiving older subscription based publications I missed
Memory of where I was even though I navigated away
e-ink is just like paper and easy on eyes
Navigating through news sections efficient (but I'd like each article title to have a relevant blurb that makes better sense to the relevance and subject matter of the hyperlink)
Form factor allows me to carry an entire bookcase without the burden of lugging a tree trunk in my bag
Bookmarking easy
Battery life
Amazon's huge book selection
Screensavers/hibernate displays are cool
Digital text platform - dtp.amazon.com - allows others to sell their books on the Kindle
Self publishing via third party

Summary: with all it's quirks, it still works awesomely well and has become a complete substitute...so much so that it's extremely frustrating that I can't do more with it or get more on it. There are so so many possibilities with this product/platform. I think it's expensive and I think it's inevitable that we'll see the free Kindle on a 2 year plan...just like a mobile phone...(it costs half the price of a blackberry so why not?)

What I would love;

A Kindle for my kids - colourful...with access to only kids content (ie all archie comics) - my 9 year old would eat it up!
Granular, per article subscription
Touch screen with multitouch
Better caching of amazon titles - why not store all titles local so we don't have to go online to search
Broader SA/local content - deal with Naspers?
Better search and navigation
Ability to browse better
Facebook friend connect for Kindle - imagine!
Kindle application marketplace - therefore Kindle content needs to be completely open and free?
Instant messaging and twitter enablement?
Blackberry type keyboard
Home page look and feel makeover
Phone calls on my Kindle? - skype + webcam please?

Stats, stats...more stats!

2010-03-03T16:17:00.004+02:00

Apple surpasses TEN BILLION iTunes songs downloaded/purchased

Apple App Store =
58 million users
280 million apps downloaded in December 2009 alone!
3+ billion downloads
140,000+ apps available

Great article comparing all the mobile application stores

Amazon Kindle sales estimates approx 2 million units sold!
Amazon Kindle sales push profits by 71%!

Twitter about to hit TEN BILLION tweets served!

More than 20 hours of video uploaded into YouTube every minute of every day! (May'09 stat!)

Google's query per second (QPS) is approx 30-40 million on a calm worldwide day!

We really should take a step back and realize what's actually happening here - these numbers are ENORMOUS and we're definitely drifting over them lightly. At minimum they're proving consumer acceptance of the e-reader/mobile phone connected to application store/data repository models emerging today. I will be blogging on these architectures and my two-cents on what they mean and where we're heading from hereon - fascinating to be a part of this technological renaissance!

"We tend to overestimate technology in the short term and underestimate it in the long term!"

"The future is already here...just unevenly distributed!"

Bill Gates backing a nuclear energy startup!

2010-03-01T10:31:00.006+02:00

I found this quite interesting; Gates at TED2010 speaking about the planetary CO2 emission problem and our challenge bringing it to zero. "We need an energy miracle", says Gates. Most of the talk was the usual global warming and CO2 jargon but towards the end of his presso he mentions a company called Terrapower - he describes them as a company focusing on enabling great alternative ideas and innovation within the nuclear energy arena - mentions some of this in the video above but here's a snippet from their online company info; “a wave of fission moving slowly through a fuel core could generate a billion watts of electricity continuously for well over 50 to 100 years without refueling.” In other words, power is generated via reactors that run on natural or depleted uranium - ok, that sounds pretty miraculous to me!

He is backing this nuclear reactor redesigning "startup" via Intellectual Ventures (Microsoft CTO, Nathan Myhrvold is also involved) - click here for the official video describing what Terrapower is all about. I'll be doing more research into this from hereon - looks interesting and very promising; "an important alternative to create a financially and socially attractive emission-free energy that is safe and sustainable." - if Bill Gate's is backing it we've got to pay attention to it...hopefully that $40+ billion gets us our "energy miracle".

P.S. Funny comment at posted below the video on youtube; "What will plants breath without CO2?" :)

Microsoft GEO team getting it together folks!!

2010-03-01T10:06:00.003+02:00

I've always been using Google Maps with Streetview but this demonstration of Microsoft's Bing mapping (Microsoft calls it "spatial search" - click here for the official explanation) with user generated overlays, internal building/structure dimensional views (via some backpack image capturing) and to cap it all; LIVE REAL-TIME streaming imagery overlays...with point of interest augmentation...is insane! (integration of the sky imagery pretty cool too!) Check out this article on searchengineland.com Microsoft's getting it together folks!! I love the end credits in this video where the TED participant states that this is truly a glimpse of the future where we would have the world and everything happening real time, accessible, interactive and personalized, in the palm of our hands...awesome!

Ranting raving Kindle/Nook/iPad & media wants...

2010-02-26T09:35:00.016+02:00

[28th Feb '10 update - click here for a more sane version written by @johnbattelle]

I'm about to do a keynote at a wireless carrier's WASP event and decided to copy and paste the following rant I wrote on my mobile whilst stuck in traffic on the way here. The event running a few mins late. Here's goes nothing - don't care about grammar and spelling right now :) Note: I will update this with links and better formatting later - Enjoy and/or cringe;

Content providers, owners and specifically publishers need to wake up!

Consumers are changing... They want content they want! ...specific and personalized to them...and very specific on a song by song basis, a book by book basis, and now with newspapers/magazines; I want my newspaper/magazine on an article by article subscription or micropayment basis...

I want the Apple iTunes model applied to newspaper and magazine literature on my Amazon Kindle - i.e. individual track/episode purchasing! I don't want to subscribe to the ENTIRE newspaper/magazine... I don't want the letters to editor section... I don't want the Lifestyle section! Example: when I subscribe to the Daily Mail on my Kindle... I don't want the entire newspaper...it irritates me! I think Daily Mail does awesome premiere league soccer coverage but the LA Times publishes a great tech section and the New York times business section works best for me!

Today, on my Kindle or Nook, I have to subscribe to the full newspaper or magazine... Haven't we been here before? Remember the music business before iTunes and the 99c a track? When we were forced to by the entire LP, cassette or CD...even though we only wanted that one or two great tracks...! I don't want the entire Newsweek magazine...I only want to pay for the columns written by Fareed Zakira and I would be willing to pay 99c a month to tap into his continuous newsfeed/opinion feed...ONLY!

Everyone's arguing about making content free or not... The argument isn't about buying the book or the newspaper! The strategic focus should be on drip based and very modular subscription capability...with dynamic and tag'able content that drives upsell revenue! Period! It would be like mixing the 99c/track iTunes model up with the Google Adsense model and mobile application stores. Stop thinking in globs and force feeding crap down users throats...I don't want to read your "letters to the editor" or your "horoscopes"! ALL your content is not great and not valuable TO ME! Atomise yourself for goodness sake - there's more revenue in micro subscription payments than there is in the total newspaper/magazine product sku!

The business model philosophy is; THE CONSUMER, ME AND YOU, HAVE NEVER BEEN MORE POWERFUL IN THE HISTORY OF COMMERCE...AND IF YOU DON'T MEET OUR EXPECTATIONS...WE WILL LEAVE YOU! If you don't create great news...we'll capture it (i.e. citizen journalism - example; CNN iReport)... If you don't write great news articles...we'll blog about it... If you sell a crap product we'll video tape how crappy it is and everyone globally can see it... We want granular choice and WE WILL PAY BECAUSE WE ARE INHERENTLY GOOD NOT EVIL! Your traditional overheads should not leak into our world...nevermind the fact that if you got your heads out the sand/clouds you may find a positive revenue infliction rejuventation and the Longtail whipping around, personified, in your old archived content!

The business model is longtail + social + subscription + content data structures/tagging/geo/feeds (semantic web) + mobile application stores + (something like Google OpenSocial) x the 99c a track/30% app store margin biz model + easy method of payment

This means a radical change in business model and views on content valuations...and who owns the user...and who bills...and who owns the identity...and who owns the device...and who the affiliate is...and who the last mile and carrier is...and who owns the bank account/facility...and which currency...and where?

There will be the Apple closed fashion oriented model...and then there will be the free and open model... Both will have to be embraced!

WASP's are about to enter an era of mass potential and revenue possibilities... Look at just the application marketplaces and how that's evolving... The reach it gives you and the ease of application rapid development, consumption and data Protection...and billing!

But...WASP'S...you will have to start adapting and start understanding where the users are and how their behaviour patterns are changing...AND MOST IMPORTANTLY HOW DEVICES THAT ARE CONNECTED ARE PROLIFERATING AND CHANGING... THE AGE OF THE MOBILE "PHONE" IS DEAD...THE AGE OF THE WIRELESSLY CONNECTED DEVICE IS UPON US! THAT THING THAT FITS JUST BETWEEN THE TRADITIONAL PHONE AND THE TRADITIONAL LAPTOP OR COMPUTER...HAVING THE BEST OF BOTH WORLDS! ...APPLE'S IPAD IS HUGE! WHY? NOT TECHNOLOGICALLY BUT TAKE A LOOK AT THE PLATFORM/ECOSYSTEM IT CREATES...LOOK AT HOW IT WILL AFFECT USER CONTENT CONSUMPTION... WATCH HOW IT WILL RUN SMACK BAM INTO HOLLYWOOD AND ALL OTHER TRADITIONAL PUBLISHING/MEDIA HOUSES! (I just hope and pray that they don't simply render dead mags and news on a sexy device - please media companies...embrace open and don't repeat my current Kindle experience!)

We are seeing an evolution of application stores connected to mobile devices...each carrier involved and mobile manufacturer getting in and content owner...and and and... all this creating silos again...SOMEBODY PLEASE PUBLISH THE OPEN-SOCIAL TYPE API'S FOR APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT, INTEGRATION AND RENDERING OF MOBILE APPLICATIONS ACROSS ALL CARRIER/PHONE MANUFACTURER'S/MOBILE OS/ ETC. APPLICATION STORES...THEN I WANT THE GOOGLE ADSENSE CLONE FOR ALL CONTENT RENDERED ON THE IPAD, NOOK AND KINDLE...AND THEN I WANT THE SDK AND API SET FOR WRITING AND RENDERING MY APPLICATIONS RELEVANT TO CONTENT TAGS AND CONTEXT IDENTIFICATION AND TRACKING...AND THEN I WANT AMAZON'S ONE-CLICK-PURCHASE BUTTON CLONED AND AVAILABLE ACROSS ALL CONTENT AND STORES...IF NOT AMAZON THEN I'LL JUST SETTLE FOR TRANSVERSAL PAYPAL MERCHANT AND USER INTEGRATION ENABLED ON A WORD-BY-WORD/TAG-BY-TAG BASIS... P L U E E Z E!

ENOUGH ALREADY STAFFORD - GET UP THERE AND TAP DANCE BOY!

Btw: This Wired tablet app demo is visually very appealing but concerns me a little;

Tribes by Seth Godin

2010-02-09T16:51:00.002+02:00

Seth Godin is the author of the book "Tribes" - this is the first time I've actually watched him speak in person about the ideas surrounding his posit - I think it's brilliant and branches/extends from the concept(s) of crowd sourcing and wise crowds.

Three fundamental questions at the foundation of tribe establishment/creation/realization; Who are you upsetting? Who are you connecting? Who are you leading? - really insightful and personifies the value proposition of hyper-connectivity.

Mashable accurately describes this presentation by saying, Seth Godin "believes that our revolutionary new connectedness has brought human culture back to its roots, and that tribes (groups of people mobilized around a shared interest) are the present and future of all web content"

Google TELEVISION superbowl ad - Awesome!

2010-02-08T12:01:00.001+02:00

Kseniya Simonova - Sand Animation

2010-02-01T11:33:00.001+02:00

Scott sent me the link to this video over the past weekend - simply left me speechless! An amazing display of real-time talent - i.e. If Google was like contemporary art...this girl would be like twitter; real-time, in-the-present, and brilliant artistic expression. I've seen some folks write beautiful code with impressive real-time rendering...but this just blows me away - so much is told without the use of any technology - wow!

Ray Kurzweil at Google

2010-01-26T14:48:00.014+02:00

Some of Ray's (author of The Singularity) outtakes - (check out the video below);

* Machines will achieve human-level artificial intelligence by 2029

* Tiny robots will be implanted in people's brains to make them more intelligent

* We will have both the hardware and the software to achieve human level artificial intelligence with the broad suppleness of human intelligence including our emotional intelligence by 2029

* Humans and machines will eventually merge, by means of devices embedded in people's bodies to keep them healthy and improve their intelligence

* We'll have intelligent nanobots go into our brains through the capillaries and interact directly with our biological neurons

* The nanobots will make us smarter, remember things better and automatically go into full emergent virtual reality environments through the nervous system

The last one above worries me a little; imagine personalized advertising being rendered within your body based upon present bio-chemical composition or state of mind? And we all thought climate aware ads were cool?! This will be when every human body becomes a physical node "on the network" and we can be anywhere, everywhere, and know everything...instantly - as George Gilder said in Telecosm; the only beings documented doing this are angels :)

Ray is also a member of a team of influential thinkers (Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Craig Venter included) assembled by the US National Academy of Engineering to identify the great technological challenges facing humanity in the 21st century. Here are the 14 they all agreed are of the greatest importance;

Make solar energy affordable

Provide energy from fusion

Develop carbon sequestration

Manage the nitrogen cycle

Provide access to clean water

Reverse engineer the brain

Prevent nuclear terror

Secure cyberspace

Enhance virtual reality

Improve urban infrastructure

Advance health informatics

Engineer better medicines

Advance personalised learning

Explore natural frontiers

Conspiracy FYI: Sergey's wife heads up 23andme whose official mission is "to be the world's trusted source of personal genetic information" - in other words; making your entire DNA helix and genes " information universally accessible and useful" - hmmm! :-)

Martin Luther King "I have a dream"

2010-01-21T12:15:00.002+02:00

This is the complete speech and makes me think of the eloquence of Obama

Meteor hits Johannesburg...uh, actually...Botswana

2009-11-25T11:31:00.003+02:00

Footage from the security camera of the Mustek building in Midrand (Johannesburg South Africa) of the meteor shower that took place on 21 Nov 2009. Yip everyone thought it was the end of the world :)

Nicholas Carr on twitter's 140 character limit...

2009-11-24T18:39:00.004+02:00

I've added a couple of my sister's acquaintances as friends on gtalk and twitter - they're all about 7-10 years younger than I am - Been reading their messages and tweats - to be completely honest, I just don't understand most of them...the acronyms and symbols used to convey emotion and a more verbose meaning behind the shortest word combines and structures...are...well...almost impossible at times for me to decipher!

Nicholas Carr takes it a little further in defining the usage of the entire 140 character limit on Twitter...found this quote quite interesting;

"Who sends a 160-character text(sms)? A 160-character text would feel downright Homeric. And that's what a 140-character tweet is starting to feel like, too. I think our alphabetic system of writing may be doomed. It doesn't work well with realtime communication. That's why people are forced to use all sorts of abbreviations and symbols - the alphabet's just too damn slow. In the end, I bet we move back to a purely hieroglyphic system of writing, with the number of available symbols limited to what can fit onto a smartphone keypad. Honestly, I think that communicating effectively in realtime requires no more than 25 or 30 units of meaning. Give me 30 glyphs and a URL shortener, and I'm good." - Nicholas Carr - author of IT Doesn't Matter and The Big Switch

Marketing 101...simplified!

2009-11-23T12:36:00.007+02:00

One of the best, "moment of relevance" meets "where the consumers are" meets "per transaction long tail billing", marketing placement I've seen in the physical world : I met these guys several times in the multi-level parking of one of the malls here in SA.

Their business strategy and plan : Two multi-talented guitarists/vocalists working 4 floors in close collaboration with the parking attendants monitoring traffic flow per level. They swap floors constantly and also theme their music custom to each - i.e. level -2 is where all the kids entertainment and toy stores are (therefore music is more pop and kiddie oriented), level -1 is adult clothing and merchandise, so they do the more contemporary stuff... They place themselves close to the parking pay point stations in order to score some of the change folks have left... They're average take per weekend is R2,500 each and on month-end weekend's it can reach R6,000. Not bad at all and says a great deal about placements, targeting, profiling/personalization, and relevancy...definitely lessons these guys personify versus some of the big marketing campaigns I've seen executed around town :) See below;

Wonder who's paying for the billboard space above...mmm! ;-)

Augmented Reality mashups

2009-10-28T13:46:00.003+02:00

I've blogged about this below a little and starting to investigate it a whole lot more. Check out the following HowStuffWorks link to get the basic concepts. It's still in its' infancy but the applications for mobile reality augmentation are endless; real estate, healthcare, retail, agriculture, supply chain management... This is the personification of location based services that people will actually wanna use - at least those that can afford the higher-end mobile devices. One of the most impressive public sector applications/mashups is the one done by the folks at Sunlight Labs to augment government recovery spend data - check it out here. We're hosting the world cup next year- immense opportunity to create annotations for visitors...especially since Google Maps was launched in SA today ;-)

South Africa on the map :)

2009-10-28T12:09:00.005+02:00

YES! Google maps for South Africa was launched today...

...and...

The movie District 9 was a huge hit worldwide

...and...

New movie out this year re Mandela, Francios Pienaar and the Rugby World Cup... click here for the HD Youtube trailer...

...oh yeah...

We're hosting the Fifa world cup next year!

We're getting there...

2009-10-27T16:46:00.001+02:00

Touchable Holography

2009-10-15T12:05:00.004+02:00

Above is the next evolution of augmented reality (AR)...actually augmented reality sensory enabled (ARSE - *grin*) - the video explains it all! The simpler stuff we're seeing out there is personified by these types of applications; Urbanspoon released this iPhone app - fully leveraging the mobile devices geo/osc layering capabilities to augment graphical restaurant location and related data on present reality view and positioning - check out the news article - loving it ;) Interesting one is Wikitude mentioned in the article - augments Wikipedia information over the realtime image rendered on the iPhone. These are all idea-based releases of the capabilities but imagine the application of it for government service delivery enhancement or emergency services or, the one I like, travel & tourism...if only everyone had an iPhone :)

2010 World Cup Stadiums - 1st October 2009

2009-10-02T10:44:00.003+02:00

SA Good News has published an article today detailing the status of the 6 new 2010 World Cup stadiums. WE ARE ON TRACK :)

"We as South Africans can be proud of what we have achieved," he said. "It is fantastic seeing that most of the venues are almost ready." - Danny Jordaan, 2010 LOC CEO.

Design for the Wisdom of Crowds - SXSWi 2009

2009-09-29T08:05:00.002+02:00

Quoted from the video : Taking a bunch of people and putting them in a room does not make them smart by definition. Four elements create wise crowds:

Diversity of opinion (large, diverse groups help avoid group think)
Independence (each contributor making his or her own choices)
Decentralization (no one person or authority is in charge)
Aggregation (to take all that noisy data and turn it into something smart)

Check out the book and also check out this in comparison to crowd sourcing which I blogged about here

Enjoy :)

South Africa - best country on the planet!

2009-09-22T13:44:00.005+02:00

Photo above from SA the Good News re the Gautrain project - check out their flickr photostream also

Fifty facts about a remarkable nation

[Compiled by South Africa The Good News]

Economy

1. The rand was the best performing currency against the US Dollar between 2002 and 2005 (Bloomberg Currency Scoreboard)

2. South Africa has 55,000 high net-wealth individuals holding at least US$1million in financial assets (World Wealth Report 2008)

3. South Africa has the 27th biggest economy in the world, with a Gross Domestic Product of US$254 billion (World Bank)

4. South Africa accounts for almost 25% of the GDP of the entire African continent, with an economy more than twice the size of the second biggest – Algeria. (World Bank)

5. Gauteng is South Africa’s smallest province but produces 34% of South Africa’s Gross Domestic Product (Stats SA)

6. The JSE Securities Exchange is the 14th largest equities exchange in the world, with a total market capitalisation of some R2.3 trillion (JSE)

7. More than 12,000 'Black Diamond' families (South Africa’s new black middle class) - or 50,000 people - are moving from the townships into the suburbs of South Africa's metro areas every month (UCT Unilever Institute)

8. The black middle class grew by 30% in 2005, adding another 421,000 black adults to SA's middle-income layer and ramping up the black population's share of SA's total middle class to almost a third. Between 2001 and 2004, there were 300,000 new black entrants to the middle class (Financial Mail)

Infrastructure

1. South Africa generates two-thirds of Africa’s electricity (Eskom)

2. South African power supplier provides the fourth cheapest electricity in the world

3. Chris Hani-Baragwanath Hospital in Soweto is the biggest hospital in the world

4. Durban is the largest port in Africa and the ninth largest in the world.

5. There are 39 million cell phone users in South Africa (International Telecommunication Union)

Tourism

1. The number of tourists visiting South Africa has grown by 200% since 1994, from 3 million to over 9 million in 2007 (Dept of Environment and Tourism)

2. The Singita game reserve was voted the best hotel in the world by the readers of a leading travel magazine (Conde Nast Traveller)

3. The world's best land-based whale-watching spot is located in Hermanus in the Western Cape.

4. In 2002, South Africa was the world’s fastest growing tourist destination. In 2006, South Africa’s tourism grew at three times the global average.

Sport

1. South Africa hosts the largest timed cycle race in the world (the Cape Argus Cycle Tour), the world's oldest and largest ultra-marathon (the Comrades Marathon) and the world's largest open water swimming event (the Midmar Mile).

2. South Africa will become the first African country to host the Soccer World Cup in 2010 … and only the second country in the world to have hosted the Cricket, Rugby and Soccer World Cups.

3. Since the 1940s, South African golfers have won more golf majors than any other nation, apart from the United States.

4. In 1994, we won 11 medals in the Commonwealth Games. In 2002, we won 46.

SA Teaching the World

1. South Africa houses one of the three largest telescopes in the world at Sutherland in the Karoo

2. South Africa is the first, and to date the only, country to build nuclear weapons and the voluntarily dismantle its entire nuclear weapons programme

3. South Africa Constitution is widely regarded as being one of the most progressive in the world, drawing from the experiences of the world’s most advanced democracies

4. The South African oil company Sasol has established the only commercially viable oil-from-coal operations in the world.

5. Two of the world's most profoundly compassionate philosophies originated in South Africa – Ubuntu (the belief in a universal bond of sharing that connects all humanity) and Gandhi's notion of "passive resistance" (Satyagraha), which he developed while living in South Africa.

Education

1. Almost a quarter of South Africa’s non-interest budget is spent on education

2. The University of South Africa UNISA is a pioneer of tertiary distance education and is the largest correspondence university in the world with 250,000 students.

3. Our learner to teacher ratio has improved from 1:50 in 1994 to 1:34 in 2004

4. South Africa’s matric pass rate has improved from 49% in 1994 to 70% in 2004, but student’s receiving university exemptions has remained at 18%

5. The first MBA programme outside of the United States was started by the University of Pretoria in 1949 (Gordon Institute of Business Science).

Social

1. Over thirteen million South Africans (a quarter of the population) have access to social grants (Department of Social Development)

2. Since 1994, 500 houses have been built each day for the poor and 1,000 houses per day have received electricity

3. Seventy percent of South Africa’s population is urbanised

To the best of our knowledge, these facts are correct.

If you have evidence that any of the above are incorrect or inaccurate, please contact us.

+27 (0)11 463 5713 | ian@sagoodnews.co.za | www.sagoodnews.co.za

Environmental

1. The Kruger National Park supports the greatest variety of wildlife species on the African continent

2. The Cango Caves near Oudsthoorn is the world’s longest underground cave sequence

3. South Africa is the only country to house an entire floral kingdom (fynbos), one of only 6 on the planet

4. In 1991, South Africa became the first country in the world to protect the Great White shark.

5. South Africa has the oldest meteor scar in the world, at the Vredefort Dome near Parys. The scar is 2 billion years old.

6. South Africa has the 3rd highest level of biodiversity (SA Tourism)

7. The Cape Hyrax’s (dassie) closest relative is the African elephant

8. South Africa has embraced the concept of trans-frontier ‘peace parks’, linking ecological reserves across national borders

General

1. The Western Deep Levels is the world’s deepest mine at 3777 metres

2. South Africa has the world’s largest deposits of gold, chromium, platinum and manganese

3. The only street in the world to house two Nobel Peace Prize winners is in Soweto. Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu both have houses in Vilakazi Street, Orlando West.

4. South African Breweries (SABMiller) ranks as the second largest brewing company in the world. It supplies up to 50% of China's beer.

5. Cape Town has the fifth-best blue sky in the world, according to the UK's National Physical Laboratory

Come visit us - click here to see our country

Steve's back in charge...

2009-09-10T12:18:00.004+02:00

Haven't had too much time to blog recently but I notice this article on CNET describing the return of Mr. Jobs...on stage! Yip I'm a Jobs fan and it's good to see him back! I published a post on his commencement address at a university and a little on his history. Amazing the co-incidence since I was on the phone with someone last night, for at least 3 hours, and a chunk of the time we discussed iTunes, his speech, and the future of Apple.

Some of my favourite Steve quotes;

"You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle."

"No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary."

Welcome Back Steve Jobs!

Interesting developments & some kewl stuff

2009-08-20T17:06:00.005+02:00

* Multisensory marketing - the resurrection of print? i.e. Video ad in a magazine by Americhip

* Print experiences the largest historical decline in ad revenues - check out the report

* Latest (Aug '09) on digital music sales versus CD - original NPD release here - check out the graphic in this report

* Latest (Aug '09) Facebook stats and demographics - check out Ben's post on the numbers - click here for the blog post (FYI: currently at 266m active users)

* Chris Anderson on the FREE economy

* Time to start thinking about infinite broadband capacity and availability - click here for synopsis on the article and if you find it interesting I recommend George Gilder's book "Telecosm"

* Ultra transparency : Really kewl IT Spending trends and data published by the US Federal Government - click here

* Google launches StreetView partner program - check it out

* Choosing a wife mathematically - LOL...click here

Death of distance ;-)

2009-08-20T10:48:00.003+02:00

CRF invited me to be the keynote speaker at their event and in prep'ing for it I did some research into the history of remote communication. I stumbled across the following on the South Africa Post Office website - very very interesting review of postal history below their "About Us" link (just wish they would present it in a better manner - horrible having to click on a particular year and then click back to get to the next) - here are a couple snippets that'll blow your mind...we've really come a long way;

Year 1501; Pedro D'Ataide, the captain of a Portuguese ship, placed a letter in a Milkwood tree at Mossel Bay. The letter contained a message about the disaster which had struck his fleet. Three ships, including that of Bartholomew Diaz, had gone down during a severe storm over the Atlantic Ocean, leaving no survivors.

When they left Portugal, these sailors were told to stop over at Mossel Bay for fresh water. With this in mind, Captain D'Ataide left his message in the Milkwood tree, knowing that the fleet would return to Mossel Bay on their way back from India. Three months later, the fleet found the letter and delivered it to Portugal.

Year 1501 - 1652; During this period, the crew of ships travelling to or from the Orient past the South coast of Africa, placed letters under postal stones, hoping that they would be found and delivered by other ships. The necessary information such as the date, name of the ship and its captain, were carved on these stones. The letters were occasionally wrapped in waxed canvas and, apart from the address, the letters DGG were written on them – for Door God geleyd, or ‘Guided by God’.

fast forward >>>

Year 2002; A world first for the Post Office, as South African President Thabo Mbeki electronically signs the Electronic Communication and Transaction Act into law. This was the first Act in the world to be signed into law by an electronic signature. The signing was enabled using the Post Office authentication service. The Act defines the Post Office as the "preferred authentication service provider" of identification procedures necessary for the issuing of advanced electronic signatures.

All LIFE magazine pics online

2009-05-31T11:13:00.004+02:00

All of their photographs ever taken now online and easily searched - notice the original resolution and clarity/quality of the pics. Really kewl ;-) One more wish; geo tag all the pics and render as a Google Earth KML...please? :)

Google Wave and the enterprise

2009-05-31T10:42:00.007+02:00

The following graphics are the best I've found re Google Wave from Dion Hinchcliffe who I've been following for years now (my favourite blog) - check these out:

Simple dissection of the "wave";

"Enterprise Wave" integration dissection;

Love it ;-)

Physical versus Digital music sales

2009-05-31T10:19:00.005+02:00

2008 performance

"Despite global digital sales growing 24.1 % to $3.78bn and performance income by 16.2% last year, total sales still finished down 8.3% at $18.4bn after a 15.4% collapse in physical sales"

Europe:

Sales of $7,3bn - down 6,3%

Digital $750m - up 36,1%

Physical $5,8bn - down 11,3%

USA:

Sales of $4,9bn - down 18,6%

Digital $1,78bn - up 16,5%

Physical down $1 BILLION - largest drop seen and largest in the world

Performance income up 133%

The recorded music industry generates a greater proportion of its revenues through digital sales than the film, magazine and newspaper industries combined.

Single track downloads, up 24 per cent in 2008 to 1.4 billion units globally, continue to drive the online market, but digital albums are also growing steadily (up 37%). The top selling single of 2008 was Lil Wayne’s Lollipop

The US is the world leader in digital music sales, accounting for some 50 per cent of the global digital music market value. Single track downloads crossed the one billion mark for the first time in 2008, totalling 1.1 billion, up 27 per cent on 2007. Digital album sales totalled 66 million, an increase of 32 per cent (Nielsen SoundScan)

The UK saw the biggest increase in digital sales in the first half of 2008 among the top markets, with sales up by 45 per cent. 110 million single tracks were downloaded in 2008, up 42 per cent on 2007. Digital album sales also rose sharply, by 65 per cent to 10.3 million now accounting for 7.7 per cent of the albums market (OCC/BPI)

Collating separate studies in 16 countries over a three-year period, IFPI estimates more than 40 billion files were illegally file-shared in 2008, giving a piracy rate of around 95 per cent.

Interesting note : 75% of global sales are still physical, against just 4% digital

Golfing baby...

2009-05-30T11:09:00.002+02:00

Shank-a-potamus...LOL! Craig, this take made me think of you baby ;-)

Tip: watch the clip in high def and notice the computer screen says "Shankshire Hills"...too much!

SIXTHSENSE : The Coolest technology ever...?

2009-04-29T12:58:00.003+02:00

Take wearable computing and mash it up with natural surface interface technologies and sprinkle in some Minority Report movie magic...then you get the coolest piece of tech I have ever seen; SIXTHSENSE

"SixthSense is a wearable gestural interface that augments the physical world around us with digital information and lets us use natural hand gestures to interact with that information... SixthSense attempts to free information from its confines by seamlessly integrating it with reality, and thus making the entire world your computer."

Pattie Maes heads up the Fluid Interfaces Group at MIT labs. Pranav Mistry is the student lead for the project and a pretty interesting guy... Their projects are really ground breaking but this Sixthsense project is jawdropping...I want one ;-)

Official MIT linked project website
Pranav's project website
Pranav's personal website - also so cool ;-)
Wired article on Sixthsense

Two comments on the article I found funny;

Posted by: hell yeah! | 02/5/09 | 5:16 pm
Now I can project porn onto anyone I don’t find at least mildly amusing!
“What’s that? Of course I want to hear about the specifics of your 401k.”

Posted by: Aswan | 02/5/09 | 6:38 pm
What do you need the human for?

Bill Joy: What I'm worried about, what I'm excited about

2009-04-29T12:25:00.002+02:00

Bill did this talk in November 2008 - notice his posits re pandemics and flu viruses...interesting!

Bill Joy profile
His famous Wired Magazine article; Why the future doesn't need us

The future of social networks?

2009-04-29T01:11:00.007+02:00

[Disclaimer: It's 2:30am right now. We got home pretty late after a last minute dinner invite; The restaurant, dinner and company was awesome and about to type the following completely freestyle...]

Social networks should focus less on advertising and more on transactions! Their revenue generating strategy(ies) should be more about replicating Amazon.com's model versus Google's advertising monetization methods.

In future could we be the proud owners of Facebook credit cards and/or bank accounts? Mmmmm

Transparent Real Time Transactional Enablement (TRTTE) is what social networking needs...not only ad injection in API reference streams and social graphs!

Why do I refer to Amazon.com? Well, remember the "1-Click" purchase patent?

I remember arguing Amazon's business model with Dave Nelson in the Novell cafeteria on a snowy day in Utah, Provo! (Dave was all on about Yahoo!...blah blah) The premise was that the business you're in is not necessarily the business you will be in tomorrow....the bases of this rationale is today modularizing re-usable components of your business... Reusable by all and not just you...

Refer back to Amazon; When they started they were an online bookstore...but that merely became a service executing upon a commerce engine...they enabled other distinct and variable services to execute upon this engine in a similar manner (aka Z-Shops)...

Why did I keep going back to Amazon? Barnes and Noble also launched their website and they had the offline ability in addition...ie buy the book online and get it at your local BAM BnN store... Why did Amazon win?? They won because of their "1-Click" purchase button...

Amazon made the acquisition of goods online seamless, transparent and instantaneous... AMAZON REMOVED THE NOTION OF A SHOPPING CART BEFORE OTHERS HAD EVEN INTRODUCED PURCHASING CAPABILITIES ONTO THEIR WEBSITES. See this overview of 1-Click and the motivation Jeff Bezos and crew had (very interesting!)

Note: remember the big Barnes and Noble versus Amazon lawsuit? Amazon attacked BnN when they introduced a derivitive of 1-Click capabilities...based upon their filed patent...settlement was out of court....

FYI: Amazon licenses 1-Click to Apple for usage in their iTunes store - happened back in 2000

The ability to transact and acquire products/services online still remains a dilemma... The notion of the abandoned shopping cart stat is one we've seen since the late nineties....

Flick back to social networks today... Not one of them are making any profits! Twitter is burning cash and people utilizing the twitter stream are making money before them! Everyone seems to be focused on advertising as the main source of revenue... Everyone seems interested in introducing the Google advertiser business model into their social walled gardens...

Note: Facebook's main revenue....and only revenue will be coming from their homepage ads...not the ads seen on the right hand side of the screen on your facebook profile or apps pages (yip, those are ads...fyi: most people don't event notice they're there. Btw, in terms of screen eyeball heatmap studies done by Google...the least clicked upon ads are the ones on the right hand side of the search resultant landing page...the most coveted positioning are those three sponsored links located just below the search field and just above the natural search resultant link listings)

Social networks are hard to advertise relevantly within... Advertising to a user is evolving into advertising for a user... Ads are becoming a part of contextual and relevant information at that moment/instant of relevance versus the shotgun billboard next to highway model or tv ad. Search is the perfect medium/platform for the delivery of this "information" in that manner...social networking is not! It is too general purpose and usually stuff finds me, not the other way around... Relevance, timing, geo location, device usage, circumstance and context are attributes extremely difficult to correlate to deliver great ad quality scores... It becomes worse when you open up the platform for 3rd party development and more general purchase data/app delivery... Relevant and effective adverts with high click through rates aren't going to happen soon... So how are these guys going to make it?

I wish to posit that sustainable social networks...no wait...I wish to posit that the online social holy grail is the transactional enablement of all content, apps, services and all else relevant throughout a social graph... Imagine the 1-Click purchase enablement of anything and all things within social networks?

Yip, that means the future of social networks may lay in being the platforms/NOS's enabling mania and innovation around individual/group social graphs...yet focusing on revenue via actually being the couriers for seamless payment/transactions/purchasing for all things above... Yes, a complete replica of Amazon...

Amazon built their business on being open...but their key component that kicked everyone's butt was that "1-Click purchase button...not just ease of use but same look and feel enabled throughout the site...whether you're buying a new book, the latest DRM free MP3, or a garden hose...just click that button and we'll take care of the rest...

I want that in my facebook account, in my orkut account...and wherever else I wish to take my social graph. Fyi: Myspace tried this within their social container but the complexity/limitations/single application is too much for the consumers to ensure broad purchase enablement... i.e. their partnerships with the big record label companies for music sales via myspace... Those are silo attempts at what I'm trying to outline here...

Why would I describe the [social graph enabled "1-Click" purchase button] as the holy grail? Well, just think of all the applications and appeal to any financial institute if a user can buy things within their walled garden, draw others into buying...imagine mass purchasing capabilities...and now with Facebook connect and the new Facebook stream api...the user would have the ability to take their entire social graphs wherever they wanted online...to peruse, comment, and finally....transact ;)

Then the question about making money via advertising is less of a focus... Give the user and their social graph the ability to leave home but buy with daddy's credit card :-) ....which would actually be their own...

Hey, maybe step one is the introduction of a social networking virtual currency standard...? ie paypal for all social networks? Similar to the SecondLife Linden Dollar? Nah, don't think so :-)

Anyway, I do believe If a social network cracked this one they would become one of the largest financial institutes in the world...providing all facilities necessary for transactions... Imagine the facebook credit card...pretty cool me thinks... Imagine browsing through stocktwits.com and when you like what people are tweating about re CSCO, you just simply select purchase 1000 Cisco shares and then clicking on the "1-Click" purchase button which is connected with your facebook account? The various applications, evolutions and derivitives of this can be opined about all day...

The architecture of this model is simple... Focus and wrap the same open standards and interoperability frameworks (eg opensocial for transactions/payment) around "buy now with 1-Click"...

Social networks may become the authoratative stores for our identities, bank accounts and manner of ecommerce...apart from ensuring non-repudiation and all the security/governance/compliance "stuff"....

So, what do you think? Is it really as simple as just social network enabling of Amazon's "1-Click" purchase button? Can social networks evolve to become our social wallets? Will we in future have facebook, myspace, orkut or twitter bank accounts? Or the facebook dollar?

I'm not sure...but...I do believe that the holy grail is commerce enablement of social graphs...not adverts injected into every aspect of online social innovation!

Gudnite!

Crowdsourcing...offline!!

2009-04-28T18:39:00.004+02:00

"Crowdsourcing is a neologism for the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people or community in the form of an open call." - source; Wikipedia.

I periodically "pop into" the ITP Tisch website to see what the students are up to...very very cool and quirky stuff! Here's how they describe themselves; "ITP is a two-year graduate program located in the Tisch School of the Arts whose mission is to explore the imaginative use of communications technologies — how they might augment, improve, and bring delight and art into people’s lives. Perhaps the best way to describe us is as a Center for the Recently Possible". Check out some of their projects - click here

Kacie Kinzer is a student at the institute and working on a really cute and interesting project; Tweenbots

The concept is pretty simple; build a robot (as above) and then send it out into the public with no navigation capabilities, a particular destination as the objective and rely on people (the crowd) to help it along...i.e. source the crowd or "crowdsourcing". What Kacie is demonstrating is an in-person-real life-real time outsource-positioning-and-tracking-program...simply consisting of and relying upon willing project participants to repair directional error and reprogram positioning of the object...physically!

This is no different from the technological/electronic manner in which people participate to create software (open source) or aggregate knowledge (wikipedia)... Wikipedia describes "crowdsourcing" in a very technical manner...perhaps it needs some appending because Kacie is demonstrating it the offline biological world...

Kacie is going further, developing more robots and gathering associated data - check it out here - you can also be kept posted by sending a blank email to tweenbotinfo@gmail.com

So kewl ;-)

P.S. Click here to see some good reads on Amazon.com re crowdsourcing.

What am I up to...?

2009-04-28T17:02:00.006+02:00

Received a few emails recently asking me what I'm up to...and what I'll be doing next... Well, doing a great deal but nothing to announce on the professional side of things ;) I must be honest, this time off has been extremely liberating and probably something I should have done some time ago. Here's a list of top 10 of what's happened and happening on the fun/personal end - there are some bucket list items here...figured I'd get them done whilst I have the time;

1. Get out there - Diving - do a great deal of diving at present. Just returned from Mauritius and was absolutely wow'd by the marine life. You don't even have to dive...snorkeling is enough!

2. Travel - quite a large crowd heading back to Mauritius this week - diving around more of the islands and the east coast with the kids this time.

3. Concerts - couple of longtime friends (school buddies) have bought tickets and flights to see Simply Red in Italy in May - was supposed to be a birthday gift surprise but Chivon just couldn't keep it silent...3 glasses of wine later %¬)

4. Musical instrument - Mike Stopforth is organizing a new guitar teacher for me - started this a few months ago but the wheels came off. Mike's getting someone that'll show up at home, flexible on time and does not arrive intoxicated ;-) Thanks to Mike's tweating I discovered that he plays in a band...

5. Fly more - doing a week long Microlite excursion in the Kalahari in May - flew again this week and the magic is still there Roberto... (I won't even mention your predictions here)

6. Literature - finished biography of Martin Luther King Jr and The History of Coal...finally! (I HIGHLY recommend The History of Coal - I really do... !!) Bought the autobiography of Winston Churchhill and Barak Obama (both editions) and started reading over the weekend

7. Health - back into swimming again and back into the 4 day, one hour per session, 80-100 laps routine...feels great at the moment and hoping I can just keep it up...5am in winter in the pool, even though heated, is going to be tough!

8. Pets - kids and I doing the Obama canine search thing ;) We've scouted pet shops today and did some online searching...we're just not sure yet...(Can't believe the price of some of these puppies! The price of two equals what a brand new car cost when my dad bought one in the 80's)

9. Crazy - Tracy and Craig are part of a local Red Bull base jumping crew - I'm heading out there next week Friday for lesson 1... ;-(

10. Mundane - I shouldn't categorise this just yet but after an interesting dinner a couple days ago a group of us have decided to attend professional chef directed cooking classes... We start next week and I'll report back with pics asap ;-) We're doing the Japanese, Thai and Indian themes over the next couple months... More nervous about this versus base jumping!!

P.S. On the side - Figuring out how I can get my hands on the Amazon.com Kindle...Argh, I want one of these so badly!

GEO tracking Swine Flu outbreak

2009-04-28T14:00:00.006+02:00

Click on pic above for the GEO tagged swineflu news reports annotated on a Google map

Also check out this flu trends website that was launched some time ago - co/op between Google.org and the USA's CDC.

(Something tells me I should be tweating this versus blogging about it... The dilemma of micro-blogging versus blogging like this is still exactly that for me... Anyway, I'll get with it soon)

Google's data center

2009-04-28T13:41:00.004+02:00

I'm always being pinged about Google's mysterious and secretive data centers. Well, see above...enjoy! Btw: Google recently hosted a "Effecient Data Center Summit" - loads of videos, presentations and best practice material re data center design, build, maintenance and overall operations ;-)

Additionally; Amazon.com's James Hamilton was there (really informative and valuable blog) and posted his remarks regarding the event and the slides he covered during his session.

Excerpt from James's blog; "River water cooling: The Belgium river water cooled data center caught my interest when it was first discussed a year ago. The Google team went through the design in detail. Overall, it’s beautiful work but included a full water treatment plant to treat the water before using it. I like the design in that its 100% better both economically and environmentally to clean and use river water rather than to take fresh water from the local utility. But, the treatment plant itself represents a substantial capital expense and requires energy for operation. It’s clearly an innovative way to reduce fresh water consumption. However, I slightly prefer designs that depend more deeply on free air cooling and avoid the capital and operational expense of the water treatment plant."

The future of newspapers and content providers

2009-04-28T12:02:00.010+02:00

I've been investigating some of the noise newspapers and online/offline content providers have increasingly been making recently. Some have described it as the perfect storm; all due to the credit crunch, the resultant decline in overall advertiser spend and the worldwide migration to online/digital being the predominant medium for media consumption (a world where revenue models truly create a clash of civilizations)...

Few people have brought this into the equation; end user generated content/news - i.e. CNN's iReport - citizen journalism enabled upon a fabric of connectivity and content capturing devices that easily upload data into the cloud (e.g. mobile phones capable of taking more than 5 megapixel pics and recording high res video - suddenly everyone is a journalist and everyone can contribute content irrespective of location)... Then there's examples like YouTube and Twitter and and and... more on this subject later ;-)

The decline of newspapers have gone from a few little blogs and speculation about a year ago and now has grown into a cacophony of worldwide panic...

I don't believe all newspapers will completely die out...just yet...but I do believe those that are built on archaic business models/revenue streams and/or fail to embrace the hyperconnected world...now have an immensely reduced lifespan. Bill James gives a simple but insightful account of the history of newspapers relative to its' current (d)evolution - check it out here.

This is simply newspapers going through the same inertia that the record label companies did in the early 2000's. Remember the Napster lawsuit, continuous shutdowns and then the rise of iTunes which now sells more music than Walmart in the USA?

We're in phase 1 of that right now within the context of our newspaper friends... Evidence of this is the recent bellowing made by the worlds largest creator/compiler/aggregator/distributor of news content, the Associated Press;

"AP and its member newspapers and broadcast associate members are the source of most of the news content being created in the world today. We must be paid fully and fairly. We can no longer stand by and watch others walk off with our work under misguided legal theories. We are mad as hell, and we are not going to take it any more." - remarks made during an AP Annual Meeting by Dean Singleton, Chairman, Associated Press, 6th April 2009

LOL...what are you going to do Mr. Singleton? How are you going to stop every single blogger on the planet? How are you going to apply your intellectual rights and copyright protections in countries that have no regard for your misguided legal theories?

Check out this 17 min interview with the CEO of AP Thomas Curley and Charlie Rose - love the way he refers to online evolution as "devolution" in his first opening remarks;

Interesting but I do think that the AP is taking the wrong angle on all of this - who can blame them? There's so much of their money at stake! Tom Curley, you're sounding like encyclopedia guys when Wikipedia became popular...or like a record label company that now sees Apple iTunes selling more music than any other entity...or much rather like those laywers headbutting Napster and threatening every citizen with subpoenaes used to attain ISP TCP/IP records...

Don't get me wrong...I have a very high regard for the AP and what they have done and will continue to do as stated by them; "The AP news report remains the gold standard of newsgathering and reporting throughout the world. And last year showed that news was more important than ever. From the presidential election to the Israeli offensive in Gaza, and from the White House to your statehouse, last year proved dead wrong those who claim that the power of original journalism has waned. A few years ago, AP started to keep a tally of its journalists killed, harassed, beaten, detained or prevented from doing their jobs. Last year, that number totaled 62. It is not a profession for the fainthearted, or those who work in their pajamas. Beyond the news, as well, AP brings you other unique value propositions and special opportunities. You may not always be able to put a dollar figure on them, but they all add up to value you won't get anywhere else."

Look at how much infrastructure they put into it; click here... Unfortunately the world does not allow them to continue generating revenue in their traditional manner(s) and now it is time for change! I completely disagree with that last phrase "value you won't get anywhere else" - as stated above I do believe that end user generated content poses the single biggest threat to the AP because it simply devalues the need for their sophisticated infrastructure, resources and thus licensed content...

The future here will be a hybrid model of freedom mixed with corporate return on investment with intense innovation (i.e. Amazon's Kindle) - a blend of accredited journalism and the person capable of capturing content right there on the scene i.e. CNN's iReport... AP should embrace this and become the nr 1 place for end user generated news content... Else they'll just land up being like the record label companies versus the Amazon's (DRM free MP3 sales) and Apple's (iTunes)...

Interesting times! I'll end this off with a snippet from Mike who commented on the Charlie Rose video interview; "The problem here is negligence on the part of the leadership of the press. They were caught asleep at the wheel while dramatic, seismic shifts were occurring in the marketplace and they failed to innovate - early or often enough to keep pace. Like the recording and automotive industries, the traditional press too now finds itself caught up in a downward spiral. Trying to backtrack and charge for content now is not the answer. There are many other, more innovative ways to create value which consumers are willing to pay for, but the ones Curly suggests are clearly not it!

Innovation is required here - a skill, that for all their homage to the concept, many of our business leaders are stupendously poor at executing. Capitalism is Darwinian - evolve and adapt or die. And this my friends is potentially and sadly the sound of a dinosaur gasping it's last breath! Compensation in a capitalist system never succeeds through demands or through litigiousness, but instead by creating content consumers want, when they want it and how they want it. Unfortunately the A.P. is still under the delusion that they control the purchase decision. Good night and good luck!"

Nice comment Mike ;-)

P.S. Garett Rogers comments on this also...check it out.

Online dating evolution... %~)

2009-04-24T13:20:00.002+02:00

Check out these 10 I found that are pretty interesting - LOL

1. Jewish only folks

2. Dating for beautiful people only

3. Till Death do us part - online dating for terminally-ill patients

4. Women behind bars - snail mail dating with incarcerated females

5. Star Trek fanatics unite

6. Actual DNA matching

7. Weed lovers - puff it up together

8. Intergenerational dating

9. Geeks to geeks

10. Online dating for those with STD's...whoa!

Farewell Alan...

2009-04-24T13:12:00.004+02:00

Alan Knott Craig Jr has resigned! My word! Sorry I'm a bit late on this news...especially considering that just last week Monday Alan and I had breakfast...AND YOU DIDN'T TELL ME YOU BUGGER!! ;-)

Well, good luck Alan, enjoy Stellenbosch (something tells me to do two things now; expect a significant dip in wine exports from the area and that I should be buying into some wine stocks - leave some for us too - ha!) - I will certainly miss your insights and leadership in the telco sector! There are many of us who greatly respect you and admire your accomplishments!

For those of you that don't know Alan - he's resigned from iBurst where he's been the MD. Alan also wrote the following that was widely publicised and spoken about...

Numbers...numbers...numbers...

2009-04-24T12:44:00.002+02:00

(Just got back from two weeks of Mauritian diving, snorkeling and healing ;-) First time I've been there and I'm going back again in a couple weeks time! It's an amazing place and I'll be blogging about some of it over this weekend... Btw: I haven't typed on a keyboard for the past 14 days and my fingers feel like the dentist injected them all with novacaine...shake, shake, shake)

Checked out some numbers this morning and these are absolutely mind boggling;

Twitter; has now passed 1,5 BILLION tweats - check out this live ticker

YouTube; 15 hours of video published up into it every minute of every day + 100 million viewers per month only in the USA + 40% marketshare of all video watched online

Facebook; 200 MILLION registered users - reached 8 months after hitting 100 million

iPhone app store; more than 1 BILLION apps downloaded within 9 months of launching the app appstore... 3 months ago they were at 500 million

What does all this mean? Well, end user generated content is where it's all at folks... Interesting times!

I love these two quotes;

Amara's Law : "We tend to overestimate the effect of technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run"

William Gibson : "The future is already here...just unevenly distrubuted"

Black emerging class township cultural data...

2009-04-15T11:09:00.005+02:00

I watched the MD of Foshizi, Lebo Motshegoa, being interviewed on TV the other day and did some digging into who they are (hey, I have the time watch TV these days Greg!!). I'm really fascinated by the niche he's leveraging - township cultural knowledge. This was an idea I discussed with another township boy in one of the advertising agencies a couple years ago; the idea was simply - launch a research company that surfaces and provides intelligence on local township culture and trends to the rest of the advertising/marketing ecosystem.

Check out the following interesting and insightful links;

* Township lingo for well known brands (I think the list could be so much longer!!)
* "Credit Crunch" in the townships
* Go to their homepage, click on "Latest Insights", and check out "Products Become Remedy" - I found this so funny because it is so true! (Yus, I hate flash enabled/driven websites - yuk!)

Why is this such a huge opportunity? Well, because the black emerging middle class is the fastest growing segment and the least understood by businesses and their advertising/brand agencies... Reaching out to this enormous emerging base/class is a challenge if you don't "get them" - Foshizi does...but I would say you need to segment the various "townships" into the apartheid-type categorizations because there are racial verticals with unique and beautiful "township cultures"...language to dress code to slang to humour to buying trends to social activities...etc.

Lebo said the following that really resonates - (paraphrasing);

There are 3 types of township/emerging class folk:

1. Those that live in the townships because they have no choice
2. Those that live in the townships although they have a choice to live in the more affluent suburbs
3. Those that live in the affluent suburbs but spend a great deal/the majority of their time in the townships

He outlined the cultural differences category 2 & 3 of people still retain although now being the "black diamonds". There is so much more to explore in this regard and if you have ever grown up in a township...I'm sure you're nodding vigorously in agreement ;-)

Would be great to segment the rural/township culture by geography and race - i.e. Eldo's is so autonomous to Diepkloof...as Cape Town coloured folks are to those in Durban...or Eesterust, Pretoria.

Foshizi is an interesting company and I think understanding these emerging LSM's are critical to any marketing/brand campaigning. Localizing based on this knowledge could really drive a brand's/company's reach throughout South Africa. (Besides the fact that the data captured would be so interesting)

Last word: Lebo, please my brother...STOP USING FLASH TO BUILD YOUR WEBSITES; The Soweto website you've launched could be so much more discoverable and usable otherwise ;-(

Supporting passion

2009-03-31T01:15:00.001+02:00

Mmmmm....

OpenID - really great presso explaining it...

2009-03-31T00:39:00.004+02:00

Yes, it does say 2007 but it's still relevant and very useful background info on OpenID. Considering the mass adoption of social networks, user identity and authentication has become a massive subject underlying all data mashing. Google has adopted this within OpenSocial and we're seeing usage within Facebook Connect...and we're also seeing broad website standardization/utilization of it - check out Yahoo!'s

Corporate Board Members of the foundation;

Facebook - Luke Shepard
Google - DeWitt Clinton
IBM - Tony Nadalin
Microsoft - Michael B. Jones - Secretary
PayPal - Andrew Nash
VeriSign - Gary Krall
Yahoo! - Raj Mata - Treasurer

It is me David...evidence below! ;-)

2009-03-30T23:10:00.002+02:00

This was at 23 meters below - Bikini Reef (Sodwana)

Information at our fingertips...finally?

2009-03-30T22:19:00.002+02:00

Google says; all the worlds information universally accessible and useful

Amazon says; all literature universally accessible on the Kindle...within 60 seconds!

Google Book Search; all literature universally accessible and...maybe purchasable on any eReader? (Watch out Amazon?)

Apple iTunes; all music and video accessible online

Facebook, MySpace, etc; all my friends and I accessible

Facebook Connect & Google's Open Social; my entire social graph universally accessible and useful

Flickr; all the worlds pictures/albums universally accessible

Twitter; all the worlds presence and thought(s) instantaneously accessible

...and we could go on and on...similarities are pretty clear though! Maybe Bill Gates was kinda right when he said; Information at your fingertips ...Mmmmmm

E*TRADE Singing Baby

2009-03-20T21:07:00.002+02:00

This is one of the funniest commercials I've ever seen...brilliant! (Note: I'll be blogging on e*Trade's online campaigning model using this baby)

Copy and pasting from your website...

2009-03-06T08:16:00.003+02:00

Bumped into this very very interesting company - try it out - I like the positives (see below)...but it does not provide any indication that the user will know you are tracking their copy/paste activity. It would also be great if there was a "Trace icon/indicator" indicating that the content you're consuming on a blog or website has been copied - but I guess the link back to the original url would be a manner of achieving this. (But, what if I move content around via my CMS and the url's change? Don't think Tracer will be able to track that...if they did...it would be an awesome way to create a hyperlink tracer for hyperlinks - ha! Ok, enough!) This may be a tool that the intellectual property rights folks will love...and could be a great way to introduce the concept of "data tagging and following"...similar to a twitter/facebook following...not just a social graph...maybe a "data graph" also? Mmmm

Anyway - check out the tool...great SEO value props!

Here's their pitch;

WHAT IS TRACER

Each time a user highlights or copies text or images from your site Tracer records the user action, and automatically adds a link back to the original content when it is pasted. Now, you can see what is being copied from your site and benefit from the additional traffic generated by each copy.

KEY BENEFITS

Generate more visits and page views
Measure and understand user engagement
Get credit for your content when it is copied
Improve your search engine ranking

Amazon, Kindle 2 Jeff's take on the world...

2009-03-04T01:33:00.004+02:00

Besides dying to get the new Kindle...I've always admired Amazon.com and their comeback is impressive (stock jumped from 40.47 Dec 1st '08 to peak at 66.70 in Feb '09 - keeping steady in the 60's even though everything else crumbles around it)...this interview with Charlie Rose is verbose and so interesting! Enjoy!

FYI: I think the Kindle is the personification of a true long tail & cloud computing device...all books and publications accessible on the Kindle within 60 seconds...whoa! When the display mechanisms evolve we will in time see the Harry Potter interactive newspapers ;-)

Btw: Found this great article opining about Amazon...good read!

An economic pearl harbour - Warren Buffett

2009-03-03T23:57:00.006+02:00

This is a BRILLIANT interview Warren Buffet did on Charlie Rose - very very insightful and provides us with his insights on the current economic crisis. Here is an article re his latest shareholders letter and also the original PDF...which knocked the market down dramatically!

Charlie asks him how we got here and from the 20m 30sec mark in the video he provides some excellent commentary!

All this noise and bailouts always resultants in a discussion about what happens after all this. Warren Buffett says the following; "In poker terms, the Treasury and the Fed have gone "all in." Economic medicine that was previously meted out by the cupful has recently been dispensed by the barrel. These once-unthinkable dosages will almost certainly bring on unwelcome aftereffects. Their precise nature is anyone's guess, though one likely consequence is an onslaught of inflation. Moreover, major industries have become dependent on Federal assistance, and they will be followed by cities and states bearing mind-boggling requests. Weaning these entities from the public teat will be a political challenge. They won't leave willingly."

Interesting times. We discussed this scenario at dinner over the weekend and it's clear that the entire worldwide core financial backbone is being nationalized! The USA Fed chairman says they're not...but how much more funding is really required before the USA government owns all banks, investment houses and car manufacturers? Are they simply acting as investors and JUST bailing out businesses...? Then why cap salaries and dictate generic business terms? - if this is not nationalizing these businesses then we're definitely not in a "recession" either ;-) Here's an interview on Fox news with the author of Freedomnomics about this.

Mind blowing numbers of the day;

Auto makers posted their biggest U.S. sales decline of the now-six-month plunge, as consumers with record-low confidence remained out of showrooms. General Motors Corp. said its U.S. light-vehicle sales fell 53% in February, while Ford Motor Co.'s declined 48% and Chrysler LLC's fell 44%. Japan's Toyota Motor Corp. reported a 40% decline.

Twitter content on Google Search results

2009-03-03T22:00:00.009+02:00

I had the privilege of again meeting with Alec Hogg today from MoneyWeb fame ;-) I always find our conversations an exercise in cross-pollination; in exchange for my limited knowledge of tech, he expounds on economics, finance and the general state of the world union -invaluable!. (Buy his latest awesome book here) As have many execs over the past few months, Alec asked me about Twitter versus Facebook versus MySpace versus every other social networking "thing"... Anyway, due to that conversation I thought I'd blog about Twitter a little...

I picked this up a few days ago and played with it for a couple days before commenting...and...I like it ;-) Not only do you get Google indexed context related to your keyword or search string...you get real-time present activity, via Twitter, related to it also. To enable the Greasemonkey script click here

Twitter has published some commentary on their search plans - check it out here. Quote; "Searching over Twitter messages is like a filter for what is happening right now—it's an interesting look into the real-time thoughts of people and organizations around the world...Twitter Search adds a new layer of relevance" - they mention that more than 90% of users opt to be openly accessible...my advice; careful what you twitter, when you twitter, etc.

(Imagine the trending over time? Imagine injecting that trending into an ad engine? Imagine a future employer able to pick up what you "presence" state of mind is? Imagine a medical and/or general insurance company knowing this? ...mmmm! Reminds me of Ray Kurzweil's Singularity...we're feeding so much of ourselves into the ether...building an understanding of what we are...enabling prediction and ultimately self awareness - ok, enough doom & gloom!)

I'll be commenting some more on realtime data indexing versus/and legacy web content indexing... I see the two as symbiotic...you cannot possibly own a search engine and not expect your users to demand "present time search results".

This is so much more interesting than the whole debate about social networking search engines and the indexing of social graph activity..."yawn" ;-)

Monday 2 Feb '09 was an interesting day...

2009-03-03T01:29:00.008+02:00

Stephen Covey says this about work/life balance; "There are no quick-fixes to achieving work/life balance. Your priorities may change as your circumstances change. Thus, I invite you to consider the things that you value most and allow those to serve as the foundation. Then commit to consistently re-evaluate your current priorities, given your current circumstances and based on what you have identified as your core values. It takes courage, but remember not to trade in what you want most, for what you want now."

I've always been able to wax lyrical responding to the most intricate questions in my professional life...but I find...for the first time ever...difficulty in verbosely responding to the most simple of questions posed at me today.

So many called, emailed, im'd, sms'd asking me how I could do it and why I did it... Well, sometimes when you make a choice...you do so...irrespective of the timing ...or material/career consequence(s)...or emotion...or logic...but rather...you make a choice because you finally wake up to the fact that it is not about you anymore!

Michelle, Bethany and Amber...it was all about me...now it's all about us! And...I choose us! I will never trade in what I want most, for what I want now!

Thank goodness I woke up to this before it was too late!

P.S. Click on Covey's quote above for the excellent post on keeping the balance and check out this previous post re Steve Job's speech...

Tumbling real estate and a resulting great idea!

2009-03-03T00:30:00.004+02:00

Spent the past few days in Umhlanga and did some real-estate scouting - it is absolutely amazing how prices have declined overall! I went online and read the following report released today on realestateweb - check it out "Scary picture of SA property market".

Feels and looks like we're heading for a home loan/bond crunch here in SA 'cause of all the folks who have also collapsed/consolidated a great deal of their debt into their mortgages...assuming their properties would always appreciate. Exactly as what has happened and is happening in the USA.

Did some more reading and found this company online - GOHUD.COM - their idea is smart and capitalizes (excuse the pun) well on the situation.

Here's how it works; HUD Homes are an interesting opportunity for home buyers, and also investors, who want to purchase a home in almost any state across the USA. A "Hud Home" is one that is being sold by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. When someone with an FHA-insured mortgage can’t make the payments, the lender forecloses on the home and HUD takes ownership. It is then offered for sale at market value, based on a recent AS-IS appraisal, meaning, the market value in its current condition. Obviously with the current financial market, the number of available HUD properties has doubled over the last 6 months, and some states have thousands of available properties.

HUD properties are made available in a variety of ways, with an emphasis on “Owner Occupied” purchases that include the “Good Neighbor Next Door” buying opportunities for “Law enforcement officers, pre-Kindergarten through 12th grade teachers and firefighters/emergency medical technicians.” This last group of individuals can get incredible discounts on the purchase of a HUD property. The prices on HUD Homes tend to be very price competitive in the areas where they are located, and each will have an associated Property Condition Report.

When watching the prices on the homes, you might notice a common pattern as a particular home stays on the market. The home will be listed, and be available to “Owner Occupants” … meaning that you must live in the home as your primary residence if you purchase it. If the home is not sold in a week or so, then the status will change to “All Bidders” … meaning that anyone can now bid to purchase the property for any purpose. If the home still does not sell, it is common that the price will then be reduced by a full 10%, and the status will return to “Owner Occupants” again. This process will repeat until the home sells. Owner occupant, all bidders, price reduction … and on and on.

Like I said...smart...and a potential reverse auctioning opportunity here in SA? Maybe across the entire debt spectrum?

Geo Geo Geo...I'm telling you all...GEO!!!

2009-03-03T00:12:00.005+02:00

Most of us in South Africa are familiar with the O'Reilly tech books - they are brilliant but Tim O'Reilly and crew also do these O'Reilly Radar reports - please tag onto them - I highly recommend it... It's the Harvard Business review articles/analysis for the ICT sector ;-)

The one I recently acquired - you can purchase/subscribe online and get them in pdf - deals with the evolution of the GEO web - a preview is downloadable here.

Folks - get it! This is the basis of location based services and geo rendering of location oriented data annotations. I've always said in my pressos that geo is going to be big and those familiarizing themselves, at minimum, will have first mover advantage here in SA!

Excellent blog on Google's various map mashups - click here

Little prediction : GEO mashups will be one of the most sought after deliverables for online web real estate/content end '09 and into 2010. It'll be a niche that mainstream integration players will be able to build businesses around! Check out Google's latlong blog and O'Reilly GEO radar - enjoy!

Free the facts...awesome David Gray!

2009-03-02T23:43:00.004+02:00

If you're into freedom of information and access to information then the following slideshow presentation is an awesome show. David Gray's usage of slides and images is one of the best I've seen...ever! So impressive and clearly articulates his argument and opinion...simple yet jaw dropping!

Click here to check out the video on his website of making better napkin sketches LOL...and also his Flickr location...enjoy - I did!!

Microsoft Surface and more

2009-03-02T22:37:00.006+02:00

I've been watching Microsoft's latest technologies; Microsoft Surface - the applications here are going to be really cool! They refer to "NUI - Natural User Interface"...breaking the paradigm of having to know the keyboard, mouse, icons, etc. - environment within which all things can be physically/virtually interacted with - check out this video of them discussing the NUI (btw: really funny seeing a YouTube video embedded within a Microsoft website!)

Here are some cool videos demonstrating various applications. I showed Bethany and Amber these today and their reaction; Dad, we want one for our room! Started imagining Google Earth/Ocean/Sky on this...2010 kiosks for tourists and locals arriving at the airport and at the stadiums...on my study wall...kitchen counter (built in recipes with social networking links)...imagine a nightclubs dance floor NUI enabled...mmmm! Check out the spherical application - nice - I want Google Earth on there with StreetView!

Ok, more serious and valuable would be the medical/health uses of such an environment! Nevermind the military applications...

Also see the Secondlight project - best described here; "The screen is an LCD that can switch between opaque and transparent, alternating 60 times per second. There are two projectors underneath, each one flickering at 30 times per second. One of the projectors is timed to shine up under the screen when it's opaque, while the other is—yep, you guessed it—timed to shine through when the screen is transparent. Anything held above the screen will show what's being projected by that second projector.The craziest thing about it is that the second projector can actually follow special objects, projecting the runner you see in the first video anywhere the panel goes, and in the appropriate proportion."

The "it" factor for this technology is that it truly places a layer on top of the user usage skills requirement(s)...immersive and virtually real physical manipulation of objects and data is a new paradigm! Remember that Minority Report scene?!

fyi: Buddy of mine went to a bar in Redmond where they've deployed this NUI on the bar counter...result; the counter has been transformed into an interactive liquid/water surface - so you touch it and ripples span across the counter...coolest thing? Drink is placed on the one end...pushed to the other...ripples across...and it stops with a little virtual splash...price tag pops up, contents of the drink displayed and recommendation of what to order next...and a warning that you can only have one more ;)

Then there's Microsoft's SkyDrive - I just signed up for it - pretty neat but lacks so many features that we've seen in products like Novell's iFolder which was released so so many years ago. Also check out the open source project for source code and setting up your own cloud computing storage solution. (Besides all the features of Skydrive...why does Microsoft not learn to use Ajax more on of their web real estate? Argh, frustrating to browse around and having a new full screen refresh...every single click I make!)

Back to reality...

2009-02-21T07:52:00.001+02:00

I've engaged extensively, on the ground, with numerous corporations through too small businesses, brainstorming about their websites and general online presence. I think we've lost our way in the jargon and hype of the web. CMO's and CTO's and CEO's all want to do some social networking marketing campaign...how many times have I heard folks say, "Can you get us into Facebook?" - then I look at their company website that is 5 years old and still only, and exclusively, accessible via Internet Explorer.

Too many of us try to sprint before we've even crawled - so, here's a public cry and plea for all of us to get back to basics ;-)

Here's an offline example;

Met with a bank the other day - they spend more than R2 million just doing aesthetic due diligence and design for a new bank branch..and...that's before breaking ground to lay the foundations of the building!

The branch was being scoped to service approximately 100 customers per day, up to 1000 at peak...per day. The human capital involved in this initial process was approximately 27 people (interior designers, blah blah)...and that's just the start!

I could go on and on...but I'm sure you're starting to understand my point by now.

Note: One of the many people responsible for branding was very very proud of this diligent and costly investment because the bank wanted to ensure their reputation and key brand messages were being projected via this BAM...for a maximum of approx 30,000 individual visitors a month...this was CRITICAL!

So...with all these relevant folks crammed into a beautiful auditorium...projector beaming my laptop screen brightly behind me...I praised them for their wonderful efforts and care that they put into their branch. The next step was going to be fun - contrasting their online real estate with their BAM...

(Btw: Most of the folks in the room wanted to talk about a mobile digital campaign and how we could help them "get into" Facebook)

I had a 7.2mbps 3G connection going (never actually have truly connected at that speed...but doesn't it feel good to see that dark blue glow on your 3G dongle?!!)...launched Firefox and entered their domain name...whilst we waited for their home page to launch...I did the usual presenter tap dancing ;-)

The resultant; their root website page completely rendered after about ONE MINUTE...some of the pages I linked to would not launch certain elements in Firefox, so we switched to IE...deep linked category pages loaded slower than the homepage...information was completely outdated and there were pages that still had the branding/logo they discontinued 2 years ago...nevermind a couple products displayed that is no longer offered.

The branding folks sat smug throughout this until I compared their bank branch facilitating 30,000 clients a month...and the Google Analytics screen displaying that they had over 260,000 unique vistors attempting to access their website in the last month.

We had a George Bush moment; Shock and Awe...

So, let's get back to doing first things first... (Btw: I believe that there is a MASSIVE opportunity for companies that will simply focus on website optimization - this is the biggest hurdle in regards to overall online readiness in South Africa -

Here's brief synopsis of basic and elementary laws to ensure you have landing pages that convert and we all enjoy visiting your sites - back to basics folks;

1. Simplicity

Google pioneered this better than anyone else and it is amazing how many of their competitors just don't get it. Besides their competition not getting it, you can definitely pick up on this...make you web pages simple and "clean"!

It is amazing how many corporations try to squeeze as many applets, animations, scrollers, etc. possible above and below the fold. Please remove it all and only present information as per the category or product. WE DO NOT WANT TO SEE ANYTHING ELSE!

2. Speed

How many blue chip companies actually use their own websites? Well, if they did...there is absolutely no way they would accept the retardation of the landing page load times...much less the consumer.

3. Relevance

*Present information relevant to the search I did on a third party search engine or the one you have on your website
*Present information relevant to the link description I clicked on - know and understand where I'm coming from
*Present information relevant on the deep linked landing page and don't show me anything else
*Present ads and calls to action relevant to the subject matter, content category, product, etc. - there are just too many ads regarding tummy fat and great abs, flicking away merrily, when I'm reading about pregnancy tests - geez!
*Remember me and what I did the last time I was here/there!

4. Verbosity

*Show me *everything* relevant to what I'm looking for
*Use video
*Here's an example that I mentioned in a previous post - Amazon's Kindle product page

5. Agility

*The ability to launch new web content within minutes - opportunity loss especially when campaigning against breaking news infliction points
*Enhancing/replacing your CMS system and authorization procedures to ensure it doesn't take a month to make a change on the site cause the content management system is so complex/proprietary and/or Joe Blogs went on leave...
*This is about technology, people and process all being aligned and streamlined

6. Properly configured tracking and reporting tools

*Use Google Analytics - it's free!
*Configure it properly and apply best practises
*Sitemaps and Sitelinks properly configured and submitted?

7. Crystal clear and measurable call to action(s) - (commerce enabled and tightly coupled to 6.)

I'll talk about this point in more detail later ;-)

Gotogo

...stuff that truly matters...

2009-02-20T20:03:00.003+02:00

Tonight I was sitting on the patio and heard Michelle correcting Amber for doing something...Amber got so sad...started crying and ran into the room...curled up, tightly hugging Milo (her favourite teddy), I found her sobbing on the top bed of the double bunker.

I whispered in her ear, a little silly daddy/daughter joke...the tears stopped. I then tickled her a little in her neck...she tried holding it back but out came that familiar signature "Amber giggle". I made Milo walk around and tell her something that finally made that silly Amber smile dawn on her face.

She was over the sadness and now back to being bubbly and crazy and...well...being Amber.

Before I left the room I hugged her and kissed her neck...she cringed away, giggling, cause she's so ticklish there... I looked her in the eye, asked her if she was now ok...she nodded, eyes still brimming and moist with tears shed, and again that silly smile emerged.

Then I turned to leave the room...but her little hand grabbed my shoulder...and what happened was something that may seem so insignificant...so nothing...so stupid...so immaterial;

Turned and leaned my chest against the upper bed's rail... Amber cupped my face with her tiny hands...brought her face right up close to mine...and she said in the most mature and sincere manner and tone, "Daddy, I like it so much when you make me happy and smile when I am sad"...then gave me a pouted...smuggy and lippy...kiss...and then grabbed my head and hugged it so tightly...and when done she just immediately focused all her attention back onto Milo the bear.

Maybe I sound pathetic... but it was a moment that as her daddy...I will never ever forget...ever!

I love you Amber...and...if you only knew how much I like it when you make me happy and smile when daddy is sad ;-)

...stuff that truly matters!

New Google Earth 5.0 with Ocean layering...

2009-02-03T18:19:00.003+02:00

Just too kewl ;-) Click here to check out the official blog posting which describes it all - 3D Mars is just wrong :) Also click here for the latlong blog posting re the features...

'You've got to find what you love'

2009-01-31T11:11:00.004+02:00

Steve Jobs is awesome! Here's the video footage of the speech "Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish" - click here for transcript

This speech really inspires me whenever I read it - gives some perspective each time.

Caught up on some news regarding Steve Jobs this morning and found this article displaying how visionary he is and how accurate his predictions have been...as per this Rolling Stone Magazine article.

Interesting to see what he says about the music industry in Dec 2003 and how things have evolved to date.

I don't completely agree with his take on intellectual property protectionism...but his explanation re theft is neat...and the underlying strategy behind the success of the iPod imho ;-) Here is one of his answers from the Rolling Stone Magazine article; "...If copyright dies, if patents die, if the protection of intellectual property is eroded, then people will stop investing. That hurts everyone. People need to have the incentive that if they invest and succeed, they can make a fair profit. Otherwise they'll stop investing. But on another level entirely, it's just wrong to steal. Or, let's put it another way: it is corrosive to one's character to steal. We want to provide a legal alternative. And we want to make it so compelling that all those people out there who really want to be honest, and really don't want to steal, but haven't had a choice if they wanted to get their music online, will now have a choice. And we think over time, most people stealing music will choose not to if a fair and reasonable alternative is presented to them. We are optimists. We always have been."

Get well soon Steve Jobs :)

P.S.

The iPhone now has 1.1 percent marketshare of the entire global mobile phone market. In 2008 Apple sold 13.7 million iPhone 3G units - on par with HTC and slightly ahead of Sharp.

Nokia is the market leader with 38.6 percent market share

Motorola's second at 8.3 percent (and falling)

Come back to South Africa!!!!!

2009-01-27T17:43:00.004+02:00

So many South Africans have been emailing me about coming back home ;-) Viva credit crunch!! We want you back folks...here's the website I've been mentioning - check it out

Brilliant website design...

2009-01-26T10:33:00.006+02:00

We're always talking about the principles of being online and the best practises. I'll be blogging about the 5 laws of good website real estate...soon... (i.e. Speed, Simplicity, Relevance, Verbosity, & Agility).

But, I just had to share this one particular landing page that Amazon has done for the Kindle - check it out at http://www.amazon.com/kindle

This is an amazing product review landing page - and complies to every single one of the 5 laws...and Amazon's a proven website/model!

No uncessary banners and animation...no preloading flash...and everything you would want to know about the product...simple, clean...verbose...AWESOME! Let's learn from the best folks!!

Stuff...

2009-01-25T19:15:00.005+02:00

So...this is the "stuff" on my mind at the moment and "stuff" I'll be blogging about;

* Geospatial web

* -Real time- enterprises

* True "cloud computing" applications and businesses (models)

* The elastic cloud

* Future of the visual web - new data to human and data to data interaction methods coming up...

* New energy sources - lots has happened since I last blogged about renewable energy; check it out

* Credit crunch - where to from here and the net result is the socializing of the entire global financial backbone and a couple of the largest car manufacturers... (Like the Premiere League being sold out to oil money magnates since the West and the Russians are crunched - Ha!)

* Great websites and simple principles to ensure an awesome web property - why do keep getting this wrong here in SA?

* 2010 World Cup - if I had the time to initiate these simple startups ;-)

* What happens when you have not flown a microlight in a while...and then you do ;-o

* Amazon.com amazed me from the day it IPO'd - Dave Nelson my dearest friend...we bet on the share price of Yahoo! versus Amazon.com...you owe me so huge ;-) Remember when I was telling everyone that Jeff wasn't on about selling books...the presentation I did in 2000; "The business you are in, is not necessarily the business you'll be in tomorrow"...LOL, dreamy!!

* Update on the diving side of life - close encounter with 50 million years of evolution versus NONE (me)

* Is it going to be the network carrier or the next gen WASPS or the handset manufacturers or the banks or the pre-pay folks or the ISV's or just little Joe Bloggs...that'll create the real mobile killer data app?

* Telepresence + verbose telemetry + biokinetics + the singularity...dreamy :)

* Starting a MPL to PPL grants fund for underprivileged kids in 2009 - lets make them fly to give them a different perspective!

P.S. Started reading this book since watching Obama and listening to everyone talk about Martin Luther King jr...and not knowing too much about the man - on pg 73 right now and it's got me!

This should keep me blogging for a while...

2009 starts...

2009-01-25T19:01:00.002+02:00

2008 got really busy and I decided to take my blog offline cause I just could not find the time to publish new "stuff". I'm starting 2009...well, from hereon...with a commitment to post something at least once a week. Happy belated new year everyone ;-)

Ok ok ok ok....... ;)

2008-08-07T19:25:00.002+02:00

Hi there - I have received soooooo many emails from folks asking if I'm still alive...when I'm blogging again...or that my blog sucks 'cause it's out of date - enough already!! I'll start posting again ASAP - starting this weekend. It's just been absolutely manic over here...BUT SO MUCH FUN! Hang in there folks ;)

2010 FIFA World Cup FNB TV Commercial

2008-07-18T18:49:00.001+02:00

I love this commercial...GO SOUTH AFRICA!!!

Awesome South African Brand Ad

2008-06-23T17:44:00.001+02:00

I love this...especially the end; "I don't give a telefunken" - nice ;)

Euro 2008 geo rendered...

2008-06-05T02:13:00.003+02:00

Click here and launch the Euro 2008 soccer matches, stadiums, cities, pubs, etc. into a map mashup - enjoy! (broadband connection recommended)

Google Android demo...

2008-06-05T01:57:00.002+02:00

I'm always being asked about Android and what it'll be able to do...well, check it out ;) [click here for the official Google I/O keynote video]

Giving crude at $200 a barrel the finger... ;)

2008-06-05T01:28:00.005+02:00

Aptera...some really kewl stats...man I like this!!!!

300 miles to the gallon
Top speed above 85mph
0-60mph in less than 10 seconds
Wired Mag article on the car - good read
Costs for re-charge is $1-$2 per night - at California energy rates
Two models; all electric ($26,900) and hybrid ($29,900)
Bummer...only for sale in California right now!
Aptera is greek for "wingless flight"
Youtube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/apteramotors
Kewl launch video - click here
More FAQ's

Aptera - 300 miles to one gallon!!!!!

2008-06-05T01:23:00.002+02:00

I want two of these ;) Really awesome - I've bumped into these guys online and I'm really blown away - WOW!

Holographics...

2008-06-03T19:45:00.001+02:00

So this is something that I believe will be in common use within the next 5-8 years. I've been dredging the USA patent database via Google's patent search and I'm still yet to find someone that has a patent related to the control of "holographic presence"... similar to instant messaging we will need controls to protect our actual physical presence in a remote location... More on this later - boarding a plane ;)

Step aside Jetman...

2008-05-28T12:46:00.002+02:00

What human transportation may look like one day...fascinating...the form factor is crude right now...imagine wearable transportation...we'd be no different from insects with fold-up wings - Yes, Graeme...you can have it in pink ;) Click here for the complete slideshow and script.

Swiss Rocket Man - Yves Rossy

2008-05-18T19:25:00.001+02:00

Jetman...soon we'll all be able to fly ;)

2008-05-18T19:16:00.005+02:00

I saw this guy on SkyNews actually flying with several jets attached to a carbon fibre wing...strapped on his back. Here's the story Wired wrote about him...awesome!! CNet published a slideshow of pics - click here to check it out

The Architecture of Participation

2008-05-18T18:58:00.004+02:00

Tim O'Reilly is a very very interesting character (I'm sure most of you techs out there know about the O'Reilly books) and I've always followed his talk/speeches whenever they're published. I really enjoy his blog and this recent Web 2.0 talk is pretty insightful. Enjoy ;)

South Africa in Google Earth

2008-05-13T18:47:00.004+02:00

Click on the image above and check out the South Africa tourism layers you can view within Google Earth. The folks over at Quirk really did a good job - well done Rob!!

There are two very useful videos to watch - click here

General interesting snippets

2008-05-08T00:58:00.010+02:00

Bat-like robot;

* CNET report : The U.S. Army wants a 6-inch spy plane that will gather data on sights, sounds, and smells in urban combat areas. It has given the University of Michigan's College of Engineering $10 million and five years to help make "the bat" plane happen.
Researchers plan to equip the plane with tiny cameras for stereo vision, directional microphones, and devices that detect nuclear radiation and poisonous gas.
Credit: Eric Maslowski, research computer specialist, University of Michigan 3D Lab

* Grand Theft Auto 4 scores over $500m in its' first week of launch! Whoa! Wired has a compiled a list of all the milestones reached by this new title - check it out here

* Want to see what the Nintendo Wii remote looks like inside? Click here

* HTC innovates - attack on the iPhone? mmmmm!

* Wired on the history of the invention of the calculator - very interesting!

* Brady Barr gets bitten by a giant python after attempting to restrain it. Check it out!

Myanmar disaster

2008-05-08T00:49:00.003+02:00

Just read reports online that they expect the death toll to reach 100,000 - this is unbelievable! Please click here if you want to help out. Watch some of the CNN iReport amateur videos here. If you want to load a KML Layer for Google Earth related to this - click here or just check out the map of the area - click here.

Earth 4.3 is here ;)

2008-05-08T00:33:00.003+02:00

Google Earth 4.3 released this week - click here for details on the new features. Also click here for the official new features video... nice!

Driving directions with Street View on Google Maps

2008-05-08T00:23:00.002+02:00

I demo'd this for the first time to an audience of 650 kids at a private school today - just blew everyone away! Streetview was always so cool (if you don't know what Google StreetView is, click here...but this just takes it to another level - AWESOME! (click here for an example of driving directions done in Google Maps with StreetView)

Dahab

2008-05-07T23:51:00.005+02:00

Below are pics we took of The Blue Hole diving spot - those structures you see are little restaurants/shops where you stop and kit up. This was the first time we've ever done a simply-walk-into-the-ocean dive...unbelievable! Wish we had taken more pics...and underwater ones - next time ;) Note: Dahab's Blue Hole is rated to be in the top 20 dive spots on the planet...we agree!Below is a pic of me standing in front of those structures - notice all the dive gear scattered out to dry...we wanna go back already!!

The contrast of the Sinai desert sand and rock spilling into turqoise ocean reefs is stunning! See below - (p.s. Sorry, this was a disposable underwater camera...)

Cairo public transportation

2008-05-07T23:20:00.006+02:00

I've been to Egypt many times now and I just love catching a ride in one of those beaten up fiat cabs. Took this pic of the dashboard inside the one we caught last week when we landed... Ha!(The person I was with walked into a culture shock of note but was a great sport... Awesome trip and we HIGHLY recommend diving the Red Sea! YES, that's why I haven't been posting on my blog recently!)

Btw: I love the new lighting system they've implemented at OR Tambo Intl Airport - check the pic below... I always used to struggle so much finding a parking spot, upper or lower level, and these sparkling red (occupied) and green (available) LED's are absolutely awesome - haven't seen this implemented before...thanks ACSA! As you pull halfway into the open bay, the light changes from green to red...hey, so these subtle things do it for me ;)

Welcome to Eskom's well hidden Solar incentive program

2008-04-22T17:58:00.003+02:00

Why do they make this so hard to find?! Anyway, for those of you that don't know, Eskom has launched a rebate programme for purchasing a solar powered geyser...to get all of us of our butts and minimizing our carbon/energy footprints; They call the overall gig "Demand Side Management".

The initiative currently has five programmes;

Solar Water Heating; I really like this one cause I'm a solar fan but it can be the sales process, actual rebate scheme and certified supplier listings makes it all a little tricky. I'm actually engaging in the programme to purchase one of these - will keep you posted - seeing on of the suppliers this week.

The rebates are approximately 10% of overall costs which varies between R12,000 and R28,000. Click here for the approved suppliers, the costs and rebate outline.

Note: You don't get the rebate - the supplier has to claim it back - you just get it discounted from the overall invoiced price. i.e. "The supplier has to have complete documentation to claim the incentive amount back, thus discounting your price."

We're getting there people...one small step in the right direction here ;) But, as those of you that read these blog postings know, I'd much prefer Eskom stepped aside and government just introduced a carbon tax rebate scheme...and get out the way for private industry to engage the consumers.

Residential Load Management - this one is scary - the site says; "How does it work?
A small control unit (relay) is installed in the home of the customer. This unit will switch off the supply to the geyser during peak demand periods for a predetermined period. Groups of geysers and individual geysers will be controlled and monitored centrally from the local Municipal Energy Centre by means of a radio or/and ripple based communication system. The Centre will also take care of all customer queries." - lovely... device installed in my home that allows government to control what gets energy...and what does not...freaky!

These others I'm not really that interested in;

Energy Efficient Motors
CFL Exchange - free bulb exchange for certain towns
Power Alert

Google again ;)

2008-04-22T15:21:00.002+02:00

Brand powerhouses
R	Brand	Value ($B)
1	Google	$86.1bn
2	GE	71.4
3	Microsoft	70.9
4	Coca-Cola	58.2
5	China Mobile	57.2
6	IBM	55.3
7	Apple	55.2
8	McDonald's	49.5
9	Nokia	44.0
10	Marlboro	37.3
Source: Millward Brown Optimor

LOL...

2008-04-17T11:58:00.003+02:00

BLASPHEMY...!!!

Hanging with Jake White

2008-04-17T11:40:00.002+02:00

I've been working with Jake on a couple things - amazing man and a privilege to be engaging him. Asked Trish to take this pic in our last meeting. Note to all English rugby hooligans; The two rugby balls in front of us : on the left is the actual ball used during the world cup game in which we whipped England 33-0 and the ball on the right is the actual one used during the world cup final...in which we AGAIN beat England ;)

Blackouts (aka Load Shedding) continue...

2008-04-17T11:23:00.003+02:00

Took this pic using my blackberry - sushi bar in Sandton at 1:30pm - the entire malls' lights went out. The first time I've been in a mall during a blackout and it's an eerie experience when all the electrified mechanics and processes suddenly stop - we live in a world with an immense amount of continual electrically engineered ambient noise! I could hear someone laugh two floors below... There were areas of the mall that we just couldn't walk through because the airflow was controlled by automated air-cons...unbearable smells!! This cannot possibly continue for another 5 years...and I think everyone has forgotten that we consume more electricity during winter - which we're about to enter... I expect the load on our national grid will be too much this season and expect stories of people freezing to death...and...load shedding that's a great deal more extenive and lengthy May through till early September! I am really worried about winter this year!!

Pray tell the value of a hand...

2008-04-17T11:16:00.005+02:00

Roberto, my buddy, my friend...here it is - The story I'm sticking to is that I had a glass in my hand and slipped...but there is someone out there that knows the true story - ha! Funny now...but it wasn't so on Saturday night! Six stitches later I am continuously being reminded of the value of my right hand. The human body is such an amazing thing - I've watched my wound slowly heal...restoring itself - healing is such an amazing process and awesome capability our bodies have. Let me stop before you all think I'm so weird ;) Anyway...I was supposed to going to this horrible looking ski resort in Austria...Google annual ski trip...so much for that now - ARGH!!!

That 702 Show with Jenny

2008-04-17T11:03:00.003+02:00

Jenny interviewed me for an hour...had fun and we were flooded with callers and sms's - click here for the mp3 podcast. I decided to grab her during this snapping...thank goodness they published this one ;) Yes, I am a fan!! I feel like I've known Jenny since I've known myself - love her voice and when I was living in the USA her voice made me miss SA so much.

Ultimate Employees

2008-04-11T16:20:00.003+02:00

I am often asked about my opinion re the best employee and I always respond with the following; I choose blind passion, a pinch of humility, absolute integrity and an insanely positive attitude...over any level competency! Why would I appoint a Phd graduate who lacks in these other areas?! Give me a person or team that is able to just about read or write yet has those attributes...and I'll conquer anyone and achieve anything...and love doing it!