WOW! It’s been a crazy few weeks. Beginning of this month we moved into new offices on Long Street, then we had our BWCOM quarterly report back to Media24 and they are over the moon with us and finally yesterday - I received the most exciting news!
I have been nominated for ICT Young Entrepreneur of Africa 2008. Now to even be nominated is a great honour for me seeing as last years winner of the award is internationally renown Vinny Lingham.
ForgeAhead, our Partners and Stakeholders, congratulates you for being nominated for the 2008 African ICT Achievers Awards. ForgeAhead is celebrating the 10th Anniversary for the African ICT Achievers Awards programme…
.. You have been nominated in the following category: Top ICT Young Entrepreneur in Africa.
Got a few interviews coming up later this year to determine the final list of nominees and then to Jozi for the ceremony. Hold thumbs!
My first Tech Leader post is up - Twitter downtime - Could Google help Twitter scale? - read the full article here.
I had a thought on Twitter a few days ago: Could a Google acquisition of Twitter help the service scale? Or is it not an infrastructure issue but more a platform issue? Twitter has suffered from serious downtime over the last few weeks, trying to keep their service live during peak usage periods. They managed a 97% uptime during the WWDC keynote, which is’good’ by Twitters standards.
Would a Google acquisition be healthy for Twitter? One can’t help but to think about what has happened to other startups gobbled up by the search giant. Since the acquisition of similar life streaming service Jaiku, the community has suffered from negligence on Google’s behalf, much like the Dodgeball acquisition, an acquisition Google made in 2005 and never really did anything with. Some Jaiku users have even revolted and moved over to Twitter. Google’s strategy to gobble up small startups and then do nothing with them is an interesting one.
It’s been a good few weeks regarding personal and Blueworld press - here’s a list of press from our Blueworld mobile wap site launch and other snippets of press.
allAfrica.com: South Africa: Blueworld Launches Mobile Platform
SA networking site on the go: Sci-Tech: News
Blueworld launches mobile platform
ITWeb :Who’s who in the Web 2.0 Zoo?
Blueworld: South Africa’s Social Network | White African
Here’s the clip of the Heavy Chefs session two weeks ago featuring myself and Eric Edelstein. Thanks again to Fred, Mike and the rest of the Ideate/WWC guys for considering me for the talk.
Really enjoying Friend Feed and the services they allow you to aggregate - subscribe to my friend feed
I’m aggregating my shared items on google reader, my tweets, delicious bookmarks, youtube favourites, diggs and a few others.
Just took collection of my 16gb iPhone. “Why not wait for iPhone2!?!?” - I hear you ask - Well, it’s gonna be crazy expensive and I got a great deal with the 16gb.
Hard work pays off and I’ve been spoiling myself lately with new toys.
Here’s the iPhone on my desk
3G iPhone fan
If you follow me on twitter you might know about this already - I got myself a new set of wheels - Astra OPC Turbo . Stock standard the car pushes out 182 KWs and 365 NM of torque. 18′ wheels and full body kit also standard.. She’s a dream to drive each day!!
Check out my cyber garage profile on Zoopedup - I got the plate to match ZOOPDUP-WP
Here’s some pics
I’m speaking tomorrow at the Heavy Chefs event with serial entrepreneur Eric Edelstein. I will be talking about our experiences with Blueworld - marketing the networks, best practises we found, user experience enhancement, aggregating content from vottle and 24, the 24.com acquisition and some future prospects and projects.
From the HeavyChefs blog
Great news (although a little late!) This month’s Heavy Chef Session has been announced, with eminent speakers Eric Edelstein and Charl Norman to kick off a new series entitled ‘Netrepeneurs’. The brilliant news is that Play.24.com has agreed to sponsor the event with a film crew.
This is particularly exciting because we’ve noticed that a large portion of our audience is outside of South Africa, where most of the Sessions are held. Now, our European and US readers can get in on the action and view some of the highlights of the monthly presentations.
Read more about the event here.
Bandwidth Blog posted breaking news today about the Afrigator beta 2 launch. CEO Justin Hartman was kind enough to give us the scoop. Congrats once again to the entire team - Mark, Stii, Justin and Mike. Read it here
I’m hosting two events next week Saturday - Early in the morning Zoopedup.com car club will be gathering at DynoTech dyno tuning centre to run their cars on the dynometer and measure their power on the wheels - Now thats niche! (; You can check out more details and RSVP on Facebook.
Then later in the evening I’m hosting a party at Townsquare. I do this every second month with my brother in a trendy nightclub in Somerset West called Townsquare Fusion bar. Facebook RSVP details here.
