A CAPTCHA is a type of challenge-response test used in computing to ensure that the response is not generated by a computer. The process usually involves one computer (a server) asking a user to complete a simple test which the computer is able to generate and grade. Because other computers are unable to solve the CAPTCHA, any user entering a correct solution is presumed to be human. (via Wikipedia)

I really do consider myself an intelligent human being yet despite my own personal beliefs other websites simply don’t agree. For a long time I’ve struggled with CAPTCHA’s implemented on websites. Either I’m really dumb or the technology is flawed – I lean towards to later.

Let’s look at my latest example. Last night I went to Register.com to look for available domain names. Now I normally use GoDaddy for domain name squatting hunting but alas the last few days their search results have not been working properly so I decided to use the other giant.

When I tried to access the WHOIS details for a particular domain I was presented with a CAPTCHA – I guess in an effort to determine if I was a robot or a real human being – but after twenty unsuccessful attempts I simply had to give up the challenge-response test and succumb to the notion that I must be a robot/spammer/computer and not human after all.

After the first ten or so failures I decided to screenshot all my responses to the CAPTCHA images presented to me because I have to prove to myself that I am not a robot by getting your help on the matter. Here are my results.

Please can someone tell me where I went wrong…….?

The net-result is that Register.com will not be seeing any of my money any time soon and I can’t tell you how often this exact thing happens with CAPTCHA. I realise why a site like Register.com uses it, GoDaddy uses it too, but surely it could be easier for real people to pass the challenge-response test?

In 2005 the W3C Working Group wrote a paper on the Inaccessibility of CAPTCHA and there were some interesting findings. Most importantly they discovered that many of the CAPTCHA systems can be defeated by computers with between 88% and 100% accuracy and that all CAPTCHA effectively does is give site owners a false sense of security.

So if you implement a CAPTCHA system and are only able to achieve at best a 12% success rate in avoiding abuse of your system, then surely it’s time to implement other human verification methods?

Herewith my reponse. Let me know what you think about it.

Dear Monique

Someone sent me the link to an article you wrote on 8 June titled “Social media: Is it worth it?” (http://gatorurl.com/qmi3mg). Let me begin by saying that while I see your view-point regarding big social media sites such as Twitter & Facebook being unable to monetise their websites and become profitable I strongly disagree with most of the remaining article.

Let me disseminate some of your statements and highlight my perspective on the issues you raise.

But somehow I have difficulty accepting Powell’s suggestions: how many microcelebrity’s are there? Does it not come down more to the year you were born in, your culture, your history and being dealt the right hand at the right time, as Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers illustrates?

I too have read Gladwell’s Outliers and agree with everything he wrote in the book. I am a strong believer in the principle’s of the year you were born in, your culture, your history and more importantly the 10,000 hour rule but I struggle to see the relevance in the context of your article. If you look at Evan Williams, Mark Zuckerberg and Biz Stone you’ll see that they all form part of the culture that defines Outliers and I’m pretty sure we’ll find that each one of them have been granted extraordinary opportunities that have helped define their individual, personal success.

How much value can there be in a service that spews out so much information that if you have prolific tweeters and many follows on your profile you see hardly any of their entries?

Value is in the eye of the beholder but from my personal experience this prolific information has helped determine a new way to spread information that is both useful, relevant and real-time. There is no other platform in the world that really highlights how real-time interaction can change perceptions, influence brands and drive revenue than Twitter does. Even Google is now trying to look at how they can plug into the real-time data that is Twitter.

Social media firm Facebook is yet to make a profit. It failed to deliver on Reed’s promise for Cope. Cope’s Facebook group had over 20 000 members before the elections, but only managed to get 7% of the vote.

This statement is laughable and taken completely out of context and I find it quite sad that you’d even try to relate a Facebook groups membership directly to COPE’s inability to obtain more than 7% of the vote. While COPE’s Facebook group may have attracted 20,000 members you failed to contextualise that COPE entered the political sphere with a bang and created a new sense of hope for voters in South Africa who were fed up with the ANC’s inability to deliver on their promises. However, by the time election day came round COPE’s decisions and actions started to highlight their flaws in their initial strategy. While 20,000 members may have supported them on a Facebook group what isn’t clear is just how many lost confidence as and when COPE started to lose support.

By contrast, the DA’s social media strategy was very aggressive and molded off the Obama election campaign and they had a very successful voting day which won them the Western Cape. The DA group on Facebook only has 25,000 members and Reed’s promise may have delivered for them because their message never changed along the way. It just interests me how you chose to highlight how Reed’s promise and Facebook failed to deliver for COPE but at the same time ignored the effect this may (or may not) have had on the DA.

I am yet to meet or hear of a South African who has used social media to make money, influence people or change their career. If you know of any Saffers who have, share your story below…

Your lack of understanding and knowledge in social media is clear to me when you make such a sweeping statement to an audience (Moneyweb readers) that is struggling to come to terms with how social media can benefit them. I run a very successful company that has been built entirely on the ability to use social media to help grow our business. We use no traditional mediums to market and grow our company yet despite this we managed to take a garage startup to part-acquisition when MIH Print Africa, a division of Naspers, bought into our company.

Then let’s look at how Storm Hoek wines (www.stormhoek.co.za) used only social media to market and promote their brand. They targeted bloggers and social media platforms to promote their wines and had massive success along the way. They export wine all over the world.

The list goes on and I can write a book on the amount of people, in South Africa, that have used social media to grow businesses, influence other people and change their career path. I myself used my blog to get a new job which would ultimately set me on a course to start Afrigator.

I would, in all honesty, re-consider your initial approach of this article and look to write a more detailed one that includes some basic research and perhaps trying to explore how South African’s are using the medium successfully. Your readers deserve as much.

I plan on doing quite a detailed blog post reviewing the phone and sharing my experiences but for now I thought I’d share the unboxing pics I took. You can view the full set of pics on Flickr over here.

What I will do is give you my initial thoughts which are mostly positive. The Android interface is super sexy and very intuative and for the most part is pretty damn stable. I’ve only experienced one or two freeze ups on some applications but I think that is application specific.

The major problem for me so far is the fact that the Android Marketplace (think Apple’s App Store for the iPhone) is not going to be available in South Africa. I have contacted the guys at Leaf to get more details and once I get an official response I’ll add that to my conclusive review of the phone. The Android Market place is a key element to extending an Android phone and considering the phone will retail for around R8,200 there has to be something to replace it else I’m not sure it’s worth it.

That said, I’ve already played around with Android mobile application development and Afrigator now has a Gatorpeeps Android application which you can download over here. You can see screenshots of the application in action and it was fun learning to do this.

I’ve still got the phone for about another week so I’m going to test it extensively and hopefully my full review will be an unbiased look at how the phone compares to others in the market.

Today I stumbled across an amazing initiative called GivenGain which is run by a bunch of South Africans. Here’s a quick excerpt from their About page.

We call our service GivenGain because we believe that we are rich only through what we give, and poor only through what we refuse and keep.

GivenGain has an established reputation as a service provider to the non-profit sector. We provide a web-based platform to non-profit and support-based organizations with a complete electronic payment, donor management, online publishing, and communication solution.

We have offices in London (UK), Stellenbosch (South Africa), and further represented by partners across the world.

Why this site has interested me considerably is largely due to the fact that fund-raising online is a model that doesn’t really generate that much cash for the organisations in question. Well not in South Africa that is. Unlike other initiatives GivenGain is a model that appears to be working very successfully.

According to the site they’ve generated a total of $37,5 million donated by more than 32,000 individuals and this has directly benefited 1,626 projects. This is stagerring if you think about. It means that on average each individual donates $1,143 and each non-profit project receives $23,118. Granted this is an average and others have donated more/less while other projects have benefited more than others but it’s a massive average at that.

The team behind this initiative deserve to be commended. More often than not people in this industry only ever focus on the players who make the most noise but these giants in the online space are not only doing a whole lot more but making a success of it at the same time.

Vodacom, if you’re listening, I want to make it abundantly clear that I will not, under any circumstances, turn down an HTC Magic from you. Seriously though, since I found out Vodacom were bringing the HTC Magic to South Africa I’ve been scampering around trying to get my hands on one.

I’ve been an iPhone owner since January 2008 and this is by far the longest I’ve ever kept a phone without feeling the need for a replacement. Over the last 16 months I’ve written extensively about my experiences around being an iPhone user and rightly so – it’s the single biggest mobile device to hit the world since say… the Android OS.

While I still love my iPhone it’s time to part ways and the Android operating system has had me excited since it was announced. I doubt the Magic is really the iPhone killer but it’s clear that Android devices are going to get better and smarter as the technology and OS evolve.

Yesterday evening I was listening to the latest ZA Tech Podcast, aptly titled Paranoid Android, where Toby Shapshak takes us through some of the coolness that is the HTC Magic and now I’m even more convinced I need one seeing as my life literally revolves around Google Apps.

Thanks also to Duncan McLeod who mentioned a really cool email client called Postbox which I have duly installed and am now running on my Mac. Since I only use Google Apps for all my email I’ve found email clients (including Apple Mail) to be clunky and generally very slow with the Google IMAP servers however Postbox is not only fast but looks and functions great. Think of tabbed browsing for email and you’ll get an idea as to what Postbox can offer.

On a very amusing sidenote Toby and Simon Dingle claim that I made them swear during the podcast and you’ll see what they mean at around 11:00 minutes in the show. These guys had me in stitches and I’m pleased that I cracked a cool mention on the show.

Lagos is an adventure that I maintain any African should experience at least once in their lifetime. Lagos reminds me of one really big township and it has a real sense of adventure about it. This photo was taken while driving and depicts a typical scene of what street life is like in Nigeria. You can buy anything from vegetables to recharge vouchers for your mobile phone and on the streets everything is dirt cheap. I have to admit it’s not a city that one really wants to walk around in by oneself but if you’re with a local it’s pretty safe to do so.

Over the coming days/weeks I’m going to be posting a series of photos I took while I spent some time in Lagos. I know that everything in Lagos was an experience to me and I hope that some of the photos will help depict that experience to you.

While this blog has been a lot about my good news lately, today it’s a lot about my bad. If you’ve been reading my blog then you’d know I was chosen as a nominee in the Men’s Health Best Man Awards 2009 and last week I received an update to inform me that I was not chosen as one of the three finalists. Congratulations though to Vinny Lingham who did make it as a finalist in another category and I wish him all the best because he deserves it!

To be honest I’m not disappointed about not being a finalist because if you look at who else was nominated in my category then you’ll understand why I was flattered to even be considered in the first place. I was expecting a rejection email and as such the nomination is going to make a great addition to my CV.

The second rejection I received last night and this one has been bitterly disappointing. About two months back I applied for a TED Fellowship and despite being extremely confident that I’d crack it I didn’t quite make the grade. Herewith an excerpt from said rejection email.

The response to the new Fellows program has been exceptional – far greater than we could have imagined – and winnowing down the application pool was a formidable task. Unfortunately, due the to extraordinary qualifications of all of our applicants, we are unable to offer you a Fellowship for TEDGlobal 2009.

If any of you have ever applied to be a TED Fellow you’ll know just how strenuous the application process is. To apply you need to complete an application by answering various questions that try to gain insight into how you tick as a human being and then you have to get references to fill in referee forms on your behalf. It’s kind of like writing your year-end exam only much tougher!

It took me over two weeks to complete my answers to the questions and in it I told TED stuff that only my family know. I really shared every inner-most secret in the hope that doing so would get me a seat at the conference.

The anticipation in waiting for an answer was the real killer though. I didn’t want to entertain any negative thinking so I convinced myself that my ticket was booked and I was headed for Oxford. I realised that the risk of doing so was utter, gut-wrenching disappointment but I wasn’t going to allow myself to ruin the small chance that I had.

Unfortunately my gamble didn’t pay off and I honestly feel like a teenager who’s girlfriend has just dumped him for a smarter, better looking guy. It has long been a dream to attend a TED conference but I guess my time will have to wait…

For now I’ll continue to watch from the sidelines and I thought this latest video from Seth Godin titled Why tribes, not money or factories, will change the world would be an apt way to end this post. Enjoy the brilliant talk from Seth as he shares ideas on how tribes give ordinary people the power to lead and make big change.

One of the biggest problems we’ve had is that we sit with more than 12,000 users but we’ve had no way to connect these users together. We’ve had numerous requests to allow peeps to connect with other like-minded African users and for a long time we’ve been trying to figure out the right way to do it.

When we sat down to work the model out Stii had this ingenious idea to buy Twitter so, we made them an offer. Unfortunately our offer of R250,000 was rejected and the result is that we decided to build our own platform instead.

At first glance Gatorpeeps may appear to be competing with Twitter but let me assure you we’re certainly not trying to compete or steal Twitter users but rather leverage off the technology to enhance our existing product.

In truth we modeled a lot of Gatorpeeps off the best that both Twitter and Jaiku had to offer. Twitter has certainly brought micro-blogging to the mainstream and Jaiku revolutionised community interaction and we wanted to bring the simplicity of both into our offering.

So the question then is if we have such amazing micro-blogging platforms already why would we need another? Well, in a review of ten micro-blogging platforms ReadWriteWeb had this to say in their conclusion:

Micro-blogging isn’t a short-term trend – it is here to stay. The evolution of blogging has spawned this new mini version of blogging and many are latching on. The simplicity and ability to post frequently are what attract most to the concept. We expect much faster adoption and mainstream penetration than blogging in general.

I believe this is even more true in Africa as we simply don’t have the penetration that other developed countries have. Also take into consideration that the mobile phone remains the African version of the PC and as such micro-blogging addresses both penetration and accessibility problems. If you take Gatorpeeps into this context, couple it with the fact that less than 5% of Afrigator users have Twitter accounts then you’ll see why launching a micro-blogging platform to our audience is in fact a wise move.

On Saturday I was fortunate enough to attend BarCamp Nigeria 2009 in Lagos. Despite various concerns about going to Nigeria (more on that in another blog post) I must say I had a fantastic time and met some amazing people along the way.

Loy Okezie from Startups Nigeria has a really nice summary of the events that transpired over here and there’s another in depth look by Possicon over here as well so I won’t rehash what’s already been said.

What I will say is that this room, filled with about 80 Nigerians, was a true eye-opener for me. They all have university qualifications, all have an online startup (mostly ecommerce focused) and are all extremely well educated and experienced in the online space.

The big question in my mind has been that if a country like Nigeria is filled with such talented individuals in the largest Internet penetrated country in Africa (currently more than 10 million users) then why hasn’t Nigeria produced any world-class Internet startups yet?

This seemed to be a general question and a reason why the event took place in the first place and while there were a lot of theories flying around such as poor connectivity, electricity problems, Government support and regulations, etc., I was left with a strong sense of what’s been lacking – a community.

Up until BarCamp Nigeria most of these 80 people had never met in real-life before. Some have interacted online but for the most part each one has been left to his own devices and they’re all trying to grow their businesses with very little help along the way.

This is the core difference to say South Africa where we do have a pretty strong online community and while it’s often incestuous, contrived and filled with so-called rockstars this community does help drive products online. I can testify to this with my experiences with Afrigator – without the community we’d be nowhere.

South Africa’s online community, or early-adopters, may well be small in the greater scheme of world markets but it all has to start somewhere and in Nigeria’s case this hasn’t really begun yet. I could see that after BarCamp the guys were hungry for more and so they should be. The more they meet, interact, share ideas and create partnerships along the way the more we’ll see online innovation thriving out of Nigeria.

In addition to my observation I also had to do a presentation and to be honest I didn’t really feel qualified to do so. I am the first to admit I don’t know much about Nigeria so I decided to share my experiences of running an online startup in South Africa, shared some of our most detailed social media trends and finally launched our latest baby Gator – Gatorpeeps.

Have a look at the presentation below and let me know what your thoughts are!

I figured that Bolton had a massive impact on the South African blogging community so what better way to illustrate this than by using him as a case study. I must say that I had massive amounts of fun putting this presentation together as it reminded me of the shenanigans that went on during that brief twelve day period. If you haven’t heard of Bolton then best you view the presentation below and get some tips on how to grow traffic to your blog!

Because I only understood the theory of search engine technology it wasn’t as easy as I had thought to start my own and implementing the technology was an extremely complicated experience. My very first version was powered by Lucene but as it was powered by Java (and TomCat) I had great difficulty in getting it to work as expected.

I then ran a version of mnoGoSearch which was run as a Perl command line utility and while this one seemed to give me the best results I had resource issues which hampered my efforts. What I soon figured out was why Google has a few hundred thousand servers powering their search engine and after about a week of indexing South African websites I ran out of disk space. With about 8 million records indexed I had used up my 80GB hard drive.

So, in the end Grabble went PHP and while I retained some indexing capabilities from mnoGoSearch I also tapped into Yahoo to help out. At the time Yahoo didn’t have a search API so I had to do a lot of hacking to get results returned from Yahoo. In particular, Yahoo provided all the image, news, videos, blogs, sport and forum search results.

While being in awe of Google I also felt that total dominance of only a few players in the market wasn’t a good thing. I believed, esoterically at the time, that local search needed to be dominated by a local company. These beliefs I still hold true to heart and I feel that it’s critical that competitors exist. There is something very uncomfortable in knowing that one or two companies hold the majority of the world’s data and I was convinced that Grabble would be a winner.

Almost three years later and I’ve been debating what to do with Grabble. For the last two months the site hasn’t even been operational (well web search anyway) and while I didn’t want to close it down completely I also had to face the reality that Grabble was never going to dominate and I simply did not have the time to maintain it any longer.

Then along came 4hoursearch – a website powered by the Yahoo BOSS search API and running off Google AppEngine. I stumbled across this site by chance and realised that they had released their source code under GPL. Subsequent to this finding I have now moved Grabble onto this Python software and my final version of Grabble has now been hatched.

What this final version does is allow me to keep the site up for those who still want to use it and at the same time it gives me an opportunity to say goodbye. Running through the Yahoo BOSS API means that I don’t have to worry about indexes any longer and living on the Google AppEngine means technology is now taken care of.

I have learnt so much about search through my efforts with Grabble and I hold it very close to my heart. While it never took off it did give me an opportunity to expand my knowledge and experience in an area I felt passionate about and the learning curve I’ve gone through has certainly helped define where I am today.

Every year a few men stand out from the crowd. They inspire us, challenge us and lead us to greater heights of personal and professional achievement. Men’s Health magazine believes that these men deserve to be recognised and so the Best Man Awards was born.

As the first campaign of its kind in South Africa; Men’s Health Best Man aims to reward our country’s top achievers for the ground-breaking work they have accomplished. We’ve highlighted six categories – sports, media, business, arts and culture, public service and science and technology – and after an exhaustive process by our expert panel selected the finalists who represent the Best Man. These men were profiled in the May issue of Men’s Health from which the final three in each category are then selected. The Best Man winner in each category will then be announced at the final Best Man Awards dinner.

This year I’ve been chosen as one of eight nominees in the Media category and very shortly they’ll be narrowing this list down to three finalists. The other nominees in the Media category that I’m competing with are:

• Jonathan ‘Zapiro’ Shapiro (do I even need to tell you who Zapiro is?)
• Paul Holden (author of The Arms Deal in Your Pocket)
• Solly Philander (multi-award winning performer)
• Thabo Marera (award winning commercial director)
• Danie van der Walt (award winning journalist and executive producer of the environmental programme 50/50)
• Garwin McLuckie (award winning SA cameraman)
• Matthew Buckland (GM, Social Media 24.com)

This is an impressive list of contenders and I really am extremely grateful to the powers that be for nominating me and even considering me amongst these top professionals. It really is a nice feeling being nominated for such a prestigious award and although I’m thankful I have to warn Men’s Health that I’m not taking my shirt off for the cover photo shoot when I win!

At 17:15 on 15 April 2008 Ben Hartman was born. It’s impossible to quantify how much Ben has changed our lives over the last 12 months and it always amazes me how quickly time flies.

Ben is our second born son and I really love to see how different each of our children are. Luke is cautious and shy by nature while Ben is a maniac who shows no fear. He’s already given me tons of new grey hair and I’m positive there’s going to be a lot more in the years to come.

While Ben can’t really understand the significance of today, Luke is completely excited that his little brother is one year old. Yesterday he said he was going to invite everyone we knew to Ben’s birthday party but as we’re recent Capetonian immigrants we don’t really have anyone to invite

We don’t want to damper Luke’s excitement so we’re off to buy Ben a really cool present this afternoon and then we’re hitting the spur for a birthday dinner.

At the time I was the 6th reserve but thanks to Easter holiday’s the guys started dropping like flies and I finally made it on the list. In all honesty I haven’t felt this excited about something in a long time and seeing as the last time I played a proper match was back in 1996 I was also extremely worried.

I’m sure many of you are giggling just at the idea of a geek cricket match and while I can’t blame you I have to warn you this was a very serious affair. We had 17 professional cricketers turn up, there were many geek cricket groupies, two photographers and dedicated media coverage and that’s not even taking into account all the young wannabe cricketers learning from the masters.

First ball was bowled at around 11am and the Kaapse Klopse were off to a flying start. I got picked for the Chevrolet Nashua Mercedes Supersport Nike Chargers and we managed to contain the Klopse to a formidable 145 all out. I didn’t think we stood a chance and after only making 5 runs myself I figured it was all over. In the end though the Chargers pulled off an historic win no thanks to our esteemed captain.

As you can imagine though geeks have no concept of stopping so we decided to have a second game – this time a short 10 over a side match. Needless to say we lost a few guys in the process so our nine a side game became a six a side game. At this stage the groupies had left and all that remained was the die hards of Wynberg Cricket Club.

It was our turn to bat and the Chargers put on a seemingly impossible total of 97 in our 10 overs. I had figured the batting aspect of my game out and was top scorer with 23 not out and this time I was convinced that Rob’s Klopse team had little chance of scoring 10 runs an over.

Things were going extremely well until I had to bowl. I think the Klopse needed around 35 runs to win and I got smashed for about 25 in my over. It was, without doubt, the most expensive over of the day and I had effectively lost the match for our team. I apologised after but somehow I doubt that I’ll get a chance to bowl next time in.

And so after two grueling matches the Klopse and Chargers were all square. After more than 10 years of not playing a real cricket game I have to say that 5 hours of action packed entertainment is just a little too much for my eroding body. I have little doubt that I’ll be struggling to walk the next couple days but hell it was all worth it.

I doubt that it’s just me but the new Investec site is simply unusable and I’m struggling to see how their clients are going to be happy with the new interface. While the site is certainly pushing boundaries in terms of web design I have to ask one simple question. Why?

Let me explain why I think this site is bad for them:

• The site is largely built using JavaScript. This is bad news for Search Engines and if you happen to have JavaScript disabled in your browser (many browsers do) then the site simply doesn’t load.
• All content is loaded in an iframe. Once again, bad news for Search Engines as their content is never going to be indexed correctly. This leaves a major gap for Investec competitors who’s sites are optimised for SEO.
• Font size of the content is so small that their major base of clients over the age of 45 are really going to have a tough time reading it.
• Navigation is extremely unintuitive. At first glance it looks like the site is still loading because you don’t see any navigation bars. Eventually you figure out that if you hover on the smaller buttons to the left and right the real navigation bars appear. Using the 7 second rule new visitors to this site will simply close the browser window and move onto the next site.
• The market indicators appear to be hidden in the bottom bar. We figured out that you actually need to click the indicators to have them pop up. There is no message or call to action informing people that they should click this bar to read more.

Investec have a one question survey about their new beta site and I urge anyone who likes this brand to take the survey and tell them to rethink their strategy. I don’t particularly like to hammer brands on my blog but I’m actually trying to help them out.

Please take the short survey by clicking on this link. I hope that you’ll agree with me that they should rather stick to their current site until they’ve revised this beta one.

This time last year I wrote a birthday post and after reading it again I can clearly remember how the first year went by so quickly. Year two is a very different story and while it did go by as quickly as year one I certainly feel like Afrigator, myself and our team have matured in a very big way.

By Web 2.0 standards Afrigator is now actually a very old product. Strange to think that something so new can be classified as old but the reality is that if you haven’t had any traction by this stage your product is dead. For us the reality is that Afrigator has only really started to show traction from when we were partly acquired in September and the growth on all fronts has been phenomenal.

See, for a long time Afrigator had a great brand outside the borders of South Africa and it was largely due to this that we were even able to negotiate a deal with MIH Print Africa. That said, I do remember crapping myself at the idea of how we were going to meet the objectives and projections detailed in the business plan and contracts yet despite this here we are, six months later and I’m blown away by the progress thus far.

While Afrigator has been somewhat of a success story I am humbled by the fact that had we not done the deal with MIH we might not even be here today. Prior to the deal with MIH I was seriously considering the viability of continuing Afrigator in its current form. Mike, Mark, Stii and myself were funding the project by ourselves and it was taking up serious amounts of our time and cutting away at family and personal life and while this great personal sacrifice was manageable in the beginning after 18 months it started to take its toll.

All I can say is thank God the deal came through in the end and thank God I decided to stick it out. I’ve honestly never been this happy with my professional life and this is largely due to the fact that I’m working full time on something that I feel 100% passionate about.

Afrigator has a long way to go to truly be successful and I have a long learning curve ahead of me but as it stands right now I wouldn’t change it for the world. My life has changed so much in the last six months, I’m interacting with some of the most influential business minds in South Africa, I have a great team at my disposal, I am working on innovative ideas and I’m being tested on all levels every day of my life.

Does it get any better?

The great part about where I am right now is that I have a clear understanding of where our company needs to be this time next year and I know exactly what I want to achieve over the next 12 months. So while I’m excited that Afrigator celebrates our second birthday with you guys I’m also humbled by the idea that we have a lot of work ahead of us to achieve the goals we’ve set for ourselves.

My presentation was on Tools & Technologies, Filtering and Collaborating and while the start is mostly around education the end of the presentation got very interesting. I figured that while it was important to explain the different tools and technologies out there I also wanted to show delegates how to use the tools effectively.

Having been privy to the delegate list beforehand I knew that there were a number of Old Mutual people in the audience so I figured their company would be as good as any to do a small case study on. The results across the various social websites was interesting and I hope that it highlighted how companies are being spoken about online but also how the conversation is generally a one-way street. In my mind it’s an opportunity to engage users and customers in a very unique way.

If you’ve watched it and want some background info I suggest you read the following links.

• Did you Know?
• Over 2 million served
• Shift Happens

What I really like about the podcast series is that it’s short (generally around 15-20 minutes), the content is relevant to the industry and the production quality is superb. In a time when information overload is a major concern this podcast series gives you bite-sized bits of information on the go.

To my embarrassment I’ve been meaning to blog about The Digital Edge for some time but as you can see from the lack of posts on my blog lately time has simply not been on my side. Today however I do have a reason as I’m featured in the latest podcast titled Reprobates and bloggers.

The latest installment looks at the state of the South African blogosphere to see what was really happening. It features top SA bloggers as well as Fred Roed and Afrigator’s other brother, Mike Stopforth. This episode is quite long but I really won’t mind if you skip to the end to listen to me!

This is the time in Cape Town:

And this was the temperature in the City:

Now I’m not a big fan of heat but I don’t think I’ve ever been in a place where the temperature was more than 35 degrees. 40.5 degrees is something that is well and truly stifling. There has been a thick haze of smoke all over the city from all the fires and I haven’t been able to see the sea or mountain since 9am.

Come to think of it, without the sea and mountain it kind of feels a lot like Jo’burg!