Group Buying, or Tuangou, is a relatively new buying and marketing strategy originally from China. Offline, Tuangou usually involves several people who approach a vendor of a specific product in order to bargain as a group to get discounts. The entire group then agrees to purchase the same item and benefits by paying less. The business benefits by selling multiple items at once.

The global trend at the moment is providing the same concept online by linking up strangers interested in purchasing the same product/service to (usually) small local businesses who provide the product to each member of that group at a drastically discounted rate.

Continue reading on ohso: Will The Group Buying Model Work In South Africa?

One of my favourite new tools/apps from 2010 has to be Dropbox. This web-based service has completely nullified my need for a flash drive and I have not felt the need to carry once since I started using Dropbox for peace of mind.

Not only does this service provide a secure backup system for your important documents and files using Amazon S3 storage, but all data is transferred using a secure connection and encrypted with AES-256. Any changes you make to files you store in Dropbox are automatically synced to the cloud via the Dropbox web service and to any other computers you have linked to your Dropbox account

Continue reading on ohso: Flash Drives Are So 2009

So, it’s my birthday this Friday the 13th and I decided to share some astrological insight into yours truly using an adaptation of the entry for August 13 in the book The Secret Language of Birthdays by Gary Goldschneider and Joost Elffers.

The 13th day of August is labelled as The Day of Long Odds in this book. Now, I am no follower of astrology and am usually rather cynical of the esoteric world, but I do find the allusions to my life quite unsettling in the below excerpt. What do you think

Continue reading on ohso: The Day of Long Odds

We all enjoy our nocturnal escapades with a touch of alcohol from time to time. Some of us more than others, but most of the time we are completely unaware of what we are consuming. By the end of this alcoholic exposé, perhaps you shall be more enlightened by some standard – and some bizarre – facts on your drink of choice.

Let us first dispel a few myths about alcohol consumption. Firstly, contrary to popular belief, alcohol does not destroy brain cells and in some cases has been proven to be associated with improved cognitive functioning. A “beer belly” is not caused by the ingestion of beer, or any alcohol for that matter, but rather by eating too much food.

Continue reading on ohso: Your Drink of Choice

Google has recently been promoting their Search Story concept, which has spurned a whole bunch of cute and funny search stories. I also particularly enjoyed this one by a friend, ianaarondavidson.

Anyhow, I decided to try my hand at it late one Friday evening after a glass of wine and came up with this. Please enjoy. I might make another one soon. Probably

Continue reading on ohso: Lice Aren’t So Nice – A Google Search Story

Latest update: 1 July 2010

We all love a good special and, come winter, Cape Town restaurants usually provide a great selection of them to patrons. This year, however, seems to be a little different. With the upcoming Football World Cup, many restaurants seem to be extending current specials only till the end of May and I can’t say I blame them; what with the sketchy statistics about how many visitors are expected in the host cities and all.

However, many of the restaurants are still offering specials extending through all of the winter months, and my dear friend, Karen Hilliard, is superb at compiling lists of these. With her permission I am reproducing this list below and will update it as winter passes

Continue reading on ohso: Cape Town Restaurant Autumn/Winter Specials

Overall my experience was not as dire as I am sure we have all come to expect from South African bureaucracies. That is not to say that I could not instantly point out any number of inefficiencies in the incumbent system, but I think I am mostly grateful that I managed to spend under an hour in the rather depressing building that is Gallows Hill Traffic Department in Green Point, Cape Town.

I arrived just before 8am this morning and joined a rather short queue, which – for a change – everyone seemed to understand the concept of. The doors opened shortly after 8am and I was directed to the Enquiries counter to my left by a scarily efficient security guard who failed to hear my objections…

Continue reading on ohso: Renewing a Driver’s License at Gallows Hill, Green Point

Being the total geek perfectionist that I am, I wanted to contextually link my bio to a page describing the typical Capetonian, but was stumped by the complete lack of any definition for one on the WWW. Even Urban Dictionary returned nothing beside the generic etymological definition, “Someone from Cape Town”.

So, in my efforts to link to something more substantial, I decided to write a post describing the typical Capetonian myself

Continue reading on ohso: Capetonians