June 2007 - Posts
I went to my first Cape Town 27dinner last night, and thoroughly enjoyed every single minute of it. Many thanks to Dave Duarte who organises these - you rock dude!! I was completely blown away by the turnout - I think there was just about 100 people, some of them driving from quite far. So what is 27dinner? Though there are some arranged speakers, it's a free-form opportunity to hook up with fellow entrepreneurs operating mostly in the field of technology (specifically web). Here is a summary of what went down, listed in no particular order:
Graham Knox from Stormhoek told everyone (amongst how they started the most widely read wine-blog in the world) more about the strategy of affiliating and partnering with entities that have huge existing market footprints and thus customer-bases, and utilising these relationships to drive customers to your own product.
Dave Gale from Storm had a very cool presentation titled "voiptopia" showing how VoIp can (and will) make our lives extremely easy in the near future, merely by utilising connectivity in innovative ways.
Yeigo told us about their product which seems pretty cool, and also the interesting origin of their name. They had some tough questions from the audience that they had trouble addressing, even though I know that they *do* have the answers and solutions to those questions that were asked. Check out their blog here.
The guys from Zoopy were running around with cameras, capturing most of what was going down.
Lots of goodies were given away on the evening: Zoopy gave away two Sony DVD camcorders, Charly's Bakery gave everyone a chocolate cupcake (by the way, Charly's *does* bake the best in town!), eSquared gave away a cool T-Shirt... heck, many more prizes were given away, but most importantly: everyone was handing out contact details. (eSquared is giving away another T-Shirt in their "Spot the Face" competition - see if you can grab it).
This is the kind of event where entrepreneurs get fresh inspiration from each other, a meeting of minds of which the value should never be underestimated! I'm definitely attending these from now onwards! For those of you who are not living in the most awesome city of Cape Town, don't despair - there are currently 27dinners hosted in Johannesburg, and planned for Pretoria and Durban too!
The Red Bull Big Wave Africa contest goes down every year close to Cape Town at the epic Dungeons. The Billabong XXL Award for the biggest wave surfed on the planet in 2006 was awarded to this monster, surfed by Greg Long at Dungeons:
We've been expecting big swell during June for weeks now, but Monday was to be especially big, with swell of about 28 foot (that's just about 8.5meters!). Knowing that the BWA went on amber status, I decided to head out to Dungeons on Monday afternoon to see what the fuss was about. What i saw and heard was a little bit terrifying. I don't see myself paddling into this place soon.
The only way to see the wave from the land is to climb over the "sentinel" - a mountain peak next to Hout Bay. Sitting on top of the sentinel, a few of us could stare at the waves way below us. The crashing sound alone sent chills down our spines as we watched a few guys towing into monsters in preparation for the BWA. Unfortunately I wasn't armed with a camera any more decent then the one on my cell phone, so this is all I could get on the day:
Where some people go to the pub, others see their shrink, and few use weird chemicals to make them feel cool, here is a great alternative therapy I can highly recommend to anyone close to the coast: get yourself a surfboard mate!
I just got a message from a Live! Messenger (MSN) contact:
Snif, get surprise at http://www.messengerweb.info/ Unbelievable!
Clicking on the link brings you to a page that looks like this:
When any of your contacts sends you a similar message, DON'T give this site your credentials! Even though they claim not to store anything, they do in fact store your credentials, and will use it maliciously.
If you've already given them your credentials, change your Live! Passport password over here immediately.
I did two talks on AJAX at DevDays in Durban a few weeks ago: one was an introduction to the ASP.NET AJAX framework that Microsoft released, as well as some of the open-source controls available in the Control Toolkit. The second talk was a bit more interesting, discussing Security in AJAX-enabled web applications in general.
Both these went pretty well, considering that my laptop blew up the evening before, and I sat awake in my hotel all night configuring a new laptop to demo on the next day.
Just to remind you how interesting DevDays *really* is, let's compare it to a conference they had the very day after DevDays:
(I took this the morning after DevDays - just think, you could have been spending your time on much less exciting stuff than software!)
It was great visiting Durban (where I used to live a few years ago) again, and see some old friends. Needless to say, I took a surfboard with and enjoyed some fun, warm waves.
Create cool software and/or hardware add-ins for Windows Home Server, to simplify the digital lifestyles of families everywhere—or just to geek out, and win over $50,000 in cash prizes, as well as an all-expenses-paid trip for finalists to Microsoft headquarters in Redmond to "wow" the judging committee with their demos.
Enter here.