By Saul Wainwright
Okay - well I will be the first to admit that I am completely biased towards anything positive and exciting about Africa. After all I am an African and grew up on the continent. After 15 years of living in the USA I will be returning to explore opportunities, to enjoy the sun and to relax on the beach all while ingesting the loveliness and magic of the African soil.
So, it was with a very sad heart that I saw this blog post from one of my favorite African bloggers - TED Africa Canceled. The reasoning appears to be pretty vague - something about the delay in getting licenses sorted out. I am not sure - I wish I knew more about why because I would gladly donate my time to getting the conference to happen.
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No Comments » Posted on May 17th, 2008
By Dani Sevilla
Recently we were working with Flugpo to develop the MyDataIsMyData plug-in to protect Facebook users from having their private information sold for profit or used without their knowledge by the social network site. In the process of researching internet privacy concerns I came across the Software Associates which provides personalized services for businesses in the telecom and technology industries to attain customer privacy and data standards.
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No Comments » Posted on May 15th, 2008
By Saul Wainwright
When you work for a new media marketing company creative thinking is a necessary part of the equation. You have to be able to strategize and be creative because after all we are in new unchartered territory. Essentially you have to think outside of the box. Luckily for me I am married to one of those “out-of-the-box” thinkers who lives her life by this motto.
My wife, Kelly, runs a company called Messy Monkey Arts which is a creative team building company. Well, while we were in South Africa for the past 4 months Kelly met a group of incredible “creative consultants” many of whom are involved with all kinds of “corporate training” and “creative thinking” programs at UCT Business School. UCT business school is doing some really great stuff with the corporate and political leaders on the African continent and is competing directly with some of the big business schools of the world.
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No Comments » Posted on May 13th, 2008
By Chris Abraham
When we work with clients, we tend to create what are called Social Media News Releases. During out promotion of the new book by Jerry White called I Will Not Be Broken, we created the following SMNR. You can see a CMS version here and the official static version here. The inline version is pasted below — as you can see, it pastes pretty well, which is important when you’re expecting bloggers to “steal” code, content, HTML, links, photos, and graphics directly from the SMNR and into their blog via coppy-and-paste into their rich-text editor. One can surely use too much style and CSS fu that could result in a difficult-to-integrate into a blog. Also, when I get the press kit from the client, it is essential to boil down — reduce — the content into web-friendly content: PDF and Word needs to be converted to PNG, GIF, JPG, and HTML — that’s all that matters online. Finally, try to pre-size the images into post-friendly sizes because most bloggers don’t have the sort of set-up that would allow them to convert “press-ready” portraits and “full-size” images into smaller, thumbnails, for a website: do as much of the premastication and blog-ready HTML as possible and make it a simple matter for your blogger. The easier, the better. Be a valet to your blogger — a facilitator!
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No Comments » Posted on May 13th, 2008
By Saul Wainwright
I have been spending a lot of time thinking about how the rise of location based technologies in cell phones and their integration into online mapping services. A couple interesting companies are Loopt and BrightKite.
I think this movement of the web to a more geography based system is really interseting. It is the flip side to the “global village” concept or the “globalization” concept where so much thinking is based around the reduction in the importance of location. You can effectively be a business based anywhere and have reach across the globe - space and place in this equation don’t matter.
However, the interesting feature that cell phones are bringing into the game is the importance of location. Where are you? Are we close? Where are all my friends? What business am I close too?
These are now questions we can answer in a way that we were never able to before. I am rather fascinated by this merging of technologies and reshaping of space and place.
I got back to the USA just the other day and while digging around on the net - checking in on some of my favorite blogs I came across a conference that started today in Burlingame, CA (just south of San Francisco). It is called Where 2.0 and looks rather interesting. In fact if I had $1800 to shell out I probably would have rushed off. In the meantime all I have is the ability to read whatever they put on their site. Maybe next year!!
I think that there is so much interesting stuff going on as the cell phone merges with the web and offers a huge amount of interesting and promising relationships as we move forward.
No Comments » Posted on May 12th, 2008
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