The first thing that struck me – but not for the first time, is how talented, passionate and inspired my fellow geeks are. There was nobody at the retreat who did not positively contribute to it. At an event like this one, where 50 people with a common thread but diverse backgrounds come together, it might seems risky to not have a set agenda, or even a set of clearly defined goals right from the start. But that is the beauty of the creative process. Slowly but surely everyone starts to fill in the blanks – no one has to catch up, or “get it”, because there really is nothing to get. We come together, we talk. We ask. We think. We inspire. And we listen. There are very many discussions – almost no time slot is taken up with a one way communication – but there are very few heated arguments.

There were over forty speaking opportunities, and nobody’s voice was silenced. There were no keynotes, no sessions that were more important than others. We sat and we listened to people sharing their ideas, and if we were not inspired or connected with what we were hearing, we moved on to another venue, another speaker, another passion.

And as diverse as the ideas were, they did have common threads running through them, The ones that resonated most with me was the national pride, and the sense of urgency of using our skills and our knowledge to empower others in our country.

But there was something stronger still: the willingness to seek solutions rather than hide behind obstacles. That is rare for our society: we tend to complain, but don’t often propose how a situation can be made better. At the Geekretreat, believe it or not, nobody ever swore at Telkom, or the government, or the dti. We really didn’t focus on what is wrong, but rather on how we can make it better.

So, can 50 geeks come together in Stanford Valley, spend 3 days talking, listening (and drinking) and come up with solutions to problems that have been baffling the country for years? Suprisingly, yes. And that’s because we each understand the power of one. It might be that social media has made us bold in our approach to conquering large problems, since we know that one blog post, or one tweet even, can start an avalanche. But that’s a blessing, because we are not discouraged by the enormity of the problems.

A lot more, I hope, will be written up about the projects proposed or discussed at the Geekretreat. I hope some get traction, and start happening. Here are a few:

And what did others think? From a quick ad hoc survey, all participants really enjoyed the opportunity to mingle, talk and share. A common thread running through the comments is that it is wonderful to realise that companies and people who previously thought of themselves as competitors have now realised they will achieve more if they work together.

And just for that little gem, the Geekretreat should be considered a great success.

(A special word of thanks to all our sponsors: <Telamenta, Old Mutual, Skyrove, Yola, White Wall Web, Seacom, IS, Jackie Scala, eConsultancy, Orca Wireless)

(And as an aside, our venue, the Stanford Valley, was absolutely awesome. If you are looking for a quiet retreat, away from the hustle and bustle, you’d be doing yourself a favour by checking it out. )

So my partner Craig and I have opened up 2010 with our official release of the The Broadband Bible, which is a 66 page pdf that compares ADSL and Wireless plans in South Africa. All in all, there are 35+ ISPs listed, and about 300+ different plans. And it took a long time to put together. You can download it for free here, or read it below.

I did most of the tabulating and comparing myself, which was an eye opener. It made me realise what a convoluted and confusing industry this really is. In fact, as Craig says, it seems that some ISPs make their living my purporsefully making the plans as complicated and difficult to understand as possible, and hiding from an apples-to-apples comparison.

And from looking at our comparison tables, it is mind boggling to understand how some ISPs get away with charging what they charge. Some prices, for a virtually identical product can be up to five times as high as those of the cheapest provider. When you get over the shock, you start feeling a big bout of disgust.

And although it is (hopefully) true that the more expensive ISPs offer faster speeds (lower latencies) and better customer service, this certainly does not come across clearly in their explanations of the service.

What is most interesting to me though, is how the Internet promises “perfect information” (all information supposedly available online, all easily accessible) yet manages to sustain such price discrepancies, for a basic commodity. Basically what it boils down to is that the theory of having perfect information does not (not even closely) lead to attaining the “Perfect Price”. And why not? I guess the extra layer of what needs to happen with the perfect information (careful analysis, rational decision process) is a challenge many simply are not committed to. Which is why, with pretty websites and confusing language, many ISPs get away with overcharging.

All this highlights a worrying trend: is the online audience expecting to be spoonfed all the time, or will there come a time when easily accessible perfect information will become the standard? Certainly Craig and I are going to continue creating “Consumer Bibles”, comparing specs of products so that the audience can make better informed decisions (our next bibles are the Printer Bible and the Laptop Bible, launching January 21 2010). At the very least we hope this will start a trend of clear reporting by the manufacturers, and indirectly force better prices, and better products.

Download The Broadband Bible for free here, or read below

The Broadband Bible

The gist of it is that instead of tying yourself to a long lease, you simply rent a space for a desk in a big office, and share it with others who are there under the same arrangement. The advantages are obvious:

• You pay only for the space you use
• You share the office with other cool people
• You are not tied to a lease
• You can add space as you can afford it (if your team grows, for instance)
• You often get the benefits of a receptionist, and business equipment
• You have access to good bandwidth, that you for per usage

You can explore the world of coworking by following the links from this excellent wiki on the subject

Well… Gareth Knight, Brett Haggard and myself would like to arrange a space like that for web workers in Joburg. We still have to finalise details, but the space would probably be in the Rivonia/Sandton area, and would cost about R1000 - R1500 per desk, per month. There wouldn’t be a lease, and I’m sure there would be some sort of crowd law that would ensure that everyone is creating a fun atmosphere, that is conducive to producing good work.

Gareth is going to be running a start up, Brett will run Hypertext Media (custom magazine publishing) and I will play around with some new ventures that I am starting soon.

We are trying to gauge the interest of others who would want to participate, so that we know how big a space we need to find. If you are a freelancer, work from home or runs a small company and want to save on office rent and mix with a cool crowd of people, get in touch with us. You can email me at eved AT ideabank.co.za or leave a comment below. There is no obligation, but please only express interest if this is genuinely something you would want to do. Let us know how many people you would be bringing with you, and if you have a finite time for which you need the space.
We would probably get this going from January or February.

Well, there is now :-) I am putting together a “SA Web Bible”, which will hopefully be a pretty comprehensive listing of all the companies in South Africa who offer web related solutions to clients. The “book” will be a .pdf, so it can be downloaded easily. It will also be free, published under a Creative Commons license that will allow it to be distributed freely and widely.

The corporate listings have a cost of R1,500 to be included, which I think is fair, since the companies are going to get huge exposure from this, and are sure to pick up new clients.

The last .pdf book I published got about 3,000 views, and that had a very limited marketing campaign and a very niche audience. I am pretty confident that this could go into the tens of thousands in not too long a time.

The coolest thing though, is that I am including one-man shows and freelancers for free. So if you are a web expert in any web-related field, please submit your details for free inclusion.

There is loads more information on Who Can Help Me.

(I really do want to include as many individuals as possible. If you know of someone else who could benefit from a listing, please let them know! Or if you represent a company who would like to be listed, please get in touch with me).

The South by Southwest (SXSW) Conferences & Festivals offer the unique convergence of original music, independent films, and emerging technologies. Fostering creative and professional growth alike, SXSW is the premier destination for discovery. Year after year, the event is a launching pad for new creative content. Conference panel discussions present a forum for learning, business activity thrives at the Trade Shows and global networking opportunities abound. Intellectual and creative intermingling among industry leaders continues to spark new ideas and carve the path for the future of each ever-evolving field, long after the events’ conclusion.

I’ve always wanted to go … but who wants to go to an event like this alone? So I am hoping that I can get about 30 South Africans together, and make a serious trip out of it. With the traction of Geekretreat, Silicon Cape and the general growing mood of online innovation in South Africa this is the time to do go.

We also have another excellent opportunity to showcase our South African talent and support: one of our own, Toby Shapshak @shapshak, has been offcially chosen as one of the SxSW speakers!!! So we can cheer him on as he and his panel talk about “Battery Life: The final (mobile) Frontier“.

I have organised 15 rooms at a hotel around the corner from the Austin Convention Centre, at a relative bargain and am getting a group discount from Delta for a flight from Joburg - Atlanta -Austin, return. The SxSW tickets start at $395, if you buy early enough. All in all, the trip will cost between R23,000 and R25,000, including top flights, top accommodation and conference ticket. I am going to be looking for sponsorship to help us cover some of the cost, but if you decide to participate you should expect to pay the full cost, just to be safe. Better still, get your boss to pay for you to go.

I also certainly want to include some people on the trip on a full sponsorship. If anyone can help with that, please let me know.

If you are thinking of going, or simply want to learn more about the event, please read what some other sites/people have to say about it:

If you want to come join the rest of us on this trip, please sign up here, email me on eved AT ideabank.co.za or just post a comment below and I’ll get in touch with you.

Others who have expressed interest in coming are:
Gareth Knight
Paul Jacobson
Justin Spratt
Andy Hadfield
Mike Stopforth
Heather Ford (Will be joining us from US)
Guy Taylor
Richard Frank
Rob Stokes
Brett Haggard
Ismail Dhorat
Craig Rodney
Colin Daniels
Jack Kruger
Justin Hartman
Matthew Buckland
Jarred Cinman
Rob Gilmour
Elan Lohmann

For a full list see here.

The dates of the trip are March 10 - March 17 2010.

Conferences are a dime a dozen, of course, but I don’t think I have ever attended one in South Africa that I enjoyed as much. Which got me thinking as to why exactly Internetix was such a success, and whether that success can be replicated by smaller companies.

Some factors that contributed to the day:

The venue: held on Dimension Data’s Campus, where IS sits, the conference venue is ideal for a conference of this size. The auditoriums are world class, the technology is (mostly) spot on and the networking spaces are top notch.

The speakers: For starters, the speakers were from various disciplines. Amongst many more, the speakers included Ravi Naidoo talking about S African creativity, Mark Gevisser talking about the future of S Africa under Zuma and Justin Spratt talking about the future of telecommunications under the power of Voip. There was a panel made up of the key telco people in S Africa (representing IS, Icasa, Telkom, and Neotel. Alan Knott Craig was part of the panel in his personal capacity) and Roy Blumenthal talking about the need for personal creativity. Tying it all together was the thread of the “What if” question…an excellent way to allow diverse topics to co-exist, while not boring the audience. All speakers had knowledge, passion and experience in their field, and it showed.

The attendees: This was probably the highlight for me. The conference was extremely well attended (I heard that there were probably more than 1200 people there), but I felt as if I was walking into a friend’s private party. It seemed as if half of the Geekretreaters were there. Obviously my advantage is that I have cool friends who actually attend events like Internetix, but even if I didn’t, the venue and the setup was very condusive to mingling, breaking out and socialising.

No agenda, hidden or otherwise: Ultimately, Internet Solutions put on a show for its clients and other people for the purpose of opening up the audience’s minds, and daring us to ask the “What if” question. No pushing of product. Even if there was an agenda you could immediately tell that it wasn’t to :

• make money
• push IS capabilities

This made for a conference that was neutral and accessible. And interesting. I also got the feeling that a lot of the attendees were there as IS’s guests (I was, thanks to Justin Spratt). But I think that even those who did pay, forked over only about a R1,000 or so. This makes for a nice change from the R5,000 ticket prices that are the norm these days.

South Africa needs more events like these: gatherings for 500+ people, with varied and top notch speakers, thought provoking tracks and affordable prices. I can’t imagine that the big corporates would struggle to make it happen. But I know of other, smaller players who are trying to shake up the conference industry, such as Gareth Knight the organiser of Tech4Africa happening in August 2010, Netprophet and Tedx.
Let’s hope the trend continues.

I am going to see if I can identify a blogging format that works better for me than my past formats. I think I place an onus on blog posts to be lengthy and well argued (whether I achieve this is questionable), and therefore I am put off by the time commitment necessary to write a post.

I am going to try something relatively new for me: rather than post on one topic, I am going to try and post many short paragraphs on various topics. My inspiration will come mostly from my news reader, which is as good a place to start as any. I won’t limit myself to this format, but expect to see it more often here.

“TsFTD” stands for Thoughts of the day, by the way.

Here goes.

In Google’s words, the service…

..is designed to develop mobile applications that serve the needs of poor and other vulnerable individuals and communities, most of whom have limited access to information and communications technology.

The power of the Internet extends beyond cool mapping technology, wikipedia at our fingertips and online shopping. We should not forget that it offers the potential to save lives, improve economic conditions, educate and uplift. It’s heartening to see Google spend efforts to connect the poor, and it is another example of how the Seacom cable is already affecting and improving Africa.

Sticking with the Google (which owns Youtube). From tomorrow you will be able to include a link with any video you post, so that your viewers can click on it and be taken to another website (preferably one that has *something* to do with the video itself. This will drive traffic away from Youtube of course, but since it seems Google has a footprint everywhere, they probably really don’t care. My understanding is that the link will be in the format of the layover ad we are used to seeing already..but you’ll have full control over the text.

Super insightful article from Techrunch exploring the potential of Bitly as a competitor to Digg. Digg gets 20,000 unique URL submissions per day. Bitly gets close to 3 million. Now both services are trying to emulate each other, and I will be watching with interest to see this unfold.

I love bookshops. Even the pathetic excuse-for-ones in Pretoria are my favourite hangouts. So when in New York, I feel as if I am in heaven. Here, the book shops seem to have every title imaginable, spanning multiple storeys of floor to ceiling shelves. I could get lost in one for days.

There is a 3 floor Barnes and Noble a couple of blocks from my hotel. I pass it often, and go in at least twice a day. There is a small Starbucks on the top floor, and I sit and read, while my feet take a well deserved break from all that walking. Mostly, I stumble on the books. (A cover sells the book, at least to me).

But someone tweeted a link to an excerpt of the latest Guy Kawasaki book, and I was intrigued to see it in full glory. Now, the quantity of books in the shop can be a drag when you want to buy something specific, because how do you actually find it? Barnes and Noble have a novel (ha! a pun!) idea: there are computers all over the place, and you search for the book you want much as you would on Amazon. When you find it “online”, you click on “Show me where” and the screen displays a map of the store, with the exact location of the book. You can even print the “map” if you want to.

Stunning. I found the book in no time, and it seemed to live up to all expectations. So you would think that by making the shopping experience as painless as possible, Barnes and Noble are gaining a new client, right?

Wrong.

The 5 books I chose today would have cost me $111.84 at Barnes and Noble. But guess what? At Amazon.com they only cost me $72.10. So with free shipping and next day delivery, I still save $40.

And because Amazon have this built in intelligence where they harness other people’s shopping patterns, they can recommend other titles to me too, and I will probably end up buying some before final checkout. So possibly the total profit for Amazon is still pretty much what it would have been for Barnes and Noble had I stuck with them.

I don’t think this spells the doom of bookshops, of course. But it does not bode well for them either.

(Note: Had I bought the books at Exclusive Books, I would have paid R1,890!!! That means I got them at 30% of the price!!! I’ll save comment on that for another blog post!)

(What have I bought so far? Click on title for Amazon page - no affiliate sales here, lol.

• Stumbling on Happiness
• Nudge
• The Art of the Start
• Reality Check
• How the Mighty Fall

)

So I’m in New York.

I’m no travel noob, but there is something about visiting New York that is different to visiting any other city. It’s almost as if it is “The.City”. And in a way I guess it is.

Last time I was here (eons ago) I was a student in Boston, about 4 hrs north of New York. Even then I remember it took a couple of visits for the City to grow on me. At first I found it too haphazard, too busy, too lonely. But that soon changed. The energy of the City takes over, and there is a definite promise of potential in the air. I would walk past the 5th Avenue shops, knowing that one day they would be mine. My boyfriend’s apartment was slightly bigger than his bed, and that was great too, because I knew that that would all change when we grew up to be responsible adults.

So here I am, the responsible adult. With no apartment on 5th Avenue yet, and with great disdain of the shops that charge $400 for a belt. So at least the responsible adult worked out right ;-). As I walk the streets of New York now, impressed by little that is in the shops but more by the sheer energy and life of the place, I find myself wondering if I could live here permanently. I am still not sure, but I suspect the answer is “No”.

It’s just too busy. I think that that works in ones favour when one is at the beginning of a career, or at the end (with retirement). But in the middle, it must just be exhausting. Life is a battle here, that much is quickly obvious. People are focussed on money. Most conversations I eavesdrop are related to job security, money issues and so on. It’s on the people’s minds all the time.

It doesn’t help that New York is ridiculously expensive. To rent an apartment that could even mildly compare to my living conditions in SAfrica would cost about $5,000 per month. And I must emphasise “mildly compare” … that would get me 2 bedrooms in about 100 square meters, which is about a quarter of what I have now, minus the garden and pool. Kid’s school would be another $3,000 pm and the other costs are equally astronomical. A coke in a restaurant is $4, a movie $12.50 and so on. So the bottom line is…you need to be pretty loaded.

Of course, New York offers you the opportunity to get loaded pretty fast. Be good at what you do, and recession or not, you are going to take home the salary that is needed to pay those bills. My problem is that I have never been the salary kind of girl.

So in some ideal wish-I-wish-I-might world, I guess I could have an apartment here, and visit for short trysts of shopping and theatre, maybe a bit of business but always with the option of going back home. I wouldn’t mind spending a full summer here though, especially with my kid. She would definitely benefit from the very different cultural environment.

And I guess that is new York’s biggest pull: there is just so much to do here. You could never be bored…at worst you could simply be overwhelmed. In that ideal world I mentioned earlier, I would sign up for photography classes, explore museums, take up roller blading again, learn French, take some college classes at NYU…maybe even learn to cook. But I am smart enough to know that the reality would be far harsher, because the pace of life needed to keep head-above-water here would probably not allow me to do many of those things.

One caveat that needs to be mentioned: I purposefully wrote this before I had any business related meetings etc, which start tomorrow. I am fully aware that once I meet people in my industry, or potential future business partners my enthusiasm for the city could increase drastically. And if it does, I will note it duly here.

Photo by Sunsurf, via Flickr

SAA: R10,252
Delta: R10,432
Air France: R9,652

Not bad, but I’d prefer to fly through London and have three meetings there while in transit. I had already researched this possibility, and knew that Virgin offered a good deal. I asked the travel agent to investigate, and she came back with a fare of R13,855. She said the taxes alone are over R5000, and it just wasn’t worth it.

Now, normally, you’d take her at her work, right? After all, she is a professional, an expert in her field. She must have some connection to a database of flights that you could never hope to have. Right? Wrong.

I got back to my office, logged into Travelstart.co.za, plugged in my dates and within 2 minutes was booked on a Virgin fight, via London to NYC for R8,317, all inclusive!!!

So: without having to drive to a mall, find parking, wait for an available agent, wait for 20 minutes while she types and types, give away my contact details etc etc, I was able to get a fare at about 40% LESS than she could.

Online travel booking - what a pleasure. Travel agents: Bon Voyage.