08.08.08
Posted in Events, Personal at 6:28 am by Christine
“A man is what he thinks about all day long.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson
I attended a business breakfast network group in Cape Town yesterday. Met some interesting folks and also had the privilege of listening to Ronnie Muhl (In May 2007 Ronnie Muhl became the 7th South African to summit Mt. Everest via the north east ridge.) on his expedition and challenges.
Not usually one to do this, but a supporter of good causes. Remember Chaeli, or the Chaeli Campaign? Chaeli is the little girl who was born with Cerebral Palsy and by the age of 9 and a bit years needed a motorised wheelchair as she had developed a degenerative neuropathy which left her unable to use the muscles in her arms and legs to their full potential. This vibrant young child, together with some friends decided that they were going to raise the money themselves. 7 weeks later they had managed to raise R20 000! Having achieved their goal, Chaeli and her friends did not stop there, and formalised the campaign as an NPO to help other children in need.
They have been successfully making a difference to others in need, this year marks the 4th year of the Chaeli campaign.
To toast the last four years, Chaeli’s 14th birthday, and to raise additional contributions to the campaign Ben and Roz Zander will host a fundraiser in support of her living proof of the “art of possibility”.
What to Expect:
- A 30 minute presentation by Ben and Roz about a framework of possibility
- A powerful peek into youth empowerment
- Inspiring singing, dinner and dancing
Tables of 10 at R10,000.00
Saturday 30 August, Arabella Quays, Cape Town
For more info please contact Zelda Mycroft on 0861 CHAELI or info [at] chaelicampaign.co.za
Permalink
07.17.08
Posted in Events at 11:13 am by Christine
Myself and Carla attended the 2008 internetix today, accompanied by Joey and Tim.
The last time I attended an Internetix conference was back in 2005, it surely has grown since then!
Internetix is an annual conference sponsored by IS, Dimension Data, MS and Cisco. This year’s mission was to explore how technology is enabling Africa to Rise to her many challenges and unlock her true potential.
It was held at the Lagoon beach hotel, the venue is pretty awesome and being right on the beach has some spectacular views. The conference snacks were good as conference snacks are concerned. However the event planning itself in terms of size I found somewhat lacking.
It would have been nice for one to be able to have somewhere to sit down for the lunch at least firstly, and secondly the lunch was served in a narrow corridor (ok, about 7meters across) but put tables and pillars and a few hundred people in that space and it soon becomes almost unnavigable. The corridors and stair cases to the actual conference venue was also very narrow, and there was not enough seats for all the attendees.
But apart from that, I thought it was pretty good.
I decided to skip the last two sessions as well as the cocktail event, which I will probably regret - lol.
I twittered during all the sessions, but I now see that alas, my hashtag (#internetix) was not registered 
so I can’t give you a link to my running commentary. Let me try to recap:
I attended the following sessions:
- The world of 2010’s - Chantell Illbury - Understand your environment: certainties - China’s relationship with Africa is growing ‘Africa is our continent of choice’. Check out her 2010’s section on her website.
- Around Africa on my Bicycle - Riaan Manser - “No Food for Lazy Man!”. Pure inspiration! 2 years, 2 months, 8 days it took Riaan to circumnavigate Africa on his bicycle. He endured times of war, child soldiers, guerillas and faced uncertainty of life many times on this epic journey. Unfortunately Carte Blanche did not have the clip in their Video Library? But check out all the photos from his trip on his site. He is currently embracing a new challenge: to circumnavigate Madagascar by kayak.
- Evolution of Media - Stafford Masie - Stafford was a really engaging speaker. Although he did not reveal anything new, but merely showcased everything that Google is engaged in currently and might also engage in future - South Africa wise, it was a great presentation to watch. Masie: websites = social components. SA search query volumes small compared to rest of world. Google is: end user content & a moment of relevance. 1 in 6 Google searches happen on a mobile in Africa. We watched the McNugget clip, which gave instant stardom to these guys. It was part of a competion that McDonalds were running, driven by consumers. Consumers voted these guys the winners, and eventually this was turned into a TV ad as well…A superb example of how to get Consumer Generated Media right. Staying on YouTube, we also checked out some features not currently available in SA: adsense Advertising embedded within YouTube videos. This is tre cool. Masie showed some of the less common search operators some crowd pleasers included: “2 = 2 =” ; “what is hillary clinton’s age? ” etc. And in Google Earth we explored the potential for future advertising opportunities on street level etc.
- Web 2.0 and Social Media - Mike Stopforth - Another great speaker to see in action. Mike delved into explaining the power of social media and how big corporates need to realise that it is no longer about talking to your consumer, but talking with your consumer, and in most cases, it’s about the consumer leading the conversation now on behalf of companies without even realising it. A great clip that expresses this sentiment is Bringtheloveback.Com or watch direct on YouTube.
- The Future of Search - Jeff Fletcher & Greg De Chasteauneuf - Besides Masie’s session, I was really looking forward to this one…But very disappointed in the presentation to be honest. Now I have no doubt these guys know what they’re talking about and are probably really passionate about search, algorithms etc. Perhaps I was just too advanced a delegate for their interpretation of their target audience…But not once did I hear anything in line with their topic title? They covered Darwin’s Theory of Evolution and a lot of psychological associations of search - old news…no pun intended. They hinted at discussing Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) of search algorithms and Image Recognition search from a more intelligent type of AI and algorithm, but that was ‘as futuristic’ as this presentation was. The two interesting tidbits that did come from this session was Tineye (prob as close to full image recognition AI as we currently are) and Searchme (a visual way to search + mixture of Meta & title SEO). The only other two elements that was mentioned during their talk was Audio searching or better known as audio fingerprinting (research paper) and mobile tagging (history of mobile tagging) - which are both also not new, or futuristic. Perhaps they meant “futuristic” in terms of South Africa usage?
All in all it was good to attend, ran into a few people that I know and recognise either from Twitter.com, or real-life :p
The sessions that I did not attend comprised of:
- Home entertainment over broadband | or Gaming | or Application Streaming
- Big Mamma and the horse - whatever that was about!
Anyone attend it and want to enlighten us about those?
Permalink
07.09.08
Posted in Events at 4:14 am by Carla Fourie
We are very excited to announce that on 2 September 2008 Christine da Silva from AlterSage will be presenting a workshop at the 10th Annual Conference on World Wide Web. Her topic will cover “The role of search: practical search engine marketing and other online brand building techniques.”
The World Wide Web Conference is co-hosted by the Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT) and the University of Cape Town (UCT) and will take place on UCT’s Cape Town campus. Five workshops, including Christine’s, will commence on 2 September. The Conference itself will be running from 3 – 5 September 2008. Numerous keynote speakers will present at the Conference and more than 60 peer-reviewed papers will be discussed.
Christine’s workshop will look at the evolution of search engines and user techniques. The workshop will provide attendees with techniques and tips to ensure that their information is seen in today’s environment. This can be done by increasing their online brand awareness and exposure, user base and ultimately the profitability of their online presence. For a full overview of Christine’s workshop, please click here.
We’re very pleased to be involved with the World Wide Web Conference especially since it caters for a wide variety of attendees: from students, to business people, to high-profile academics. At AlterSage we aim to educate others on how online marketing can work for them – no matter how big or small their business. It is still a very unknown area for many and therefore companies are too scared to venture into online marketing. Back at AlterSage, we host regular internal workshops to grow the AlterSage team to industry leaders and to keep them up to date with the ever evolving online industry.
If you would like to register for the Conference, please click here. For more information on the conference, you can go here. We hope to see you there J
Permalink
Next entries »