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Mobile in Retail – 1st Mobile Monday Joburg Event

Wednesday, February 9th, 2011

Being my first Mobile Monday event, I did not know what to expect, but I was definately not disappointed. The theme of the event, the first for 2011, was entitled “Mobile in Retail”, and took place at the The Baron in Bryanston.  A total of 170 people registered for the event.

On arrival at the venue, I was presented with my name tag and shown upstairs. I was one of the few females present and definately one of the youngest in the crowd of well dressed business men and executives. A very different type of crowd from the 27dinners that I attend regularly.

I managed to find a few familiar faces (namely @cynicalgrinch, @tinahe and @justinleephotos) and was presented with a welcome drink, was sponsored by egrips.

The first speaker for the evening was Clayton Hayward who presented his mobile startup called Mobicover. By partnering with large insurance companies, including Alexander Forbes and Liberty Life, Mobicover aims to provide insurance, life cover and funeral policies, amongst other services to the lower LSM market in South Africa.

The next speaker was Candice Goodman, recent winner of an MMA global award. She introduced the concept of the mobile phone as being the remote control of the customer and gave examples of how to use SMS and USSD to interact with customers and built customer relationships.

Baron Marshall who works for Mortimer Harvey, was speaker number three. He demonstrated the use of mobile sites and applications by means of two case studies.

The first case study was their strategy for LG and the launch of their mobile phone called the Chatterville. This involved the use of both a mobi site and a flash based website. They also incorporated the use of an online dictionary for chat shorthand. The success of this campaign was measurable.

The second case study was for Doritos Collisions. The basis of the ad was to compile a movie clip and upload it – completing 1 of 3 starts to an advert. A number of film schools were approached before the competition kicked off and this was included as part of their portfolio work. A total of 97 video clips were created and uploaded. The campaign made use of a number of channels including a mobi site, website and Facebook. The success of this campaign was also measurable.

Mike Joubert, editor of Techsmart magazine, presented the Mobile Gadget spot, as the forth and final presentation of the evening. This was by far the most interesting. He spoke about some of the latest trends in the industry including:  Near Field Communication (NFC) capabilities in mobile phones, improvements in processing power in mobile phones and the resurgence of 3D. Watch this space!

All in all a fascinating and fact filled evening. This will definitely not be my last!

09.02.2011 Experiences, Reviews 1 Comment

27Dinner Event talking Banking and Venture Capital – January 2011

Sunday, January 30th, 2011

The 27Dinners events epitomize the networking capacity of the online community in South Africa, and I love attending these events. They are always well co-ordinated, well executed, well attended and well enjoyed; and this, the first of 2011, was no exception.

Generously sponsored by Seacom and Intel Venture Capital, and held at the infamous Metro Restaurant, in Benmore Gardens, all 120 registered attendees were served both food and drink in style.

LeBistro were also part of the proceedings and kindly sponsored customised name tags for all who registered. It works with a QR Reader system. There are a number of  applications available for all types of smartphones that can read these tags. Read here for more information.

The main course was served before the first speaker. Options for the meal was Cheeseburger & Chips, Linguini Bolagnaise (my choice), and Mascaponi Pizza.

First Guest Speaker - Herman Singh | Standard Bank Director

His very engaging presentation was all about the future of banking – globally.  Entitled “Making rands and sense of the chaos, he  went on to discuss the major players in the online space; and how much they are spending on R&D.

Getting in on the action

Basically whoever owns the payment stream, owns the money. Gaming communities have introduced their own forms of currencies which are infiltrating into the global economy. Facebook also recently announced the use of Facebook Credits for all online games – read more here >>

Money is made on applications and no longer on adverts. Facebook, Google and Apple (amongst others) are able to monetize their existing databases.

Banking

Banking as we know it is changing. Virtual currencies are becoming stronger and mobile banking appears to be the future in Africa.

Second Guest Speaker – Sam Mensah | Director of the sub-Saharan branch of Intel Venture Capital

The first issue discussed was the appointment of Will-i-am into Intel. The basic idea behind this was to bring in someone who could be involved in creating innovative products that are currently relevant.

Sam then spoke about Silicon Valley and how they are trying to replicate this all over the world, including the Cape (Silicon Cape).

Why Silicon Valley? Because its the basis of almost everything. Turning research into actual products that people want to buy.

Venture Capital is available in South Africa you just need to know where to look. Between 2001 and 2011 there was total investment of 2.6 billion rand in VC with a big portion of this coming from government.

Unfortunately he went on for too long and many of the people lost interest. @markusher did happen to win a nice bottle of wine though.

Desert was then served shortly after the second presentation which gave us more time to chat to all the regulars; many people left before being served.

In closing, I always find these events inspiring and a great networking opportunity. Thanks to Cerebra for making 27dinner such a success and the place to be on every other 27th (or thereabouts) of the month :)

30.01.2011 Experiences, Reviews 1 Comment

Start Ups and Ingenious Lyrics at the final #27dinner for 2010

Thursday, November 25th, 2010

The final #27dinner for 2010 was a combination of fabulous food and pink drinks, startups and singing comedy, 130 geeks and a great venue – the Metro Restaurant in Benmore. SEACOM were incredibly generous in sponsoring a delicious main course and dessert, offering as well as cosmopolitan welcome cocktails, bottles of wine and a bar tab for the event.

The Speaker

Stafford Massie, ex CEO of Google, was the main speaker on the bill. His talk was both inspiring and industry related. He introduced two of the startups he is involved in, namely waytag, a geo location DNS system, and a transaction engine, which is yet to be named.

Waytag is like other geo location applications but which gives the user greater control and can be pinpointed to an exact location that doesn’t even need to be mapped. It is being integrated with Garmin and TomTom and will be available at a later stage in both free and paid for variations. There are 38 million points of interests to be added and applications will be made available to work across all mobile platforms. Rich third party API’s will be also be released.

The second startup, which is yet to be named, is a transaction engine. This aims to integrate payment across all banks, platforms etc, and make it one click transaction. Still in the prototype phase, it is also planned to be integrated into the waytag system.

The business model around both these start-ups is aimed at aggregation and usage.

He also mentioned that he is part of team bringing the founders of the top 10 VC’s to the country next year to discuss new big ideas and start-ups. Details available for this event will be made public in January 2010.

The Comedian

Entertainment was provided by Daniel Friedman, AKA Deep Fried Man, whose day job is with Cerebra. His approach to the delivery of his comedy genius was through playing a guitar and singing to various well known melodies. His lyrics were clever and funny and relative to the crowd with “my blog is better than your blog” and “tweet it”.

The Send Off

Mike Stopforth of Cerebra closed off by saying thank you to Stafford Massie, DeepFriedMan, SEACOM for the sponsorship and Metro Restaurant for the venue as well as the crowd for attending, and for a great year. A few PigSpotter T-shirts were also given out, 3 were also given to some brave soul who sang a line of “Eye of the Tiger”.

A free STUFF magazine was also on offer on the way out :)

PS. I had the privilege of sitting with an awesome bunch of people so of which I had never met in person before namely: @cynicalgrinch, @JackieJVR, @MeeAParkins, @PaulBedford, @markusher and @tinskaysys. You guys were great! Thanks for the awesome evening. It is always nice to meet people that you interact with regularly online, in person.

25.11.2010 Experiences, Reviews No Comments

27 Dinner with Seacom and Samsung

Tuesday, September 28th, 2010

Last night I attended another great 27Dinner event coordinated by the people at Cerebra – @mikestopforth and @melodymaker. It was held at the Metro Bar and Cafe in Benmore Gardens (a venue used once before).  I personally like this venue as there is adequate seating for everyone and allows for great networking! As @handyman_can and I got there early we chose to sit at the end of a big table in the hope of meeting some interesting people, which we did :)

I met for the first time @Cynicalgrinch and @PaulBedford (and some other tweeple I cant quite remember) who sat with us for the remainder of the evening! We shared a few laughs, tweets, drinks and more drinks.

Seacom kindly sponsored the food (starters and the main course) as well as the first round of drinks! The starter was a choice between chicken livers and rockfort salad. The main meal was a choice between beef schnitzel, chicken schnitzel (both served with chips and veggies) and a vegetarian bake! Way too much food for me but I was kindly allowed a doggy bag :)

The first guest speaker was Aidan Baigre, Head of Development at Seacom, who had a brief introduction and then a conducive Q&A session – all in less than 10 minutes!

The next speaker was Brett Loubser from Samsung who also spoke briefly about the Samsung devices compared to Apple, and also conducted a successful Q&A session. He also gave away a Samsung Galaxy smartphone as part of a draw that everyone there was entered into (by way of a number discreetly added to everyone’s twitter tag label – lol).

We were then given the opportunity to play with the new Samsung Galaxy Tab (the first group of people in South Africa it seems), as a few demo models were passed around the restaurant! I personally thought it was great – with features such as a 5 MP camera, HD video, android browser, eReading and GPS navigation to name but a few features, whats not to like about it.. Now all we need to wait for is the price!

Other people I have the privilege of conversing with included: @ryangibson, @chrisdawson, @zk, @CraigN and @walterpike :)

All in all I had a great time! Looking forward to the next one!

28.09.2010 Thoughts No Comments