Archive for April, 2009

Posted on April 30, 2009 - by Justin Hartman

My thoughts on BarCamp Nigeria

On Saturday I was fortunate enough to attend BarCamp Nigeria 2009 in Lagos. Despite various concerns about going to Nigeria (more on that in another blog post) I must say I had a fantastic time and met some amazing people along the way.

Loy Okezie from Startups Nigeria has a really nice summary of the events that transpired over here and there’s another in depth look by Possicon over here as well so I won’t rehash what’s already been said.

What I will say is that this room, filled with about 80 Nigerians, was a true eye-opener for me. They all have university qualifications, all have an online startup (mostly ecommerce focused) and are all extremely well educated and experienced in the online space.

The big question in my mind has been that if a country like Nigeria is filled with such talented individuals in the largest Internet penetrated country in Africa (currently more than 10 million users) then why hasn’t Nigeria produced any world-class Internet startups yet?

This seemed to be a general question and a reason why the event took place in the first place and while there were a lot of theories flying around such as poor connectivity, electricity problems, Government support and regulations, etc., I was left with a strong sense of what’s been lacking – a community.

Up until BarCamp Nigeria most of these 80 people had never met in real-life before. Some have interacted online but for the most part each one has been left to his own devices and they’re all trying to grow their businesses with very little help along the way.

This is the core difference to say South Africa where we do have a pretty strong online community and while it’s often incestuous, contrived and filled with so-called rockstars this community does help drive products online. I can testify to this with my experiences with Afrigator – without the community we’d be nowhere.

South Africa’s online community, or early-adopters, may well be small in the greater scheme of world markets but it all has to start somewhere and in Nigeria’s case this hasn’t really begun yet. I could see that after BarCamp the guys were hungry for more and so they should be. The more they meet, interact, share ideas and create partnerships along the way the more we’ll see online innovation thriving out of Nigeria.

In addition to my observation I also had to do a presentation and to be honest I didn’t really feel qualified to do so. I am the first to admit I don’t know much about Nigeria so I decided to share my experiences of running an online startup in South Africa, shared some of our most detailed social media trends and finally launched our latest baby Gator – Gatorpeeps.

Have a look at the presentation below and let me know what your thoughts are!

 

Posted on April 20, 2009 - by Justin Hartman

Bolton Deventer lives on

When I was formulating my presentation for the 24.com Blogging Workshop on Saturday I was struggling to find a good example of how to promote your blog and market yourself online. So, I decided it was time to revive Bolton Deventer.

I figured that Bolton had a massive impact on the South African blogging community so what better way to illustrate this than by using him as a case study. I must say that I had massive amounts of fun putting this presentation together as it reminded me of the shenanigans that went on during that brief twelve day period. If you haven’t heard of Bolton then best you view the presentation below and get some tips on how to grow traffic to your blog!

 

Posted on April 20, 2009 - by Justin Hartman

Grabble laid to rest

In 2006 I was fascinated with search. So much so that I learnt all that I could about search engines and SEO and this was largely driven by the fact that I was in complete awe of Google at the time. All of this inspired me to start a South African search engine and during 2006 I launched Grabble.

Because I only understood the theory of search engine technology it wasn’t as easy as I had thought to start my own and implementing the technology was an extremely complicated experience. My very first version was powered by Lucene but as it was powered by Java (and TomCat) I had great difficulty in getting it to work as expected.

I then ran a version of mnoGoSearch which was run as a Perl command line utility and while this one seemed to give me the best results I had resource issues which hampered my efforts. What I soon figured out was why Google has a few hundred thousand servers powering their search engine and after about a week of indexing South African websites I ran out of disk space. With about 8 million records indexed I had used up my 80GB hard drive.

So, in the end Grabble went PHP and while I retained some indexing capabilities from mnoGoSearch I also tapped into Yahoo to help out. At the time Yahoo didn’t have a search API so I had to do a lot of hacking to get results returned from Yahoo. In particular, Yahoo provided all the image, news, videos, blogs, sport and forum search results.

While being in awe of Google I also felt that total dominance of only a few players in the market wasn’t a good thing. I believed, esoterically at the time, that local search needed to be dominated by a local company. These beliefs I still hold true to heart and I feel that it’s critical that competitors exist. There is something very uncomfortable in knowing that one or two companies hold the majority of the world’s data and I was convinced that Grabble would be a winner.

Almost three years later and I’ve been debating what to do with Grabble. For the last two months the site hasn’t even been operational (well web search anyway) and while I didn’t want to close it down completely I also had to face the reality that Grabble was never going to dominate and I simply did not have the time to maintain it any longer.

Then along came 4hoursearch – a website powered by the Yahoo BOSS search API and running off Google AppEngine. I stumbled across this site by chance and realised that they had released their source code under GPL. Subsequent to this finding I have now moved Grabble onto this Python software and my final version of Grabble has now been hatched.

What this final version does is allow me to keep the site up for those who still want to use it and at the same time it gives me an opportunity to say goodbye. Running through the Yahoo BOSS API means that I don’t have to worry about indexes any longer and living on the Google AppEngine means technology is now taken care of.

I have learnt so much about search through my efforts with Grabble and I hold it very close to my heart. While it never took off it did give me an opportunity to expand my knowledge and experience in an area I felt passionate about and the learning curve I’ve gone through has certainly helped define where I am today.

 

Posted on April 16, 2009 - by Justin Hartman

I’ve been nominated for the 2009 Men’s Health Best Man Awards

Yesterday I received a notification that I’ve been nominated for the 2009 Men’s Health Best Man Awards. To be honest I’m blown away but before I get into that here’s what the awards are all about.

Every year a few men stand out from the crowd. They inspire us, challenge us and lead us to greater heights of personal and professional achievement. Men’s Health magazine believes that these men deserve to be recognised and so the Best Man Awards was born.

As the first campaign of its kind in South Africa; Men’s Health Best Man aims to reward our country’s top achievers for the ground-breaking work they have accomplished. We’ve highlighted six categories – sports, media, business, arts and culture, public service and science and technology – and after an exhaustive process by our expert panel selected the finalists who represent the Best Man. These men were profiled in the May issue of Men’s Health from which the final three in each category are then selected. The Best Man winner in each category will then be announced at the final Best Man Awards dinner.

This year I’ve been chosen as one of eight nominees in the Media category and very shortly they’ll be narrowing this list down to three finalists. The other nominees in the Media category that I’m competing with are:

• Jonathan ‘Zapiro’ Shapiro (do I even need to tell you who Zapiro is?)
• Paul Holden (author of The Arms Deal in Your Pocket)
• Solly Philander (multi-award winning performer)
• Thabo Marera (award winning commercial director)
• Danie van der Walt (award winning journalist and executive producer of the environmental programme 50/50)
• Garwin McLuckie (award winning SA cameraman)
• Matthew Buckland (GM, Social Media 24.com)

This is an impressive list of contenders and I really am extremely grateful to the powers that be for nominating me and even considering me amongst these top professionals. It really is a nice feeling being nominated for such a prestigious award and although I’m thankful I have to warn Men’s Health that I’m not taking my shirt off for the cover photo shoot when I win!

 

Posted on April 15, 2009 - by Justin Hartman

One year old today

At 17:15 on 15 April 2008 Ben Hartman was born. It’s impossible to quantify how much Ben has changed our lives over the last 12 months and it always amazes me how quickly time flies.

Ben is our second born son and I really love to see how different each of our children are. Luke is cautious and shy by nature while Ben is a maniac who shows no fear. He’s already given me tons of new grey hair and I’m positive there’s going to be a lot more in the years to come.

While Ben can’t really understand the significance of today, Luke is completely excited that his little brother is one year old. Yesterday he said he was going to invite everyone we knew to Ben’s birthday party but as we’re recent Capetonian immigrants we don’t really have anyone to invite

We don’t want to damper Luke’s excitement so we’re off to buy Ben a really cool present this afternoon and then we’re hitting the spur for a birthday dinner.

 

Posted on April 14, 2009 - by Justin Hartman

GeekCricket – a very serious affair

For a few weeks now I’ve been following the GeekCricket Wiki, an initiative started by Rob Stokes and fellow Geeks, hoping that I’d get picked to play in Sunday’s game at the Wynberg Cricket Club.

At the time I was the 6th reserve but thanks to Easter holiday’s the guys started dropping like flies and I finally made it on the list. In all honesty I haven’t felt this excited about something in a long time and seeing as the last time I played a proper match was back in 1996 I was also extremely worried.

I’m sure many of you are giggling just at the idea of a geek cricket match and while I can’t blame you I have to warn you this was a very serious affair. We had 17 professional cricketers turn up, there were many geek cricket groupies, two photographers and dedicated media coverage and that’s not even taking into account all the young wannabe cricketers learning from the masters.

First ball was bowled at around 11am and the Kaapse Klopse were off to a flying start. I got picked for the Chevrolet Nashua Mercedes Supersport Nike Chargers and we managed to contain the Klopse to a formidable 145 all out. I didn’t think we stood a chance and after only making 5 runs myself I figured it was all over. In the end though the Chargers pulled off an historic win no thanks to our esteemed captain.

As you can imagine though geeks have no concept of stopping so we decided to have a second game – this time a short 10 over a side match. Needless to say we lost a few guys in the process so our nine a side game became a six a side game. At this stage the groupies had left and all that remained was the die hards of Wynberg Cricket Club.

It was our turn to bat and the Chargers put on a seemingly impossible total of 97 in our 10 overs. I had figured the batting aspect of my game out and was top scorer with 23 not out and this time I was convinced that Rob’s Klopse team had little chance of scoring 10 runs an over.

Things were going extremely well until I had to bowl. I think the Klopse needed around 35 runs to win and I got smashed for about 25 in my over. It was, without doubt, the most expensive over of the day and I had effectively lost the match for our team. I apologised after but somehow I doubt that I’ll get a chance to bowl next time in.

And so after two grueling matches the Klopse and Chargers were all square. After more than 10 years of not playing a real cricket game I have to say that 5 hours of action packed entertainment is just a little too much for my eroding body. I have little doubt that I’ll be struggling to walk the next couple days but hell it was all worth it.

 

Posted on April 8, 2009 - by Justin Hartman

Please help Investec from committing Online suicide

Investec Bank, a company I’ve long admired, is about to ruin their hard earned reputation online. On the Investec homepage there is a graphic enticing users to test drive their new website located at http://beta.investec.com. This is what it looks like.

I doubt that it’s just me but the new Investec site is simply unusable and I’m struggling to see how their clients are going to be happy with the new interface. While the site is certainly pushing boundaries in terms of web design I have to ask one simple question. Why?

Let me explain why I think this site is bad for them:

• The site is largely built using JavaScript. This is bad news for Search Engines and if you happen to have JavaScript disabled in your browser (many browsers do) then the site simply doesn’t load.
• All content is loaded in an iframe. Once again, bad news for Search Engines as their content is never going to be indexed correctly. This leaves a major gap for Investec competitors who’s sites are optimised for SEO.
• Font size of the content is so small that their major base of clients over the age of 45 are really going to have a tough time reading it.
• Navigation is extremely unintuitive. At first glance it looks like the site is still loading because you don’t see any navigation bars. Eventually you figure out that if you hover on the smaller buttons to the left and right the real navigation bars appear. Using the 7 second rule new visitors to this site will simply close the browser window and move onto the next site.
• The market indicators appear to be hidden in the bottom bar. We figured out that you actually need to click the indicators to have them pop up. There is no message or call to action informing people that they should click this bar to read more.

Investec have a one question survey about their new beta site and I urge anyone who likes this brand to take the survey and tell them to rethink their strategy. I don’t particularly like to hammer brands on my blog but I’m actually trying to help them out.

Please take the short survey by clicking on this link. I hope that you’ll agree with me that they should rather stick to their current site until they’ve revised this beta one.

 

Posted on April 3, 2009 - by Justin Hartman

Afrigator turns two today… somehow it feels like more!

Honestly I can’t believe it’s that time of year again. Today the team at Afrigator are celebrating our second birthday but strangely it feels like our baby is much older than it actually is.

This time last year I wrote a birthday post and after reading it again I can clearly remember how the first year went by so quickly. Year two is a very different story and while it did go by as quickly as year one I certainly feel like Afrigator, myself and our team have matured in a very big way.

By Web 2.0 standards Afrigator is now actually a very old product. Strange to think that something so new can be classified as old but the reality is that if you haven’t had any traction by this stage your product is dead. For us the reality is that Afrigator has only really started to show traction from when we were partly acquired in September and the growth on all fronts has been phenomenal.

See, for a long time Afrigator had a great brand outside the borders of South Africa and it was largely due to this that we were even able to negotiate a deal with MIH Print Africa. That said, I do remember crapping myself at the idea of how we were going to meet the objectives and projections detailed in the business plan and contracts yet despite this here we are, six months later and I’m blown away by the progress thus far.

While Afrigator has been somewhat of a success story I am humbled by the fact that had we not done the deal with MIH we might not even be here today. Prior to the deal with MIH I was seriously considering the viability of continuing Afrigator in its current form. Mike, Mark, Stii and myself were funding the project by ourselves and it was taking up serious amounts of our time and cutting away at family and personal life and while this great personal sacrifice was manageable in the beginning after 18 months it started to take its toll.

All I can say is thank God the deal came through in the end and thank God I decided to stick it out. I’ve honestly never been this happy with my professional life and this is largely due to the fact that I’m working full time on something that I feel 100% passionate about.

Afrigator has a long way to go to truly be successful and I have a long learning curve ahead of me but as it stands right now I wouldn’t change it for the world. My life has changed so much in the last six months, I’m interacting with some of the most influential business minds in South Africa, I have a great team at my disposal, I am working on innovative ideas and I’m being tested on all levels every day of my life.

Does it get any better?

The great part about where I am right now is that I have a clear understanding of where our company needs to be this time next year and I know exactly what I want to achieve over the next 12 months. So while I’m excited that Afrigator celebrates our second birthday with you guys I’m also humbled by the idea that we have a lot of work ahead of us to achieve the goals we’ve set for ourselves.

 

Posted on April 2, 2009 - by Justin Hartman

My presentation at Nomadic Marketing

On Tuesday I was invited by Dave Duarte to give a presentation at the UCT Graduate School of Business (GSB) for their Nomadic Marketing course. A very daunting task to say the least but I lapped up the opportunity to engage with some of SA’s brilliant minds.

My presentation was on Tools & Technologies, Filtering and Collaborating and while the start is mostly around education the end of the presentation got very interesting. I figured that while it was important to explain the different tools and technologies out there I also wanted to show delegates how to use the tools effectively.

Having been privy to the delegate list beforehand I knew that there were a number of Old Mutual people in the audience so I figured their company would be as good as any to do a small case study on. The results across the various social websites was interesting and I hope that it highlighted how companies are being spoken about online but also how the conversation is generally a one-way street. In my mind it’s an opportunity to engage users and customers in a very unique way.

 

Posted on April 1, 2009 - by Justin Hartman

Shift happens

OK, so I had all these thoughts about the video embedded below and I really wanted to go into detail to explain the context, where it came from, what it means for me (and you) but in the end I’ve decided to just embed it and let you make up your own mind. I have little doubt that if you haven’t seen this yet you’ll absolutely love it. I hope that it helps shift your perception…

If you’ve watched it and want some background info I suggest you read the following links.

• Did you Know?
• Over 2 million served
• Shift Happens