Archive for the ‘Events’ Category
Mahalo: human powered search March 22nd, 2008
I have known about Mahalo since about the time it launched and it hasn’t really appealed to me enough to use it seriously for anything. I think a human powered search engine feels a little inadequate compared to the raw processing power of a search engine like Google’s search and with new developments in the semantic search space, I wonder how Mahalo will fit into the search ecosystem.
Anyway, those meandering thoughts aside, I enjoyed this interview with Jason Calacanis (CEO of Mahalo) and one of his directors which Robert Scoble posted the other day:
Looking at Mahalo a second time it is clear that my initial thoughts about Mahalo were pretty limited. Sure Mahalo is not going to have all the search results that Google, Yahoo! Search or even Live will have but Mahalo is focussed on accumulating the top 50 000 search results and when you consider your personal search habits, do you go far beyond the first or second page of your Google search results when looking for something?
Aside from Mahalo’s focus, Mahalo will also serve up search results from other search engines and services so it will also function as a kind of meta search service too. Here are a couple searches I ran for “27 Dinner” on Mahalo. Mahalo doesn’t have any direct search results for local dinner/event series yet. In this first image you can see a direct search for “27 Dinner” on Mahalo:
In this second image, you can see the Google search results under the Google tab:
… and under the Flickr tab:
What I also noticed is that if you scroll down in the Mahalo search results you will also see what seems to be an aggregated set of search results using the top search results from Google, Flickr, Technorati and the other services Mahalo plugs into.
Mahalo is a really interesting search engine and I think it warrants spending more time on it. There is a lot more to Mahalo I haven’t mentioned and which I probably don’t eve know about so be sure to go check it out. If you create an account, feel free to connect to me. My username is “pauljacobson” (without the quotation marks).
Technorati Tags:
search, mahalo, human powered search
Posted in Events, Search, Semantic Web | Comments (0)
2nd New Media Marketing Conference preview March 14th, 2008
I am one of the speakers at the upcoming 2nd Annual New Media Marketing Conference being held at Gallagher Estate at the end of March 2008. I was asked to prepare a profile/preview video in advance to introduce myself and give an idea of what I’ll talk about. I wasn’t too keen on recording my very tired face with my webcam so I put this video together instead:
Let me know if you are going to be there. I will be speaking at about 11:50 on the 27th and I will probably only be there for that day. Otherwise I should be at the 27 Dinner that evening where I am looking forward to meeting up with a bunch of the usual, amazing crowd as well as Catherine Lückoff and Beverley Merriman who are flying up from Cape Town for the conference and the 27 Dinner.
Technorati Tags:
2nd annual new media marketing conference, profile video, preview video, beverley merriman, catherine luckoff, presentation, talk, speaker, march 2008
Posted in Events | Comments (1)
27 Dinner - July 2007 July 28th, 2007
Well, last night was the Joburg 27 Dinner and we had a pretty good time! The venue was new (to me at least), it was the M & A in Sandton in the Edward Nathan Sonnenbergs (or whatever the firm is actually called) building, opposite Netcare. I like the venue although everyone was pretty spread out. It is a great venue for networking and perhaps a little too big for talks and presentations.
That being said, we had great seats right by the projector so I was able to shoot these two videos of two of the speakers, Scott Gray (finally) and Duncan McLeod. The Scott Gray video was shot with my Nokia N73 and I am impressed with the image and sound quality.
I wasn’t able to do the same with the video of Duncan because the lighting was a bit low for my N73 so I used my still camera which was limited to clips of 3 minutes so this isn’t the whole talk. The image quality also isn’t that hot.
I have uploaded my photos to my Flickr account as well as to Facebook where you can view them on the 27 Dinner group.
I had another interesting chat with Merle from JoziKids who is doing some really interesting stuff there. I have a two part interview with her coming up in chilipod in the next week or so which I think will interest those of you who don’t have big advertising budgets.
Technorati Tags:
jozikids, merle dieterich, 27 dinner, photos, videos, scott gray, duncan mcleod
Posted in Events, People, Sharing, Useful stuff | Comments (0)
WebPR+ Conference: Rob Stokes’ first session (part 2 of 2) July 15th, 2007
In this fifth episode of the WebPR+ conference podcast, we present the second part of Rob Stokes’ first session. This is the second part of two in which Rob talks about “Online Reputation Management”.
The WebPR+ conference was held on Friday, 2 March 2007 at the Indaba Hotel in Fourways. It was presented and hosted by Quirk eMarketing. This podcast series is sponsored by Quirk eMarketing and is produced by chilibean media.
If you would like to have your event recorded and distributed as a podcast, we will be happy to assist you. Drop us a line with your contact details and we will get right back to you. The music we have used in this episode (and which we may use in future episodes) is a track called YFM Late Remix by a crowd known as Deep Fried. The track has been published on the ccMixter:sa site under a Creative Commons Attribution license.
Technorati Tags:
rob stokes, quirk, webpr+, online reputation management, reputation management, chilivents, chilipod
Posted in Events, Sharing, Useful stuff | Comments (0)
WebPR+ Conference: Sally Falkow’s first session (part 2 of 3) June 9th, 2007
In this second episode of the WebPR+ conference podcast, we present the second part of Sally Falkow’s first session. This is the second part of three in which Sally talks about “New Media Habits and New Technology Affecting the Practice of PR”.
The WebPR+ conference was held on Friday, 2 March 2007 at the Indaba Hotel in Fourways. It was presented and hosted by Quirk eMarketing. This podcast series is sponsored by Quirk eMarketing and is produced by chilibean media.
If you would like to have your event recorded and distributed as a podcast, we will be happy to assist you. Drop us a line with your contact details and we will get right back to you. The music we have used in this episode (and which we may use in future episodes) is a track called YFM Late Remix by a crowd known as Deep Fried. The track has been published on the ccMixter:sa site under a Creative Commons Attribution license.
Technorati Tags:
chilivents, sally falkow, webpr+, public relations, pr, web 2.0, quirk emarketing, chilibean media
Posted in Events, People | Comments (0)
Announcing chilivents May 28th, 2007
Today we are launching our chilivents podcast through which we will publish events that are recorded and published as a podcast. Our first event series is the WebPR+ conference held in March this year in Fourways, Johannesburg. If you would like to subscribe to chilivents you can do so by subscribing to the feed which is feeds.feedburner.com/chilivents.
Podcasting offers a number of benefits to business that go beyond events podcasting. I recently gave some input on how podcasts can add some value. I thought it might be appropriate to repeat my comments here:
… the other hand the prevalence of devices capable of playing podcast episodes (which are typically mp3-formatted audio files) presents a sizable potential market for podcasts if sufficient provision is made to deliver those podcasts to those handsets. That being said, podcasts are hardly a magic bullet and will not make other marketing channels redundant or solve all the challenges marketeers face. Podcasts have their place, as with any other marketing channel, and it is a matter of using podcasts appropriately.
Where I see value in podcasts for businesses is in its use in the enterprise as a communications tool. Podcasts could be used as a substitute for certain content on an intranet for employees who spend their time on the road. They could be used to communicate with other stakeholders, generally speaking, by presenting an alternative to text based communications routinely sent out by email or posted on a web site. An example could be statements, interviews, discussions and presentations given by individuals within an organisation and which could be made available to an audience outside the organisation which would not ordinarily have benefitted from these statemetns, interviews, discussions and presentations.
Another use for podcasts is to record and distribute presentations given at conferences to interested parties who would not have attended the conference before for a number of reasons. We are about to publish a series of posts from the WebPR+ conference held earlier this year for the benefit of attendees and people who may be interested in future conferences of a similar nature. This is a model that has been adopted by American podcast networks like GigaVox Media and Podtech.net and I believe a podcast of a conference provides a way for interested people to benefit from the information contained in the presentations, find out more about the conference itself and perhaps make the decision to attend a subsequent conference because those people have had an opportunity, through the podcast, to see the value in the conference.
So if you would like to explore the possibilities in your organisation, let us know. We will be more than happy to chat to you about a few options.
Technorati Tags:
podcasting, corporate communications, events podcasting, chilivents, feed
Posted in Events, Podcasting, Podcasts, Sharing | Comments (0)
27-5 May 28th, 2007
We had a great time at the 27 Dinner last night at the Primi in Rosebank. Most of the usual crowd was there as well as a number of new faces. The speakers last night included Colin Daniels from The Times, Erik Hersman (the White African and proprietor of the fine Afrigadget and African Signals sites, to name a few) and Vinny Lingham who gave us a demo of a new development platform called Synthasite which he will soon leave incuBeta to run as CEO.
Colin Daniels’ talk was about The Times and lessons learned about controversy on the Web (the David Bullard controversy led to a massive increase in traffic to the Sunday Times site, more than double its usual traffic according to a graph Colin showed us from Alexa). I managed to capture a short video clip from Colin’s talk:
The Zoopy guys were running a competition where people could upload videos and photos from the evening and win a cool digital video camera. I was hoping to upload my videos to Zoopy instead of Revver but there was an issue with the upload so I resorted to Revver instead. Sorry guys!
Erik Hersman was also around to chat to us a bit about his projects. He took us through some interesting opportunities that are made possible using the Jabber platform. There is a pretty interesting mashup involving Muti and Mxit which is an “example how you can use the mobile tools that are available right now to build into your applications.”
He even mentioned a post we published a little while ago which inspired him to come up with this item:
Henk Kleynhans from Skyrove chatted a little bit about his wifi hotspot product which enables you to re-sell your bandwidth and actually make some money from it. I am curious whether there are any terms in the terms and conditions that ISPs use that would prohibit the resale of bandwidth like this? If not then this would make so much sense in so many contexts where bandwidth could be shared at a low cost to the group of users in range. It would certainly help alleviate the high costs of bandwidth in South Africa.
All in all, the event was a lot of fun.
Thanks again to Mike and his team at Cerebra for organising the event.
Technorati Tags:
27 Dinner, 27dinner, primi, rosebank, henk kleynhans, erik hersman, white african, afrigadget, african signals, the times, colin daniels, vinny lingham, synthasite, zoopy, 27-5
Posted in Events, Fun, People, Sharing, Useful stuff | Comments (2)
Bizcommunity says “thanks” May 17th, 2007
I just got back from a Wild West-themed party hosted by Bizcommunity at Party House in Northgate. The event was held to thank Bizcommunity’s clients and prospective clients for their business and interest. I had a couple really interesting discussions about satellite TV in Africa and the upcoming CNBC Africa launch on 1 June (which is expected to really shake up local and African business news on terrestrial and satellite TV) and new media adoption in South African businesses (there certainly seems to be quite a bit of enthusiasm for new media elements like blogs and what is needed is more analysis of what is appropriate for a given business).
The event was co-ordinated by Bizcommunity’s National Ad Sales Executive who dressed up for the evening in a kind of Wild West showgirl outfit (I am dredging the memory of what Wild West showgirls wore on old movies up from the recesses of my memory so I could be wrong about the style of the dress). I would like to thank Simone Puterman for inviting us to the party.
I have a few more photos on Flickr. Please excuse the poor image quality - my aging Nokia 6630 doesn’t cope very well with low light situations.
Technorati Tags:
bizcommunity, wild west, party, gee friedman, simone puterman
Posted in Events, Media, People | Comments (3)
21 Visionary Patrons: It is about innovation, free culture and open science May 9th, 2007
iCommons has been made an offer of $100 000 funding towards the upcoming iCommons summit in Dubrovnik in Croatia. The catch is the $100 000 must be matched by $100 000 to be raised by iCommons itself in 7 days! So iCommons, under the leadership of the remarkable Heather Ford, is campaigning for the balance using a very interesting approach:
A very generous sponsor will donate $100,000 to iCommons if we can raise a matching grant of $100,000 in just 7 days. Powered by our amazing community of bloggers around the world, we’re going to do just that by getting 21 Visionary Patrons to each name one of the base camps on the way to the Summit for $3,000 - taking us up 21 base camps to reach the $63,000 Summit (our sister organisation, Creative Commons, is raising the rest). Each base camp on this epic journey will be named after the sponsor, and sponsors will be able to display buttons indicating their support of this wonderful event.
So why would you want to support this effort? Well, for starters, iCommons is charged with promoting Creative Commons and related content licenses which enable meaningful collaboration and sharing of content. Creative Commons licenses are flexible tools that allow content creators to share their valuable and unique content with the world and yet have that wonderful material continue to support both them and their communities. In other words -
The iCommons Summit is an annual event bringing together 300 visionaries of the free Internet to map out strategies for fostering innovation, free culture and open science around the world. With thought leaders from the world’s top Internet companies who are leading the way in developing an innovative culture in which entrepreneurs around the world can be a part, this event is charting a brighter future for all of us. If the Internet is a part of what makes your business successful, or if you want to support an organisation that is helping to use the Internet for education, science and local innovation, you need to be one of our Visionary Patrons. (Find out more about this year’s Summit)
Old Mutual’s Tony Lankester said this about why they’re funding the Summit: ‘We are investing in the Summit because we see it as a vital incubator of great, innovative thinking around the internet. For the internet to grow to the next level there needs to be a step-change in the way we think about it, talk about it, engage with it, and use it. And that sort of change can only happen if a group of passionate individuals are given the space to pioneer the kind of debate and create a robust framework to take the internet forward. We like the spirit of Creative Commons, and we like the opportunities it can give us in the developing world to take this wonderful technology wider and deeper into society and become an agent of change in its own right.
If innovation, free culture and scientific development is important to you then support this initiative and either donate money yourself or speak to someone who can and wants to be one of the 21 patrons of the iCommons Summit and one of the inspired supporters of such a noble effort. Heck, if I had the $3 000 (roughly R21 000), I’d do it in a flash.
Then again, perhaps you could join me and pledge a donation quickly. Perhaps we, as a community, could be one of the 21 Visionary Patrons and let the world know what South African bloggers can do when inspired. What do you say? Why don’t we come together and be a positive force for change. Pledge what you can and remember the overall goal of R21 000. What do you think? I’ll come up with R1 000. Will you join me?
Technorati Tags:
icommons summit, 21 visionary patrons, dubrovnik, croatia, funding, $3 000
Posted in Events, People | Comments (0)
Cape Town 27 Dinner photos and videos on Zoopy April 30th, 2007
The Zoopy guys have announced that videos and photos from the Cape Town 27 Dinner last week are up on Zoopy. Just head on over to the 27 Dinner channel for the many photos and videos of the talks.
Our very own Aquila did a great job snapping away and uploading his photos to Zoopy and contributing to the collection.
Technorati Tags:
27 dinner, cape town, photos, videos, zoopy, 27 dinner channel, aquila
Posted in Events, People | Comments (0)