Anyways, the idea is that by being candid you’re more likely to gain the trust and confidence of your stakeholders, than you would if you kept everything Mum. I’ve always believed in the idea, more I guess because I see the world becoming more bottom up and less top down, but actually doing something about it is a difficult job.

I’ve been blogging on my own domain oneafrikan.com for over 4 years now (it seems like an age), so I know what it takes to write intelligently and more importantly, something that other people will find interesting…

So, after reading these two posts that Luke sent me, I’ve decided to exercise my Kung-Fu, and to get started talking about what we’re doing, because it seems that everyone I speak to about our business’ progress is actually interested, and we may actually have some important things to say about the work we do, the industry in general, and what we’re busy with.

I am worried that there will be some overlap with oneafrikan.com and this blog, so I’m going to try and keep it fairly separate. I’ll point to it so that people get the idea soon enough, but will keep things here about Technovated and what I’m thinking (I’m also going to encourage the team to blog here as well), whilst oneafrikan.com stuff will be more personal, probably some technical stuff, some African stuff, some stuff my employer can’t jibe me about , and as much good humour as I can find.

I also hope that our clients will find what we talk about here interesting, and perhaps even stimulating – I’m going to let as much into the air as prudent, and hopefully in doing that will get some industry people jabbering away too.

Anyways, let’s get started…

And so it begins….

Almost surprisingly, the feedback has been along the lines we were expecting:
people would be willing to go to JHB,
wanna know about stuff around web2.0 primarily,
want to hear international speakers, and
think the conference would benefit the African web community.

On top of that, we’re getting some good coverage on the blogosphere so far:
Update as of 27/11/2006:
David Duarte
Cowboysengines (business site: http://www.virtualworks.co.za/index.asp)
Hash @ Whiteafrican.com
Update as of 28/11/2006:
Coda.co.za
Scott.za.net
Muti.co.za

Anyone else we don’t know about yet? (If you’re going to blog about it, then please use the following Technorati tags: tech4africa07,T4A7 or T4A)

Thanks!

Some people have asked why we’re not just launching with dates and relying on “if you build it they will come” to make it a success – in short, 2 reasons:
1. We are speaking to some really, really high profile international speakers, who naturally want to allocate time to a conference on the other side of the world if they feel there are going to be enough people to make it worthwhile. We’ve invested the time up front to collect some real data, that goes beyond a thumbsuck, to show we’re serious.
2. We believe that business rules should apply – we need to at least break even, and we need to justify further time put into the project, so it makes sense that without real data we can’t make any assumptions beyond that we reckon 10 – 20% of people we email should respond to the initial email asking for feedback.

So, if you’re reading this and haven’t filled in the feedback form on the site then please do, just to prove us wrong The more data and feedback we have, the more likely we are to actually hold the event and make it something truly special!

Also, we’ve been asked what to do if folks are interested in helping out:
1. Email us to say so whether you think you can help with something small or big – the more help we get the better – and we’d really appreciate it. Up front, we don’t have cash to pay people now, but as and when that happens then we’re all about getting the right help, so that may be an option. Right now, telling 10 of your mates would be the best help in the world!.. and…
2. Blog it – please blog it and help to moibilise the troops
3. If you have a speaker you would really like to hear, then please do email us to say so – being able to tell speakers they’ve been asked for by people is good motivation for them!

And that’s that for now – more soon as things are worth taking about.

The guys at cowboysengines wrote a pretty cool article about the conference idea and they are giving us some solid support!

Please visit the site, at www.technologyforafrica.org and give us some feedback, so that we can give feedback to the speakers, justify sponsorship and organise a really worthwhile event.

Cheers

Instead we will be hard at work in a cold and gloomy London, which is really not as bad as it seems. One of the things we have been working on is a project which is really close to the heart and will hopefully benefit the whole of Southern Africa.

The aim of this project is to hold a “web and emerging technologies conference” in South Africa. We want to get international speakers, who are industry leaders and who would like to give some advice to Africans involved in the Web and IT industry.

I have been doing quite a lot of research over the past few months and I really believe that a conference of this nature will be beneficial to the “African technology community”

We have a site up at and running (www.technologyforafrica.org), which is still undergoing some final testing before we start to contact Southern African companies involved in the IT industry. However, if you have any comments or suggestions please contact one of us, or just post a comment to this article.

I am hoping that we will get positive feedback from the majority of people who we contact because I think the concept of “Technology for Africa” is a fantastic opportunity.

For the uninitiated, user generated content (UGC for short) is basically where instead of creating valuable content yourself and then letting people read/consume it, you rely on your users to create that content for you. Two notable examples that have recently been acquired for absolutely stupendous amounts of money are MySpace and YouTube.

OK, so where do you start?
Adsense – let’s just throw this out the window straight away – you can’t start and build a business from advertising revenue that relies on people clicking little text based adverts on your website. At least, you would have to be insane to do that.

Advertising – sounds like a good option. But to make that work, you have to do advertising deals or have an advertising network at the ready that will provide you with contextual advertising that still gives you a good enough cut, and/or you have to have so much traffic that your advertisers would be stupid not to consider your channel for their ad spend (but of course the problem here is that you don’t get really good huge amounts of traffic overnight); and/or you have to have contacts that can give you an inside track to advertising spend where your growing number of users and traffic is worthy of someones attention.

Either way, advertising revenue as a viable sustainable business model only works when you scale to a large enough user base to make the revenue model work.

Build it and they will come – is where you assume that whatever you are doing will grow big enough and quickly enough to attract the attention of your friendliest 800 pound gorilla on the block, so that they will acquire you and make the founders / shareholders richer than they were the day before. Here you’re making some big bets – some might say stupid bets…

Find value to offer, and make it cheap enough to afford and easy enough to scale – is the attitude where your core offering is free, but if the users want a value added “widget”, then they have to pay for it. So, you’re not pushing people away ‘cos your offering is paid for, but you’re saying to them that you can have this little piece extra, and it will cost you a dollar a day/week/month (or whatever) – most people probably won’t go for it, but chances are a smallish percentage of your user base will go for it – so your revenue model needs to be really conservative (not “if 10000000000000 people use this, we’ll be rich!!!”), where “relatively small number of users x low cost per widget” == “enough money to keep the lights on”.

The only problem is, what in the sam hill is that widget going to be?

So – where is the middle ground? How can you offer a service which is useful to your users, and still earn enough money to get it off the ground while not killing your credit rating and making enemies with your bank manager?

At the moment, I think it’s a mixture of advertising and widgets, probably with advertising dominating once you scale up to a large number of users – the question is how you grow initially to a large enough critical mass to make things work.

I don’t know the answers to this, but rest assured I’m going to ask my sub-conscious to think about what widgets make sense to users, and are easy enough to implement, while also trying to do some more reading on revenue models for user generated content.

For now, I have the following URL’s open in FireFox:

http://www.e-consultancy.com/news-blog/361871/jakob-nielsen-s-tips-on-increasing-community-participation.html

http://www.gertismedia.com/blog/category/ugc/

http://mrwavetheory.blogspot.com/2006/09/zecco-is-free-business-model.html

http://paulstamatiou.com/2006/08/04/wordpresscom-adds-pay-feature-custom-css/

What do you think?

I’ve personally done more blog implementations than I can remember, but somehow this one is sweetest so far – all the knowledge I’ve accumulated over the years made the creation of the layout relatively straight forward, and the implementation process slick and easy (literally got everything working and installed once the theme was done, in about 30 mins), so we’re on schedule, which makes me very happy.

All the client needs to do now is start blogging! And this is the hardest part really…

Loads of people we speak to have heard about this blogging thing, so they are naturally interested and want to get started, but they don’t make the connection between blog success and regular content. Blog readers come back for content and conversation, not sweet design, nor tight Ajax, and not even competitions – they come back because they are engaged with the writer in some way!

So, if you’re starting a blog, or thinking about starting one – don’t ask questions about the technology or the design, or whether it can be done, because the answer to all those questions is an emphatic yes. What you should be asking is, am I prepared to write regularly, and commit myself to writing content that I like, and content that has some value to my niched market? If the answer is yes, then all the best to you, ‘cos you’re on the right track