Must say that the last few months have been a blur…
Since January of this year, Technovated has gone from 4 people, to 10, to a venture funded project with 14 people in all, over three office moves and many many late nights and long weekends.

There’s a blog post coming up about it all soon, but the long and the short of it is as follows:

1. I’m responsible for getting our venture funded application out the door soon, so I’m stacked as it is
2. I’ve battled to find dates this year that get the right mix of African and international speakers together at the same time
3. I’ve battled to find the right kind of sponsorship early, which would mean the difference between something good and something mediocre – mostly related to point 2 (since sponsors like to be linked to speakers and topics)
4. I’m convinced that it would be a loss maker if we didn’t get the right speakers – there’s a very fine line between raising enough sponsorship to make the cost for attendees affordable as well as afford to bring out good speakers; all before you have fixed numbers that are all paid up… and without a pot of cash to dip into, it’s harder to take risks

So, in truth I’m not 100% happy about it ‘cos I’ve been talking about it for a while and I’m the kind of person to do rather than talk wherever possible, but I’ve taken some good advice from people who are helping out, and the consensus is that we should be aiming for around March / April next year rather, to give us more time to get points 1 through 4 above right. I certainly don’t want to spend time, effort and potentially my goodwill only to get great speakers out to SA and the event is a dismal failure and costs me more money than I have or can afford!

Anyways, this isn’t a sob story if you were thinking you were gonna be reading one.

A lot of people have either told me to give the idea up, or told me that I’m crazy, but I believe that they’re wrong. I’m pretty sure now that the original format and idea that I had bubbling in my head is going to have to be re-thought to take into account the difference environment, the cost of long trans-Atlantic flights, and the relative expense that something like this is when compared to someones monthly salary.

That said, I think the direction to take is to adapt and give more time to finding the right dates so that the right speakers can congregate for the event. Once that is done getting sponsorship will be easier and therefore the chances of success higher.

So, bottom line is that I’m still personally 100% committed to getting this off the ground and happening in Africa, even if it has to be delayed some – I would rather delay by 6 to 8 months and make it a good one where everyone benefits, than rush to make it work in October and end up with something that is mediocre…

So, I ask you to bear with me, and to stay tuned. It will happen.

Anyone got any serious problems / reservations / issues / red flags with those dates?

I’ve had one well known person, with a massive following, come back to me and say that he’d love to speak at the conference; another individual is going to be too expensive (I mean really, really too expensive – we’re not doing this one to make a huge profit, ‘cos we want to make it as cheap as possible for as many people as possible); and another one is expecting a child to arrive, so has other priorities on his mind (which is to be expected – good for him!)…

So it forces me to ask whether there is a point where we don’t do this? I’m an optimist, much to my colleagues dismay sometimes, so I’m sure it will all work out fine, but I am worried that for any number of reasons the conference won’t measure up to my expectations.

Now, that’s not a totally bad thing.

I’d rather have 50 passionate people in a room where we get to really thrash out African web and emerging tech, talk about innovation and business opportunities, swop some code, share ideas, make new friends, and then go on to change the lives of Africans all over the continent; than have millions in sponsorship, get too many speakers, not have enough time to do them all justice, have too many people with too high expectations, …. blah blah blah – you get the picture.

I’m after qaulity, not quantity. So I’m not afraid of small numbers and less speakers than I would like. But I do want quality, and unfortunately flights cost money…

We all know that success is borne of perspiration and sheer dedicatiion to a task, so it may take 5 years for the conference to reach some sort of success – question is, are you happy with that? Would you come if there are only going to be 50 to 100 people? Are you willing to share your ideas with the top 75 innpovators in Africa today?

We’ve always been committed to a bottom up type conference, so your thoughts in this are much needed and appreciated – what are your expectations, and what can we do to make them a reality?

Get commenting, we’d love to hear from you

PS – we’ve got one keynote speaker bagged, so when we have a firm date decided, that will be announced.

When I first started doing research on the web to get contact details for Southern African businesses & individuals involved with the web and information technology, I wasn’t convinced that there would be massive interest in another technology conference in South Africa.

However, with responses from over 150 people I am pleased to say that I now know that there is a definite ineterest for a conference like “Technolgy for Africa”. We have had some great responses and feedback from interested people and here are some of the suggested topics which will probably be discussed at the conference:

• Emerging technologies & trends
• Web 2.0
• New Marketing
• The role of Open Source Software
• Blogging & social/community software
• Future of the web
• Telecommunications in Africa – VOIP, mobile/cellular technology
• Web standards

The “power of the blogosphere” has been a great help in getting the word out there. So far there have been at least 6 posts from different bloggers, all of whom have written very supportive articles. It’s a great help to have your guys support, thanks goes out to:

David Duarte
Cowboysengines
Hash @ Whiteafrican.com
Coda.co.za
Scott.za.net
Muti.co.za

During the next few weeks, our main aims are to find a suitable date, add some new features to the website(technologyforafrica.org.) , talk to the key note speakers – and get as much buy in as possible from the Africa web & technology community…

Watch this space, we are going to make this happen!

Technorati Profile

So, that’s great but who are the speakers?
In alphabetical order, here you go for now (more on the way):

We’ll be announcing more speakers as we confirm, and if you’re interested you can view what people are asking for at the conference, at our feedback results page.

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.