Feedback from the NetProphet conference has exceeded all our expectations. Originally planned as a 100 delegate conference, then 200, it quickly expanded to 450 registered users, so much so that registration had to be closed! On the day an extra row of chairs had to be put out to accomodate all the delegates.

The speakers were fantastic, they also managed to keep the topics less technical and more informative so it wasnt just another geek event. The appeal was across industries, not just IT. They shared insights into what they do with real world examples of their experiences and advice on how to build your own web-enabled business. The content from the event will be posted with video and slides on the Netprophet website to allow more people access to the excellent content.

Some comments: Arthur Goldstuck said “I have never seen so many people at an Internet Conference before”, Peter Flynn said “All software will ultimately be web-based” and Mike Stopforth – “How conferences in SA should be run”

RSAWEB was one of the headline sponsors to make NetProphet possible, along with sister company WhiteWallWeb and the Innovation Fund. There is talk that Cape Town has become the “Silicon Cape” – the Silicon Valley of Africa and NetProphet has helped enable that!

Twitter was also a major success factor in the conference, with a twitter fountain pulling up all the #Netprophet tags. We managed to ‘trend’ into the Top 10 and got to be the 2nd most talked about topic on twitter in the world for over 2 hours.

NetProphet was conceived by the Directors of the RAMP Foundation and is a new initiative created to inspire creativity and the flow of ideas among entrepreneurs and stake-holders who operate in the internet-tech space in Africa & South Africa.

If you missed the event this year, go and register now on the Netprophet website for updates around the next event.

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NetProphet an outstanding success

The application, Travellogger, was developed by White Wall Web in response to recent stipulation enforced by SARS, which states that effective 1 March 2009, South African tax payers will be required to properly track their travel and related expenses in order to qualify for rebates.

Travellogger enables users to track their mileage online throughout the year and easily export the data to a CSV file for use in Excel, when it becomes time to submit their annual returns. This application is also compatible with most cellphone browsers, making it ideal for “on the road” logging.

All  data is stored on one of our web servers in the Cape Town Data Centre environment, greatly reducing the risk of data-loss normally associated with paper based alternatives. Ruby on Rails is the web language of choice used to build the application and its developers worked in conjunction with RSAWEB engineers to setup and migrate the application onto our web servers.

Visit www.travellogger.co.za to check it out.

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Online convenience for tax payers

If your ads work, if you can measure them and they return more profit than they cost, why not keep buying them until they stop working?

And if they don’t work, why are you running them?

The time-tested response is that you’re not sure, that ads are risky, that you can’t tell. …

Digital ads are different (or they should be). You should know cost per click and revenue per click and be able to make a smart guess about lifetime value of a click. And if that’s positive, buy, buy, buy.

And if you don’t know those things, why are you buying digital ads?

We do a lot of online advertising through various providers and it is amazing how scientific you can get in order to gain real value from the medium. Online ads have totally changed the marketing landscape and we no longer rely on made up stats like “readership” and “circulation” that off line print media rely on the help justify their advertising costs.  I’m not saying don’t use “off line” media, as not all of your target audience are necessarily online, but it sure does help to focus your marketing efforts with stats such as cost per click and revenue per click.

The one thing about online advertising is that you need to actively track them.  Gone are the days of sending off an advert to your favorite magazine and then waiting for the phone to ring. Today, you can see exactly how your online ads are performing, who is viewing them and if they are delivering real business results. All in real time. Its amazing how the Internet is revolutionising marketing and the way we reach customers.

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Does online advertising work for your business

• Popular Mechanics
• Popular Science
• Maximum PC
• Mac Life
• Mens Health
• Mens Health Best Life
• CIO

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Read magazines online

My answer usually hinges around explaining to them how people’s communication choice’s are changing in a similar way to how we changed our method of communicating when we bought our first cell phone. We no longer needed to wait at home for that important phone call, we could just pick up our cell phone at any location and call/text our friends. Twitter and Facebook are the next step in this communication evolution as the Internet allows us through these platforms to communicate for free on a one to many basis, rather than a one to one method like your cell phone. So you can now tell all our friends about the new bike you have just bought or about where we are having dinner tonight. Your friends who are now following you on Twitter have the choice of whether to act on this information or to ignore it.

After dabbling a bit with Twitter I initially wrote it off as a niche teenager communication tool that while sometimes useful would not be something I would ever use, however I am finding more and more business uses for it as I interact with others through it and explore its uses.

So, what is Twitter? According to Wikipedia…

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users’ updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length.

For a business Twitter offers new ways of engaging existing and new clients in a way that was never possible before. Take a look at this short screencast video that explains how to use Twitter in your business. Enjoy!

Screencast courtesy of www.smallbiztrends.com

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What is Twitter?