Welcome to the blog of Gareth Knight. This is the evolution of one Afrikan: oneafrikan.com

« Older Entries

Newer Entries »

Archive

Checkout O3Spaces - billed as alternative to Sharepoint

Published

Gareth Knight

on 2008/7/23

in General

. 0 Comments

From the Using Sharepoint with Firefox post a while back…
_ O3Spaces Workplace - About the software

About O3Spaces Workplace

O3Spaces Workplace is a Web 2.0 Document Management & Collaboration Solution for OpenOffice.org, StarOffice and MS Office users.
O3Spaces document collaboration

O3Spaces Workplace brings document management and document collaboration features to OpenOffice.org / StarOffice and Microsoft Office, including real-time version control, automated check-in/check-out and document security.

O3Spaces Workplace offers you freedom of choice. You can use the office suite of choice on your (MS Windows, Linux, Solaris or Mac OS X based) computer, and have O3Spaces Workplace offer its unrivaled user friendly Document Management and Document Collaboration solutions for (distributed) teams, workgroups & departments.

Looks pretty interesting - anyone using it?

50 Useful Tools for Evaluating Your Website

Published

Gareth Knight

on 2008/7/23

in General

. 0 Comments

Check it out, you might find something new and interesting here:
_ Internet Service Deals » Is Your Site Hot or Not? 50 Useful Tools for Evaluating Your Website

You may think your website is great, but if you really want to know the truth, you need to call in some help. Whether you’re assessing your popularity, traffic, or usability, there are plenty of tools out there to do the job. Here, we’ve shared 50 of the best tools that will tell you just how good your site really is.

Enjoying the new Last.fm design

Published

Gareth Knight

on 2008/7/22

in General

. 1 Comment

Nice work guys, think it’s clean and fresh and cool - check it out if you haven’t already

Job: Social Media Manager in Johannesburg

Published

Gareth Knight

on 2008/7/14

in General

. 0 Comments

(Directing strategy, content and actions on niche social networks)

Context: Social media and digital technology offers business powerful ways to interact and collaborate with their customer, channel and employee communities. This speed and flexibility offered by innovative Web 2.0 tools and Social Networking platforms is one of the only remaining avenues for competitive advantage.

The Virtual Works are an 11 year old business that supply outsourced expertise, creativity and engagement systems and management services to help clients build and engage their enterprise communities. We run niche social networks – for business reasons – and offer our clients a REAL rate of return on Web 2.0 platforms. For a live example – check out www.designmind.co.za.

Roles: 4 key functional roles exist at The Virtual Works:
1.Strategy: We help our clients develop community engagement objectives and strategies.
2.Data: We gather and capture profile data and the opt-in consent to engage members.
3.Systems: We configure open source Web 2.0 platforms to help our clients manage their interactive relationships.
4.Engage: We create the content, the value and invent tactics to get community interaction, engagement and commitment – and measure our results.

Social Media Manager: Drive community interaction and engagement to get community commitment - profitably:
1.Design social networks (Strategically – this isn’t a development position! Just be at home with Web 2.0…)
2.Implement widgets / Web 2.0 measuring tools and plugins
3.Implement the strategy/Build community eco-system. Make sure the right people exist inside the network – it’s the only way to trade value for loyalty.
4.Create and Manage content and value distribution. Work with writers to direct the content strategy.
5.Administrate the network
6.Set up moderation processes to keep content focussed.
7.Invent and innovate.
8.Promote, blog and market the niche social network. Liase with PR to make it famous.
9.Analyse and measure. Web analytics. Sales analytics. ROI.
10.Grow the network in terms of member base, interactions and client sponsors.
11.Rinse. Repeat. Refine.

Skills required:
1.Social media / Web 2.0 / internet savvy.
2.Trained in marketing communication discipline. [Degree/diploma]
3.Good communication/writing and presentation skills.
4.Strategic thinking ability.
Personality attributes
1.Results orientated.
2.Over the top passionate about the web as a medium… but clever enough to think strategically though its impementation.
3.Good planner/co-ordinator. Inventive/creative
4.Self starter. No spoon feeding. Take the ball – web with it.
Package: R20k to R25k p/m CTC and a 20% profit share on the community. Run a business, within a business!

www.virtualworks.co.za

Email CV’s and a reason why you’re great to jobs@virtualworks.co.za

Recommend: Posh Eyes for specs (& good SEO optimisation)

Published

Gareth Knight

on 2008/7/14

in General

. 0 Comments

While on a business trip recently, I left my black glasses case on the black leather back eat of a cab, and didn’t get the returned despite the £50 reward offered inside… Which was a bummer. But hey, I’m not likely to do that again

Anyways, so I went to my optom to find the same frames that I like and they didn’t have them, then went into the optom to find new ones, and couldn’t really find anything I liked. So faced with more shopping, I decided to try online to see what I could find, armed with the make and model of the frames (I had an older spare pair of the same).

So, take home is that through Google and good SEO I came accross Posh Eyes online, made a call once I found my frames, and hey presto about a week and half later I had my new frames all the way from Italy, at about £60 cheaper than if I were to get them from the high street optom.

I found the service was personal and prompt, and as a result will continue to use them, and will probably try contact lenses too when my current batch are finished.

Check them out, might be a good find if you’re in the UK.

_ ACUVUE Contact Lenses from Posh Eyes

We’ve complemented our product range with the best customer service. In over 10 years in the optical industry, our Managing Director, Julian Gooddy, has led teams which have won the top customer service awards in the UK, including the prestigious Daily Telegraph/Energis Customer Service Award.

We’ve also made it much easier for you to purchase your contact lenses. Join our Posh Eyes Plan and your lenses will arrive automatically at your chosen address every 3 or 6 months without the need for you to reorder them. As a Posh Eyes Member you will also receive a 5 % discount off our already incredibly low contact lens prices.

Our designer range of glasses both looks great and provides amazing value for money, with complete glasses starting at only £64.99! There is a superb range from which to choose including designer names such as Emporio Armani, Jai Kudo, Silhouette, POLICE, GUESS, GANT, ELLE, Tommy Hilfiger and others. To help you decide which frame suits you best, many of our frames can be viewed on a face. You can see colour options online, and view a high quality magnified image of every frame design. All of our top name designer glasses come with scratch-resistant and anti-reflective coated lenses as standard. Our extensive range of lens options includes sunglass, photochromic and ultra-light thin lenses.

Because we are based in the UK there are no hidden additional duties, taxes, or delivery charges.

So why don’t you browse through our store and let us help you look good and feel great about yourself!

Kaelo for health and wellness in Johannesburg

Published

Gareth Knight

on 2008/7/11

in General

. 0 Comments

I’ve known John since we played hockey together at Jeppe Quandom in Johannesburg in the mid 90’s… and even back then he was always into holistic health, as well as a good party

So after 6.5 years of being in London, it’s super cool to see him (re-)launch something that is clearly aligned with his interests…. Kaelo.

If you’re in Johannesburg and are looking for someone to look after you and yours, then I’d highly recommend John, he’s an awesome guy.

It is with great excitement and anticipation that Kaelo unveils our new identity, which extends well beyond a visual re-branding, to reflect the physical growth and continuous evolution of our business.

When Kaelo first launched, our intention was to provide corporate Africa with workplace HIV/AIDS solutions – which we continue to do with much success. But Africa needs a much more comprehensive, holistic approach to health and wellness. We are successfully partnering with African companies to meet that need; together we are improving the health and well-being of their people and ensuring a positive return on investment and greater profitability for their businesses.

Kaelo’s work has always been driven by a need to ensure that all Africans can achieve their right to health and wellness – for life. But this cannot be accomplished by addressing HIV/AIDS alone. To support overall health and wellness, we cannot exclude the increasing prevalence of chronic illnesses and disease – and the lifestyle factors that contribute to their prevention or onset and management. Our goal is to ensure an improved quality of life for all working Africans and their families for life.

The time has come to align Kaelo’s corporate image with who and what we have become – a guardian of health and a leader in the journey toward both wellness and lifesaving lifestyle changes.

Kaelo is a seTswana word meaning “guardian” or “guide”. Our new logo is a symbol of Kaelo - our work and our passion for and dedication to the health, well-being and happiness of Africans.

The arms extended represent Kaelo as ‘guardian angel’, offering care, protection, strength and openness, while the circle encompasses wholeness, endurance and perfection. We chose the color green as it is the healing color of nature and of life, symbolizing health, growth, well-being and harmony. Accompanied by our name in grey font, the logo is balanced with sophistication, stability and respectability.

We hope our new look resonates with you and we look forward to continuing to reap mutual and greater benefits as our rapid growth persists. We encourage you to visit our new website at www.kaelo.co.za, but please bear in mind it is a work in progress as we complete our changes. If you have any questions or feedback, please drop us a line - we would be happy to hear from you.

Yours in Health…For Life,
The Kaelo Team

South African Leaders Day

Published

Gareth Knight

on 2008/7/11

in General

. 0 Comments

Check it out:
_ Welcome to Leaders Day!

Negativity has overwhelmed our country.
There is so much negativity in South Africa at present even the brightest souls are reacting negatively. Although Leaders Day is for all leaders (government, political, educational, business, science, religious etc. – or anyone who leads other people), the government leaders of our country are going through a difficult time. This is a concern for many people. We can riot, march, strike, send letters, threaten – but none of this is going to help. Its reactive, its negative and more importantly it’s judgmental. There is sometimes place for masses of people to riot and make a noise about something they are unhappy about. Nothing wrong with this but it is probably not going to solve the problem in the long term, nor work in harmony with the big picture.

Lets show positive intention and lets show it BIG.
Negativity generates more negativity like a cancer. Only we can stop this sickness before it wipes us out. Our positive stand on Leaders Day will encourage our leaders to move forward in a positive and decisive manner. Each person taking part will also be inspired – giving or showing good intention lights up ones soul. Imagine a soccer team going onto the field being negative – they’ll lose. Have you ever seen an orchestra playing music negatively? There are many things we can do positively and we should all do more of these things. Leaders Day is one of them.

Can Social Networking be a real business?

Published

Gareth Knight

on 2008/7/4

in General

. 10 Comments

Martin sent this around the office this morning, pretty interesting reading…
_ Technology Review: Social Networking Is Not a Business*

Social Networking Is Not a Business*
Web 2.0–the dream of the user-built, user-centered, user-run Internet–has delivered on just about every promise except profit. Will its most prominent example, social networking, ever make any money?

I keep going back to this with what we’re doing - you have to offer real value to your users over and above the quick thrill, social pull, or fleeting curiosity that most social stuff offers. Why do people go back to Starbucks? It’s convenient and the coffee is mostly good. Why should people come back to your site? Cos it’s easy to use, and there’s something there that they want/need/desire, that you can give them now. Advertising is not a silver bullet for scaling a business.

Get an online personal assistant, it will make your life easier

Published

Gareth Knight

on 2008/7/3

in GTD and Productivity

. 3 Comments

The shorter version:
Checkout Online Personal Assistant. I recommend it, it’s saved me time and made my life easier. Best part is you can use it from wherever…
Try it, tell Ed you got there from here, and he’ll treat you nice

The longer version:
OK, so I’m the first to admit that I often find myself with too many balls to juggle. I find that having more to do actually makes me more productive and when I get in the zone, things happen and it feels good.

However, when you’re starting a business, or working on something important to you, and you decide that it is the highest priority in your life, then other things slip down the priority order, and they simply don’t get done.

Cases in point:

I’ve needed to get a UK drivers license for at least 3 years now
I’ve needed to renew my South African passport for over a year now
I’ve been serious about taking up Kendo, or a Japanese Sword Art, for at least 18 months
I’ve needed to sort out health insurance for a long long long time
I wanted to organise a birthday bash for myself this year, for precisely the reason why it didn’t happen last year

I think you get the picture…. Basically you keep your life together somehow until something threatens to break, then you mend it so it doesn’t break in the short term, then you go back to being focussed. I know not everyone is like that, but I am, hence this post!

Anyways, I’m not really into recommending or plugging services that I don’t have a lot of exposure to, mainly ‘cos I get too many emails so it’s hard to decide whom to spend an hour for getting to know a service, and also ‘cos people don’t really read my blog for that reason I’m not Scoble or Arrington or Kirkpatrick, and neither do I want to be.

Back to the point - a while ago my friend Ed setup a service called Online Personal Assistant, and after a bit of nudging I decided to give it a try. My @Inbox was overflowing, and I really just needed to clear some stuff that was important, but not that important it could go above Kindo.

So I sent a list of stuff to my personal assistant Kevin:

Book Geek BBQ venue for summer in London
Book karting venue for my birthday delebration
Book bowling venue for my birthday celebration
Find me health insurance
Find me Tai Chi schools close to where I live
Find me Kendo schools close to where I live

As you can see, they’re all time intensive tasks that would mean me spending a few hours online for each one, at some point, getting to a place where I can make a decision and then do some actions… Getting my passport and drivers license require me to be somewhere in person, so I needed to do that.

Where we are now is that Ed’s team (thanks Kevin!) has spent about 9 hours doing all that stuff for me, for which I’ll pay an hourly rate. Everything is documented and tracked in an online workspace (not Basecamp), and I’m happy with the results. I have a few things to tie down now, but basically all the research is done, and all it requires is another booking, or an action on my part.

Bottom line - I’ve saved 9 hours of my time (which I value more than what I’ll pay for it), thereby enabling me to focus on things more important to me now, so as far as I’m concerned I’m a happy biologist.

I happily recommend the service, and am going to continue to use it.

Carsonified:- Matt Week - Day three and where we’re at

Published

Gareth Knight

on 2008/7/2

in General

. 0 Comments

I’m a bit skeptical about this, but anyways I think the results will be interesting…
_ Carsonified » Blog Archive » Matt Week - Day three and where we’re at

Day three is upon us. We have had a few challenges along the way but all of the team are making progress.

There is a bit of an air of pandemonium, but all the team are weighing in with a tremendous effort. We are getting an enormously valuable insight into what web development companies have to go through day in day out.

From an email:

As you may already know the Carsonified team have set ourselves a challenge this week - to build a web app in four days (32 hours) and we’re launching tomorrow at 5:30pm GMT.

The app is called Matt and it helps people post to multiple Twitter accounts (Multiple Account Twitter Tweeting). We know the idea for the app isn’t going to rock the world, but we’re going to share everything we’re learning in the process - so hopefully that’ll be valuable for other people.

What do you think?

Tips for landing a php job in London

Published

Gareth Knight

on 2008/6/30

in Uncategorized

. 0 Comments

OK, so I’ve not got long so will be brief and to the point with this one, in the hope that it will help some of the people that read this blog, and maybe even some of the folks that are looking for devs to join their teams.

I’ve had to run through a lot of agencies and candidates in the last month or so, recruiting for Kindo, and these are some thoughts in no particular order:

As a candidate

DO:

accept there is lots of good competition; you have to stand out to be noticed
research on the company you’re interviewing at - it’s polite and will help you with 3, 4 and 5
send a cv that is relevant to the job spec - java experience won’t interest someone looking for a php person
learn how to sell yourself and articulate your experience - enough said
accept you’re going to have to send code to show what you can do - send your best relevant code
describe what your code is supposed to be doing to there is context - don’t just send a bunch of methods
comment more than you think you should - esp if you’re going to work in a team or be contracting
write documentation in the code for something like phpDocumentor - that makes people happy

As a general rule (unless you’re a superstar), your work environment, the people you work with, and the work you’ll be doing, should all supersede remuneration unless you have a specific reason (like a mortgage for example).

As someone recruiting

DO:
Read this first:
http://www.nickhalstead.com/2008/07/01/10-reasons-why-i-hate-recruitment-agents/

accept that it is going to take up a lot of your time
have a clear job spec and role description in place to send around
use your personal network first
get your agencies to send some cv’s to assess the kind of candidates they have
ask for source code if you like the cv - you’ll do less unnecessary face to face’s
expect them to do some filtering and work for you; if not, bin them
turn your phone off if you want quiet time to work
agree on terms first, or re-confirm them if circumstances change on your end

Hope that helps!!

Intruders.tv interview on Kindo (about scale/product/marketing/revenue)

Published

Gareth Knight

on 2008/6/30

in Uncategorized

. 1 Comment

Was at Open Coffee last week (looking for developers), and did this interview with Vincent and Eugene from Intruders.tv on Kindo. Talked about how we’ve tackled some of the usual web app issues like scaling our userbase, internationalisation, product dev, marketing tricks, revenue generation….
_ Intruders.tv interview on Kindo.com

Kindo.com is a “new take on the traditional family tree”. In this interview, we sit down with Gareth Knight to talk about Kindo and their user acquisition strategy. Gareth shares with us his experience of attracting users to the site and the effectiveness of strategies such as blogging, Google AdWords and PR.

If you’re building a webapp, could be useful

Ariadne Capital : Entrepreneur Manifesto

Published

Gareth Knight

on 2008/6/23

in Uncategorized

. 1 Comment

Found this reading the London paper City A.M:
Ariadne Capital : Entrepreneur Manifesto.

… That Leaders are those people who create trust in society and their businesses, and that trust is efficient. Success is forged through competition and human greatness is possible precisely because people are not the same and they have the option to choose whether they want to lead or follow….

Pretty interesting reading if you’re an entrepreneur - any thoughts?