Tag Archive for 'Outsourcing'

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

Published
by
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:

  1. I’ve needed to get a UK drivers license for at least 3 years now
  2. I’ve needed to renew my South African passport for over a year now
  3. I’ve been serious about taking up Kendo, or a Japanese Sword Art, for at least 18 months
  4. I’ve needed to sort out health insurance for a long long long time
  5. 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:

  1. Book Geek BBQ venue for summer in London
  2. Book karting venue for my birthday delebration
  3. Book bowling venue for my birthday celebration
  4. Find me health insurance
  5. Find me Tai Chi schools close to where I live
  6. 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.

South African bandwidth at ‘fraction of today’s cost’?

Published
by
Gareth Knight
on 2008/2/19
in Uncategorized
. 1 Comment

From Tim (he who has no blog or site or anything to point to):
_ Business Day - News Worth Knowing

THE price of international bandwidth will plummet 80% when the Seacom undersea cable goes live on June 17 next year.

Seacom will be the first of several proposed cables to finally reach African shores and local universities have already been promised international bandwidth for just 2,5% of the fee they currently pay.

Seacom president Brian Herlihy said the $600m, 17000km cable running up Africa’s east coast, then on to India and France, was on track for a “dead-certain delivery date”.

Its bandwidth will cost as little as R267 a month per 1MB, compared to between R3500 and R11000 to use Telkom’s bandwidth on the existing Sat-3 cable, or a punishing R231000 for satellite connectivity.

So, is this good news or what?? Thoughts? Will SA people based in SA be able to take over the world now? ;-)

Kindo family shop is launched

Published
by
Gareth Knight
on 2007/9/19
in Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

Check it out, we’ve added a shop for some cool T’s and stuff for your wearing pleasure… ;-)
_ Kindo family shop

What’s happenning to Tech for Africa?

Published
by
Gareth Knight
on 2007/7/26
in Uncategorized
. 1 Comment

I’m the first to admit that I’ve had my head in the sand the last few months, and have received many emails asking what’s happening with Tech for Africa... So I thought that posting something public would be the best way to communicate what’s happening for everyone to see ;-)

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.

;-)

Proposed dates for Technlogy for Africa ‘07

Published
by
Gareth Knight
on 2007/5/3
in Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

Check it out …

Dates that are in discussion at the moment are 24th to 26th October in JHB…

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

Naked CEO series: Fighting fires and differing perspectives

Published
by
Gareth Knight
on 2007/5/3
in GTD and Productivity
. 0 Comments

Lately it seems that what I do is fight fires all day long. I can’t remember tha last time I sat down for a full day and cranked something out, much less a full week. No complaints at all, it keeps life interesting, but it is hard to manage. Good thing too that we’ve got a truly great team of people in the same space.

Primary problems are around the expectations of the inputs I have coming in, and then the corresponding outputs. Typically an email comes in, and the sender requires some sort of response and / or action. The challenge is that my priorities are often vastly different to the priorities of other people. Coders want to write great code, PM’s want to stay in budget, clients want stuff yesterday, I want to be able to pay salaries on time. Fundamentally, paying salaries is my primary drive every day, and it’s very hard to keep on track when you’ve got so many inputs to deal with.

So, I end up fighting fires to keep them from enveloping us all, and if I had to write myself a job description toay, it would be three things:

  1. fight fires
  2. keep everyone happy
  3. speak to people

And that’s it.

Sod php, css, svn, mysql, etc etc etc - going from project meeting to project meeting all day long means I inevitably end up answering emails and getting stuff done in the TV or radio induced noise of my living room at night, currently occupied by my cousin Dave (Hi Dave!) just off the boat from SA, and my brother Morgan. Tonight I got home from the gym, guzzled some chicken for protein and fruit juice, then settled down to clear about 50 emails from the day. This blog post is the last thing I’m gonna do before hitting the floor (still no bed yet - sleeping on futon mattress). So where’s the glamour? I don’t see no hot chicks waiting for me in skimpy neglige… ;-)

~~~

The other thing that has become blindingly obvious the last 4 months, but an important component of the above, is that we’re all coming from different perspective, and even though we’re all part of the same business, and we’re all trying to do the same things, we often suffer from thinking that everyone has the same reference point or point of view when dealing with an issue.

The point is that I constantly have to remind myself that everyone thinks differently, and thus needs to be approached differently, but it’s bloody hard ‘cos a one size fits all approach works so much better. Clearly, that’s not the case though… I’m not sure what the answer is here, except to say that it’s a work in progress.

Any thoughts / observations / comments?

South Africa 5 years on

Published
by
Gareth Knight
on 2007/5/2
in Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

_ localglo.be: South Africa 5 years on

Saul talks about SA in some detail, and it’s a good read. If you find yourself outside of SA, then defo worth a gander.

;-)

The Curious Incident of the Missing Market - Technology for Africa ‘07?

Published
by
Gareth Knight
on 2007/4/5
in Uncategorized
. 2 Comments

Dave Duarte and Mike Stopforth have put together a regular marketing podcast for South Africans, which is shaping up to be a promising part of the ecosystem.

Recently there was an attempt to get a “web 2.0 conference” done in SA in May, which didn’t happen for whatever reason. Apparently there isn’t enough interest, which I can picture, but like Mike and Dave, I have my doubts about how the market was approached… Which is a shame…. but that leads me to my next point ;-)

They contacted me earlier in the week to do a Skype podcast, which I naturally said of course to, and after having swanky dinner with Tim tonight, over Flirtnik, I’ve come home and decided to listen to the podcast while getting some work out of the way.

Anyways, it’s always weird listening to your own voice, but I think I get the message accross about what we’re trying to do with the conference, much better than if I could write it here…

So, go check out the blog post, and listen to it.
Tell your mates about the conference, sign up yourself at the conference site so we can mail you more info, and get involved!

Also - while you’re at it - sign up for the Amplitude podcast, and you should also probably keep an eye on Dave and Mike’s blogs… ;-)

Also, while I’m thinking about it, if you’re interested in what we’re up to in London, then this is also worth watching, although in the next few weeks I might have to eat my shorts… but more on that when the time is right.

The pain of blogging

Published
by
Gareth Knight
on 2007/3/15
in GTD and Productivity
. 0 Comments

It seems an age since I last blogged regularly. I mean, I used to live blogging. I love the ideal of it, the ability to communicate with anyone anywhere in the world with access to the internet, the way the long tail brings you together with people in a way that you never thought entirely possible. I love the application of blogging too - support tool, notification tool, reminder tool, news tool, memory tool, family tool, community tool, collaboration tool - and in each of these ways I’ve missed the contact I used to get every day through blogging.

People used to laugh at me and ask me why I blogged - “What’s the point?” they’d say; “Who’s reading your blog?” thay’d ask; and so it went on and on and on. I just smiled and told them that it was more for me than anything else. The catharcism of blogging is unique in human existence I think. When else were we as individuals able to communicate with so many of our own kind at the click of a “Publish” button? That was my excuse and I’m sticking to it. [ As an aside, to all the doubting Thomas', today I can honestly say that I have a business, doing more business than I could have ever imagined a year ago, with two partners I would have given my left testicle to work with a year ago, doing the kind of work that I love doing, because I blogged. Put that in your pipe and take a deep breath ;-) Blogging works. ]

I used to just read and absorb as much as I could, and then simply point to it. My blog was only useful to people who wanted to find the kind of stuff that I was pointing to. Now, when I do blog, I try to make my blogging useful in it’s own right. There are loads of people pointing so why add to the noise? If you are any good with a search engine these days, you shouldn’t need a pointer - blogs are indexed so regularly now that if you use the right search phrase and you’re specific enough, you go right to the source - so I’m not going to try point anymore unless it’s really something I think you might benefit from, especially if it’s a bit of humour, or something I’ve got first heads up on ;-)

The pain is that good blogging takes time. It’s time consuming because to write something good takes something out of you, and it requires that you think before you write. At the moment, everything I have is being poured into my business to get to where we want to be, so I have little left to give outside of getting sleep, going to gym and running, eating properly, and having a small semblance of a normal social life. I don’t bemoan it, but I do feel guilty for not blogging more than I would like to.

The greater pain is that I have started to realise what I can blog about, where I can actually offer something of value to readers, and the ideas that pop into my head all the time are all great blog posts, but they need time. And like any good cobbler, I’m so busy that I’d rather not blog, than blog something half-arsed and half-conceived.

What do you think?

Anyways, this is a brain fart. I’ve got about 20 mins before I need to catch the last tube home, so I thought I’d post something for a change, and it’s been really cool just letting the words come out. The good news is that I’m starting to change my role within the business, so that I do less code & project management, and more communication, so hopefully that will lead to more regular posts about good stuff. I also need to introduce you to Doris, and I’m really looking forward to that.

Adios for now ;-)

37Signals using Amazon S3 for file storage on Basecamp

Published
by
Gareth Knight
on 2007/1/16
in Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

Was just trying to download a file off of 37Signals’ Basecamp, and got an error message - turns out the error message was an XML snippet from the Amazon S3 webservice.. Which is not really that interesting to anyone other than real Geeks who are wondering who is going to supply their massive storage needs in the near future, and who else is already doing it to make their decision any easier … ;-)

FYI:
_ Amazon.com: Amazon S3, Amazon Simple Storage Service, Unlimited Online Storage: Amazon Web Services
Amazon S3 is storage for the Internet. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. The service aims to maximize benefits of scale and to pass those benefits on to developers.

Technology for Africa ‘07 credit card test passed, speakers announced

Published
by
Gareth Knight
on 2006/12/6
in Uncategorized
. 1 Comment

The last week or so has seen us sit with bated breath, waiting to see the reaction to the web and emerging technology conference we’re going to put together for Africans (with an African context of course). Well, we’re happy to say that the credit card test has passed, and the response has been really positive - At the moment we’re getting a sign up rate of 25% of visitors that view the site, which is not too bad I think. You can view what people are asking for at the conference, at our feedback results page.

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

Andy Budd

Andy Budd wearing a suit but no shirt collar, sits with his hands clasped in front of him.Andy Budd is an internationally renowned user experience designer and web standards expert. Andy is a regular speaker at major design conferences and recently spoke at @media 2006 in London, and Webmaster Jam in Dallas, Texas. Andy is also the driving force behind our annual d.Construct web development conference.

Andy wrote the best selling book, CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions. In this book, Andy shares his years of experience in creating attractive, standards compliant websites.

Andy’s design experience and knowledge has been called upon many times as a judge in web design awards, most notably the Bubu Awards, the ReUSEIT Contest and the Web Standards Awards, which he founded in 2004. Andy currently sits on the advisory board for .Net magazine, the UK’s leading web development periodical.

A more personal side of Andy can be found at Blogography, a popular weblog where he writes about web design and web standards issues, as well as his passions for travel, photography and diving.

Andy is the creative director at Clearleft and runs their web standards training program.

Andy Clarke

Andy Clarke

Andy Clarke has been working on the web for almost ten years. He is a visual web designer based in the UK and started his design consultancy Stuff and Nonsense in 1998. As lead designer and creative director, his clients include local and national businesses, charities and government bodies and he has designed for The British Heart Foundation, Disney Store UK, Save The Children and WWF UK.

Andy is a member of the Web
Standards Project where he redesigned the organization’s web site in 2006. He is also an Invited Expert to the W3C’s CSS Working Group. Andy regularly speaks at workshops and conference events worldwide and is the author of Transcending CSS.

Demian Turner

Demian Turner has been involved in web development for the past 9 years. His primary focus is on developing multi-tier web applications. He also has experience building standards compliant XHTML GUIs, acting in a customer-facing role and managing projects.

Demian specialises in PHP/MySQL/Apache development on Linux and also has experience in system administration, requirements gathering, UML and Object Oriented Analysis and Design. He is the maintainer for the Seagull framework project, and contributes to SimpleTest, Max Media Manager and the PEAR open source projects.

Malcolm Hall

President and CEO of Open Box Software, a 50+ team of .Net developers out of Cape Town.

Born and raised in Cape Town, South Africa, Malcolm was a founder member of a successful start-up (The World On Line) focused on Microsoft Great Plains—a mid-market ERP package—in the 1990’s.

Upon moving to the UK in 1998, Malcolm has, as a member of the Deloitte & Touché (UK) and then e2i (UK) management teams, managed consultancy teams in the London, Central and Northern regions of the United Kingdom. Malcolm has extensive hands-on technical experience and has also programme managed IT projects across the UK, Germany, France, Spain, The Netherlands and the US.

Since founding Open Box, Malcolm has divided his time between US, UK and South Africa overseeing operations and project delivery. He is also responsible for developing further relationships with prospective and current clients, as well as partners and suppliers.

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.

You get what you pay for… every man is in his underwear on the web.

Published
by
Gareth Knight
on 2006/11/19
in Uncategorized
. 5 Comments

I’ve just had an interesting experience these last few weeks, where I’ve been woefully underwhelmed by a supplier that I thought was going to do a lot better than was eventually produced. Throughout the process I was defending the supplier with my colleagues, thinking that I would hold on ‘cos that great piece of work I was expecting was around the corner.

Unfortunately it never arrived, and I had to face the fact that I was out of time, and couldn’t afford to take things further. It kinda sucks, but this was for something that is really, really, really important to us, so I had to stop things in their tracks and find another supplier.

This is all pretty standard in most business lifecycles I think, so nothing great so far, but what is important is that on the web every man can literally be in his underwear, warts and all, but pretend to be as amazing as they would care to portray. Now I’m not for a minute insinuating that the person in question is or does pretend, but the fact remains that since we’d not met personally, nor worked together before, I had no yardstick with which to measure things with. No experience to make an informed decision on.

I guess the point is that originally we looked at our budget and decided against the Ferrari ‘cos we didn’t have the cash to pay for it up front. Instead we went with what we thought was the Audi. As life would have it, the Audi simply didn’t perform well enough, and now we’re back with the Ferarri (on a side note, we’ve managed to mitigate the cost of the Ferarri with a barter, so we should really have been that creative from the start, instead of assuming we would have to pay outright. Note to self I think) and since we’ve worked with the Ferrari before we know what the results are likely to be.

Bottom line for web work (and I guess most everything) is you get what you pay for.

My lesson is to never ever make the assumption that you will save money in the long run by choosing the cheaper option in the short term, ‘cos the cheaper option in the short term will almost always have other costs you didn’t factor in that will probably equal the more expensive option, so why not choose the more expensive option and save yourself some hassle, and get something better in the process?

Anyways, catharcism over - any thoughts?

Making digital headway in 2006

Published
by
Gareth Knight
on 2006/6/22
in Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

Just posted another piece over at Lemon Foundation on how businesses should be going about finding their digital suppliers… Here’s the intro:

It’s becoming apparent that the digital arena is starting to pick up, certainly much more than it has year by year over the last 4 to 5 years. Businesses are starting to look at their digital / online / technical / IT / software needs and are realising that they really ought to start improving their online presence / taking advantage of sales on the web / leveraging the advantages of online collaboration etc. The corollary to this is that whilst there is a growth in spend, it produces an increase in competition between the vendors or suppliers that provide services to the abovementioned organisations.

Read more…

Basically if you’re a business looking to do stuff digitally, I think it’s more important to understand what you want to be doing before you go about finding a supplier, as you’re less likely to be led down the rabbit hole, and more likely to be invested in the outcomes - it also means that you’re more likely to find the right supplier, and less likely to get burnt.

More on this soon though - I’ve got one or two angry posts stewing up some steam ;-)

In Luxembourg

Published
by
Gareth Knight
on 2006/6/7
in Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

I’m in Luxembourg today ’till friday doing client work, and I have to say that Luxembourg is definitely not what I expected! I’ve not yet been into the city yet, so can’t really comment on that, but from what I’ve seen it’s absolutely beautiful and very modern - albeit a bit sparse ;-) Also got a bit scared doing 180km/h on the freeway in the taxi!!