Start-up Update, and a plea for help.

Happy Friday everyone… Sorry it’s been a while since I updated this blog, but as you will see I have been busy.

I’ll start out by letting you all know that I am in the final stages before being able to unleash my first site in the world wide wilderness. TopOf.co.uk is busy having the final changes made by the developers as we speak, and if they can follow our instructions properly (things get a little lost in translation in India) I’m hoping it will be all done by middle to late next week!

That being said we have also started work on our next two sites:

Tazoo.co.za will be a shopping site for the Saffa market, and we have finished the business plan and are shopping around for quotes from developers.

Yuni.co.uk, is probably our most complex and ambitious project, and is aimed at the UK student segment. Yuni, is still in the planning stages, as we know it’s going to cost a fortune to get it done the way we want it. We are considering a staged development process, slowly adding on the new features which will eventually come together to form the final site.

In other news, as you’re probably aware I’m looking forward to my trip home (just a tad), and today I realised that my trip will coincide with the 3rd 27 Dinner in Jo’burg. Chuffed! So I’m all ‘registered’ to go. I do get the feeling though it will be the same vibe as when I go the monthly MiniBar meetings- me on my own desperately looking for people to talk to, and trying my hardest not to look like a loser. I find this rather humourous as a big part of my day job entails networking and I’m pretty damn good at it. In fact anything that revolves around drinking I’m good at.

So I can see it now- I’ll arrive early (as always, can’t bring myself to be ‘fashionably’ late), and hit the bar with a vengeance. Once sufficiently lubricated, I’ll probably try and hit on a girl which will break the ice and I’ll end up having a great evening. So in order to save some poor girl getting the ‘Squirrel’ treatment I am launching the ‘Adopt Grant and save a poor girl from having to get rid of me’ campaign. All that is needed is for someone to acknowledge my existence prior to arriving at 27. In other words I’m looking for someone to say, “Hey Grant, I look forward to meeting you at 27.”- No Mom, you don’t count, and no I don’t think it will be cool if you come along to hold my hand while I try make friends!

Man, it’s like the first day at school all over again!

Barcamp | MiniBar

I started my crazy weekend by heading off to my second ‘MiniBar‘. An offshoot of the immensely popular BarCamp, MiniBar is aimed at providing a monthly get-together for geeks, developer, investors, web enthusiasts etc.

Fiday’s theme was-”Online Video – What to do with all this user generated content?” Upon arriving I bumped into John again whom I had met at my first minibar. His mobile blog on the speakers is far more comprehensive than any attempt by me of trying to retell the story after the fact. (Free beer will do that to you.)

Personally my attention waned after Drupal spoke, as the topic was not something that I am particularly interested in yet. All the legal mumbo jumbo involved in online video really gets me down, and unfortunately my current entrepreneurial mood does take kindly to unnecessary distractions and constraints.

The minibar concept however is a great success, and the fact that they had to close the registrations at 170 ppl must be very encouraging for the organiser Christian. My congrats go out to him and all those who helped make MiniBar an event I will definitely be attending more often.

Joost launched

Yeah boy, now we’re talking. Step aside YouTube, take your grainy, low quality, ad infested content and take a hike. (I actually love YouTube, but that rant sounded more dramatic.)

Introducing -Joost (pronounced: ‘Juiced’ as in LiquiFruit not as in Van der Westhuizen)- an interactive, IP-based TV software system from the people who brought you Kazaa and Skype, Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, considerably richer after the $2.6bn purchase of the telephony start-up by eBay.

Rather than butcher various articles I’m gonna show you some screenshots, and recommend this article.

Google funny

Imagine my surprise today when analysing my incoming traffic referrers to my personal blog and found some rather amusing search terms pointing to it:

thecolony pub

thecolony drinking

thecolony drunk

Hungarian porno clips ?????? WTF!!

Imagine the poor sod looking for his daily dose of hungarian smut, only to find himself reading about my trip to Rome! lol

UPDATE: Google has re-crawled my blog and is no longer listing it on the first page of the AOL syndicated search results.  Damn!

Dell Inspiron 9400-NEW- R570.00

Sweet!

With thanks to Henk Kleynhans for this tit-bit of info!

Dell South Africa have cocked up and are offering one of their notebooks for £40 including delivery. Fortunately once my first order was bounced because I was using a UK card and a SA address, I swiftly contacted a mate back home so they could benefit. Success!

Now we just have to see if they fulfill the order. Head over the Henk’s blog for details on how to get your own.

Mountain out of a molehill

Hectic! In a new development over at TechCrunch UK Mike Stopforth’s blog the guys trying to organise 27 are taking a bit of heat over the fact that they are branding it.

Having only started taking part in this community recently (the 6000 miles makes it hard to relate and participate). I’ve commented there already, but just to reiterate that I found the whole thing quite amusing and this must be quite a frustrating time for Mike and Dave in particular who also took a bit of flack over their podcast- Amplitude (see previous post below).

Thankfully this little debate has not boiled over to the point of the TechCrunch saga, and fortunately the personalities/ego’s involved seem to have a handle of things.

P.S.: For all you conspiracy theorists- Maybe this is all just a clever ploy by the combined marketing geniuses of Cerebra to raise awareness for their brand. Following the recent press of the TechCrunch UK saga in the blogging community, they’ve created their own micro-saga! Brilliant! Oh- and they’re all aliens too.