27Dinner-Jozi, May 2007

Attended my first 27dinner event last night. Wanted to attend the March event, but already had made plans by that stage. Anyway, so what is a 27dinner event you're asking? Well, its kinda like First Tuesday, but its a dinner event. Held on the 27th of each month, alternating between Cape Town and Jozi, the event is open to anyone who wants to attend, but has a special focus on New Media, blogging, marketing, and other tech related trends and topics. The idea is to get like minded people in the same space to discuss ideas and network over food and wine.
The 27May-Jozi event took place at Primi Piatti, The Zone in Rosebank, and whilst I wasn't blown away with the speakers, it was definitely worthwhile attending.
Colin Daniels spoke about the hype surrounding Bullardgate before turning everyone's attention to The Times, the daily paper that will be made available to Sunday Times subscribers from June (or was that July?) of this year. Colin looks after the online strategy for The Times, so he shared some of his vision for how The Times would like to engage their readers in the online space, and then use that to feed back into the paper. We'll see how successful that turns out to be in the coming months.
Next up was Erik Hersman from White African. He spoke about mashups and taking existing widgets/gadgets and other interesting pieces of code, and putting them to good use in web and mobile driven applications.
Finally, Vinny Lingham who runs Incubeta in Cape Town, spoke about some of his new projects, which include setting up a small Venture Capital firm that will fund startups in SA, as well as a product that he has been working on called Synthasite. The interesting thing about Vinny, is that he sits on the Yahoo advisory board, so he's a big deal in the online space in SA at the moment.
I'll definitely be attending the July dinner.