Wait, firstly I have always wondered should one always start a blog post with a greeting or is that not the way it works? I find it rather difficult to just dive into the subject matter. But, now as I think about it, it seems like a greeting is not needed.

Ah well.

I have been procrastinating writing anything around these parts. Which is not a good idea, considering I have a lot of things I want to share, but I've never come around to penning them down.  Some thoughts are quite fleeting, sometimes more reactionary to current events, but what has been stopping me from writing is that some thoughts are too generic. What would be the point of me talking about the new iPhone 4s? or who else is trying to compete with the iPad?

With that disclaimer out of the way, I do plan to write a few things, mostly will be centred around "social media".  I am yet to come across proper critical analysis of this subject. It appears you either believe social media works or you don't, and if you don't, you are cast aside with the same wrath as religious fanatics. It is a strange thing, I am sure you have heard or even you might have said this with vigour:

What? You don't tweet?

I will try, before end of the week to share something.

I promise.

What is a gangster if it is not an entrepreneur willing to risk everything to shape the world, they are in, in their own image? Hell, we even got our stripes: instead of numbers or colours, we swear allegiance to the programming languages — ruby, php, c++, java, c# — and we will bleed, fight, stackover-flow everything untill the bitter end, well, not that end, but until the batteries run out.

With that dry attempt at humour, here we go.  I finally attended a 'techie' conference — I am not a big fan of conferences or any geek-get-together. A lot of people have tried to convince me otherwise but I have three reasons:

1. I do things, I build things. I am more interested on what is possible than what people have done — I will explain this further.
2. The costs of conferences never justifies my attendance: 5/6/7 thousand rands to hear people talk 'bout their successes? (again, the point above applies)
3. The costs of conferences creates a barrier of entry, not only for me, but from others who might in fact be custodians of ideas that provide answers to what we are trying to solve. #TIA

But, this time I entered an idea (MISS, more about that in the future) into the Innovation Award — nope, we didn't win it— Because of the award I was afforded a ticket to go to the conferences, and Gareth, has been trying to get me to come to the conference.

Wow— what a long intro, meh.

So, what about the tech4africa conference? I don't have a lot to say 'bout it, not a lot of things peaked my interest, but that is never the point, what I do think matters is, one single thing peaked my overall interest:

… there is always something for everyone, right?

Herman Chinery-Hesse stood out, not because he gave me ideas of what I could be working on next, but because, he reminded me of the context of where we build these ideas: Africa. I know it sounds clichéd, but a dose of reality for our ideas is important.  Through his narrative —he told stories and didn't present— he showed that it is not so much that Africa is a difficult challenging market, but, rather a market to engage: for as long as you contextualise your mind frame:

• Yeah sure, there isn't 99.9% guarantee of electricity; so what? That means during the blackout there is another business opportunity presenting itself that you can't monetise in the West (US/EU)
• There is a small smart-phone market, so what? You already know HTML/5; you have invested in SMS engines, yet another opportunity to build something with those technologies;
• Internet connection is not affordable, so? Build for the entry level and everything above it will take.

These are not things learnt at the conference, but this how Herman spoke about things he was doing and how he came about doing them.  I'd like to say, I don't like the phrase: African solutions — a good idea, is a good idea, is a good idea—

… in the age of internet connectivity, geographic boundaries of ideas no longer applies."

You might ask, is that all I got from the conference, well the usual stuff: making connections; chatting with geeks about geeky stuff— albeit these are not the things that excite me, I'd like to think I don't build things for geeks, but tools that people can use.

Will I go to the next one— probably, but not certainly— there were things that I found could have been done better, but most importantly is this:

… speakers/panellist should keep focus on Africa and the technology inherently in it— I found some speakers (e.g. Google) spoke about their products in a marketing perspective of those products. That was extremely lame."

I do however, doubt, I'd go to more than one conference a year — I am however keen to be in a setup that explores bleeding edge ideas and technologies:

… from knowing and learning about those technologies, I believe that is where the creative application of them allows for innovation to flourish."

I think.

… If you place a thing in the center of your life, that lacks the power to nourish, it will eventually poison everything that you are and destroy you." — Lion Tamer

I have upgraded the laptop to Apple's Mac OSX Lion, I am not ready to upgrade the work-horse desktop yet.  I am merely testing how far I would have to go to be able to get the laptop to a working development enviroment.  The aim of these posts is to share the experience with OSX Lion.

In all its glory of a new operating system, Lion, will look good for the casual user, or maybe even the first time user of a mac, but, for everybody else, it will be pain.  There are some grand beautiful things about it, if you look past the fly in and out animations:

1. the scroll bars are not shown automatically, which is good for visual aesthetics;
2. the scroll bars and most form inputs fields have changed, they look way better than the old ones — I think that was one of the things I hated about mac's ui, the scroll bars were not as good looking as windows ones;
3. accented letters (e.g: é,à, ö) are now easier to get to: press and hold the letter (just like on an iPhone)
4. the login window is way better it incorporates your background; and it has extra information about the state of the system;
5. uhmm, what else?
6. thinking,
7. oh, yes, Mail is different, more of a mail client, than a toy-looking mail client;
8. safari seems to be improved, I don't quite know what, I don't trust that browser;

Those are little cosmetic, UI (user interface), changes that I can't complain about, the major UI and UX (user experience) changes are the ones I find to be the undoing of the great legacy of OSX.  The major change is how the track-pad works by default:

Instead of the normal push and pull that you know, the pull and push now works depending on the content, not the application you are using.

Let me explain that:

When you drag two fingers down the track-pad, you are NOT moving the scroll bar down, BUT, you are pushing the content down.

This makes sense on an iPhone and iPad, but that process has now being replicated onto a desktop. Which I think is flawed and bad UX, because:

… the scrollbar moves in an opposite direction to your hand movement — that breaks the eye-hand coordination; this process is also replicated onto how you would scroll with a mouse. At it's core, you know that feeling you get when you dance out of rhythm?

Yes, you can change this settings in the preference panel but it comes as the default setting. Just after you finish the installation of Lion, you get a screen notification informing you of this change:

the fact that Apple had to inform you that scrolling has changed, implies, they are aware it is new, it is drastic, is most likely, counter intuitive.

I have, decided to try it out, see how far, I can handle the frustration of not realising, I'm supposed to push or pull the content and not 'scroll up or down'.  This changes a great deal of the visual narrative we are used to.  You might argue, well, it's something new, we just have to learn to use it.  I would agree, but every UI or UX that is new needs explaining, needs to answer a question that the old, tried and tested, method couldn't.

The only reason, I can understand why Apple is going this route, is for a uniform iPhone and iPad UX, so that when you switch from one device to the other, you continue with the same visual narrative. This is a justifiable reason, but the next question is:

is Apple assuming it's consumers are not intelligent enough to know the difference between the devices? Switching between an iPhone and laptop has never been a problem, ever. Secondly, different devices do not require the same UI or UX, each devices requires what works best for the optimum utility of it.

Wow, this is becoming a very long post — I'll leave it at this, I'll write another part, maybe break down this LION into four cubs, :)

For now, in closing, the very 'reasoning' for enforcing the change of scrolling to pushing and pulling is the key reasoning behind most of the changes I've encountered on OSX Lion:

uniform UI+UX throughout all it's devices.

But, Apple had an advert mocking "PC" users for that same 'uniformity' using George Orwell's 1984 story.

Jury, out.

When the Growth Project concept was conceptualised the idea was fairly simple:

to grow human intuitive environments in collaboration with other like minded individuals.

Over the years I engaged with a lot of people, built a lot of interesting projects, some died, some grew, some evolved some stayed the same.  During that very same period, the question in my mind has always been:

… why do they die or rather why do they not grow?

I can't answer that but I have observed the following:

1. 2LMN's involvement in a specific project had to do with a specific business objective
2. in the beginning the custodian of an idea was in a better position that 2LMN, that is to say, I would invest the time, effort and resources to realising somebody else's idea, without certainty on the return on investment or at least achieving that business objective I envisioned.
3. the custodian had their own objective

Over the years as the growth project grew — the objective of the owner of the project and that of 2LMN never aligned or they change to head into different directions, that is good or bad depending on whose objective you are on.

Now, this is simple bad business — not only business but that is not how to grow anything:

the objectives must be the same, that way all effort is geared towards a common a goal, without that common goal, then what is the point?

Strangely, during the course of this week and last week I have been at work, defining and actually implementing a project that I have codenamed: Germination.

… that is the new direction — Germination — I will explain it when it is ready, but in essence it is the objective that has been missing, so, from here-on any project that was to be grown, will be germinated instead.

Obviously, this means, I have to give the owners of the current growth project a choice to make, to either go along with Germination or well, leave the project.

I will however, still allow all existing growth project to stay, an pursue their own objectives within the environment I have provided and if they want, I will also help with the migration to wherever they want to go.

It is possible to see this as a loss, after all the Growth Project is +6 years old,

… but, you know what they say about crop-rotation.

So, we will venture on with Germination and see what happens.

I suppose social media is reflecting what happens in life, big companies dominate the spectrum.  Alas, this post is not about that but about the tiny obscure numbers attached to a twitter, facebook and google +1 sharing buttons.  I beg any being to explain to me this simple question:

what is the point of those numbers?

Yes, they show us how many people (or entities) have shared a specific content across those specific platforms, but what value do they add to the consumer? What additional valuable information are they adding to my consumption of that content? Will they make me read the content based on the grand total of those who have 'read' it before? Do they indicate if I have actually read and agree to the content?

In face value it might appear so, but in reality — all that happens is:

It shows up on my profile that some random person I have a random connection with has liked or 'plus-ed' something or in the case of twitter somebody tweets what they have just consumed, we assume.

In the context of the platform, that is if you are on facebook, you get to see on your stream that something was liked by somebody, same applies to twitter I see a tweet — I don't know about "google +1" it seems to want way too much personal information attached to the action.

A few question arise when I thought about these numbers:

1. will I be compelled to read, view, open or click-through the the item based on the amount shown?
2. have the people actually read or viewed the item being shared?
3. and lastly, how honest are these shares? Take for a example a beautifully crafted, composed photograph of a naked woman or man (frontal nudity). Are you going to share that or will you first calculate who will see it?

The third question is important, because it begs the question about honesty, about being true to yourself.  It does not only apply to nudity, take religion, if you found an article that humorously portrays one of the deities, would you share that?

this then, could, suppose the notion that, what is actually being shared is most likely what is felt to be 'digestible' by your network — which is nothing new, considering in the real world there is jokes you can only share with separate types of networks you have: friends, acquaintances, family, etc.

All that being said, it doesn't answer the question:

what is the point of those numbers?

For the person or company owning the space the content is based, those number have value — it allows them to know, to some degree, who has shared their content and to whom but outside of that those numbers don't matter, so then, why show them to the public?  But, in their defence, facebook, twitter and google make it quite hard to hide those numbers to the point it is not worth trying to, and yes, I have tried, and failed.

I do think there is a caveat to this:

… it is game theory — twitter, facebook, google want us, content creators to focus on moving our content to as many people as possible, so their system can harvest that information.

It seems illogical for me to find this at fault, well it taps into social behaviour: wanting to be heard, but the question is, what is your focus: creating compelling content or selling it?

I could ask the same question about seeing 'people who tweeted this article' as part of the comment section of an article. Again, what is the point? Am I supposed to read those tweets? Are those tweets part of the conversation? They are not, not in anyway part of the narrative that might actually be taking place within the article, which means, they break the narrative, which is most likely going to force me as a reader to ignore the entire comment section,

… which is counter productive, because, within the dialogue in the comments, you are most likely to get the best rebuffle of any false assumptions made by the key story, well, if we ignore the South African news website comments.

I am of the school of thought, that nothing should be placed on an interface, especially one that is interactive such as the web, that does not serve to enhance what that specific interface wants to achieve.

… is it possible to zero your activity on social media platforms, specifically twitter and facebook?

That is to say, to bring your tweets — in my case 21 thousand — to zero and remove all facebook activity. The quick short answer is:

Yes, if you are willing to delete (or deactivate on facebook) your account then create a new one. But, that comes at a price of recreating all your friends and the people you follow.

If that is too much social currency to lose, then the answer is no, it is not possible to delete all your tweets and all facebook activity.  You can attempt to. Twitter only allowed me to go as far back as March this year. Facebook went all the way back to April, 2010.

The greatest problem is actually, deleting each activity — there isn't a single "delete all" button on either platform, you have to go through all of them one by one.  If you are a geek you might want to write a script: either a background process that will query for the activity then send delete requests or you could try 'greasemonkey/userscripts' approach.

I was reluctant to use any of those. I went with the one by one deletion (assuming most people are not geeks this would be the only choice). It took me from 6pm till about 2-3am this morning on Facebook — twitter stopped showing my old tweets so there was nothing to do.  Both, twitter and facebook use a lot of JavaScript for their UX, which perfect if you are adding things to their platforms. If you are deleting it you have to go through 2—5 seconds process per activity:

select; confirm; scroll (rinse and repeat) — it is bound to give your wrist cramps.

The best way is to go through their mobile versions, which use less JavaScript based UX, where you can click a lot of statuses to delete and you just confirm — this means a lot of windows and/or tabs will be open. It is by far the best way.

With that said, I was asked a question why would I want to do that and my reasons are:

1. Why not — I think these mediums, specifically twitter/facebook are transient. That is to say, what matters is what has been said in the very short time period. I am willing to bet anything older that 24 or 48 hours no longer matters;
2. If you wanted to clean your profile without losing any of the networks you have created, this could be an important thing to do — say a change of jobs? or online 'persona' (in virtual space you can change who, how and what you want to be perceived as, easier than real life)
3. Twitter and Facebook have been rather not so protective of ones online identity — twitter recently revealed the identity of one its users. Being able to delete your tweets, might, assist in removing 'incriminating' evidence.

Lastly, I don't trust these two companies to uphold any privacy laws — in the long run — and they have proved so by refusing to sign the Global Network Initiative with aims of:

… protecting and advancing freedom of expression and privacy in information and communications technologies. (Google and Yahoo have signed)

So, that alone, means — we should be able to zero our activity, whenever we want to — like how those 'dirty' law firms in John Grisham films shred 'documents' in the early hours of the morning.

I was walking to the taxi rank today and I had a moment of inspiration, well lets assume this idea is inspired.  I have for the last month or so been trying to pen down this blue-print that we will take to potential investors. Although I have written quite a bit, it is not enough to take further, yet. Yes, I have procrastinated more on writing this document than ever before.

During that same time period, I redesigned and launch two websites (YG&B and HALF). Inasmuch as I was feeling  guilty of doing do so, I realised something about the nature of how I work, ipso facto, how 2LMN operates with respect to the Growth projects:

Instead of waiting for someone or thing to solve a problem we have identified we would rather provide (as in build) the solution to that problem.

That might seem egotistical, but it is exactly that — 75, Studio83, Gusto all these projects fit a defined need that we wanted to exist but didn't at the time.  With that same narrative, I started thinking:

Why wait for some external entity to vet our ideas and thus allow us to grow them? Why don't we fund our own ideas?

Is this even possible? I think it is. I know there is a Crowdfunding initiative locally. Alas, where we differ with them is that, we would be looking to fund specific ideas — our own ideas and we would make the decisions ourselves instead of waiting for approval from somebody else.

So, let me break down this idea into mathematics. Mathematics never lies, right? The big question is how much would you invest? I am not talking about asking a Venture Capital firm, I am asking you the ordinary web surfer.  Lets take a round figure like say R500. If we take the conservative approach:

1. if we have 1000 people willing to contribute R500 every month we would get
2. 1 million rands in 2 months;
3. 3 million in 6 months;
4. 6 million in 12 months;
5. and so on and so on

So, you might ask what do I get in return — well assuming when you get preview to the ideas we have lined up and the growth strategy you would know what are the possible ROI's (returns on investment). The key part of this, is that whomever contributes will have a stake and influence on the projects that their capital is invested in. Over and above that is, we are not going to be starting from zero — we already have some of these projects of the ground and they have their own niché market that can be grown to realise whatever we set as the objectives for it.

But, being that this is mathematics — it is not so much about getting 1000 people, it is about getting enough capital to invest into implementing and growing these ideas.  As anybody who has run their own business would know that time and effort is easily afforded any idea that is worth that time and effort.

What I do like about this idea is that we are literally putting our money where our mouth is and it has the idea of a "collective good".  I will say though, I don't know if it is possible or not — but that is not what I am focused on, I do believe it is feasible and most importantly it is a quicker strategy to take and implement.

I could easily start with family members whom I think are already supportive of what I am trying to do; then follow that up with close friends, of which I asked this afternoon about the idea — they mostly agreed with it.  The idea of social networks could also be applied, where once we realise that we need more capital, family and friends could vet for somebody else to become a shareholder and investor.

What are your thoughts? I will return to this idea to explore it more and update if it has worked and where it has failed: each one, teach one, right?

Come to think of it — just the knowledge of knowing that this is an idea I will pursue has made my mind at ease to re-write that original business plan. This idea has given me the sense of confidence to complete writing that other document.

There has been a lot of people fired or suspended over what they had tweeted or what they posted as their Facebook status — I know in America and other western countries it is common — but I am reading a lot about it now in South Africa, which makes sense these two (twitter and facebook) mediums have taken centre stage.

As justified as an employer is in firing somebody that brings their company in 'bad light', I think they should hold back their triggers and rather try to understand or rather learn from what they are now preview to.

Imagine a time before interactive social media was mainstream — no employer could know what their employees really think of them, unless one of the employees rats a colleague out; or a mistaken reply-to-all email reaches the corridors of power.

With the advent of interactive social media — an employer has a greater chance of knowing what one of their employees is thinking, almost all of the time. You know those pub drinking sessions talking about how miserable the pay is; how stupid our manager or CEO really is? Well, with social media those conversations tend to happen in real-time and are 'stored' permanently, well, almost — facebook and twitter store the data but may not be possible to archive your entire history.

We are in a phase where any company can monitor what you are saying online — and to some degree dictate what you say. Which is all good and dandy in the context of brand management (public relations and/or propaganda) — but I think it is a flawed strategy for three reasons:

1. When somebody applies to work for a company they tender in their professional services to that company for an exchange of payment, i.e a salary — their personal attributes allows them to remain productive within the working environment but after 5pm they are no longer a slave to it; (of course if you are a brand ambassador your job is to be good to the brand until the contract expires) — so individuals are rather secular state-ish;
2. Companies are ruining an opportunity to gain insight into the 'true' psyche of the people they have hired — if an employee is no longer engaged at work, you could get an insight to why they are under performing by knowing what is going on in theirs lives; what their gripes is with your company; if you want to keep them as a resource then the company can put remedial processes in place: training; promotions; re-positioning whatever the human resources teams recommends;
3. If companies persist to keep monitoring your activities — one is inclined to go underground — become anonymous and that would not work well for the idea of 'social media'.

Over and above all this — there is fundamental understanding that employers need to embrace — social media is like the response a person makes in traffic and somebody cuts you off:

It is transient — it never forever and thus an employer needs not to overreact — yes, the whole world might know one of your employers made a racist joke but that person is the best designer there is in the world — and if we truly believe in reconciliation: every racists deserves the chance to change their mind — banishing one is not the solution to creating harmony.

But, then again loss in profit overrides reason.

A few years ago, when I was setting up the company, I read quite a bit on putting together a business plan and the jive that goes with that — what I was particularly interested in was how to get funding.  At the time I was in the process of completing an honours degree and ideas where plenty and thus seed funding was a key component I needed.

Needless to say, I was discouraged not because the process was tedious, which is, but because I could not find a format that would fit the business narrative I was embarking on.

Fast forward 7 years later — I have decided to embark on that journey again.  I am still not quite sure how to pen my 'greater' idea into a format that a random stranger will have the insight to understand what I am trying to achieve. This time, I will not give up, I will pursue it till one of the two things happen:

I get funding or I fail.

Truth be told, I have never sourced out funding before. I have no concept of what it is like to get funding nor what it is like to fail at it. Being that we have hit the limit of what we (the company) can do on it's own — we are at a state where we need funding to 'grow' these ideas quicker and efficiently.

The aim of this post is to let you know that we will be sharing — barring 'intellectual property' — the process as we go along.  I am still in the drafting phase. Compiling this document requires a lot out of my oration ability than ever before.  I am enjoying it as I am hating the fact that this 'draft' document is not complete.

With that said, if you have before sourced out funding (in South Africa) please do share — what you can.  Rumours have it that South African venture capitalist are not adventurous with their capital. Is it true?

It has taken quite a number of years to get site off the ground to a point where it makes sense.  I do believe the time is right, although slightly late, but you know what they, better late than never.

The key parts of the site are 'Growth' and Ideas: these are the crown jewels.

1. Growth — is a collection of web based ideas we implemented with like minded individuals. These are projects that we (that is 2LMN and the respective company involved) believe in — to borrow from politics — their existence is paramount. The list of projects is not complete, I am in the process of compiling more. Some of these projects are not yet live they are still waiting for resources to be allocated.
2. Ideas — are, well, ideas. These are not things we believe in blindly but these are thoughts, not so random, but thoughts on this medium we are consuming at a greater rate day in and day out. Most importantly, these ideas are grounded within the African (spoken mainly from a South African) context and that, Africa, will be the key counter-point of engagement.
3. Work — this is our collective experience that spans over 8 years.

I hope you will engage in the dialogue as time moves, for now I need a cup coffee and hope the site holds till the tomorrow. I do have a few ideas I'd like to share with you.