More than a little unconventional : Louis Venter : Blog

sustainable.co.za - a green initiative

Those that know me will realise that recently I have been a bit more grumpy than usual. The main reason is that I have been working feverishly on a new project with my very first business partner Zeke Murphy. Spare time has become more rare as a result :).

While I moved to London to further my IT business aspirations and eventually founded MediaVision, Zeke branched out became a hippie and started saving the planet. Well actually he was allways a hippie but IT really didnt allow him to do a hell of a lot of bunny hugging.

Birdmen are still wicked cool but i think ill leave them to it

A few weeks back @lisaditlefsen tweeted  on the birdmen. Seriously the closest thing humans can get to flying. Ive been on running commentry with my wife on doing it thinking the guys are actually pretty far from the cliff and have more control than we can really see….

but perhaps not!

the original bird men video, still gets me all excited

Just when you though sailing wasnt a contact sport

Not sure if everyone is following the VORG

Picked this up this monting……ouch….

Mountainboarding with the clan

Just thought I’d take a few minutes to share a few mountainboarding videos, my helmet cam recently died so thee are filmed with the blackberry in the shoe! Anyhoo Mr Vodafone probably dosent ask where the mud comes from so im not going to care too much

Gabe - hes 8

Issy - Just turned 6

And me - didnt fall so not much point watching

All that proves is that im no cameraman and not as hardcore as these guys, got to try this!

Bird Men

Volvo Ocean Yacht Race Game = sublime branding

Im sure most people reading arent aware of the Volvo Ocean Yacht Game but it has a current following of 85000 people. Thats a serious amount of people in a single online game that spans the better part of half a year to complete.

I registered last week while on a business trip to our Cape Town office. (yes i know what youre thinking but youre wrong, LOTS of work was done ) The thing thats great is that it only takes a few minutes every hour to check your bearings and see if the wind has changed. It also maps the actual wind across the globe to make it very very realistic. In short its pretty addictive.

Why the BT - Phorm - Webwise trials are a good thing

BT announced on Tuesday that the BT Webwise trials have started again and not surprisingly the reception has been mixed. There is a huge amount of negativity towards Phorm from certain parties; some justified and some not. There is no point entering the debate myself, suffice to say there are some big and trusted technology companies out there that have worse privacy policies than Phorm.

what the hell?

“Zimbabwe has agreed not to participate [in the ICC World Twenty20] in the wider interest of cricket … we voluntarily agreed to back out … we don’t want to gatecrash where we are not welcome.”
If Zimbabwe Cricket chairman Peter Chingoka hopes that if you say something enough then people might start to believe it

Jul 4, 2008

i.e. we wont pitch up to force your hand because we know youre a bunch of gutless cowards and would prefer not to act

“The ICC should just write out a cheque for $10m to Mugabe.”
A disgruntled but unnamed cricket administrator in Dubai as quoted in the Australian

Jul 4, 2008

Its Time to Act…..surely

As most people have, i have been monitoring the Zimbabwe situation very closely hoping that we would see the end of the murderous dictator. That seems to be a false dawn and since the situation has developed into the completely farcical its time for all bodies to act and make sure that the sanctions imposed hurt him.

The ICC at the moment have another vote on whether to revoke Zimbabwes ICC test playing status and thus removing them from the elite sector of international cricket. As someone who has experienced sporting sanctions as a small boy i can honestly say that was my ownly real experience of apartheid, the one area they couldnt propaganda away, foreign countries would simply not play against us and as proud sportmen that really hurt.

yeah well i did speak too soon

I posted on the 29th of May that the new site would be live the next day, well ive been cleaning the egg off my face since then as we wanted to hold off for some new content ideas.

The official launch should happen tomorrow if a few weird IE issues are resolved by the design team.

holding thumbs

on a side note i took the kids on an upstream paddle up the thames on saturday which was epic.

New brand launch tomorrow

I have been looking forward to this one for a while. At long last we have rebranded and updated the website to reflect our focus on being a specialist search marketing company.

With any luck the website will be live tomorrow and it will go from strength to strength from here. There is so much research and news that we gather as a company and it has been a real frustration not to be able to share that through our site.

The idea from here is to add new modules on a monthly basis starting with news while we refine the content for the knowledge  base.