27 Dinner - Cape Town Edition
Just got back from 27 Dinner in Cape Town tonight. Tonights "geek dinner" was more of a dinner for marketing folk than geeks in my opinion. Although I did get to chat to guys like Miquel, Rafiq, Jaco, Neil, Aubrey, Stefano, Sally, Angus, Ian, and various others.
There were close to 60 of us at Relish in New Market street, around the corner from e.tv's Longkloof studios offices.
Pity that the Zoopy did not launch tonight, as they had planned on doing. Instead Mike and Dave launched their site named twac (which translates to rubbish dump in English (the polite version)). There were these mini business card style cd's on the table for people to take home.
Stormhoek apparently were sponsoring wine, of which I did not see any bottles of their "average" wine on the tables where I was sitting. Graeme from Stormhoek mentioned how they sold a couple of thousand cases of their wine before they even launched, and how they went about creating hype for their yet to be produced product. He also mentioned some 40% discount coupon from one of their resellers which was a huge success.
Verity sang a couple of songs and started using the platform as a "mini-sermon" after she discussed how she's sold close to 1000 copies of a cd that has not been produced, and how she's donating a percentage of sales to two organisations.
Mike mentioned about the twac cd's on the tables and how people should contact Cerebra before hand to ensure that if products are going to launch at 27 Dinner, that they can co-ordinate so that a limited number of products launch rather than trying to launch say 40 new products at a 27 dinner.
Guy Lundy's talk I found a bit strange but he ranted about South Africa and the future and his "Declaration of Independence"
Angus from Itouch chatted about the future of the mobile space. Apparently USSD is the next big thing along with WAP (after three premature stumbling blocks along the way). Also Premium Rated IVR (think content delivery for watching video's on your cellphone), and mobile television.
Don't get me wrong but this was supposed to be a geek evening, and I'm not sure where marketing falls into the geekyness factor. Alan Levine (from ZADNS) mentioned that he got quite a low Geek Test score. A basic requirement should perhaps be scoring a minimum of say 15% on a Geek Test before entry. Alan knows a thing or two about DNS as he's on ZADNS (the guys who manage the .za domain and don't see to set any policy).
Updates from around the web about 27dinner:
- Nightswimming GeekDinner (Johann Botha)
- 27 dinner Cape Town off to rocky start (Ian Gilfillan)
- Some of the better things about last night (Tania Melnyczuk)
- 27 - Post Analysis (Aubrey Killian)