netprophet: what a ride!

17 May 2010, Posted by Cape Town Girl in Celebrity, bloggers, cape town, south africa, technology, weblebrity, 3 Comments

Netconference panel: Stephan Ekbergh, Sarah Lacey and Stephen Newton, hosted by Richard Hardiman

Went to the delightfully geeky technology and entrepreneurial-focused Netprophet conference last week, which has suddenly become amazing. it’s of the same standard as Design Indaba, except it’s totally free! i guess having Old Mutual funding much of it certainly helps. really – i was blown away. I was there as ‘media’, so put clothing over the lingerie to appear vaguely respectable.

Everyone there was on either a laptop, an iphone or an ipad. Felt right at home. Felt like, for once, no one was judging me for being on my phone. It felt good. A safe place. A happy place.

I won’t go into details over each speaker, but i’ll tell you who i thought stood out:

Rich Mulholland

Rich Mulholland, obviously. He had the crowd eating out of his clicker. I’ve never seen him speak before, and i love that he doesn’t take himself or his weblebrity status too seriously. Y’all shoulda seen some of the egos in the room, and Rich seemed pleasantly free from all that.

The Stephan Ekbergh, Sarah Lacey and Stephen Newton panel was great, because they were all such personalities. Between Stephan calling himself a “caveman” in comparison to Sarah, and Sarah’s no-bullshit, smart opinions (I’m kinda over cloud-computing too heh) and Stephen Newton’s experience, they made for good listening. And then Vinny Lingham tossing out the tweets about Stephan not investing in local startups, and then Stephan’s later blog post explaining that his entire business is South African anyway… oh my lord! Wonderful cross-mediumed geeky hilarity!

Adi “I don’t take funding” Pienaar had a good story too. Woo Themes have done undeniably well.

Adi Pienaar of Woo Themes

Highlights included the video intros – we even had a massive talking Seth Godin head! It’s like he was right there, with us. I felt close to him. I felt his presence.

Oh Seth! Blessed were we

Loved Vinny Lingham’s kid up there in a bear suit, for why have kids if not to dress them up as small animals? Right Frances darling?

Vinny and his kidbro

Well done to the Netprophet team, and to Old Mutual and the other sponsors, for sponsoring such an awesome and worthy event. It’s super inspiring. If you use the internet in your business in any way, you really should make an effort to attend next year.