The BugEyed Review Blog

I just got back from the 27dinner at Relish in Cape Town.
Nice venue, expensive food. Big bowls, not a lot of food in said bowls. I had a Thai something Fillet salad for R50 as a starter. Whoa. Too much green stuff in there. Didn’t like it much, but then, I’m not really a salad person. The fillet was nice though. Main course was pork something, with crackling and delish garlic roast potato mash. Yummers. But that was the food.

The venue was great though. Relish has three levels, the first being their restaurant level, which can apparently seat 80 people almost comfortably. Second level is an enclosed bar, top level is an open lounge area with balcony. At one time I saw a bouncer-looking guy and a rope closing off the balcony area on the top floor. Odd. Must have been a private party. Bastards. It was the only place that actually had fresh air.

Anyway, on to what the 27dinner was all about, what happened, and who did what. Firstly, Guy didn’t pitch. Work related reasons. Tsk. I didn’t see Leon there either. Tsk-tsk! (OK, I just noticed he removed himself from the list…) Others I saw was bje, nbm, Bryn, Alan, other Alan and Ian. I met some interesting people, some of which are Tania, Johan[n], Jonathan, Heidi, Sarah, Carlos (briefly), and about 3 other people from Quirk whose names I forgot as soon as it was mentioned, you know how it goes…

There was some socialising beforehand, outside the door, on the top level, bottom level, middle level, all over the place. We ended up listening to a bunch of people yacking about topical stuff. Except for Graham from Stormhoek. He related the history behind Stormhoek, and why Stormhoek is really part of the blogging community. OK, so maybe that was topical too, but I didn’t catch much of the story I’m afraid. I’m not a big wine drinker. Allthough, the glass of Stormhoek wine I had (I forget the name…) wasn’t half bad. Dry white I think.

There was this lass called Verity (A talented artist I must say) that told is her story, which involves selling CDs for her album… Which she hasn’t recorded yet. Yes, novel idea. Selling a product before it’s made. It’s working. Nice on-the-way-to-success story. She also sang some songs, nice local sound, nice voice. She’s good. And good-looking too…

We also heard about affiliate marketing and how to make money using an affiliate network, from a rather short lady going by the name of Shelly, who was there from a company called Traffic Synergy. Interesting talk on how to monetize your (blog-) content with more than just adsense (which, let’s face it, is what most of us end up sticking onto our blogs to get a couple of extra bucks… I’m yet to make my first $100 from the adsense on my blog. Can you see how popular it is? Heh.). Shelly, however, has one of those voices that one expects from a marketing person. Not a bad voice, but a marketing voice nonetheless. I’m not a big fan of marketing people. The rate amongst estate agents and telecoms monopolies in my books. But Shelly made some really good points, which I will take with me to work, and possibly even on my blog too. Thanks Shelly!

There was a gentleman that chatted about what roll the Mobile internet will play in the internet’s future, sorry dude, I can’t remember your name, I don’t think I caught it. Anyway, he made some good points about where mobile is being positioned, and where it will play an important roll, but then also had comments that included “Yes, it is expensive, but if you ignore the cost” or something along those lines when talking about 3G and HSDPA. No, sorry, you can’t ignore the price, because price is what rates the affordability of a product. It’s useless to you and me if there’s this really awesome, really fast mobile internet solution out there, if it only comes bundled with your R1000+ cellphone contracts, or if you end up paying exorbitant fees like R20/mb of traffic. What’s the frigging point? No, we can’t ignore the cost. He also mentioned that WAP will still be a viable delivery medium for content to endusers for at least another 4-or-so years. This may be true, but that will also be driven by what the phone manufacturers end up putting into their phones. If Windows Mobile 5 takes off in a big way, the phones will have Internet Explorer on, and WAP (and the whole WML thing) will be useless, and you won’t need to have a specific WAP version of your site, ‘cos the phones will be viewing your normal site anyway. And besides, with sufficient CSS-fu, you can make a mobile version of your site run off the exact same URL as your normal site. No need for this stupid .mobi TLD. It was a dumb idea to begin with. Stop it!

Dave Duarte from Cerebra also chatted about stuff, and at 1am, I can’t remember what. He’s quite a character though… Actually, I think he hosted the whole thing. haha.

We also heard from Guy Lundy, who also really talked about things non-topical (topical being what the blogging community wanted to hear, not what the speakers wanted to tell us…), he mentioned an e-mail he sent to 15 people that then pyramid-schemed itself ti “millions of people”, and the books he’s sold etc. Yes, we get it Guy, you like South-Africa. Yay for you. I like it too. Guy’s talk sounded a bit too much sales-pitchy though…

After that the Stormhoek guys auctioned off some t-shirts, some poor sod paid R350 for a white t-shirt with some black writing on. And then it was on to more socialising and paying the bills. Apparently there was a rather big shortage of paying customers at the JHB 27dinner… Shame on you people!

Anyway, it’s almost 1am, and I have work in 5 hours. I hope you enjoyed my summary of how I experienced the 27dinner, and I’d love to experience another one, but not if it’s at an expensive place like this, really. It cost me R200 in total for me-myself-I to have supper and a couple of drinks. And no dessert! Tania said Spur, which brought on a “Yes!” from Jaco, and a *groan* from Neil. Heh.

Anyway, bedtime.

Selection of an airlines company for your travel trip depends largely on your budget and destination. Companies like jet airlines offer affordable packages with flights to almost every part of the world. In the same way selecting one from the hotels available depends on a balance of your budget and comfort. You can get almost all qualities of hotel rooms as per your criteria. And finally, to get there, national car rental service should be an easy find for you.

Tags: 27dinner, Relish, Stormhoek, marketing, Mobile