Noel

Soccer Time – it is (certainly) here! We’re feeling it. We’re seeing it.

Buildings are decorated, streets bannered, cars socked and flagged and many faces are soon to be painted, but online? That place which holds so much of our attention? Not so much.

It’s time to fix that… it’s time to Spread The Feva!

We’ve created the perfect way to fast-track the release of pent-up patriotism by introducing The Flag Tag. With very little effort, you too can proudly sport the online equivalent of mirror-socks!

With a 1-line addition to your site’s <head> tag (preferably with all your other JavaScript includes), one of a variety of flags can be added to your site. Visit www.flagtag.co.za now to show your true colours!

Right. Now that you’ve taken care of your online reputation, go out and buy some real stuff, take a deep breath and practice Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika – we’ve got a lot of excitement to prepare for!

(And just because this is interesting, we made a point of checking the correct orientation for a vertical flag. Doing our best to be on the ball!)

Business Metrics – Introduction

Arguably one of the most important concepts behind engineering, design, management, quality-control, leadership, world fame and even ordinary everyday life, is the humble feedback loop.

It’s such a simple concept that we’re usually blissfully unaware of it, but it represents – albeit by a technical term – the common sense of learning and adjusting from experience. Having watched my two children grow up, there is certainly no doubt that our brains are immensely good at learning, improving and optimising automatically. We’re all (mostly) good at gathering feedback from our peers, our critics, our environments and our endeavours, and we manage these various cues by influencing our actions and behaviours. Many experiences can be observed with our five senses and perhaps some intuition, but when our natural detection abilities start to break down, the age-old adage should come to mind: “if you can’t measure, you can’t manage”.

Google Maps it’s Crowdsourcing Success

A week has passed since the South African Google Maps launch, time enough to settle the thoughts and put some fingers to keys. I’d have to admit that the launch was less than stellar, but perhaps I’m getting used to high-flying events like NetProphet, Silicon Cape and Internetix – and quite probably this wasn’t trying to be one of those. Maybe deliberately, the venue almost required one to have used mapping to find it, and many of those I spoke to had already sampled the new engine just to be told how to have used it. Finally, as a long-time user of GPS, and a veteran of Google’s mapping engine many years back in Europe, the directions being produced on this new co.za domain and displayed with fanfare, didn’t really rock my paradigm of what mapping should be. The Engineer-Heart in me finds this tragic given the amount of effort I know would have gone into bringing a new country online. Sign of the times…

That said, the underlying technology is doing an excellent job. Nay. A Very Excellent Job.