Remember Transkei daisies? They adorned the countryside way back when most carrier bags were yellow, in the days before the shopping police decreed that we should pay for plastic bags in shops. Five years ago, millions of decorative “daisies” were replaced by millions of rands, which have made their way … nowhere. All of that […]
Business
Posted inBusiness, Media, Tech
Online millions: The advertising model
Part one is here. You will probably never make millions from online advertising, no matter what type of website you run. However, if you are able to create a site and attract a reasonably sized and loyal audience, you can sell the site to a bigger player who can exercise the advertising potential. That’s how […]
Posted inBusiness, Tech
GAAP is so Web 0.0
I’m continually surprised at how much interest exists for the quarterly financial results of the online tech powerhouses such as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo!, as if they’re any indication of value created by the business during those three months. It’s fairly clear to me that AOL and Yahoo! are managing while spending an awful lot […]
Posted inBusiness
Coega and the Radiohead song
Every time I drive through the upgraded stretch of road around the turn-off to the Coega Industrial Development Zone (IDZ), just before Port Elizabeth, a song floats unbidden into my head. The Coega IDZ is a multibillion-rand industrial development complex covering 11 000ha, centred on a new deepwater port. Nude is the haunting song, from Radiohead’s […]
Posted inBusiness, Lifestyle, Media, Tech
How to make millions online (part one)
You know you are behind in your financial achievements when Entrepreneur magazine starts running articles on how to make your first billion. Or when you see a property exhibition for apartments in Brooklyn, Pretoria, that cost up to R24-million. Each. Or when you read that there are more than 5 000 South Africans who became new […]
Posted inBusiness
Let there be light, and there was none in SA
Some years back in Kenya, a major catastrophe hit us. El Niño — the climate catastrophe that happens when the Pacific Ocean around the equator heats up by just a fraction of a degree — had just ravaged Kenya badly, with floods that destroyed crops, roads, homes and lives. When it was done with us, […]
Posted inBusiness, Lifestyle, Media, News/Politics
Fair trade is unfair
“What developing countries need is to develop, not to have their present conditions of life and work preserved like a museum exhibit,” writes Janet Daley in a column prompted by a report that finds “fair trade” to be fundamentally unfair.
Posted inBusiness, News/Politics
Mega-crisis in the making?
Things come together, the capitalism system cannot hold. That’s the message from Canadian activist academic Dr Sandra Rein, speaking at a seminar on gender activism at Rhodes University on the weekend. And here we were thinking that our biggest problems are racism, crime, political degeneration and electricity. “We have a global crisis if you look […]
Posted inBusiness, News/Politics
Nationalise Eskom now!
When the government backed off from selling 30% of Eskom some years ago I was relieved. I knew that the wheel would turn, as it always does, and Eskom would change from being loved to being loathed, as it was in the early 1980s. It emerged a stronger organisation from that time of intense animosity. […]
Posted inBusiness, Lifestyle
Salad-bar diversity
A few months ago I wrote a piece titled “The Oros Man” in which I detailed the pressures and inhumanities to which fat people are subjected in order to fit in the corporate workplace. In that particular piece I used the illustrious year-end office function as a tool to illustrate my point of view on […]
Posted inBusiness, News/Politics
Surviving an economic downturn: Philanthropy and the non-profit sector
Working in the philanthropy field gives me some idea of how confident people are about South Africa. Until 1976, huge philanthropic investments were made in the country by the then white elites — they established charitable foundations to ensure that their legacies endured into the future, and we still reap the benefits of some of […]
Posted inBusiness, News/Politics
It’s nuclear, it’s now and it’s happening — whether you like it or not
Eskom has recently announced that it will most likely be going ahead with South Africa’s second nuclear power station. The draft scoping report has been completed and it looks as if Koeberg might be the most likely site for the station. Last week, French President Sarkozy visited South Africa and apparently spoke to President Mbeki […]