General

The race to own the social profile Companies, brands and start-ups are waking up to the fact that there’s a really easy way to disintermediate service providers. Own the social profile, not the mother brand. Look what Mint.com is doing in the US financial industry as a good starting point. With Facebook Connect and Google […]

Forget Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, if an SAA flight had taken off from La Guardia and ploughed straight into a gaggle of geese, then the last thing our mob would have needed to do was ditch the plane in the Hudson. No, your average SAA crew seems to carry enough goed on board any given flight […]

I first came across Twitter, the micro-blogging service, in 2006 when I was living in San Francisco. Up until quite recently I resisted using it for the simple reason that I didn’t think I needed to. I was also worried about the concomitant information overload and time consumption that Twitter inevitably brings with it. But […]

I spoke to our vet and he seems quite happy to have Nicola Patten, mother of 13-year-old Alfie who has just fathered a child, spayed and if that doesn’t work, put down. His diagnosis was that this wenner “probably has mad cow disease or, at a push, a severe case of swine fever”. The mother-of-the-year […]

In a democracy, today’s leadership is tomorrow’s electorate; power is never predestined and children are not heirs (except of course to hot off-the-cuff black economic empowerment deals). Today, our kings and queens are presidents and prime ministers voted in, not born or ordained by God. They are practical assimilations of royalty without the creed or […]

What an interesting Friday and Saturday it turned out to be — starting off the Super 14 with some peculiar results on the table, which will count for a lot in 10 weeks’ time when the top teams angle for a quarter-final. Let’s digress for a moment: There was the upset last night in San […]

The holy book has got an account of a certain Judas Iscariot, one of the twelve apostles of Jesus Christ, who driven by greed betrayed his divine master and sold him to the Roman authorities. It was an act of betrayal of the brotherhood of men, which is premised on mutual trust and respect. For […]

This much-vaunted referral system the International Cricket Council (ICC) has implemented is a terrible decision. For one it has turned the hallowed grail of Test cricket into a stop-start contest, complete with all the hollow tension of a game show with a silly mystery prize. “Is he out or is he in? Let’s go upstairs […]

So on the weekend, Tata Mandela, our former president and global moral beacon came out and re-affirmed his support for the ANC. Speaking on his behalf, his grandson proclaimed that “when he gets to heaven, the first thing he will do is enquire about the local ANC branch”. A sentiment that Mandela did express a […]