Nicisms

Justin tried his hand at Tilt-Shift Photography recently. I just discovered the site, tiltshiftmaker.com. It’s incredible what you can find online.

Here’s what I managed to do in under 5 minutes using the site. It’s not a great example, but it’s clearly evident what the site is capable of. Great tool.

The Original:

The Tilt-shift:

I’m still not convinced by the validity of the Podcast in the local market. Yet Saul and Jarred continue to try and prove me wrong. They’ve been doing a relatively good job of it lately and even went as far as to invite me on to the latest episode of the Digital Edge.

You can download it or listen to it live by heading over to the Digital Edge website.

From the site:

We speak to Nic Haralambous of SA Rocks, Seth Rotherham of 2Oceansvibe, Exmi from Expensive Mistakes Cheap Thrills, Shaun Oakes of Shaun Oakes.com, Jason Bagley from the Incredible Connection blog and finally Se7en from Se7en.org. We round up that line up with a summary of the blogosphere by Justin Hartman, head of blog aggregator Afrigator.

Nothing particularly groundbreaking came out of the bloggers interviews: We are all egotistical, we all like to win stuff, we all brag, blah blah blah. It’s riveting blogger “Days of our living lives online” sorta stuff.

Definitely worth listening to. Do it.

And thanks to Saul and Jarred for having me on the show. Always a good boost to the ego hey?!

The tribe is strong with this one.

Last week (26 March 2009) saw the launch of the Vida e Caffé Twitter Account (follow them). I immediately followed them, then realised they were giving away free coffee to the first 60 direct messages. So I sent off a message and managed to get myself some coffee to collect soon at my nearest Vida, which happens to be Rosebank, Johannesburg.

The very next day I decided to have a morning meeting at Vida e Caffé in Rosebank with my coffee and my mac. I paid for my coffee. I don’t even care if I ever get my free coffee, it’s the idea that matters, the offer that counts and the ownership I feel towards the brand that makes me loyal to the Vida brand.

Hell, to be perfectly honest, I’m not even sure if I think there coffee is the best of the best, but I really don’t care.

Let me tell you why I don’t care.

I don’t care if Vida has the best coffee because I like the service I receive when I order my coffee. I get smiles, jokes and laughs.

I don’t care if Vida has the best coffee because I like the way they operate their business.

I like the placement of their shops. I like the vibe of the brand, the funkiness and the way they embrace the culture of South Africa in spite of the brand being more Portuguese.

I like that their menu is simple and their food is good, however expensive it might be.

Vida e Caffé has positioned itself as one of those brands that people would rather pay an extra R5-R10 for per coffee just to say it’s a Vida coffee. Simple. People feel like they are getting more when they are paying more.

The Vida e Caffé brand owns me and let me be clear here, I feel an acute ownership of the brand when I choose to have meetings there, drink the coffee or eat the food.

I just received this in my Gmail account:

Good day,

My name is Maria Norwood;I work with the Total Quest Services,a consulting Firm in London,
UK. We are conducting a standard process investigation involving a client who shares the same
name with you andalso the circumstances surrounding investments made by this client at HSBC
Bank Plc.The HSBC Private Banking client died intestate and nominated no next of kin to
inherit the title over the investments made with HSBC Bank Plc.The essence of this
communication with you is to request that you provide us information on three issues:

1-Are you aware of any relative/relation having the same surname, whose last known contact
address was Madrid, Spain?

2-Are you aware of any investment of considerable value made by such a person at the HSBC
Bank Plc.?

3-Can you establish beyond reasonable doubt your eligibility to assume status of next of kin
to the deceased?

It is pertinent that you inform us ASAP whether or not you are familiar with this personality
that we may put an end to this communication with you and our inquiries surrounding this
personality.You must appreciate that we are constrained from providing you with more detailed
information at this point. PLEASE RESPOND BACK TO MY PRIVATE AND DIRECT EMAIL ADDRESS;
mrs.mariawood@gmail.com as soon as possible to afford us the opportunity to close this
investigation.
Thank you for accommodating our enquiry.

Yours sincerely,

Maria Norwood
Total Quest Services
For: HSBC Private Clients.
This is a confidential message from Total Quest Services

Something smells fishy.

The Glaceau VitaminWater campaign started with “random” drops of test cases of VitaminWater to key people throughout the blogging community as well as key stores.

I was fortunate enough to receive one of these trial cases with the various flavours and quirky messages on the bottles. I’m hooked.

The marketing is fresh, the brand is funky and the product tastes good. It’s apparently good for you too.

But then I was asked to participate in an Urban Game Drive today.

This is what we drove around Rosebank/Parkhurst area in:

We drove around with a Gorilla in one of the chairs, a videographer in another and an “Urban Game Ranger”. I was classified as a Sabretoothmongoose, you know, one of those people who sits in an office and pops their head over partitioning to see what’s going on in the office around them, that’s me, you, us as bloggers, apparently.

We passed various urban game such as the carguarduselasaurus (or something to that effect) and stopped outside the magnificent Espresso in Parkhurst who after a while called the owner to forcibly remove us.

The marketing is brilliant, every car we passed would have a head twisting to see what we were about, every person on the street would wave, kids were gawking at the gorilla to my left and I was reveling in the brand awareness being created.

Here’s the video and some more photos from my ride around town: