The digital event of the year played off in the beautiful city of Cape Town. Net Prophet was hosted in the impressive Artscape Theater on a rainy Wednesday morning. The rain couldn’t keep away the die-hard digital fans wanting to hear what the best in the industry had to say. It played host to some of the best digital minds in South Africa, and not to mention some international flavours such as Jody Ford (Vice President of Marketing at eBay) and infamous co-founder of the controversial WikiLeaks website, Julian Assange. This certainly got me excited.
Right off the bat, we were impressed by the amount of people that attended the event. It seemed like the who’s who of the digital world came out in force. The VIP access gave us the opportunity to rub shoulders with some of the speakers. I ended up exchanging some words with Jody Ford from eBay for a couple of minutes about his talk regarding eCommerce and where the market is going. As TrafficBrand deals with various eCommerce clients, this was especially useful for us.
The topic of the day was definitely mobile and how luck can play an important role in having success in any industry. It was clear that mobile is growing at a very high rate, on all digital platforms. Especially the development of apps seems like the way to go if you want to make a quick buck, but not so much for Aaron Marshall of Potluck. After years of struggling, testing, borrowing money and finally moving to Cape Town from the United States, he and his dedicated team developed a great app called Over. There is a misconception that apps are a quick and easy way to get noticed. In Aaron’s case, it took them 3 years to get his app out, and now it is doing great. So when you want to take on apps, make sure that is unique and well thought through, because it can easily get lost in the thousands of apps lying around in app stores.
Another interesting speaker was Simon Dingle. He took the conference from a different angle when he started speaking about human behavior and how this tied in with the digital culture as well as the way in which information through operating system have also influenced the way we search and look for information.
Speakers that got the crowd at the edge of their seats were definitely Rob Stokes from Quirk (which was recently sold for a whopping R68 million) and Julian Assange from WikiLeaks.
All in all, Net Prophet was the event to be at. We hope to catch you there next year. For more information about the event, please follow the link below.
