Andy Hadfield

This is a summary of my SXSW experience in 140 character bites with pictures...

About to explore Austin. Wow. Location based services SERIOUSLY make sense here. No wonder FourSquare/GoWalla got funding.

Location based services and marketing suddenly make a lot of sense. http://bit.ly/dbc7vW

These location based services were pretty amazing. The combination of relevancy and immediate access to crowdsourced information is powerful. The images below are from GoWalla and FourSquare - the two front runners in the location based service space.


Ah. Stopped in on my first location based offer and store was clueless. Fulfilment!! http://twitpic.com/17rzn9


Had my first US begging experience. Lady stopped me on the bridge asking for change. Tough world for all at the mo it seems.

Lovely evening walk down the Austin river http://twitpic.com/17srsy

This is a summary of my SXSW experience in 140 character bites with pictures...

Oh baby... off to airport for the SXSW Texas trip! Going to check out FNB Premier Banking SLOW lounge while I'm at it.

Aw. FNB Premier Banking SLOW lounge only in domestic. Bounced because I'm not a 'private client'. What can ya do! Mental note: chat to them

I was extremely impressed to be contacted by RMB after this, inviting me to apply. OK, they're all part of First Rand - but it's still a great example of social scanning and quick, reactive response.

Andy, Austin and an iPhone http://bit.ly/9YgXhZ

Let's go live. I'll be blogging #SxSW at http://sxswsa.co.za/ -- Also, follow @sxswsa

This tweet from Ivo Vegter kicked off his live (and proper) journalistic coverage of the South African delegation and their experiences at SXSW. Check out his site, it's well worth it.

Tweeting at 30,000 feet. Somewhere over Texas. Surreal.

My first blog post at 30000 feet - http://bit.ly/99…

Just attended the Banking 2.0 panel with my colleague from FNB, Head of Digital Strategy in the Personal Banking segment at FNB. The following is an interview style summary of some of the amazing content that was discussed.

The Panel comprised of CEO's from Mint.com, SmartyPig, LendingClub.com and Credit Karma.

Andy: So with all the intermediary aggregation / content / experience services that are coming into the US market - are banks going to be around for much longer?

Lynette: Yes. Banks still own the money, the relationship and the banking licenses. We will have to be careful how we manage these relationships because these services are starting to intrude on the gaps left by the industry meltdown and ingrained inefficiencies.


Andy: Who do you think is the most exciting web player in the financial services space and why?

Lynette: Mint.com. They use the bank's information to add value and provide relevant content to our customers. It's perceived by customers as adding more va…

Here's a quick pic of April (Sweet Leaf Tea social media / communications manager) and I with the product. Acquired virtually. Fulfilled in the big bad real world.

In the last post, I was quite excited by the application of location based services in a community that has the infrastructure to generate enough traffic. I'd like to temper that exuberance with some considered thinking . It involves a good story, and a not so good story.

And one word, for which I have my 'banking' experience to thank: fulfilment.

My first attempt at acting on a LBS (location based service) was at a curio store called Ten Thousand Villages. The offer was a Fair Trade chocolate to every 5th FourSquare check-in. The poor lady behind the
counter didn't have a clue what FourSquare was. In fact, she looked at me like I was a little mad (foreigner?!).

To her credit, she was a dear old thing, and I left with the desired chocolate having had a long chat with her about the store (store managers are volunteers which starts to explain the issue).

The experience very quickly highlights the great potential social media has to disappoint.

As a business, you're…

Checked into my first hotel in Austin, a little one night stop before hitting the Hampton Inn and Suites with the rest of the SA delegation. My bag didn't arrive - which carries on a long and stormy relationship I have with baggage. And airlines. Ahem. Delta.

Anyhoo, the Delta Airlines lady was wonderfully pleasent and I should seeing my gear later.

Being a digital conference, I decided to give the whole location based social networking thing a try as I undertook first explorations of the city. Luckily I'm on an iPhone, so these services are fairly accessible.
A little patience and a lotta battery life is all you really need (many thanks Darryl Bernstein for the life-critical iPhone extra battery pack).

Wow.

So this location based thing really does make sense all of a sudden. Sitting in the hotel room, I switch on GoWalla and FourSquare and start checking out the live tips/comments and nearby places. 5 minutes later I'm sitting in Jo's coffee, a quaint cornerside caf…

So I'm winging my way off to Austin, Texas for the SXSW Conference. I'm on the connection flight via Atlanta, blogging this while 30000 feet or more in the air. Yup. Go Go Wifi on Delta flights. I'll do a speed test ;)

(Update: Speed Test gave me over 100 kb / second - that's 3 TIMES bottom level South African ADSL speed. In a bloody plane.)

It's the first sign of a truly first world adoption of technology. Broad and pervasive accessibility (US's greatest strength which is also Africa's greatest challenge). Pretty much every mobile related advert or service has an iPhone on it. Even airport services, flight checks, check-in sites and queue checkers come firstly with a smartphone app, secondly with a call centre.

Entry into America was pretty uneventful. Airports are airports after all. Didn't see much of 'em as I was sprinting between flights. They really don't give you much time.

Uh. Turbulence. *fastens seatbelt*

I'm also now officially …

And we're off. I'm sitting at OR Tambo airport, having a farewell Castle Draught before embarking on a mind numbing, Stillnox induced flight to Atlanta and then Austin. Bumped into Mike Stopforth. He was having lamb shank. Something I don't know?

So here's the deal for SXSW (follow the #sxswSA tag on Twitter). I'm going to do what everyone else does there. Absorb the future. The culture of the Internet as embraced by the US. What is happening in the big, wide world out there? How is it relevant to banking? How is it relevant to me?

I'll be live tweeting, live blogging and digitally doing everything I can to keep up. Follow most of the action here or on http://www.Twitter.com/andyhadfield.

And. I'll be doing this all on an iPhone. Just how good is this device? We'll see. Got my extra plug in battery. Hear me roar.

Catch you soon Austin!

Little side project that came to me like a cheap shot of cheaper brandy while reading a Wired Magazine. Did you know the Cheezburger Network? Yes, the SEO-centric site from the brain that brought us LOLCats... is worth around $6 million per year!

That's utter madness.

That got me thinking. What do I hate most in the world? Email spam. What do I hate almost as much as email spam? Those crappy chain mails and photo jokes that people send around. Yet... my wife always bitches at me that I missed "the funniest" thing "the other day".

Well no more. Introducing Jou Meme! Collecting all that funny crap in one place for your enjoyment.


I'm particularly fond on the initial strap line - Funny Kak for South Africans. Har. Har.

So I whipped this up using Tumblr, which is a remarkably sexy blogging platform. It doesn't have a flashy header, 3 column wonky layouts or any of that other fancy design stuff - but if I've learnt anything over my time on the Internet, …

Huh. This is an interesting twist. Popped up a couple of days ago on a test search.


If you ogle down towards the bottom of the image, you'll see Twitter results from "3 minutes" ago appearing, page 1 of Google Search results.

My thoughts:

Very cool. Wow. That's quick indexing.It's a vote of confidence in the industry's trust of "what's happening now" being as relevant as information on a site.Oh dear, if they go ahead, they'll destroy Google Search. Twitter is SO FULL OF BOLLOCKS. Can't imagine how they could find a way to sort the 140 character gems from the bollocks.We'll see
(UPDATE: Seems like this only works on Chrome. Perhaps they're testing, but it's not widely available)