Tswalu Kalahari Reserve Africa - Luxury Private Game Reserve in South Africa

Tswalu Kalahari Reserve in South Africa is owned by the well-known Oppenheimer family and gives a new meaning the phrase - luxury private game reserve.

Tswalu Kalahari Reserve, in the Northern Cape Province of South Africa, covers 1000km2 (100 000 ha) of land on the edge of the mysterious desert wilderness that is the Kalahari. The largest private concession in Sub-Saharan Africa, Tswalu boasts 70 species of mammal including lion, cheetah, desert black rhino, sable and roan antelope. There are also more than 200 bird species. Tswalu is the historical home of the San people (Bushmen).

Tswalu has its own air shuttle that flies direct to the reserve seven days a week from the Anglo American hangar at O R Tambo airport (ex Johannesburg International).

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Elle MacPherson Intimates - Very Different Campaign

Elle Macpherson Intimates has launched a very different tv advertising campaign

The Glue Society helms this unconventional campaign for Elle Macpherson Intimates in what are arguably the first lingerie ads to tease your brain with something other than the scantily-clad model. The ads are sexy and fun and a long way from the usual high gloss ad agency products.

10 Ways to Hurt Your Blog’s Brand by Commenting on Other Blogs

Back to my old friend ProBlogger today for a great blogpost - 10 Ways to Hurt Your Blog's Brand by Commenting on other Blogs. What it really is all about is the fact that there are ways to comment and ways not to comment.

Ja, everyone says commenting on other blogpost will help you build your blog, because you get known and people will link to you and all that, but there are ways to comment that attract people to your blog and other ways that make them run a million miles.

As Darren says: "Much has been written about commenting as a strategy to build traffic (because used correctly it is a powerful tool) - but very little has been written on the dangers of it."

He then names 10 danger areas and asks bloggers to comment. What do you think?

Yahoo mail lets e-mailers text-message

In an effort to stay in the leading pack, Yahoo Inc has announced that it is giving its e-mail users more ways to reach friends and online contacts by allowing them to trade messages with mobile phone users.

"The Yahoo Mail overhaul is part of a drive to transform its e-mail franchise into more of a social activity that blends the convenience of instant communication with the implicit network of relationships found in one's online address book."

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TrekStor Beats Blacks...Then Changes Product Name

Adrants is one of my favourite newsletters. I had to smile when I saw this post about a really badly named German product - or maybe the rumours of the rise of Neo-Nazi's is not that exaggerated after all?

In an unfortunate and amusing product naming mishap, German company TrekStor had named one of its MP3 players i.beat blaxx. upon realizing the not so nice meaning of that product name, the company has since switched the name to a less culturally agitating and more simple blaxx. One wonders who looks at this stuff before it goes out?

Check the URL First

Proofreading starts with the URL. Please believe it, or you'll have a disaster on your hands. I cannot tell you how many horror stories I've heard of people having costly documents printed where every inch was carefully proofread, but because the URL doesn't look that familiar, it is glossed over.

Result - thousands of spectacularly printed and varnished brochures, programmes, annual reports etc are printed with an incorrect website address.

I smiled to myself this morning when I found this article in MarketingSherpa and decided that I had to blog it, because I know that no matter how many warnings we sound, people will still forget that proofreading should start with the URL.

Proofreading Starts with the URL - the Pain of Typos

By Anne Holland, Content Director

Admittedly, our B-to-B Marketing Summit Brochure was brochure-from-hell from a proofing standpoint. The marketing department had to get 29 different speakers' names spelled properly (this must be very easy in places, such as Sweden, where you have a limited pool of names to deal with, but in multicultural America you always have to double-check.) And we had to make sure the right headshot went with the right speaker, which can be easier to screw up than you think.

Plus, there were 500+ past attendee company names to spell correctly, including some with caps in the middle (Sherpa included, unfortunately) and some without, which also makes guessing impossible.

And, of course, all those session times ... for some reason putting sessions into the proper slots is also always harder than expected. Like children, they wiggle about and bump into each other instead of lining up in a nice, quiet, orderly fashion.

So, when the marketing team proofed the blue lines the printer sent over for our big August campaign, they had a lot to review.

Which explains how everyone totally forgot to proofread the response URL. So, we ended up with tens of thousands of brochures that read, Go to "http://www.vanityurl.com," which was typed in as a placekeeper copy early in the process and never updated.

When the team alerted me about this, I said, "No problem, just go buy VanityURL.com and redirect from it!" Which would have been lovely except for the fact that NutriSystem already owns it.

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South Africa pushes 'e-skills'

The South African government is to establish a council to oversee the development of "e-skills" in the country, while a number of leading local and international IT companies are to set up new training centres in SA, it was announced on the weekend.

Speaking to journalists after meeting with an advisory council on information society and development in Kwazulu-Natal, President Thabo Mbeki said that improving South Africa's information and communication technology (ICT) infrastructure would be futile if people did not possess the necessary skill to use the technology.

The new e-skills council, comprising members of government, business and academia, would "very rapidly" drive the process of improving ICT skills in the country, Mbeki said.

Mbeki, Deputy President Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka and Communications Minister Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri were among those who attended the latest meeting of the council, set up to advise the government on ICT trends and ways of encouraging economic development.

At the meeting, a number of corporations outlined their plans for contribute to skills development in South Africa.

Hewlett Packard (HP) announced a R150-million initiative, dubbed the HP Business Institute, designed to provide subsidised training to small black-owned ICT companies.

Ken Willett, MD of HP Middle East, Mediterranean and Africa, said the institute would provide its students with comprehensive training, including not only traditional IT-related training but also general business training in areas such as marketing communications and business management.

Microsoft, Cisco and Oracle also announced proposals for the launch of centres to provide ICT training and job placement.

Oracle said that, according to industry statistics, the demand for skills in South Africa's ICT sector - which currently employs approximately 200 000 people - would exceed the supply by as much as 24% by 2009.

"The skills shortage in the manufacturing sector alone will lag by 14 000 ICT specialists in 2010," the company said in statement.

SouthAfrica.info reporter and BuaNews

Source: SouthAfrica.info
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