Daily Archives: November 17, 2005

E-Commerce (well, lack of) in South Africa

Just Rambling

Here’s a market for someone to figure out how to capture. While I was in South Africa, I was talking with Microsoft S.A.’s Lillian Serobatse about buying clothes on the internet, trying them on at home and shipping the rejects back. This works well when you live in the boonies and retailers like Patagonia have their big annual sales online! Lillian was surprised. “You bought clothes on the internet?” I was surprised (at her question). “Don’t you?” I asked.

Lillian explained to me that e-commerce has not really taken off in South Africa. One of the reasons, she tells me, is that like many South Africans, she LOVES to shop. The shopping trip itself is a good part of the fun – as it is for many here in the U.S. I personally hate shopping. I only go when I have to find something very specific. I don’t like wandering around from store to store just looking at stuff and maybe buying something I didn’t really need.

I imagine that purchasing stuff from outside of S.A. is cost prohibitive – think of the shipping! So it would be South African retailers that would benefit from this more than anyone. Perhaps a retailer in Jo’burg that does not want to open a storefront in Capetown or Durban (or visa-versa).



Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Rob Howard tonight at Vermont.NET

dotNET

Rob Howard has come to Vermont on a cold, gray, cloudy, blustery day. Maybe we can make it up to him with a great pancake breakfast!

Rob is presenting at Vermont.NET tonight (thank you INETA!!) and will be giving a talk on ASP.NET 2.0 tips & tricks. We are very excited to have him here!

Addison-Wesley has donated 6 copies of ASP.NET v2.0 which Rob co-authored, to raffle off at the meeting! Plus we will be raffling off a copy of Infragistics Net Advantage.

Our .NET Newbie session is by Mike Soulia who teaches .NET development at Vermont Tech and also owns two awesome retail stores on Church Street in downtown Burlington (www.kissthecook.net and www.applemountain.net) which he built .NET e-commerce sites for in the very early days of ASP.NET (you may recognize the UI 🙂 ). Mike will be talking about Extreme Programming concepts.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Airline pilots

Travel

gotta love them. I am always SO happy it’s them flying the plane and not me. I am terrified of flying and every bump and jiggle the plane makes turns me a little paler. I have learned to remind myself that these guys and gals know what they are doing and I don’t need to be so afraid. .Yesterday was a windy day. We didn’t get the tornadoes that were further south but it was still wicked up here. Landing in D.C. was a little unnerving, but the flight in a smaller plane between D.C. to Burlington was worse. As we descended through the two cloud layers towards the Burlington Airport we found ourselves in very gusty winds. I know up at our house it was anywhere from 30 – 50mph. The plane was bouncing around a lot. I could barely contain myself when the pilot had to bank the plane a few times to circle around and line up with the runway. Even as we were merely hovering over the runway, about to touch down, the plane was still bouncing a little – side to side. That was really scary. Poor Rich sitting next to me. I was clinging to his pant leg pretty tightly (…he said I didn’t hurt him). But even with all of that, they landed the plane with no problems (and I made note of the fact that there were no fire trucks and ambulances waiting on the runway  so it was really just business as usual.. 🙂 )

This is what they are trained to do! It is just *me* that doesn’t know how to fly a plane in turbulence. You should have seen me on the overnight flight from Frankfurt to Johannesburg. It was a really bumpy ride. I was in a cushy business class seat with Kate Gregory sleeping peacefully in the seat next to me, but I coulnd’t sleep. Eventually I dozed off but was startled awake by a big bounce and then spent a good hour or so wondering how I was going to get back on the plane again to come home. Such a worrier. But I’m still here to talk about it! Yay for pilots.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Presentation tip: Help with timing in doing sessions

Presentations

Many speakers have big problems with timing, especially in a conference setting when you cannot go long. Though I have practiced talks against a clock, this does not really help me when I’m in the session – if a question takes more time than I should have allowed or I ramble, then the time I took in practice means nothing. I’m sure other speakers have ways to deal with this, but I inadvertently came up with something on my own that helped me enormously last week and wanted to share it. It is probably not a new idea, but it worked well for me since I thought of it rather than trying to follow someone else’s suggestion.

I had ended up with one of the one hour session slots at the end of DevConnections for my WSE3.0 Overview talk and knew that posed a problem.

I looked at the powerpoint deck and divided the presentation up by topic. Then, off the top of my head, wrote down how many minutes I thought each topic (including demos) should take. Luckily, this added up to 55 minutes!

Then in a notebook (notebook is a tip I got from Ingo Rammer) I wrote down a name for each section and then, based on how long I thought the previous section should take, what time it should be when I started that section.

It looked like this:

Start2:45
Turnkey2:55
Programming Model3:15
TCPIP3:15  (the previous was only 1 minute, so it was easier to just write down the same time)
MTOM3:25
SecureConversation3:35

The session was supposed to end at 3:45. I knew I was cutting it very close for Q&A, but since it was a short session, I told them at the beginning that we would not have a lot of time for Q&A and could continue it in the hallway or online afterward.

So this worked for me like a charm. I had my little travel clock right on top of the notebook and it was easy enough for me to remember to take a very quick look over there as I started each section to see how I was doing. In this way I was able to determine if I needed to speed up or if I was okay.

I wish I had come up with this prior to TechEd South Africa where we had one hour slots but were told to leave 15 minutes for Q&A, making the presentations only 45 minutes long. But now I know I can do this from now on and hopefully it will help someone else.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org