Last night Barack Obama formally accepted the nomination to run as the Democratic candidate for president of the USA. This has been a foregone conclusion for some time, but his acceptance speech crystallised the rather miraculous moment. America might have a black president in a few months time.

 

Despite being a Hilary supporter earlier in the year, I have no doubt that Obama will bring a dose of intelligence to US politics, and international awareness to his global relations, that will fundamentally change the tone of the world stage. After the miserable 8-year reign of one of the most ignorant, and foolish, men ever to hold power, everyone on the earth should breathe a sigh of relief that the most powerful nation could come under the leadership of this man.

 

Whatever you may say about Obama -- he's inexperienced, young, even a bit of a media invention -- he has what it takes to change the world. Just being WHAT he is: a young black man not in the pockets of "big oil".

 

So before South Africa gets election fever next year, we must first turn our attention to the US and say: may it be Obama come November.

In what I think was a pretty spectacular fashion our sales team, led by our MD Kevin Lourens, won the business to redevelop the Toyota Automark site and rollout a comprehensive digital marketing strategy around the offering. This deal is important to us in a number of respects, but mainly in that it's our first major "win" under our new positioning as a results-oriented digital marketing agency; and that we successfully unseated a very experienced and well-established incumbent, who are in fact part of the Above the Line agency group that has held the Toyota account for over 20 years.

 

We are quite definitely going to stir things up as we feel this site is hugely underperforming. We know the used car online business pretty well after our work for Barloworld Motor in recent years, so expect to see some cool stuff at www.automark.co.za in the near future.

 

And needless to say, our plans don't stop there...

Spent this weekend away at Thakadu Lodge in Madikwe reserve. It's my first time at Madikwe and was overall a great experience. We had lovely warm weather, and though the animals were a bit scarce, the lodge is great and overall was really relaxing.

 

Thakadu is a "community" lodge which means that the intention is for it to be wholly owned and operated by the local village nearby. This process is well underway, so it kind of felt good to spend the big game-lodge bucks on something that genuinely is uplifting the locals instead of some bastard at CC Africa.

 

My inherent anti-sociality and distaste for the human race is always a bit of a problem on these trips where one invariably ends up having to share game drive vehicles with the despicable lumps of flesh and bone known as other people. It obviously just doesn't bother others as much to have noisy, annoying folk shouting their way up and down to their rooms. And that's to say nothing of young teenagers who must, surely, be the most laughable and foolish subset of our species.

 

Rants aside, Cherryl and I managed to have a wonderful time, and the lodge is highly recommended.

Thanks to Posterous' new feature I can now point my own domain at my blog. Not exactly the world's greatest innovation I acknowledge, but added to the super-convenience of the Posterous offering, this is a welcome addition. So, welcome to www.jarredcinman.com.

v4 of our content management system -- Cambrient Contentsuite -- has just been released onto the first few of our production sites. It boasts massively improved performance, as well as a gazilion other new features, bugfixes and what have you.

 

Our development lifecycle essentially sees us do a major version release a year, and then many sub-releases of that version. Our previous version 3.4 ran to release 95 I think, during which time we let the product evolve quite significantly, so that the way it looks at release 1 will be very different to the final release in that version. We find this gives us the most amount of flexibility, and also supports the way we work which is that features are often dictated by client projects rather than our own invented roadmap.

 

See it on a site near you soon (like Moneyweb, DSTV or some such thing).

Read my latest Thought Leader post where I express my own views about the controversial SA arms deal that has everyone squealing around and yabbering on about Australia again.

 

My previous post has received close to 150 comments -- though I must say they seem to be more infighting between commentators than any actual commentary. I've read very few of them. My life is so much more peaceful when I'm not constantly exposed to namecalling, although both these posts seem to have generated some positive comments. Which I find kind of remarkable, but hey, maybe it reflects a change in me to a more mature, intelligent and serene writer.

 

Although I still think Jesus is a big dick.

This is the sight I woke up to on Saturday morning, as my landlord
added some more expert building elements to his house. Note the
incredibly clever use of tree stumps in the construction of his
swimming pool: surely a world first in this kind of project.

Whew, we finally did our big pitch the the client yesterday after many days of exhausting work. It went well, I think, although it was a bit like doing a 7 Act Opera for a nursery school audience. Maybe that's unfair, but it did feel like we had over-prepared a little.

 

Anyway, our team at Cambrient did an awesome job, and it was fun working with Jason X again after all these years. Hopefully more to come.

 

And the results? Who knows with these things. I wasn't even sure by the end what we were actually pitching on, but in the spirit of enjoying the journey and forgetting the destination, it definitely and thoroughly rocked.