A couple of weeks ago Iringa Living Lab was a hive of activity. The long awaited training on entrepreneurship was finally done, by Mr. Craig Ross from RLabs Cape town. The training attracted more than 20 participants of Iringa Living Lab. And what a week it was.

From the start, Craig emphasized that he was not going to teach, because he’s not a university professor. He was neither going to share new information, we all know what entrepreneurship is about. “So what is he going to do?”, some participants wondered. “I am going to share what has worked in my life, what I have seen work at Rlabs”, he said.

Well, true to his word, he shared his experience, in a simple but powerful way. His first challenge was to go against what most people think is a key aspect if one is to become an entrepreneur, having capital. Craig said to become an entrepreneur, one does not need capital. You need a powerful idea, that can add value to your target clients.

VALUE!!!! Not that we had not heard about it, it’s a word we come across very often. But, many of us attending the training understood value differently. Many believed it’s about selling a high quality product or service. How wrong we were! Craig proved to us that Coca Cola is not in the business of selling coke, they sell happiness, refreshment! What? Yes, think about it, close your eyes, think of all the Coca Cola adverts, you see that they sell happiness?

And how do you start a business without capital? It was our turn to prove what many of us didn’t believe was true. After taking us through the exercise of idea generation, now it was time to answer the question, how we go forward with our brilliant ideas. We looked at the enormous requirements for each idea. And then, we looked at what we already have. Many of us discovered we already have what it takes to start, and then capital in form of money can find us on the way. Really!!

And we all have something at our disposal. So what makes many people not to start? It’s the mindset. We need an alternative mindset, to begin to see the same things with different lenses! Now, this requires a paradigm shift. That is the task we have.

Though many African nations have caught on to Twitter, the study shows that there is plenty of room for the platform to grow. Visit the source for more stats and information.

 It was never my aspiration to start a business but when this question was posed to me: “What do you have in your hands that you can give back to the world?”, I knew what I had to do. I absolutely had to make my business, The Digital Factory, into more than just a thought that may be forgotten, I had to make it a legacy that will one day be left to the world with my entrepreneurship ideas.

In 2012

In October of 2012

As part of our Innovation Incubation and Acceleration (InnovIA) profile series, we highlighting another exciting social enterprise start-up, Social Media Factory, which was founded by Craig Ross to maximize the use of Social Media to create employment and provide quality services to organisations, businesses and corporate companies.

The idea was birthed after realising the high unemployment rates in his community and the opportunity to develop digital artisans in working as remote agents/workers for companies in need of digital work. The Social Media Factory team develop the campaigns and strategies for companies and compile manageable pieces of work for its extended community to execute. This is further managed and moderated by the Social Media Factory manager to ensure quality of the work being executed in the factory.

Through this service more than 50 part-time workers has been employed through the Social Media Factory and being part of the RLabs InnovIA the goal is to grow the platform beyond South Africa.

sourch

A few months ago I was afforded the opportunity to do an online course. There were over 18 courses to choose from, two  stood out for me,which was the Internet Super User and Internet Marketing course, my choice was Internet Marketing.  The course was offered through GetSmarter, a high-touch online education company and is accredited by the University of Cape Town. This course duration was 10 weeks and the deadline for submitting our assignment was the end of business day every Monday.Overall,I had a great experience, I’ve learnt a lot and my mindset on internet marketing has changed, I can definitely say I am “Smarter”.  I  have no hesitation in recommending this course to anyone who wants to acquire more knowledge on internet marketing skills or specifically,how it benefits marketing professionals in small, medium and large businesses as well as small-business owners and entrepreneurs.

The topics/subjects that were covered:

Module 1    Introduction to internet marketing
Module 2    Website design and development
Module 3    Online copywriting and web PR
Module 4    Email marketing
Module 5    Online advertising
Module 6    Search engine optimisation
Module 7    Social media and viral marketing
Module 8    Web analytics and conversion optimisation
Module 9    Mobile marketing
Module 10 Internet marketing strategy

Well done  to everyone  who voted for our majestic Table Mountain! The announcement was 21:07 in  the V&A Waterfront. We were all  gathered  at Sevruga Shushi Restaurant, waiting for the announcement of  the  top 7 wonders of nature. It was a nervous, nail biting moment  but but some how I just had that feeling that Table Mountain will come out tops.

The  New7Wonders of Nature are as follows: Amazon, Halong Bay, Iguazu Falls, Jeju Island, Komodo, Puerto Princesa Underground River and  Table Mountain. I am proud to say that I was part of the Social Media Factory team that did the online campaign for this historical even.  Table Mountain is  360 million years old and is on of the oldest mountain on earth.

Social Media Factory in collaboration with Table Mountain Cableway  did a outreach programme to teach disadvantage children computer literacy and and getting them to vote. From February – November more than 120,000 unique visitors per month  was directed to www.votefortablemountain.com. A record breaking 3million votes was casted via the Mxit platform in one day. The Table Mountain fanpage reached an amount of 14,000 fans over a 8 month period and @votefortablemount twitter reached more than 2 million twitter users.

You can read more about the online campaigns and the outreach programme here

Saturday past was the big day for me, did the “I Ran-D For Hope” campaign. I woke up with a cough, headache and felt a bit flu-ish, however ,after a good ,healthy breakfast ,I felt good and ready for the day. My background , I am not professional runner and this was the first time I did a road run, this distance. The journey was from the foot of  Table Mountain to the RLabs office. While making my way to Table  Mountain, I realized, just what I got myself into,and the realization…there  is no way out this is going to be a long day for me.

The first stretch from Table Mountain to Mike Sports was down hill all the way .  Mike Sports was  the first water stop. I enjoyed the first stretch and we did it at a fast pace. When I came to Woodstock, I grew tired and my legs started to cramp, all that went through my mind was”  its still a long way home”. Then,Just when I felt like giving up the RLabs team, Hectic nine 9 and Fiona Fury( Table Mountain) came pass with motorbikes and made a noise and cheered me on. That gave me some extra miles

Coming down Blossom Road, this was the home stretch,  I had little to no energy left. While waiting for the traffic car and the motorbikes to escort me into Bridgetown, where RLabs are situated. I took a break to stretch. A  few minutes later the traffic cars came with the motorbikes. I was escorted through Bridgetown,the people came out to see what the buzz was about, I took that opportunity to encourage them to vote for Table Mountain.

As I came through the gates at RLabs it was  amazing to see all the students  standing outside as I’m making my way to RLabs. This whole campaign was about them and to raise funds for their end of year graduation. The students also contributed extensively to the Vote For Table Mountain campaign. My overall experience, I enjoyed every moment of it and it was nice to have a team and people that supported us.

A big thanks to our sponsors

Our Partner Vote For Table Mountain

29 WAYS TO STAY CREATIVE from TO-FU on Vimeo.

Today the RLabs team out in Cape Town is part of what is known to be the largest event to date in Amsterdam called where  ‘Labs’ all over the continent: Cape Town, Nairobi, Kampala, Cairo, Buea, Ramallah and London are connected.

The objective of this year is going to be the interaction between different labs all over the world. For one day we’re going to work together and organise the biggest co-creation event and  will solve concrete cases. The RLabs team work on a case from Bazinga developing a “Community Involvement Strategy”. They find it important to build a strategy on how to connect and involve different communities.  The idea of the project is to create a strategy that will be able to get people involed in any commintiy and engage with others. In this case, we focused on a tech community of geeks and tech lovers  and developers who have a space available to use to collaborate on building products.

You can follow the hashtag #1PCE for more updates.