I’ve just come back from 27-21 (link should be active soon), the (sort of) 21st 27 dinner and it was an event fit for a 21st party, and certainly a lot better than my 21st party.
The secret to its success was that there was much more time for chatting to people than normal. This incarnation of the 27 dinner had only 1 main speaker, and 1 and a bit short talks.
Adii talked about his business selling WordPress themes, and the challenges he faces from working with the GPL licence and ripoffs. It seems to be the kind of business most of us dream about – waking up in the morning with a little bit more in the bank account!
Graham Knox, of Stormhoek wines, perennial sponsors of the 27 dinner and now Geek Dinner as well, talked about the December bankruptcy of the UK distribution arm, and the impacts on Stormhoek, as well as the plan to repay the debts incurred by local companies as a result – entitled own a vine, save a job.
I was disappointed that another of the sponsors, Pushplay, didn’t talk, as I would have liked to learn some of the inside story. I’m a complete Pushplay fanatic – it’s revolutionised my enjoyment of film, as anyone (and there can’t be more than one can there?) who follows my Facebook profile can probably tell.
With so few talks, there was more time for what the real purpose of these events is – meeting and talking to other interesting people! Perhaps I’m biased because I seemed to be talking about organic food most of the time, a topic you can’t shut me up about, but I had really interesting talks with Chris, an environmental scientist from Rudevco (good thing you registered the domain for him and put up a holding page Tania!), Tanya, from teapots.co.za, Paul and Kerry-Anne Gilowey from (amongst other things) Cape Town Daily Photo, Trevor, from the venue, the Wild Fig (it’s really a great venue – a successful Geek Dinner was held there too, and there’s talk that the 27 dinner will stay at the Wild Fig), and Charl.
Thanks again to Dave and the organisers. Followup events are being opened to the community, more in the model of the Geek Dinner, and it’ll be interesting to see how it works for this event.
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Tags: 27dinner
I managed to totally not notice there was a 27dinner planned this month.
Want to convince the PushPlay people to give a talk at GeekDinner in March? I also love the service, although their site sucks pretty badly. Maybe we can convince them to use better technology, eh? 😉
Lol! I forgot that it was our 21st! Good to see you there as always Ian!