Traveling Geeks

Team Player

Matthew Buckland took the picture

Sowetan Prophecy & Poetry

We hear from Prophet at the Credo Mutwa Cultural Village, an outdoor museum tucked in a hillside park in the Jabavu section of Soweto.  The village is named after its creator, an artist, author and healer who began building the structures and sculptures in 1974.

Below is his narration. Watch and listen to his energy and passion.

The sculpture garden, also called Khayalendaba, or "Place of Stories," was empty when we arrived, but suddenly Prophet appeared to lead us on an oral journey.  He provided mythical and religious meanings for the sculptures and symbols while weaving a tale of history and consequences, fables told and dreams interpreted, lessons learned, an amusing section on masculine and feminine energy, all delivered with passion and often with poetic energy, meter and heat. 

The space is surrounded by a park with a landscaped garden and, at the top of the hill, the Oppenheimer Tower, which gives a full view of Soweto and beyond. The tower is named after a mining magnate who donated money for the construction of houses to replace shacks in the township.

We are reminded by Prophet countless times that the space is a sacred one.

Credo Mutwa is one of the many recent success stories of Soweto, rescued from disrepair in the last few years and restored with the help of some of the original builders.

Photos by Renee Blodgett

Toens

At Alexander Bay, we also met Toens Mostert, a wonderful character with features as weathered as the Richtersveld itself. He was working as a guide for John De Waal’s Richtersveld Tours. He was a fount of knowledge about local lore and places names. Here he speaks about his life and and ancestry in and out of the region.

Nkhesani Masilani

At Anglogold Ashanti’s Tau Tona mine, some 3.4 kilometres underground, we met a newly minted geologist. Over the din of men and machines, she talked to us about her work.

Soweto’s Mall Offers High-End Designers

Another recent Sowetan triumph is the Maponya Mall. With more than 180 tenants and 1.5 million monthly visitors, it’s Soweto’s first major upmarket retail space.   It was built by Richard Maponya, an entrepreneur who bought the land in the 1980s and waited patiently for the political and economic landscape to change so that it could be built and that it could be supported by the locals.

It opened in 2007, a gorgeous space that looks along its middle like a sleek international airport terminal, with a selection of food purveyors, department stores and some upscale shops featuring goods that place design at a premium.

The parking lot was full of cars, as the video shows.  Shopping, it turns out, is the international language.

My new roommate: Craig Newmark

When I got into the Kinnernet conference in Israel I found out that we were all going to have roommates so that everyone could fit into the lake-side resort here. I was a little disappointed, after all I had just spent the last few trips rooming with Rocky Barbanica and I was looking forward to having a room all to myself.

But when I opened the door and found Craig Newmark, founder of Craig’s List, sitting there on his computer I knew that this would be an interesting weekend. Craig’s List is the top classified ad site on the Internet and is how I got my job at NEC.

And interesting it has remained. I’m at the Kinnernet camp which is a small, exclusive, elitist, by invitation only, affair that’s just been a thrill a minute (it’s done by Yossi Vardi, the investor who’s kids started ICQ back in 1996). How did I get invited? Yossi proudly shows me around and says “this is the guy who had the first ICQ Web site.”

At Kinnernet there are robots running around, people flying weird contraptions (one of the world’s top remote control helicopter pilots is here), weird devices of all kinds, and TONS of geeks and entrepreneurs.

But back to Craig. He’s got such a great sense of humor. cote d’ivoire . His business card reads “customer service representative.”

I’ve been giving him heck for not being on Twitter. He joined this morning and said “now everyone can see how boring I am.”

Valleywag, last night, asked me to ask him if he’s gotten rich yet. He answered “if I really had a lot of money would I be rooming with Scoble?”

Hey!

Anyway, some of our fun here at Kinnernet is up on my Qik account. The wifi here is very shaky.

For more info on Kinnernet, there are quite a few people blogging and stuff. Check out Google’s Blog Search for Kinnernet. ip tech info . i cloud . domain abuse website down . apache web server word cloud

My Israeli Education, Day 1

last night, my plane landed in tev aviv, and passengers erupted into applause. the Israeli-born guy sitting next to me said, “Bet you haven’t been to many places where they clap when the plane lands.” i’d been in Israel about 30 seconds, and it was already clear this was a very different place.

we exited into a almost-totally empty airport, thanks to Shabbat. at
the hotel, i couldn’t order most of the room service menu, again
Shabbat. and just a few moments ago, i returned to my room hoping for a
diet coke and some nuts from the mini bar. it’s been cleaned out for Passover. never
mind that my room hasn’t been made up and my tray from last night is
still here.

in less than 24 hours here, i’m continually struck by how many cultural
things are exactly the same in Israel (down to the american tv on
nearly every station!) and how many things are deeply different. it can
be disarming and frustrating all at once. it’s in many ways exactly how
i expected Israel to be, and also very different.

i’m honored to be here for a week as part of a group of Silicon Valley
bloggers and techies exploring Israel’s culture and technology scene.
we’re guests of the Israeli consulate, and our blog posts will all be
collected here. aside from our own impressions we’ll take from this culture, it’ll
be fascinating to see how each blogger processes the things we see and
do differently.

i am one of the few in the group who has never been to Israel before, although i’ve
frequently interviewed Israeli venture capitalists and entrepreneurs. i
am also one of the non-Jews on the trip. as a result i’m not exactly
clear on why i can’t have a mini-bar at passover, even as i could order
any of the exact same items to be brought to me via room service. so i apologize in advance
if anything i write is offensive, naive or just drenched in wide-eyed
enthusiasm. it’s going to be an exciting and perplexing week for me, and you’ll just have to bear with me! hopefully, i’ll leave with a much greater appreciation and understanding of this culture and its entrepreneurs. website down . similar sites . word cloud

Cathy's TravelingGeek Log: Back to Tel Aviv and on to The Marker COM.vention

Oy.

After three days at Kinnernet I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to being just slightly south of knackered.

However, my physical state runs in stark contrast to the utterly energized cycles of my brain right now. You see, I should be well in bed, getting rested for my session at tomorrow’s Marker COM.vention.

But at the moment, I’m too excited to sleep. The last several days were – as is always the case with Kinnernet – deeply steeped in passionate discussions about art, society, technology and how all those things come together.

The idea behind Yossi Vardi’s annual confab along the shores of the Sea of Galilee (known in Hebrew as “The Kinneret”, thus the play on words with Kinnernet) is simple: talk about anything – except for business. The result is an incredibly engaging experience of meeting people – truly meeting them.

Here’s one of the superb new friends I met. His name is Danny Litani. A serious player in the Israeli music scene, he was very excited about the idea of Seesmic. So, of course, I showed him. And during the demo a special guest dropped by.

There are myriad videos from Kinnernet that I’ll be editing and posting here over the next several days, which will of course be in addition to the ongoing updates from the Innovation Mission on which The Traveling Geeks are embarking.

So stay tuned … as a friend of mine said this afternoon as we sadly departed Kinnernet 2008, the end is really just the beginning … cote d’ivoire . politika . domain owner . parental blocker . where is domain hosted . domain dns server . ip tech info . web archive website down . similar sites word cloud .

Returning to my old Kibbutz

Yesterday, I went to a kibbutz in southern Israel where I lived over twenty years ago. It was my first visit back since then so the odds that I’d find anyone I knew from way back were against me. The good news is that one of my kibbutz mentors, now 72, is still alive, healthy and has a garden to die for. politika . cote d’ivoire The quarters where I lived is under serious construction; sadly I missed seeing it in close to its original form by only six months.

20′ish years ago, my journey through Israel was a ‘coming of age’ story as much as it was a journey to understand the complexities of the Middle East and what it meant to be an Israeli. The mission of this journey couldn’t be any further from my first mission, yet some of the stories I heard from my former kibbutzim colleagues and others I met in this process ended up taking me full circle. So much so, that there is far too much to capture here, at least now.

The experience? Intense. Historical. Emotional. Energizing. Inspiring. And yes, life changing.

I plan to write about the experience in great detail but to give it justice, recapturing what I heard and saw will take some time. It will be a story of three people’s journeys, one of them an entrepreneur whose family made it to Chile safely in 1939, the second of a woman whose parents were taken by the Holocaust and mine, because the full circle of our lives met at this intersection and its frankly, why we’re all here. web archive . website down apache web server word cloud

Leaving Footprints in South Africa

I’ve just returned from spending ten days touring South Africa as one of nine U.S. bloggers who were brought in to write about the experience.

While the country certainly left an impression on us, we left a LeBron James-sized footprint on the world. I was invited to write about the plight of South Africa as it tries to be more sustainable, and it feels a bit hypocritical to have contributed so much in carbon emissions in the process.

The flights — including back and forth to Johannesburg, plus one commercial and two charter flights within the country total and three rides in a helicopter — total about 25,000 miles logged.

And then there were the bus rides — about 30 in all to hotels, restaurants and various travel destinations — for another 1,200 miles of road travel. By my rough calculations using TerraPass’ carbon calculator, that’s about 4 tons of carbon emissions for each of us, not including the impact of the energy burned in preparing the wonderful buffets and staying in hotels that are out of my normal travel budget.

Al Gore has been slammed for jetting around the world and preaching about climate change, and I expect some of you might also think our excursion was not worth the energy expended. But I hope that trying to enlighten myself and the world about how South Africa is striving for sustainability will get people thinking and eventually offset my travels.

We were exposed to a rich, proud and diverse culture, as you can see in my photo gallery, as well as in the pictures from my fellow bloggers. South Africa wants to become a first world nation, but with AIDS, poverty, and an economy based on the mining of natural resources, that won’t be easy.

In case you missed it, here’s what I wrote during my travels, with more analysis to come:

Following South Africa’s Past

Finding Diamonds in Rough Seas

South Africa Has Joule of An EV

Cradle of Mankind’s Grave Lesson

Game on at Plumari Conservation Reserve

Project Runway