It’s been a crazy year. I’ve managed to launch a few projects with exciting partners and learnt a lot about the web, getting investment and startup life. Each year I start off by thinking “this is gonna be a big year”.. Finally, 2007 has been huge for me and I look forward to the exciting opportunities that lie ahead in 2008.

Here are some of the stuff myself and my partners have been involved in the past year -

My Blogging network

My network of blogs have grown its readership considerably over the past year - I started Car Blog last year and managed to squeeze in a redesign with Adii just before year end. Car Blog has done great over the past months growing to a 1000+ uniques a day. In the beginning of the year I launched Bandwidth Blog which has also done great year end. Some of the posts I wrote on Bandwidth received some good traction - One made it to the Digg homepage and the other was published in print.

CarBlog’s growth from Jan-Nov 07

Finally, I bought two blogs from Adii, SA Rugby Blog and Daily Glamour, then revamped both with a new look and got writers for each. Both blogs are growing steadily and I look forward to managing them in 2008. My adsense earnings, mainly derived from my blogs, have also grown exponentially over the past months.

Blueworld Communities

In January this year I joined a company called Blueworld Communities (Pty) Ltd. which owned one website - a night club photography service called Blueworld. In Feb 07 we sold a big stake in the business to two Jozi based businesses, Teljoy and The Creative Counsel. They sat on the board and funded the business 100% allowing us to focus on building our technology. We managed to relaunch Blueworld as a open social network featuring a blog platform, user profiles, video and photo sharing.

During the year we aligned our strategy to create niche targeted audience social networks and launched Zoopedup and GayPeers. With GayPeers we teamed up with a gay ad agency (Pink advertising) and gay magazine (Wrapped mag) to help promote and monetize the network. All three social networks are growing very well and I have a huge announcement to make about our company in the coming days.

Zoopedup

Zoopedup is a site I started seven years ago when I was 16. It was a car photo gallery and forums until this year when I joined BW Communities and brought Zoopedup into the share holding structure. We then relaunched Zoopedup as a automotive social network with all the usual bell and whistles (photos, videos, blogs) but also some unique auto related hooks e.g. Battle Rides area.

Zoopedup car club - I launched this venture in 2005 to help promote the Zoopedup website. In 2007 we took the car club and expanded it to KZN, PE and East-London. The club was already in Cape Town and Jozi. The Zoopedup car club is a motor sport team you can join which gives you cheap car services, road side support, discounted after market parts (subs, mags etc) and access to our Zoopedup events such as Dyno days, track days and exclusive member only parties. To join the club you need to place the stickers on your car (that’s how we market zoopedup - see pic on right) and pay the membership fee. This is one of two offline businesses I own.

Netbuzz

Netbuzz is a small side project I put together earlier in the year - It was a Digg clone using the security flawed Pligg cms. A few days after launch Netbuzz got hacked to pieces by some Turks and I decided to ditch the voting cms idea and just keep the domain. A few months later I showed Foxinni (head of design @ Blueworld Communities) popurls.com and he suggested we do the same with Netbuzz but with local content - three hours later Netbuzz 2 was born! A few weeks later Killerstartups picked up on Netbuzz and published a solid review.

Press

I was fortunate enough to receive some press for my work this year -

• I was featured on Thought Leader by Arthur Goldstuck.
• ‘Your Business’ magazine wrote a feature on young entrepreneurs and included myself and a few others.
• I wrote the automotive section for DailyVoice for a few months which resulted in good exposure for Zoopedup.
• I was featured with a host of local entrepreneurs on FM Campus. (Subscription only)

You can find some of my old press here

TV

I was featured on TV twice this year - first on carte blanche about my power outage site and then on the 20 something show on ETV about social networking and Blueworld.

Jozi mission

As mentioned above we sold a portion of our business to Jozi investors which resulted in myself and one of my business partners having to move up to Sandton to be close to our new partners. At first moving out of Cape Town was a big move but resulted in me meeting a ton of awesome contacts which I’m so grateful for - Vince, Mike, Justin, Stii, Mark, Tyler, Ronnie, Arno, Armand, Ramon, Simone, Nic, Wezzo and Paul. (Hopefully I didn’t leave anyone out)

Jozi was amazing - In one week I managed to meet with some huge names in the South African technology business - chief of sales and marketing at Vodacom, Chris Ross, Ronnie Apteker (he started IS - nuff said), Dennis Armstrong from Webmail and the CEO from Mercury Media - they handle all the governments advertising. Jozi is big business and opened my eyes to what real money is.

I will be moving back to Cape Town in Jan - I have a big announcement regarding this which I can’t publish just yet..

Hope the past year was good for you and good luck in the next.