Who sticks to their new year’s resolutions anyway? I know I don’t. But after reviewing the goals I set out to achieve in 2009 – Surprisingly, I didn’t do to badly. Here are the goals, those ‘striked’ out were obviously completed -

1. Build a better Blueworld and Zoopedup with strong mobile plays
2. Get back into Golf
3. Video blog my thoughts on Tech
4. Expand the Blog network and monetize better
5. Spend less time online and more time outside
6. Build an Adobe Air application
7. Try new restaurants every other week with Jade
8. Get to gym a few times a week
9. Invest and save my money (I spend like crazy)
10. Write more articles online and get them published
11. Spend more time with my folks
12. Buy a Macbook Pro and join the ‘other’ side
13. Setup a daily work schedule and stick to it
14. Attend more internet related events and conferences
15. Travel overseas

Brainstorm magazine – I’m featured with my BWCOM business partner Bradley Voges as well as Adii Rockstar and mobile prodigy Tyler Reed.

Leadership magazine with Rob Sussman CEO of Integr8-IT and Adii Rockstar of WooThemes fame

Hey Everyone,

From everyone at Blueworld Communities we would like to take this opportunity to wish you a happy XMAS and your business a successful new year.

Blueworld experienced a great 2008 and we look forward to continuing this success in 2009. Some of the highlights we experienced this year included being acquired by Naspers in a landmark SA internet deal, launching the new look Blueworld, using our platform to launch 24.com’s Speakerbox project, launching the new look for Zoopedup, soaring past the one million page views mark and launching Blueworld mobile.

In 2008 the Blueworld community posted 6441 blogs, uploaded 101 033 photos, created 1034 groups, shared 1854 videos and sent 558 939 sms’s from our free sms platform which accumulated to 1.5 terabytes of monthly bandwidth and a storage total of 95 gigs. Blueworld photographers took 187.460 photos covering in excess of 2.600 events.

As I write this Blueworld is ranked 47th on the OPA (SA website rankings) for local visitors and 7th on the OPA time spent on site chart with our sister niche social network, Zoopedup, 2nd on the OPA for time spent on site.

We look forward to continue our growth in the new year and look forward to working with you.

Please be safe if you travel these holidays and look out for the Blueworld photographers!

Visit the staff blog

Charl N and the rest of the team

Co-Founder, Chief Operations Officer
BWCOM pty ltd
charl@bwcom.co.za

Read Blueworld press from 2008 here

I’ve had a crazy working week and wanted to share it with you -

Sunday
Zoopedup breakfast run – photos here

Monday
Fly to Jozi, meetings – Absa, Daily Sun, Trigger, Heat Celebrity news and FHM
Public speaking event – 27 Dinner

Tuesday
Meetings – Cerebra and Brandsh, Nashua mobile, 24.com sales and GroupM
Fly back to Cape Town

Wednesday
Start testing Speakerbox – our new Blueworld project
Attend Heavy Chefs event with Yuppie Chef and Cyber Cellar

Thursday
Lecture at Dave Duarte’s mobile marketing course on Web 2.0 to mobile
Attend Geek Dinner event

Friday
Moving into my new place and I’m hosting a party in Green Point

This all amongst SEOing and blogging – I need a holiday!!

24.com are now partners with BWCOM. Mybroadband published the scoop – you can catch it here

This is huge for BWCOM and we look forward to collaborating with 24.

Some quotes from the scoop

24.com CEO Russel Hanley says that the acquisition gives the company access to both Blueworld’s established online community and their social networking technology.

Hanley highlighted the fact that Blueworld Communities’ audience is complimentary to the 24.com audience and they will definitely look at synergies in future. The 24.com CEO further pointed out that the Blueworld Communities technology will enable them to target certain niche social media markets in future.

“We are very excited to be a part of the 24.com family and look forward to leveraging their assets to further expand our social network’s market reach.,” said Charl Norman from Blueworld Communities.

“We also have a very strong youth demographic which compliments 24.com’s older user base. We are very proud of the social media platform we have built and look forward to exploring synergies between our technology and existing 24.com brands to further expand our niche social network strategy.”

I can’t say much but watch this space !

Here are some of the most popular posts I published on Bandwidth blog since its launch one year ago.

South Africa’s top startups to watch (Was published in print)

Afrigator beta launched (Was picked up by ReadWriteWeb)

24.com launch Laaik.it social media aggregator (Breaking news)

The offices of todays internet companies (Reached the Digg homepage)

Microsoft wants Yahoo – $50 Bil (Bandwidth Blog’s best rumour published of 2007)

Just a quick note to highlight some new functionality we ‘plugged’ into Blueworld today. It’s called Gender Bash and is all about asking the opposite sex a question. The new service has been a huge hit with tons of questions and replies.

genderbash.blueworld.co.za – Have a look, learn something from the opposite sex

Most popular question so far – “How big are your boobs” and “Are pink shirts gay” .. haha

Some of the content boxes on the Gender Bash page – you can see the users have been going crazy for the new service:

We have added two new areas on Blueworld aggregating some of our user’s data.

Blogs.blueworld.co.za is a summary of all the user’s blogs – Visit

Photos.blueworld.co.za is a summary of all the user’s uploaded photos – This is the biggest area on BW with 100+ photos being uploaded each day firmly cementing us as one of the top photo sharing sites in SA – Visit

Both areas are updated dynamically whenever users update their blogs and photos. Next up on our dev schedule is to do the same with videos.blueworld.co.za and chuck bluetube.co.za – Which is now a stand alone site. This should be done by tomorrow as our video sharing code was completed for the KFC campaign last week.

Here’s some screen shots – Blueworld Blogs – blogs.blueworld.co.za

Blueworld Photos – photos.blueworld.co.za

Daily Glamour

SA Rugby Blog

I’m really chuffed with how the blogs turned out. I also have two reliable bloggers working on these blogs now updating the properties daily.

My older brother Andrew’s latest venture is a classy restaurant on the tip of Bikini beach, Gordon’s bay. Naturally, my web design company was commission to take care of the restaurant’s website and logo design.

We came up with a sleek clean design for the layout. Yes, the design is a little basic but works well in flash. At the top the navigation bar has bubbles floating through the ‘roof’ as a backround effect, quite nifty. The entire site was done in flash giving us freedom to move the content around. As you navigate throughout the site the content ‘slides’ from right to left. Check it out and you will see what I mean.

If your ever in Gordon’s bay pop in and have a drink. The food is great and the entertainment plenty.