I’ts lovely that some of our country’s useless politicians presided over a function to promote the Cape as “Silicon Cape”.

However, innovation and invention also happens here, in Johannesburg — “amazing doll!”.

I think in Joburg it’s just more the accepted norm than “something amazing”. Perhaps that’s why fancy banners aren’t slapped onto web2.0 businesses in an attempt to attract venture capital, because quite honestly every single investor I’ve talked to are looking at business fundamentals and not the badge.

From what I can see the soon-to-be-immolated-in-silicon-cape  has come up with  SynthaSite (ohwaitzors that’s called Yola now) (didn’t geocities try this and fail?) and a Fon-like  scheme trying to monetize Wi-Fi hotspots,  and an even grander scheme to reinvent Youtube in a bandwidth starved country.  I wish the initiative luck, and lots of mountain. Then again,  frogfoot do rock so there must be some brains in Cape Town. In fact, it must be so, because many of my previous colleagues have immigrated there…

Blogs, “Web 2.0” apps and the like was OFN in the year 2000 when the bubble burst. I really don’t see the reason for the excitement now. I had a web-2.0 style framework more complicated than prototype, jquery, mtools and and scriptaculous built for a web-based application delivering real-time data in 2004 already. Oh, and I had paying customers.

Why does every brand new MVC based framework out there still have a “blog” as the primary example of the efficacy of the framework? Is this what computing has driveled down to?  Blogs ?

Honestly — trying to flag a single city in South Africa as “silicon” just because a lot of people living in it tend to blog, and build RSS based aggregators does not mean that it invents stuff. RSS, XML feeds, content aggregation — it’s been done. All the Silicon Cape appears to be doing is refining it, and putting well-designed badges on it.

Call me sour. Call me whatever you want, but please don’t label the Cape as if it’s something new and fancy, or “the mother of invention”.

Try and build something innovative, that requires scaling, and challenge the problems before claiming that a city filled with developers is the new Silicon Valley. Do something really innovative. Like. Let’s say… Something that HASN’T been done before. Repeat it. Make it a success. Monetize it.

Politicians take note — if you want to incentivise innovation, technology and the overly-used term “ICT Development” how about giving technology companies a tax break, stop charging insane provisional taxes on profits not yet realized, and unbundle the local loop already… Perhaps then, successful businesses would want to put people into apprenticeships, and innovation and development could really happen. Perhaps — THEN, we could develop into an information society.

I have nothing against the Cape. Sounds like a marvelous lifestyle, and I certainly wouldn’t mind to live in Cape Town.

In my mind “SiliconSA” sounds a lot better…

Invention and innovation is a mindset —not a fucking geographical location.

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