Vinny Lingham's Blog

Yup, I just logged into MSN and found that they launched a competitive product to Yahoo & Google’s desktop search products. It’s called the MSN Toolbar . I’m busy downloading – will give full feedback once it’s launched.

All searches on MSN are now being passed through to their new MSN Search product.

1. Google will look to buy Skype or similar.
2. Yahoo will look to buy Linkshare or similar (ValueClick?).
3. MSN will launch themed search capabilities (better content targeting).
4. Google will do one of the following : A. Buy Mozilla, B. Buy Opera, C. Build a browser

More predictions to come as the year progresses…

It’s freezing in the Big Apple! I wouldn’t be surprised it’s it’s about -20 Celsius!!

What a trip!! We arrived at Fort Myers Aiport on Saturday at about 10am to catch our 3 hour flight into New York, only to find that New York is stuck in the biggest blizzard since 1978! All flights into and out of the area was cancelled.

Delta was as helpful as ever! We called their hepline and asked to be rerouted to the nearest airport overnight, but unfortunately, they could only route us to an airport within 100 miles of our final destination. So I said fine, and they said “I’m sorry Sir, all airports within 100 miles of JFK are closed”.

FANTASTIC! At this point, I was like an WWF Superstar with PMS. Anyways, we managed to speak to a real human being at the information counter, after explaining to her what we were trying to do, she started to look for flights. We eventually suggested a flight connecting from Fort Myers, overnight in Atlanta and a rebooking the next day to New York. Lo and behold, we arrived in Atlanta (90 minute flight), about 8 hours after we got to Fort Myers Airport.

By the way, so far on this trip, I’ve finished reading Dan Brown’s International Best Seller, The Da Vinci Code, soon to be a full length feature, starring Tom Hanks & Audrey Tatou, directed by Ron Howard.

Anyways, so now (Saturday night), we arrived in Atlanta, and checked into the Hilton – Atlanta was cold, but no snow. Nothing could have prepared me for the next day’s flight.

We had breakfast at 9am and we got to Hartsfield at 11am, and after much fuffing around with security, tickets, checkin etc, we managed to get to the gate on time. The plane was then delayed by about an hour.

Eventually we board and takeoff for New York, this was to be the longest flight of my life. It’s normally a 2 hour trip, and the ride was pretty shaky, but nothing serious. Eventually we get to within a few miles of JFK International, and the ride start getting rough and everyone gets agitated, but it’s normally “OK” because we’re descending and will be landing soon – or so we thought.

The pilot says that there’s a 15 minute delay and he has to circle for a while. A long 15 minutes passed.

The pilot then speaks through the Intercom and tells us that our runway has been closed and he has to do another approach, so he circles again, over the Atlantic ocean. The ride was very bumpy, so bumpy in fact, that I had my food sink into my socks! The women next to me started hyperventilating and her daughter starting puking. All the while, Llewellyn is reading some article about South Park – obviously, not too concerned.

Anways, another hour of this and eventually we land and everyone roars and claps hands. The moment was very tense and EVERYONE (even Claasen at this point), was relieved to have touched down.

You think that’s bad? Wait till you hear the rest of it…

So now we’re at JFK, and we’re taxiing down the runway for about 15 minutes (long taxi).
Eventually we disembark and look at the screens and go to baggage area E. No baggage, so we trek in the snow (outside the airport, because we weren’t allowed back in through security), to baggage Area D. At this stage people were nearly swearing – our baggage wasn’t there either – something about the runway change messing with the baggage controllers, blah blah.

So now, after another trek, we get to baggage claim B, where we wait for an hour to collect our baggage. Now, this is the fun part. We go outside, in the snow, cold and hail, to get a cab, where we stood in a queue for over an hour. Amongst other things, the idiotic taxi controller broke his radio and stood around like kippie, without telling anyone. I will post a movie clip later from the queues.

Anyways, eventually we get to the hotel after like 12 hours of commuting and only 1 meal (Delta did not serve a meal on the flight, typical).

That’s my fantastic weekend – how was yours ?

This is also my longest blog ever

Ok! So I made it into Miami. We fly South African Airways. Ok, so not the best, but the only South African airline to fly into the USA. Their customer service is shoddy, and their staff aren’t that bright – ahhh…the inefficiencies of monopolies. Hopefully the Airports Compay of South Africa will take the country’s best interest to heart and give a license to British Airways to fly the transatlantic route. Sad to think that in today’s world, you have a bunch of monkey’s running around and creating monopolies to line their own pockets. Anyways, enough airline bashing…

You may be wondering why I am even bothering, well I just have some gripes with SAA and I hope my blog gets to the top of their keywords just to tick them off. They shafted me out of an upgrade to business class on my last trip, and then stole my miles and wouldn’t refund me. So I didn’t get a free flight from Voyager and I don’t have the miles back in my account, because they say I flew in business class, although my boarding pass says otherwise!!!

Miami’s weather has been pretty crappy lately – so I don’t know what the big deal is about this place, however, it’s got a nice enough nightlife here in South Beach.

This last flight was pretty decent. I met Felicia Mabuze-Suttle, a local Talkshow host in South Africa. Had a short chat with her about my views on the overvalued property market in South Africa.

For those of you who aren’t aware, Vodacom has launched 3G in South Africa, with super fast BROADBAND WIRELESS INTERNET!!! I’m just loving it! Now I can lie on the beach and work as if I was in the office! The wonders of modern telecoms!

In terms of website launches, we launched BidThenBuy.net, BidThenBuy UK, HotelSquire UK and Revenue Index.

Google recently released it’s new policy on affiliate marketing. Our company has been quietly developing the next generation of affiliate marketing tools and software, and luckily, our launch is but a few weeks away. The official launch of Revenue Index will not detail exactly what the plans are, but I can tell you this, it going to ease the pain for thousands of affiliates out there, who are stuck between a rock and a hard place with Google’s new policy.

We’re attending the iDate conference here in Miami, and I must say, the numbers are quite sad. We operate a dating site, DigiFlirt, and I thought that we were just poor at marketing dating sites, but it seems that the gross revenue size for the online dating market is only $500 million per annum, and growth is expected to be a single digit this year.

Let’s do the math:

Approximately $40m per month, industry average of $20 per user per month. That’s 2 million paid users of online dating (on a monthly basis including attrition). Divide that by 1000 websites and the average is probably only 2000 paying users per month per dating site. Yup, sounds about right! The bigger gorillas out there, excluding eHarmony and Yahoo, are racking up losses. We decided to cut our losses and get out, so to speak, so we’re working in the room for the rest of this conference! At the very least, I met my fiance online – so we know it does work!

I’ll be in Miami, Fort Myers, New York and Boston for the next 2 weeks, amongst other things, attending the Online Dating conference. Hopefully I’ll be blogging often, but if not, don’t sweat, I’m still alive.

I need to make a shameless punt for a site we built for a client, GoToMyPC Software. The great thing about this client is that we use their software aswell. It really is good stuff and I recommend any traveller to consider using it when you need secure access to the office, without having to setup a VPN.

Funny thing, if you go to www.bloglines.com and search for either iPod, Gadget or Marketing – this blog comes up in position 1 – not too shabby eh?