2oceans Vibe

Who is Jordan Belfort? Wall Street millionaire at 26, playboy, philanderer, addict, charismatic leader, giant fraud and federal convict at 36, Jordan Belfort says he’s a man who has found atonement. He’s coming to Cape Town. 2oceansvibe landed an exclusive interview with the man.

[BONUS: Includes audio podcast download of interview!]

RetailEstateWeb just released the results of its annual property value survey, with some fairly interesting results.

For a start, it’s obvious that The Fairest Remains just that, with seven out of the nations ten most valuable suburbs.

Not shabby, hey?

Perhaps I’m new to the property game, but my question is: Is a pad in Clifton really worth twice as much as one in Camps Bay?

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Being a rapper is good for business. Or rather, “bidness, yo”.

So much so that Forbes has compiled a list of the top ten highest-grossing rap artists of the last year, subtly titled “Hip Hop Cash Kings”

And it goes somethin’ a little like THIS, fool.

CLICK HERE for bling

Are you a business executive? Do you find yourself tempted to remain at work until the wee hours of the morning, churning out directional missives, illuminating memos and pep-rousing employee bulletins? You may be adding too much douche to your vocab.

Not sure? Test yourself. Do you, or have you ever used one of these phrases?

• Accelerated Emergence of High Maturity Behaviors
• Disambiguate
• Core Competency
• Make It Pop
• On a Go-Forward Basis

Are you an employee, desperate to decipher the unholy midden of corporate jargon that your executive has lovingly penned for your benefit? Or do you simply want to figure out exactly what in the hell a TPS report is?

If you’re that executive or that employee, then boy; do I have the thing for you!

CLICK HERE for simple language

I’m just going to put this out there. If your father has political ambitions of the presidential kind, don’t be short sighted and follow him into the vote-collecting game.

Go into mine management. It can be very, very lucrative.

Ask Duduzane Zuma. But be sure to make an appointment. He may be very busy cuddling his money.

CLICK HERE for money bag$$$

If you’re in an executive position (as most of you LSM 12-14 vibers will be), then this is the kind of boss that you should aspire to be.

Clearly, this man has been taking management lessons from one Seth Rotherham, esq.

I mean, look at this company memo.

Solid gold leadership, ey?

There’s oh so much more after the jump.

CLICK HERE for quality leadership

So we wrote recently about Gordon Ramsay making an ever so slightly unceremonious exit from Cape Town, and specifically, the One & Only hotel.

Needless to say, The Big Bad Potty Mouth and his cronies are slightly upset about this. I mean, it must leave a little bit of a sting to be tossed out on your ass, for whatever reason.

And the reasons for his exit have been widely speculated, but we’re a little closer to the truth now that the legal dogs of war have been loosed.

CLICK HERE for the LAW, baby

When Sol Kerzner enlisted the expertise of the man who is arguably the world’s most popular chef, Gordon Ramsay, he would have felt confident that the star food aspect of his monstrous V&A Waterfront hotel, the One and Only, was buttoned tight.

Gordon Effin’ Ramsay opened the five star Maze restaurant at the hotel, but alas, without the mouth-cannon himself in regular attendance at the restaurant (he has a number of other Maze branches dotted across the globe), the masses saw no particularly pressing reason to avail themselves of the establishment’s fine fare.

JUST EFFIN’ CLICK HERE

You ever heard a blogger say, “You want impartiality? Read a newspaper”?

Ja, well, if you want impartiality, don’t read a newspaper. At least, don’t read the New Age newspaper.

What’s that? You haven’t heard of the New Age newspaper?

No, that’s quite alright. You’re not expected to know about it. They themselves confess that their target readership will be LSM 4 to 10.

Now, “LSM” stands for Living Standards Measurement, it’s basically an indication of the lifestyle and wealth of an audience. In other words, an LSM of 4 to 10 is the majority of people in our lovely country. Coincidentally, Brendan Seery would be aiming for a similar audience LSM.

2oceansvibers, you won’t have heard of the New Age because 2oceansvibe’s audience is in a slightly different LSM – so don’t beat yourself up over it.

But here’s the spice. New Age launched by the Gupta family. You haven’t heard of them either? OK, it’s time to catch up, this concerns you.

CLICK HERE for a public service announcement

The Hef “Hugh” Hefner, as we like to call him, has lured an equity company to bed, and together they plan on buying out all of Playboy Enterprises remaining company shares in a bid to make things a little more private.

Apparently he’s not interested in selling his shares, or merging with other shareholders. But then, why would he? He has a mansion and a harem of blond c-cups to merge with on a daily basis.

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Doctors are calling the syndrome LAWC, or Life After World Cup.

Symptoms include being productive at work, not watching SABC, and facing up to the fact that there are still crippling pot holes on most of Johannesburg’s roads.

And on that note, this article makes for eleven-herbs-and-spices kind of reading, if you know what I mean.

The gist of it is this: KFC gave the Johannesburg Road Agency (“bloody agents!“) R200K to fix potholes, and then spent R800K telling everyone about it with a series of ad campaigns.

Meanwhile, the JRA hasn’t successfully fixed any roads, and no one can say for certain how and when the money was spent.

I’m smelling a brand fail here. Using an infrastructural problem to look like the good guy? Good idea. Advertising your generosity? Good idea. Letting the details leak of how much you spent on doing good versus making yourself look good? Bad idea.

We all know advertising is an expensive production, okay? We get it. I’m just saying, KFC’s mass target market might not see it that way.

KFC, next time spend all the money on advertising, but make it really good. Really good, like this:
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Remember the “alleged” tale of the Grand Daddy Valet who stole a customer vehicle and rolled it 70 kilometres away in Blue Downs?

The Grand Daddy Hotel left a comment on that story. Let’s enjoy it with our morning coffee:

A response to this post from the Grand Daddy:

It is regrettably true that this incident took place. One of our (now ex)staff illegally (and silently) took a guest’s car home to get a change of clothes. The car in question was a Mini Cooper but it is not the one pictured in the blog post – the damages in that picture are a somewhat exaggerated version of the real damage. The staff member has been arrested and criminally charged and the Grand Daddy’s insurers are currently dealing with the situation in order to settle with the car owner.

Okay so, this happened, and Grand Daddy admit the illegality of their staff’s (and therefore their own) actions. Also, the police happen to agree that the valet committed a crime. So this thing is pretty clear cut. Grand Daddy will sort the owner of the car out, right?

Sadly, not all hotels have service at the heart of their business model.

On Friday I got a somewhat troubling email from Rosanne Turner, the owner of the jacked Mini Cooper S, some of which is posted here.

Rosanne picks up with the tragic narrative the day after her car was wrecked by a Grand Daddy employee. As Black Beard would say, “Woe betide thee not to listen, for tharrr be lessons!”

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This is some pretty cool reading for those of you still trying to shake the post-public holiday major Bafana let down cobwebs.

If you’re a white guy in Beijing incapable of speaking a shred of Mandarin, you might feel that your employment opportunities are limited.

Or you could get off your ass and get paid to be a pretend CEO for a week, as long as you look like this guy:

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Product endorsements and commercialisation aside; aligning yourself with another nation and singing for their victory in a tournament which is being held on your home soil (a tournament in which your own country is competing), may well be the final straw for Parlotones fans.

“Aligning” might be a bit tame. By the looks of their new website (the-parlotones.de), it seems as if the Parlotones have in fact defected to Germany. In their new song, which is widely celebrated in Germany, the ex-South African band sing for the German football side to “Come Back As Heroes.”

It is not known when or why their new affiliation came about, but here is the bombshell video that has left SA fans completely bewildered.

Wow! I’m speechless..

Commericalisation is a part of business growth and, whilst 2oceansvibe can be teased and get a bit of flack here and there for promoting various brands and products, one thing stands true – these are products and services that we believe in and want to use and choose to use. Some of them pay, some of them don’t. It is common knowledge, for example, that I only use Ponds face wash, and they don’t pay me a red cent.

Be careful not to confuse this with “selling out.” Selling out is if I accepted R1 million to endorse and feature Crocs shoes on 2oceansvibe – a product that I have never and never will like (except on the feet of chefs and kids). And that’s exactly why you have never seen it advertised on 2oceansvibe. It is this very reason that sees 2oceansvibe often turning down brands and services which we do not believe in – something a lot of readers out there are unaware of.

All of that said, if Germany knocked on my suite at the Cape Royale hotel, and offered me R3 million (or any figure for that matter) to support Germany winning the World Cup, would I do it?

No, I wouldn’t.

Check out the Parlotones German website here and find out more about their song made in support of Germany bringing home the cup.

* Kahn, the lead-singer of The Parlotones has subsequently responded to this article. You can see his responce here.

See, we told you it was the era of the instanet. Mweb offers cheap uncapped ADSL, and all of a sudden businesses everywhere are freaking out, losing their heads in acts of reckless generosity as they bring South Africa up to speed with the global village.

Like Skyrove, who’ve gone and hooked Capetonians up with free, that’s right FREE wireless internet in Greenmarket square for the next six months.

“Goodness gracious!”, I hear you say. “But how much are they giving us!?” you exclaim with one of those half-question, half-statement things.

OK, get ready. Promise you won’t freak out. PROMISE.

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Apparently, if you were ever looking to sell your soul, the Devil would be the guy who might put in an offer.

In that case, we’d like you to meet Satan himself:

Nice shades, Satan

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Cape Town’s obsession for meetings is a worldwide trend, but, given the existence of this website I’m about to show, so his the hatred for unnecessary (the majority) meetings.

Catherine S sent in this absolute beauty:

www.meetordie.com

So I filled in the details of a typical waste-of-time-are-you-really-this-bored meeting that gets thrown around this town. Meetings that a lot of us are forced into, when we’re trying desperately hard to live the holiday – something that is possible with a email/sms existence, instead of a tiresome world of random meetings and unexpected phonecalls.

So what you do is you send people to the website, following their request for a pointless meeting which could easily be dealt with on email.

I filled in the results, including the number and type of employees that will be attending, just to test.

Here’s the vibe I went for:

The I clicked the red button at the bottom, to get the meeting results.

Using the ever-filling database that the website is accumulating, it is able to give you a result, showing how much money will be wasted on the meeting, should it ever come to fruition.

Check it out:

I love it.

Go give it a test run yourself – www.meetordie.com

[thanks catherine]

I’ve been getting a LOT of people asking me about the new 2oceansvibe Jobs and 2oceansvibe Villas banner ads currently displayed on the site.

Including these two:

2oceansvibe Jobs

2oceansvibe Villas

As much as I would love to claim it, I did not make the banner ads. I just used the same peeps I have always used for my banner design work. So grab a pen and write this down, so I won’t have to tell you again.

They’re called 100 Volts and they specialise in web banner advertising. I’ve been using them for ages and recommend you do the same. Seriously, stop wasting your money on web exposure with ads that don’t get the message across properly. You spend all that money on the ad space, and then you cock it up with the wrong ad?? Weird. Just because your “in-house” designers can add a tan to a model’s pic in photoshop, doesn’t mean they know how to sell a product in a 468×60 space. It’s like flushing money down the toilet..

And don’t even get me started on how easy it would be for foreign clients in the UK and US to get their banner ads done by 100 Volts. Why would you not? It’s the digital age, baby..

These guys are EXPERTS at getting the message across online and they’re the ONLY guys I use. 100 Volts are very reasonably priced as well and, even so, I’m sure you’ll get a further discount if you mention 2oceansvibe

Check out their website here and stop dicking around.