Regular readers may be aware that I was fortunate enough to spend four amazing years in South Africa, from 2000 to 2004. I remember vividly driving along Constantia Main Road on the afternoon of 15 May 2004, listening to Sepp Blatter on the radio as he announced that South Africa would host the football World Cup on 2010.

The moment the announcement was made, you could hear the cheers. And yes, there were Vuvuzelas.

Way back then, though, the Vuvuzela was a local curiosity. Manufactured (mainly) in Khayelitsha by Masincedane Sport, and I’m sure I remember reading of all sorts of schemes to make them out of recycled plastic bags and PET bottles. The South Africans are ingenious like that.

Fast forward six years … your ‘proudly South African’ vuvuzela is, more likely as not, manufactured in China from all new plastic. And whilst Masincedane still make the ‘Proudly South African’ Vuvuzela, Neil van Schalkwyk, the man behind it all, has branched out into earplugs.

Progress?

This week I’m going to play with DropBox and Flickr. Why? No real reason, other than everyone else I know seems to use them. And the iPad integration looks cool.

I didn’t think I needed EverNote a while ago, either, but now I use it all the time. On the other hand, I didn’t think I needed Digg or StumbleUpon, and I was probably right. ReadItLater I’m undecided on as yet – it should be useful, but it doesn’t integrate properly yet.

Waaay too many new services to get to grips with at the mo. (yes, I know they’re not all new, but bear with me).

I must be slacking.

I’d missed, until today, the announcement a couple of months ago that Ketchum had fused with Pleon. I’d probably still not have noticed it, but for receiving an email from someone there today.

All good mergers involve a bit of rebranding. So the new firm is called, perhaps understandably, Ketchum Pleon. Except that the email I got today wasn’t from Ketchum Pleon.

It was from (anonymised to protect the sender) ineedafavour@ketchumpleon.com. Let’s look at that again:

ketchumpleon.com

How’d you pronounce that?

Why, it’s

ketch-UMP-lee-on,

of course.

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shhhhhh.

(no change there, then)

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