Discovery is soon going to be providing short-term insurance for vehicles, personal and household cover and that is surely going to disrupt the current status quo! If they leverage Vitality, and all of their members, one would think they are going to have a huge and immediate sign-up. There is no doubt that to existing insurance companies, Discovery’s entrance is probably the biggest threat that they faced in many years.

It is amazing how quickly the train companies can mobilise the national media to ensure that urgent coverage is given to their setting up of compensation desks, whereby people can immediately qualify for compensation “from R7 500,00 to R10 000,00”. No mention was made initially of the fact that some people may have injuries that are far more substantial, that they may well have injuries that will take time to settle down and cannot possibly be quantified immediately and that once you have signed your acceptance of the offer that is made, you will have no right to claim again!

I think that the media at times like that generally believe they are helping by putting out the “good message” but the reality is exactly the opposite for all but perhaps one or two cases where maybe the person only suffered a bruise or a small bump, in which case maybe immediate compensation is the way to go. They did, as soon as attorneys started objecting, put out the other side of the story and hopefully some of the claimants will hear it in time. Injured people really do need to see an attorney and in our firm we do handle these cases and you are welcome to read a little bit more on the following link: www.trainclaim.co.za
 

I was driving in my car listening to an advertisement for a Retirement Home. I have to say that it did not fill me with any great excitement! Mention of a Frail Care Centre as well as a pool in the complex hardly makes one think that one has great times to look forward to. I have felt, since a young age, that the elderly are really neglected and I certainly hope that our generation, or at least the one before me, becomes more demanding and puts up with less of the abuse that, for example, we have seen over the years on Carte Blanche on hidden camera footage, where the elderly at one home were being beaten and abused by people that were meant to be looking after them, that even when there is a radio station that specifically targets the elderly, it only has a medium wave signal. Sadly, for many, apart from maybe Mother’s Day and Christmas Day, when sometimes their families remember them, there are a large number of elderly people who live lives of total neglect in sub-standard facilities.

I have enjoyed one or two rounds of golf recently at Pecanwood. I think it is probably a bit out of the way to stay, if you are working in Johannesburg or the Northern suburbs, but it always does give you a sense of a holiday atmosphere, as if you are on holiday for a day, and with blue skies and the mountains, the view is spectacular.
The golf course itself is in excellent condition with quite a few challenging holes and plenty of bunkers. The greens in particular are generally quite fast and so you have putts that are much faster than on most golf courses.
As an investment, I don’t think it has worked out well for people in the last 6 or 7 years, although most of the property market has been down for the last 2 or 3 years, and certainly the surrounding area in Hartbeespoort with an unlimited supply of properties, there is unlikely to be any recovery soon. I guess, ultimately, it is a question of a lifestyle and for some that permanent holiday atmosphere will make the drive worthwhile.

I see that with the growing popularity of the Fourways area and flights from Lanseria, that the airport has now announced that it would be expanding. It is going to be adding an extra runway to cope with the bigger and heavier planes, apparently at a cost of R100 million and will spend another R50 million on additional passenger gates, extra parking bays as well as other facilities. One can only imagine, once these upgrades are finished, that there will be considerably more business traffic to and from this area and presumably it is only a matter of time before a big company moves its offices there and starts basing its staff there, which will ultimately reduce the traffic.

Before these elections we got all the usual promises by every party that their support was growing and if you add together all the percentages that they claim, you would probably get to about 125%! Now that the results are in, the reality is that the ANC has lost a small amount of its support, COPE has halved in size and the DA has been the biggest winner of all. With approximately 23% of the votes it is now showing that it can be taken seriously as an opposition party, particularly when one bears in mind that the white population in South Africa is approximately 10% of the population, and thus the DA can no longer be considered or trashed as the party of white people given that its support has more than doubled. Clearly, delivery is becoming an issue, and the way that the DA held onto Cape Town, and substantially increased their margin proves, hopefully, that elections will be fought more on delivery in future as opposed to race.

I picked as my subject heading, two of the “days” that very few people seem to pay attention to. The reality of the matter is that all of these days are invented by people or businesses to try and achieve some or other goal. Some of them take off, some of them don’t, but one cannot possibly pretend that they have as much importance or significance as a birthday or a serious event in somebody’s life.
Secretaries, for example, always remember secretaries’ day, but bosses day is normally remembered by somebody at about 3pm at my offices and I cannot remember when last anybody spoke to me about planting a tree to celebrate National Tree Day! I could have started my blog by referring to Mother’s Day, but that would only irritate far more people, but the reality is, just like Valentine’s Day and Father’s Day, this is a commercial invention that serves the card industry well, sellers of chocolates well and is a fantastic money spinner, above all else, for the flower industry.
I have no problem with all of them coming up with whatever days they can to generate business, as long as we accept that that is precisely what they are – commercial exercises. There are far more days and reasons to celebrate whatever you want to celebrate, rather than be told by big business that this is the day when you have to celebrate a certain thing!
 

I recently upgraded my Sonocaddie to the latest version, the V500. For those of you that don’t know, it is a golf GPS system that gives you distances to each and every hole. GPS is such a useful tool that everybody, whether they are riding bicycles, running, or just taking part in an activity, they are be able to use these days to monitor the path that they are following or their route and it is highly effective.
The only problem in this particular case was precisely how complex it was to set up the system. I am no fool when it comes to computers, and it took me well over an hour to attend to it, so I would imagine that a number of people with perhaps less experience in computers would actually have to give up and call somebody else. The website is particularly unfriendly and you have to register, load up credit card details and then, using a hand-held device, where it is incredibly easy to press the wrong letters on a minute screen, you then have to load up golf courses, one by one. I would be really preferable, given that you have to connect to the Internet to do this, to do it via the Internet and not to then, as I did, have to do it via the touch screen panel.

It is always sad to see an Association struggling. When I took over the chairmanship of the Johannesburg Attorneys Association, they only had R60 000,00 in the bank and in the three years I was Chairman, I took steps to ensure that those reserves were increased eight times. An Association that has desperate financial circumstances is unfortunately weak.
I see that the Shareholders Association of South Africa is threatened with closure, due to its membership decreasing with no new members being attracted and the older members retiring, and it is sad that there is no independent voice for shareholders in South Africa and an organisation formed to do just that is basically on the edge of closing in part, because they have not been able to afford the finances to establish a decent website and use that to attract new blood and membership. I guess it is no different to the problems that a whole host of charity organisations and other good causes face, and at a certain stage, sometimes it is better to close the door and give up, especially when there appears to be no outside interest, but it is still very sad.

I see that the South African President, Jacob Zuma, is now on Twitter and it would be interesting to see if he will continue tweeting after the elections. You can follow him by searching for @sapresident on Twitter.

Municipal elections are on us once again, run by the IEC and we all get our chance to join a line, and vote. There are always some interesting parties, some which are announced to much fanfare and hardly survive two years, such as appears to be the case with COPE, but I found a very amusing one this year, namely the Cape Party. The Cape Party stands for declaring the Cape Province as an independent country, to be called Cape Republic and one has to wonder as to whether or not these are the thoughts of people with wonderful, sincere intentions, or just a bunch of people who are enjoying the publicity and media coverage that it will surely get for making such statements!
The important thing of course is that we’ve had 17 wonderful years in this country, 17 years after the world media descended on us, ready to cover what they thought would be a bloodbath and getting to report instead on a normal voting procedure with long queues, that eventually stretched over three days.

Most of Johannesburg’s golf courses look their very best at this time of the year. The fairways are still in great shape and green, and the leaves and trees range from green to orange to yellow. As a quick picture I snapped with my cell phone illustrates, the Country Club Johannesburg is looking magnificent. We really are blessed in Johannesburg with the weather we have and ultimately we only really have about three months of cold weather.

Of course by now it is already old news that Microsoft has bought Skype for $8,5 billion. It is amazing that a business that is based on free calls, apart from international calls, can be worth so much money, but Skype did make over $800 million in profit last year, before the deduction of losses relating to previous debts.
It is going to be particularly interesting however to see what Microsoft has in plan for Skype, and one can imagine that it is going to be incorporated into one’s Outbox or additionally, with the Microsoft Office Suite, so that you probably have video conferencing and networking going on while you work on Word document, for example. There is no doubt that the age of voice calls is slowly drawing to an end and will be replaced in almost all instances by video calls. One would imagine, whether it takes 5 or 10 years, that there will be a time when people will be “suspicious” of you if you don’t want to be on a video call. Welcome to the world of always having to look good and having styled your hair!

The top paid executive in South Africa, from JSE listed companies, is Whitey Basson of Shoprite. His total package is R627,5 million. The salary comes in at R32,1 million a year and the rest is made up of share options. The Chairman of Shoprite, Christo Wiese, has shares in Shoprite worth R8,6 billion and he said, of the money that Whitey Basson is paid, in an interview with Moneyweb, “If I could find another Whitey Basson, I would happily pay him a billion. A guy with his talent is terribly rare and the performance is there.”

Lanseria Airport is soon going to be welcoming Mango to compete with the Kulula flights, with Mango announcing flights from 1 June 2011 to Cape Town. There are apparently going to be three flights a day to Cape Town at the rate of R495,00 one way, and it once again confirms that this is the next node of development. 1Time is apparently looking to offer flights later this year and one assumes that the Airport is going to have to upgrade its runway, and certainly a few more shops as well as parking facilities will help it grow even more than it already has.

I took a poorly lit picture of my daughter speaking on Skype to one of her cousins in Italy, albeit to make the story more complex, a Russian cousin. It is amazing that not only has the Internet, via applications like Skype, cut the cost of phone calls dramatically, but that you can now have a video call for much less than what a fixed line operator, such as Telkom, would charge you in the first place.

South Africans love to complain about how high our taxes are, but there is no doubt that all of those countries are a long way away from seeing any reduction in their tax rates – if anything, considering the fragile state of their economies, they are going to see increased taxes in most European countries, so while we are entitled to moan, we need to be thankful that our rates are in fact substantially lower. Of course, in America, you pay much less, but only if you are extremely rich, because all the tax concessions in America are not to the average man or woman, but to the very rich!

The Republicans, in their effort to try and drive a wedge between President Obama and the average person, managed to create such a stink about where he was born, that he eventually had to, on 27 April 2011, reveal his full birth certificate. Of course there will be those who will not accept that and will claim it is a fake, just as there are still many who still spot Elvis Presley on a regular basis.

The next line of attack will be simply to continue their statements that he is a Muslim, because it is not as easy to disprove, although it is very sad that this can even be considered a line of attack, and that his religious beliefs could amount to “anything wrong”. The bottom line is, the thing that they really want to say is the one thing that they cannot say, because it will be obviously racist to all day announce that they are white, and he is black and so they will hide behind other conversations designed to indicate that he is “different” such as the allegation that he is not a real American or that he is a Muslim. It does America no credit that half their population, based on the beliefs they have that we read about in the various polls, are shown up to be complete morons.
 

I have written about the Flip video camera before, and I guess that I should have known that when I stopped using mine, that it was a good sign of the future of the company. It is still the number one seller on Amazon.com.

The company that bought out Flip, namely Cisco Systems, for $590 million in only 2009, has just announced that they are shutting down the Flip video camera division. It shows you again how quick our modern digital world is, that a company has gone from zero to hero, to obsolete in four years and that’s it – the end of Flip video cameras, even as they just started getting marketed officially in South Africa for the first time!
 

The iPad 2 was released in South Africa on 29 April 2011, although I doubt there will be sufficient stock for some time, given that even in America, with the order from Apple directly, the waiting list is about 6 weeks. Most people obtain iPads from other resellers who got into the queue early, and sell iPads at a mark-up.
In other words, the popularity is so high that most people are paying more than the retail price to actually get their hands on an iPad and there can be no doubt that whatever stock is coming to South Africa will be very limited, and of course it is going to leave anybody who is selling the original iPad with an out of date product, that they will now struggle to sell at anywhere near the retail price.
 

I have been testing the iPad 2 for the last week or so, and it is slimmer, lighter and way superior to the original iPad, which is being sold in South Africa at the moment. It is sad that some people are being sold old technology, when it has already been replaced around the rest of the world, and in this case, with the new version working four times quicker and featuring a camera which the previous version did not, would make little or no sense to get the original iPad. 

My summary, at this time, would be like it is like an iPhone, only larger and whereas the iPhone like any cell phone is not really suited to surfing the Internet, this is, and all the applications built for the iPad would look better, smarter and in most cases have more functions than those for the iPhone, which is still of course the leading phone. Apple is leaving the others trailing in its dust, when it comes to the tablet computer which the iPad is or in the phone category with the iPhone, and I quite frankly cannot see the gap being closed by any other company soon which is probably why the shares, for example of Nokia and of BlackBerry makers, RIM (Research in Motion), have been on the slide.

I was saddened this past weekend to hear of the death of Kimberley racehorse trainer, Peter Miller. Peter and I served on the Racing Association together and every time he opened his mouth I listened very carefully, because you either learned something or were entertained. He was a tremendously funny and controversial man and I had the pleasure of often sitting at the same table as him on big race days, where, despite the fact that he was a great studier of form, he never seemed to tip me any winners, but could keep one entertained for 5 or 6 hours.

It really was a shock to hear of his death and it is a tremendous blow, not only to his family of course, but to everyone who knew him and particularly to racing in Kimberley, where very few people appreciated what he did behind the scenes, whether it was negotiating with farmers to use part of their land for the race track or sorting out and improving the surface of the track and it will be extremely hard for someone else to fill his shoes.