Hello Africa bonjour! - 27 Mar 2007

It is with pride that I write the first comment in Africa Bizcommunity.com. Pride at being an African, proud of Africa and personally a hat-trick for me. This is the third significant pan-African development I have presided over – if I may be so presumptuous. As one of the founding directors of iafrica.com it fell to me to develop a significant African extension for the company. Subsequent to that I left for the heady delights of Nairobi as Group Head of Media and Marketing for the African Lakes Corporation operating then out of 14 countries (its principal brand and my development baby – AfricaOnline has just been bought by SA’s Telkom for a cool £10.5 million).

There we created the most significant African web portal responding, after lengthy research in the field and empirically, directly to the needs of the diverse African web community.

Today we salute another – cognisant of the galloping development of marketing skills on the continent and the quality of marketers as they face the unique challenges of mud and dust marketing (with apologies to Kuzwayo 2001) – we respond to pleadings from the continent to provide a daily marketing watch on the continent that is complemented with a newsletter. Our parent took six months to aggregate 6 000 newsletter subscribers, they now have 62 000. In a week we have reached and passed that mark. Thank you to all and please subscribe your friends to be in line to win our fabulous getaway to Cape Town.

www.bizcommunity.com is young, but like the continent will develop in leaps and bounds. Encourage your marketing colleagues to contribute on their African experiences and companies and help build this site into the central marketing authority on Africa.

Editorial contributions and news may be sent to .

Robin Parker, Managing Director, Bizcommunity.com