My Experiment (Plus GIVE IT A REST WITH THE IPADS ALREADY CAPE TOWN!)

Ok, first off, I've been to two dinners and a lunch in Cape Town in my 24 hours in town and AT EVERY GATHERING AN IPAD HAS COME OUT OF A BAG AND DOMINATED CONVERSATION FOR A GOOD 30 MINUTES. I'm kidding with the all caps here, but it is becoming a meme. Considering I'm speaking at a Web conference tomorrow, I'm half-serious when I say they might ask to see mine before they let me in. I'm bringing it just in case.

Second, my experiment: I am going to try to post *something* on this site every day of this absurd five week, three country, two continent trip. (Don't expect deep. All of my deep thoughts are taken by the book or TechCrunch these days.)

So: Today was awesome. I worked in the morning, then went to a lunch with some awesome entrepreneurs. People like me say things like "I had lunch with some awesome entrepreneurs" a lot when they travel to sound nice, but honestly, I was hugely impressed by the level of business sophistication with these guys. The companies included Skyrove, a wi-fi hotspot company that charges by the bandwidth not the hour, GetSmarter, an e-learning company (that's a lame category in much of the US but actually quite interesting in the emerging world), Personera, a company that takes a modern approach to - gasp - PRINT, and Evly, a company that may still be in stealth, I can't remember. Here's a picture. (Notice the clean plate in the foreground and then look at the rest of our plates. It was taken by Eric Edelstein of Evly. He was hungry or just really anxious to take a picture.)

To be fair, this was a lunch where Vinny "Not the Cat" Lingham hand-picked entrepreneurs he thought I'd like. Tomorrow, at the Net Prophets conference I should get a bigger sample set of what Cape Town has to offer. I'm excited.

After lunch, we went on a staggeringly beautiful drive. Here's a picture of that. (I look somewhat silly trying to pull my hair into a ponytail because the wind was blowing it all in my face, ala Cousin It)

And then, we went to a dinner with a bunch of Net Prophets organizers and speakers. My half of the table talked about aristocrats, porn, vegetarianism, why people are jealous of Cape Town, and whether Invictus was the most exciting chapter of Nelson Mandela's life to capture in a major Hollywood picture. (AND THE IPAD.) And, for some weird reason, Jason Calacanis kept coming up.

Sorry, no picture. But here's an iPad: