Steve Song

Community-owned Telecommunications Networks

As the Telecommunications Fellow at the Shuttleworth Foundation, Steve Song looks for ways to drive down the cost of communications infrastructure in South Africa and raise awareness of the potential impact of affordable infrastructure on social and economic growth.

Steve worked at the International Development Research Centre for ten years before joining the Shuttleworth Foundation. At the IDRC he led the centre's Information and Communication Technology (ICT) programmes in Africa.

He has worked in the area of ICTs and development since 1991 and was involved in the early development of the Internet for the non-profit community in South Africa.

Walter Pike

Walter grew up in the world of classic marketing, branding and advertising, managing some of the biggest ad budgets in the country as a marketer and with major marketing clients as a client service and strategy director for then the  top creative ad agency in the country.

He is the founder of the AAA Digital Marketing Academy, the first in the world to offer Google recognized courses and is the Head of Faculty; Marketing and Advertising at the AAA School of Advertising in Johannesburg, he runs the new marketing consultancy, PiKE.

Walter was invited and then appointed onto the academic liaison committee of the international marketing body, the Chief Marketing Officer’s Council.

He has a unique position of being a Baby Boomer who is at home with both classic and new marketing and able to bridge the two.

Walter has appeared on SABC TV, Summit TV, and CNBC Africa and on various radio stations, he is a regular contributor to “The internet economy” on Classic FM where he has his own regular jargon busting segment “Key Words with Walter Pike” on the show. He blogs at PiKE's Thinking and contributes to various industry publications and is on the verge of launching PiKE's Thinking Advantage... The podcast.

A graduate of the School of Business Leadership he matriculated from St Andrew’s College Grahamstown. He grew up the son of a citrus farmer in Addo in the Eastern Cape and started his career as a farmer and racehorse breeder. He is a divorced father of three, an avid reader, a fly fisherman, cricket coach, football coach, played polo and provincial level polocrosse, bred and owned a winning racehorse, plays some golf and likes cooking, including making and eating sushi and drinking red wine.

Walter will speak about the disconnect between "traditional" and "new" marketing, how they are the same and why they are completely different.