Hello everyone, my name is Rob Stokes. I am an internet entrepreneur from South Africa, occasionally living in London. I studied Business Science at the University of Cape Town with majors in marketing and economics. My Honours thesis was on email marketing and from it grew Quirk eMarketing, the agency I run to this day. But that was almost 9 years ago (wow how time flies!) and things have evolved immensely since then.
These are some of the companies/projects i'm involved in:
Group CEO, Quirk eMarketing
Quirk is a full service online agency which grows and evolves in line with the internet marketing needs and priorities of our clients. My job is to drive the business forward and with my partners ensure that we innovate in the right direction.
Our latest initiative and certainly my current passion, revolves around online reputation management. We have engineered a reputation monitoring, and scoring tool called Brandseye which is currently in a closed beta with a few of our clients. We aim to launch by November.
Director, Ninjani Social Impact Marketing and Gaming
Its a mouthful, but its meaningful. Ninjani is a very exciting new venture in which Quirk is a large shareholder. We specialise in social impact marketing and commercialisation and represent social development/impact projects in the ICT space. These are self sustaining technologies for impact and innovations to improve the livelihoods of the people in Africa and beyond. Ninjani investigates and where necessary implements commercialisation and sustainability opportunities for these projects.
Ultimately social development projects are critical to the growth of Africa but they need to be self sustaining to be succesful. Ninjani makes that happen. Our areas of ICT focus include education, disability, childhood development and community development.
Ninjani is in close partnership with Metalab in the UK and the Meraka Insitute of the CSIR in South Africa. We are currently working on the following projects: Digital Doorways, Singazenzela and the National Accessibility Portal.
I am super excited to be coming to Greece. There are people coming to this event who I have admired from a distance for years and I can't wait for this opportunity to learn from them.
I am a sponge.
