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Rian Van Der Merwe

Rian van der Merwe grew up in Stellenbosch, South Africa, where he studied engineering before moving to Perth, Australia to complete a Ph.D in Internet Marketing. From there he moved to California to pursue a girl (yep, they eventually got married).Rian spent the next 6 years working in Silicon Valley: first at market research firm Survey.com, followed by 4 ½ years in eBay’s User Experience Design group. His last position at eBay was as Senior Manager of Product Strategy, where his responsibilities included leading a team of strategists who worked with various parts of the organisation to develop and guide product roadmaps and requirements that meet user needs.He then joined South African startup Yola.com in San Francisco as a Senior Product Manager, where he is responsible for the product vision, strategy, design, and development of a variety of areas of the Yola user experience.In March 2010, Rian and his family moved back to South Africa permanently where he now works at Yola’s Cape Town office. He is passionate about user experience and software product management, and excited about the great opportunities ahead in the South African Internet space.

RECENT POSTS

• Use location-based services and help me avoid bad choices

  When you have an 11-month old, you don't get out much.  So when we went away this weekend with my parents, and the opportunity presented itself to go to lunch while they watched our daughter, we jumped at it.  The problem is, we were in Kleinmond, a small South African village.  There are probably about 5 restaurants in Kleinmond, and let's face it, they can't all be good.  So the pressure was on: where do we go?In the US, this ...

• How to get the most out of Twitter

  In a recent update on Twitter, influential tech blogger Robert Scoble said the following: "The problem with Twitter as news source: repetition. Robert Novak's death has crossed my screen dozens of times already."My response to Mr. Scoble is that I don't think Twitter is the problem. Instead, his network might be the problem. If we get repetitive information from Twitter, we only have ourselves to blame. The problem is that if we don't follow enough people from ...

• Are we surrendering our privacy too easily?

  Google Buzz is really messing with my brain. All my other social media activities fit nicely along the private-public continuum we all have to juggle. But Buzz feels like an invasion of my personal space. By infiltrating the most private of online communications (email), it's also daring me to move that privacy line a little bit, and let people in on conversations that they really have no business in being a part of.As Danah Boyd pointed out ...