Tag Archives: Pietro Ferrero

Restaurants, MasterChef SA, and Social Media dominated Whale Cottage Blog in 2013!

January 5, 2014

We used Google Analytics to identify the top ten blogposts on our WhaleTales Blog in 2013. The most read blogposts related to restaurants, MasterChef SA Season 2, and Social Media drama. The top 10 most read blogposts in 2013 were the following:

1. Autumn and Winter Cape Town and Winelands Restaurant Specials 2013 tops the list of most read, achieving almost three times as many unique readers compared to the other top 10 blogposts. In winter restaurant specials are extremely important to Capetonians, as their wallets and purses are more bare.

2. The year started off with a Social Media explosion, when ‘Mother Superior’ Blogger Jane-Anne Hobbs attacked us on Twitter, protecting her ‘chicks’ Michael copy-and-paste Oliver, mommy Tweeter and then occasional CEO of Cape Town Tourism Mariette du Toit-Helmbold, former political poor-spelling-grammar ‘PR’ and Communications Consultant Skye Grove at Cape Town Tourism, and Eat Out editor Abigail I-love-Giorgio-and-Luke Donnelly. We retaliated with a blogpost (‘New Year kicks off with Twitter bullying, bashing, and blackmail’) which attracted so much attention that Hobbs must have regretted her Tweet, as all ‘sins’ of the four ‘chicks’ were laid bare! Continue reading →

Five years of Blogging: looking back, looking forward!

September 30, 2013

On 28 September 2008 we posted the first blogpost on this WhaleTales blog, not knowing where this journey would be taking us. Five years and close to 2000 blogposts later, we look back as well as forward.

Looking back

I had set myself a goal of blogging daily, and while I question my wisdom at times, it has kept the rhythm going, and forced me to find material to blog about. My biggest fear is that I will run out of things to blog about one day!

The statistics from Google Analytics help in casting an eye back: in the five year period we have achieved 1,4 million pageviews, with 759452 unique readers. We were a Finalist for the SA Blog Awards’ The Most Controversial Blog in 2010, and try to stay true to this accolade. We have reached the 5th position on the amatomu.com Popular South African Blogs list. We have been included in the 100 Great SA Travel Twitter Feeds.

Many of the most popular blogposts Continue reading →

President of Ferrero Rocher company dies in Cape Town cycling accident

April 18, 2011

Pietro Ferrero, 47 year old head of Italian company Ferrero SpA, died near Oudekraal on the scenic coastal road between Camps Bay and Llandudno in Cape Town this afternoon, from an heart attack he suffered whilst cycling, the Camps Bay police station has confirmed.

Ferrero and his Ferrero Rocher colleagues were in Cape Town to attend a conference, which was held in different venues around Cape Town, including the Bay Hotel in Camps Bay, where they met for the conference yesterday.

Mr Ferrero was the Chairman and President of Ferrero SpA, a private company manufacturing Ferrero Rocher chocolates, Nutella, Kinder and Tic-Tac. The company, founded by Ferrero’s grandfather with the same name, has 18 factories around the world, with 21000 employees.

It is sad that our beautiful city Cape Town should be associated with the death of this prominent business leader, especially as reports, even from our local Mail & Guardian, state that he was “killed in SA accident”, over-dramatising the sad event.

Chris von Ulmenstein, Whale Cottage Portfolio: www.whalecottage.com Twitter: @WhaleCottage