TED Talk Tuesday #202: Trees, trails and inspirational entrepreneurs

This week’s TED Talk is one of my favourites – as I spent a wonderful morning in an urban forest of Vancouver, learning about my favouirte part of nature – trees – with the speaker. I’ve chosen it as I have been thinking a lot about nature since meeting Alon and Evan, the inspirational entrepreneurs behind AfriTrails.

Afritrails is a new venture, launched by Alon and Evan. As they say: “Afritrails’ vision is to connect people and nature, and the idea for the platform was formed from our struggles when trying to book trails in South Africa.

“After countless calls to various booking offices to determine availability, as well as the difficulty in finding a suitable equipment provider, we started to think of a better way to do this.”

The Afritrails platform was launched shortly after and debunks the myth that one has to book trails a year in advance.

“Our interests peaked when we realised that people are misinformed about the availability of many trails, thinking that they must be booked a year in advance. In reality, this is not the case and the confusion is created by the lack of real-time calendar visibility of each trail.”

The biggest perks of using the platform:

• The search filter allows you to find trails by location and pricing
• View trail availability in real time
• Book all trails directly from the Afritrails platform
• Compare the distance and duration of trails.

Of course, I am already a big fan of trails thanks to my mate and CN&CO partner Blake Dyason. And I’m a sucker for entrepreneurs. And, if more reasons were needed! – my mates at Emperor Asset Management are the newly announced title sponsor of the Holy Grail of all Trails – the Otter – taking place in October (more info on that in this blog, soon!) Check out what Evan and Alon are up to – and treat yourself to a trail … and to get you in the mood, here’s that TED talk on trees ….