Former Naspers chairman Ton Vosloo admitted to being "flabbergasted" and said new chairman Koos Bekker had breathed life into annual general meetings (AGMs) he himself had always dealt with in a rather dull way. "I just read my speech," said Vosloo, who seemed agreeably surprised by the new format.Sadly, as Vosloo intimated, it was easy to improve on his AGM chairing performance. And for Bekker the highly formal approach of his predecessor was evidently inappropriate for the 21st-century cutting-edge group that Naspers grew into during Vosloo's chairmanship, which kicked off in 1997."I'll be doing things a bit differently," Bekker warned on Friday before he launched into a much more informal process.Bekker got all the directors to stand up and say hello.This is a simple but surprisingly useful gesture for the majority of non-institutional shareholders who are kept at bay for most of the year and have little sense that real people are actually involved in driving the company.A brief video insert was also useful for long-standing shareholders who might struggle to get their heads around what it is a "global platform operator" does.story_article_left1Bekker's few formal comments were brief and to the point: the board is broadly satisfied with the results, which were generated by an excellent management team; world markets are turbulent, "there's nothing we can do about that, we must swim with it and check out opportunities where we can"; technology is changing lives everywhere, "you can participate or be a victim, we've been on both sides"; and regulators need to adjust their idea of the local media industry, which is out of date, given the globalisation of the industry, "We're competing with Amazon and Google more than with local players."One area that saw little change was the utter flatness of question time. After much coaxing three shareholders were persuaded to ask questions.Charles Searle, who heads the internet division and until recently was based in Hong Kong, answered the most obvious question about what is going on in China. "The country is looking at a growth rate of around 7%, this is off its recent highs but is a significant achievement." China is changing but Tencent is not affected by any turbulence and the drop in share prices might create some buying opportunities.Larry Illg, the CEO of new ventures, told shareholders that an e-wallet was being looked at but he didn't seem to hold out much hope of early success.As for the prospects of Naspers's Russian operation, Mail.ru, ever returning to its listing price, group CEO Bob van Dijk provided an essentially political explanation as to why that was not likely in the near term.And perhaps because too much change might be a bad thing, the board chose not to disclose the results of the voting at the AGM. This despite the use of appropriately cutting-edge vote-counting technology, which generated the results within three minutes of voting...