Things are finally progressing. It took a while to get the designer to make a design for my new project but now it’s finally in the hands of the CSS/xhtml coder and I will get all the pages back on monday. I’ve been thinking about making this a affiliate project, but now I can tell you it will be a 100% e-commerce project. I’ve established contact with a good supplier within the EU, that will drop ship to my customers.
I feel that I can’t give you the entire business yet, but since it will be online before the end of June I promise I will write more about it during next week. Last year I made some tests on the Magento platform and until last week I had plan to use that for this project. But a friend of mine introduced me to Shopify that already have a great working platform with everything you need to a good price. And the best thing is that you can style it any way you want.
So, I’ve started working on one of my new projects this week. I will be a mix between a regular e-commerce site and a lead generating site. Today I’ve been sitting at the office with the designer and made a really good looking layout for the webpage.
Next thing is to get the page coded in perfect CSS/XHTML and thanks to previous work I have good connections for that in South America. Hopefully it will be finished by the time I wake up tomorrow. After that I will start doing the back-end coding in PHP.
I’ve also contacted some potential partners for this project. The project will be two sites, one English for UK and one Swedish. The will have different content but almost the same design.
Since I’m going to sell things on the site but don’t want to handle a large stock of products, I think I will solve this with Drop shipments. That means you don’t have to keep all the products in stock, you have someone else keeping the goods for you. And they ship the products to your customers. One other way that I’ve been talking to friends about would be to link to other e-commerce sites that have affiliate programs. I haven’t decided what way to go yet, but I will before the end of the week.
I will have these two projects up before the end of June.
The summer is on it’s way and with that comes all these questions on what fun things to do during the summer. I was thinking on going on a road trip with some of my friends, we haven’t managed to decied where we’re going. But I was thinking of driving down through Denmark, Germany and try to reach the eastern part of Europe. I’ll write more about this later…
The biggest news at the moment is that I’ve left Testfreaks. The economic recession and the fact that people don’t buy as much consumer electronic products as before have gotten our trafic and conversion to go down. The company therefor decieded to let 5 people go inkl yours truly to cut some of it’s costs.
My task when I got to Testfreaks was to found a operations team outside of Sweden that could provide high quality work at a resonable price per month. And this I have been doing with a fantastic achievement. We started working with a Ukrainian company that have evolved into a very good relation. We do also work with Chinese, Philippines, Russians, Brasilians and Indians to mention some of the other people working with Testfreaks.
When I left Testfreaks my operationsteam was a well oiled team with 25 people working close together with Skype, msn, gtalk, YahooIM and other communication plattforms, to make Testfreaks the largest and best review site in the world. .I will still keep my stocks in the company and I’m still convinced that the company will do great online.
Due to the recenssion and the fact that the company needed to save money I figure they will cut the spending on some of these workers and therefor they also thought it would be best if I left as well. I’ve done a great work and have the best recommendations from our CEO but now it’s time for me to do something else. The big question is what?
Currently I’m working together with an old friend of mine with his new mobile application that will be release on the techcrunch meet up in Stockholm in the end of may. I promise you it’s a great product. Available on almost all platforms except Windows mobile. (The iPhone app is really great).
I’m also evaluating the possibility to either take a new job or create my own company. I’ve also had a thing for e-commerce. I think there’s still big potential for e-commerce in Europe and especially in Sweden. I haven’t found any e-commerce site that have done what I want to do regarding design and functions. This is also why I’ve started experimenting with a Magento which I think is a great back-end system for e-commerce.
Just cut my American Express in pieces. I’ve been using it on and off for the last year. I mainly use it to pay for transactions online. They wanted me to pay an anual fee of 1250SEK (150$) to continue using the card. Why would I pay to be a customer, when there are a million other companies offer the same product for free. And I don’t even need a credit card, I have money in the bank. I think it’s greedy of them to both charge the customer and the merchant that accept AMEX in his/her store.
Where are we going? I got a link over Twitter today from a guy that I’ve been following for a while. I don’t know him, but still I like to follow certain people on Twitter. Some twitter about work, other about their live and some about something else. But thanks to him I saw this great video on Youtube. Check it out it’s about the technical evolution.
I’m currently using an old Sony Ericsson K850i since I’ve had a binding subscription with my provider for the last 18 month. But next week I’m free to terminate the contract and can choose a new phone and also carrier. Question is what do I want. I’ve been drewling for an iphone for so long, I can’t really tell you why I didn’t get an iphone 18 months ago instead of the crap brick I have today.
So my main questions is - should I go with an Iphone or maybe a Palm Pre. Palm has been out of the game for a long time when it comes to smart phones. But with their new smart phone Palm Pre they have a good chance to be the new champion again.
Here it is, and sure it’s really beutiful and slick. The phone was presented during the CES 2009 and since then it’s been a lot of writting about it in blogs, forums, news and review sites. The really nice thing with Palm pre is their new webOS that the phone is runing. So the phone handles CSS and HTML which will make it a really webphone and probably a lot of widgets and other programs. It will also have no problem at all with webpages. The Palm Pre also have a touch screen in the same way as the Iphone.
Here’s a video about it
My friend Stefan Svensson have gathered a lot of pictures and video reviews of the Palm Pre on his swedish blog, please check it out.
But what about the Apple Iphone? I’ve heard rumours about a new version of the phone in coming out in June, I guess that the best thing is to way until then before I order a new Iphone if I’m getting one. Or I buy a new Iphone now and when the new version is getting out my girlfriend can have the other one. The reason why I would choose an Iphone is all the widgets you can have. I see a real need of at least three of them that I really want and would make my life easier.
I’ve had a Twitter account for about 1.5 years. I also had a Jaiku account that long. I’m not very active on Twitter and even more less active on Jaiku. Since Google a couple a weeks ago announced that they won’t continue developing Jaiku and instead turn it to open source software I’ve started using Twitter again. I must say that Twitter have becomed a lot more mainstream. It seems that more and more people do find their way to the site or system. The other day I was visiting the site for the Grammy Awards this year and I saw the little icon on the web page saying - follow us on Twitter.
In Sweden a competitor called, Bloggy have started up their business and managed to move a lot of the Swedish Jaiku community to Bloggy instead. The guy who funded it is name Jonas Lejon. I don’t really the point in creating yet another one of these sites. Who will win? Twitter haven’t really found a good way to make money on yet. In Japan Twitter are experimenting with this ads (See the Toyota ad below). Perhaps something for Bloggy as well to start with.
So how will these microblogs platforms make money? Why don’t they charge companies for their followers. Say for example that a large company would be on Twitter to communicate with their fans then Twitter could charge them like a buzz marketing company that do Word of mouth marketing. Perhaps this would be something for Bzzagent to use. Does anyone know if they already use a platform like this?
I really need to start posting more things on my blog…
Why is it only 24 hours in a day? I would need at least 12 more hours to per day. I would use those extra hours to work-out (New Year’s resolution) be with my friends and take care of my girlfriend. A couple month ago I remembered I read about a man in Sweden that only sleep for 2.5 hours, he took micro breaks for 25 min every fourth hour.
Since I got back from my vacation I’ve had a lot to do, both at home and at work. At home we are finally getting settled in the new apartment and we only have a few more paintings to put up on the wall and after that we will have a welcome party for all our friends. At work it’s been a lot of focus on key metrics and measurable values that we can benchmark over time. It’s always important to keep a look at the competitors and what they do. And for me that means keep an eye on their newly added review sources and partners on each market.
In the beginning of each new year we set goals that should be achieved by the end of the year. One of my goals this year is to launch another 16 markets for Testfreaks. And today we welcome Testfreaks Denmark to the family. A couple of other markets is also in the pipeline, but I will get back on that later.
One good effect with the financial crise is that the amount of programmers and freelancers outside of Sweden have increased and it’s much easier to find good workers. However it’s still seems to be very difficult to find programmers in Sweden that will join the Testfreaks staff. On our swedish site we have a couple of different jobs listed, take a look here. Work at Testfreaks (sorry about the swedish). Mainly we are looking for people with knowledge in Ruby and that wants to work with Ruby on Rails.
This Monday when I returned to the office after a well needed three weeks vacations in Thailand I had over 400 unread mails in my mailboxes (yes I have more then one). So basically the first day of the week was spent reading through old mails. 50% was spam or people trying to sell SEO, SEM or PR services. About 20% was mails where I was just put on cc. So over 70% of the mails I read was more or less a waist of time.
Tuesday was bank holiday here in Sweden.
After that I’ve been debriefed by our team leader for operations of what have happened during my time away and what’s the status of certain important projects are. Since the new year started when I was away I spent a couple of hours in Excel making really good looking graphs over last years performance.
By the end of the 2008 we had launched Testfreaks on 24 markets. All though 5 of them was launched on the 28th of December. In 2009 we will launch another 16 markets bringing the total to 40 sites by the end of 2009. All of this will demand very hard work and long hours. Our team will most certainly grow in order to make this possible. We have started to focus a lot more on the quality and will set up measurable targets for the quality of the sites.
If you look at our US site we know have over 100 categories, and we continue launching new ones. We’re adding new review sources every week, but we’re finding it harder and harder to find new sites that keep the good quality. Many of our competitors don’t care about the quality of the review site they add to their site. Therefore it sometimes seems as they have as many sites as we do or more, but there are a lot of sites that we don’t list on Testfreaks, sites that are made just to make money from adsense or other affiliates. We want the sites we recommend for our users to have high quality and really give the user what he/she is looking for when they do their product research.
Anyway, to sum this up. I’ve had three weeks vacation and haven’t feelt this eager to work hard in a long time. 2009 will be the year when everyone on the Internet will learn to know about Testfreaks and how good we are. Our tech team is constantly adding new features to our sites and hopefully you will like them.We are also looking for more programmers, please check out this link. Work at Testfreaks. Sorry about the swedish… if your not speaking english send us a mail and we will help you from there.
I just love internet and the fact that people are willing to help each other when one is in need of some expert help.
I’m a regular user of GAF where you can buy pratically any service in the world. I found a funny project about a man from sweden that needs help with his math course. It’s basically high school math, algebra and stuff like that. He’s willing to pay up to 150 USD per month if the person solves his problem (homework) every friday.
I guess the school wouldn’t like this if they knew about it, the fun part is that they probably never will know about it. But for you that want to know about the cheating person, you can read more here.
He includes examples of the homework he need help with. Math1 (It’s in swedish) Math2 (It’s in swedish)
